Live economic statistics!!

Can this be done? You could have a simple page (it just needs to display a few numbers) on the website that reports statistics about the whole Eleven economy.

You could measure Gross Domestic Product (GDP), although of course it should be called something silly: add up all the income, in currants, that accrued to players every IRL day. That's the Eleven equivalent of GDP. It's fantastic!

You could also track consumption — how many currants were spent in the last 24 hours? — and savings —how many currants did players have in their pockets at the end of the day?

These tend to be the three macroeconomic factors that IRL economists want to look at: income, consumption (i.e. spending), and savings. Oh, and there's a very important fourth factor: GDP growth. It would be so cool if Eleven tracked GDP growth. If you already had the GDP info, it would just be a simple calculation. If you knew the number of players, you could calculate total GDP growth — which can result purely from more players joining the game — or per capita GDP growth, which is an increase in the average income (simply put, people are earnings more currants).

MMO economies are so fascinating to me. The MMORPG Eve Online once hired an IRL economist to be an analyst of the game's virtual economy. One of the most fun things for me in Glitch was the boom-bust cycle of certain commodities. You had people speculating on the price of things (I once bought 1 million currants worth of fish because it was about to go scarce) and losing big or winning big. It was a crazy fun world. I don't know if macroeconomic statistics would inform gameplay at all. I vaguely remember some third-party websites using Glitch's open API that would tell you the going price of any item over the last few days.

Comments

  • We measure so many things in our real lives and some people do in the games they play. I'd be happy for those who value the measures to have this but would never use it. More Glitch, less real life.
  • edited January 2015
    Id be more in favor of the sales history of each item, to make it easier to judge how to price items, but i dont really want to know who earned the most currants or the least, plus i dont think comparisons to each other in that manner is a good idea
  • I don't want to know specifically who the richest glitch is, but it would be interesting to see trends. Think about what the charts would have looked like when the rare items smugglers showed up.
  • I'm currently many years into a torrid and steamy affair with numbers, so I'd love something like this! It would be lovely to compare myself to the whole economy ;) I would take great pride in finding out that my earnings/savings/spending were something like 1% of the economy if 1000 of us were playing ; ) It would make me feel dedicated : P Honestly I just love numbers so so so so so much. Have I mentioned how much I loved Humbabella's blog Mathemaglitch? (http://mathemaglitch.blogspot.com/)
  • @"Liza Throttlebottom" do you know if Humbabella is coming back? I haven't seem them around
  • I quite like the idea as I'm sure many other glitchen would, and I think it would be really interesting to put that little bit more emphasis on the economy as well- and I think this sort of thing would work really well once excecuted in the quirky nature of Glitch.
    Though I do agree with commenters above, I'm not sure I'd like to see who's richest- or have any of that sort of comparison between players as it seems like it would add something that Glitch (or Eleven) should neither have or need- a leaderboard as such. One of the (many) biggest appeals in the game for me, is the fact that there is no pressure. No pressure to be better than others or rank higher on leaderboards- and no sense of higher or lower standings among different players, because we all play our own seperate ways- without needing to compare levels or wealth.
    However, a greater focus on the in-game economy, without bringing forth a leaderboard- seems like a really fun and interesting idea, that I would love to see brought forth. Perhaps even with some aspects of stocks involved could be fun, or a banking mechanic- an aspect of money and business seems like it could fit really well in with the quirky themes that this amazing game has to offer.
  • edited January 2015
    @Teddy I hate to disagree because I love the spirit that your comment is given in. I loved the quirky non-competitive feel of glitch. But to be honest... I'm a competitive person :) I loved the leaderboards! And for that matter I loved Game of Crowns! Friendly competition between Glitchen was my absolute favorite thing in Glitch (besides, perhaps, my love affair with Grendaline ; ))!

    So basically what I'm saying is that I love that Glitch encourages us be non-competitive, but honestly I also loved that it ALLOWED us to be competitive if we so chose :) Because I love non-violent games with crafting and Glitch is the best non-violent game with crafting I've ever played! So it'd be nice if Eleven also had the competitive elements I enjoyed just as Glitch did :) Because of course, leaderboards can always be ignored if there is no emphasis placed upon them :)

    So I'd say ditch the richest glitch stat, but definitely keep the leaderboards!

    Edit: Oops, almost forgot you @EiraFae! I sure hope he is! I should track him down and inform him this project exists and see if he's interested!
  • I wouldn't want a listing of who's the richest; while Glitch didn't get much in the way of griefing, it did get beggars who showed up and pestered people with "give me something... give me some potions... how about some beads... can I have some ingots..." Wouldn't want to announce in public where anyone could see it, "this glitch has srs resources."

    OTOH, I kinda like the idea of a leaderboard of who's spent the most currants. Not sure if there's a way to do that without doing the other. We had leaderboards of who had the most favor with giants and such; if this was similarly unobtrusive (it took me a long time to notice those leaderboards existed) it should be okay.
  • edited January 2015
    We did have leaderbaords, but it was for areas visited, or the most favor , and various other things, but it was tied to activities you could do....stuff like that. Im Against leaderboards for wealth or lack thereof however, we do compete, but anything that there is a leaderboard for should be things that everyone can compete in ,Wealth is an aspect of the game but it is not an activity of the game itself
  • @"Eris Lord Freedom" As a former rich Glitch I can imagine it wouldn't be a good idea to have a list of the most successful players just out there like that... But at the same time the former leaderboards pretty much functioned that way : P If so and so had 2 million favor with Tii they probably had some srs resources as well! Just playing devils advocate there since I'm not a huge proponent of wealth/spending/earning leaderboards even if I think they'd be interesting : P

    @"Lyrical Dejavu" I agree with your premise but I think it's sort of a cloudy, murky grey area : ) I don't think it's necessary to have wealth as a leaderboard since I think it's a bit too straightforward. To get on a leaderboard you should have to expend your wealth into a specific category AKA donating items for favor or spending money to buy materials to earn badges. However I'd say that it's sort of hard to differentiate the categories, since what is favor but wealth that was donated instead of sold? If I donate 1000 meat then I have 1000 favor, but if I sell 1000 meat in cebarkul I have 8000 currants.

    Honestly I just love discussions like these : ) I think they're really thought provoking and help us to think through exactly what every aspect of Glitch meant and entailed and how we want to recapture all the Glitchy spirit in Eleven : )
  • True but favor the items you donated you did not necessarily have to buy to do it, you could of course but it doesnt = wealth perse, since it could be gotten a different way
  • I was thinking the leaderboard would be based on currants spent, not what's currently held--so the top spots would probably belong to L60 glitchen and stay that way. However, I suppose it'd have to be currants spent at vendors, not at auctions or towers or via trades, or two players could just trade 50k currants back and forth until they won the top spots.

    And I'm not fixed on the idea of a leaderboard; I just like the idea of some way of drawing people's attention to the fact that there's an economy, rather than just the money they own. It's also a way to encourage spending, but maybe a handful of achievements would do that as well. ("you've spent 1,000,001 currants! Maybe you should get a platinum card... just as soon as one of the giants imagines platinum ingots!")
  • edited January 2015
    Could add additional trophys and therefore achievements associated with them. There is the 1mil currant trophy already, if currant sinks is what you were getting at
  • Yeah, I wasn't suggesting a leaderboard based on currants, and I don't like that idea. Macroeconomic statistics are all aggregated. When you say the GDP of China was $9.24 trillion in 2013, that doesn't tell you about any individual people in China, it just tells you about the Chinese economy as a whole. What I'm suggesting is statistics about the Eleven economy as a whole.

    So, in my mind, there is a page that says something like:

    Statistics for Today

    9,113,484,950 currants earned
    7,653,269,810 currants spent
    39,715,816,332 in savings

    Trends

    Currant income is up 2.1% from yesterday

    Currant spending is up 1.7% from yesterday

    Currant savings have grown 0.4% since yesterday
  • It would be interesting to have stats like these at times like the fish speculation bubble. When the fishing update was announced, a lot of people like myself bought up tons and tons of fish, literally millions of fish, from street vendors and from players, thinking fish would suddenly became valuable because they would become harder to get. What actually happened is that the price rapidly soared beyond rational heights and then just as rapidly plummeted to around the price it began with. I spent 100% of my savings — 1,000,000 currants — on fish and lost all of it. A lot for players did the same thing. I wonder what the overall impact was? Was Glitch briefly in a recession for a few days? It might have been, not that it would have bothered anyone. It would just be fun to know these things.
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