# DRPG Economy Fixes

## Underlying Issue

The underlying issue as it stands right now is that there's too much gold in the game, and not enough to spend it on, leading to a decrease of its value, also known as inflation.

It also leads to the users with the largest amounts of gold spending it on the market which causes the prices of items to inflate aswell, which in turn leads to lower-level users gaining very large amounts of gold with minimal effort.

## What we've done.

In an attempt to remedy this, we introduced the market tax to remove some gold from the game and market, something that has worked rather well, but could use some improvements, which will be brought up again.

## What needs to be done

There's several ways to approach the issues with the current state of the economy, some easier than others.

As such, we've got some main issues to remedy.

### Gold gain

The main culprit of this is the gold gain.

The amount of gold a player gets each adventure is currently set to be directly dependant of the level of the enemy, currently at a minimum of `8 * level + 5` and a maximum of `8 * level + 25`, which is then used to randomly generate the gold reward.

This number is then used along the gold boosts of the user to calculate the final amount of gold.

#### Gold Boost

As the gold boost attribute works in a strange way, I'll do my best to explain it, before I proceed onto the issue with it.

In order to calculate the total gold boost a user has, we first get their attribute points, then the percentages the user has on equipped items.

Once calculated, we add the total percentages to the base gold gotten from the kill, along with the users level, and then we multiply it with the users ring, and finally, we multiply it again with the users active potion boost.

As this can lead to very high amounts of gold, for example at level 1000, we have a base gold of 8005 to 8025, and 5000 attribute points, which, if all put into gold boost, will give a 500% boost to gold.

Let's do some math.

We'll assume that the user is level 1000, has a base reward of 8025 gold, a ring with a 1.25x multiplier, no necklace, and no armor.

Our 5000 attribute points will give us a 500% gold boost.

Calculating this according to the bots math will give us 41,125 gold with full gold boost.

After this, we multiply it by the ring, 1.25, which gives us `41,125*1.25` or 51,406.25 gold.

Remember, this is without any item boosts.

As you can see, we quickly get large amounts of gold with the gold boost, and very small amounts without it.

##### Solution

The solution I propose to this is to decrease the potency of gold boost, while increasing the base gold a user will get, which will be in accordance with the level of the enemy and it's difficulty to kill.

### Item pricing

If we are to redo the speed of which users gain gold, we'll also need to make it so those users can actually afford the next item in the upgrade chain, and not have to resort to selling rocks for 6000 gold each on the market.

In order to do so, we'll be looking over all the items and their requirements to determine the optimal price for the item according to the new gold gain speeds.

### Market

A large part of the economy currently relies on the global market, since users can set their own prices, and as such, can easily gain the gold they need and want.

#### Inflation

As users can put their own prices on the market, the value of an item can grow very rapidly, quickly making the item cost thousands, when it cost 500 gold last week, which leads to rapid inflation, and a decrease of the value of gold.

#### Tax

One aspect we've introduced in order to remove some gold from the game and market is the market tax, which is paid when a user creates a trade, and is based on the total trade value.

As has been pointed out by some users, the system we currently have is flawed as we currently require the player to pay the tax up-front when the trade is created, instead of when it's executed, and as such, we'll be working on having the tax be paid upon trade execution.

#### Guidelines

In order to regulate the market and the inflation, we're proposing some strong, clear and defined market guidelines that we can automatically enforce within the bot and game itself, with manual moderation only in extreme cases.

[Guidelines to follow]

### Item Rarity / Availability

Another reason for the cost of items being high is that they're in high demand, but not high availability, or they're just hard and tedious to obtain.

A possible fix to this is to look over the availabilty of certain items, and based on their uses, (I.E. If they're quest items etc.) make the items more or less available, and in some cases untradable.

### Gold Sinks

Another way to remove gold from the game is through so called "gold sinks", which can be done in a lot of ways, and I'll be exploring some of them here.

#### Skills

One proposed gold sink is through skilling, with skills that need materials that can only be obtained through the usage of gold in order to advance it, with the skill allowing users to create items and objects with positive effects.

#### Cosmetics

Another gold sink to look into would be cosmetic items which would be able to provide a good gold and item sink.

The issue that I see for cosmetics is the way of displaying them.

#### Minigames

Minigames can provide a good way to remove gold, if they are offered for a fee, with untradable rewards which will give a boost to the user.