Absolutely!!! I spent a fortune on OOC beer the first time I came to anvil!
Then I learned about IC pubs and the difference in the atmosphere in both!
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Don’t make me mention the fishing quota.
I suspect that mithril - like plutonium and industrial diamonds - is not in the “basket of goods” that is used to calculate the Retail Price Index (RPI), which is the measure of inflation.
Hence ‘plutocrat’?
Plutonium might not be, but the energy generated from its partial consumption as a form of power (in other countries) is.
Same for industrial diamonds - a bucket of them might not be, but the tools that use them are.
Commodity prices do have a driving effect on RPI - worst case in point the price of BRENT crude.
Same for Mithril - I agree that so far inflation has mostly been confined to the bourse positions, but the shadowing effect of the elevated Mithirl prices on over goods and services will inevitably eventually filter through to other areas unless the bubble bursts spectacularly first.
At the moment, ‘transient’ resources are holding roughly steady - it’s the resources that grant permanence that are sky rocketing. And I see that the transient market isn’t actually one where a lot of trading is going on - at least not compared to the huge amount of the resources in system. That I fear is an inherent reluctance in the player base to buy something one use/lasts a year instead of save up for the thing that lasts forever (even if the transients for exactly the same thing over the course of the game will cost drastically less).
Tell me again, Archmage, how many times that ritual could have been cast for the price the Empire paid for a permanent one?
Tricky question. If you sourced all the Illium at the price we were prepared to pay for it on the semi-open market and bought crystals at the rate the bursar is willing to buy them at…
Every season for 5-6 years.
But… not even a third of the 160 rings of Illium was actually paid for in cash. So the question is ‘would you have got a better return on investment using the Illium for anything else?’. At which it doesn’t matter what ritual you’re casting the 5-6 year pay off is the same, because that’s based on the ratio of Illium price to mana price not how big the ritual is - so it therefore makes sense to use on the larger rituals as they return inherently more effect per magnitude ergo per Illium.
Unless the Conclave simply wishes to sell of its Illium in exchange for mana - which would be another matter entirely.
Anyway; it might not come as a big surprise to anyone but what Vince thinks about economic matters and what Maurice does are often two very different things!
(I had no idea that the ilium market was so illiquid!)
I’m not sure. If it did, then in one sense it’d be bad - in that inflation would gradually drive the IC price of beer and cake beyond the point where your eighteen rings bought you a meaningful amount - but in another sense it’d be good, because it would mean that the IC economy was functioning like an economy. The mechanism for this shadowing effect is most likely to be rational and distributed use of the national bourse positions - marginal propensity to spend still increases the more distributed your money is, and a lot of the national positions serve to spread money out.
The alternative problem is that people stop thinking of the Imperial currency as a medium of exchange and go back to a Maelstromesque situation where money is more like a cushion for barter deals that don’t quite match. That’s what I really want to avoid.
[quote=“Iulian”](I had no idea that the ilium market was so illiquid!)
[/quote]
Without wanting to talk about too much that’s best left to a field - although Mithril/Granite/Weirwod/Illium are the four resources with the transparent route to permanency and share the common mechanism of distribution via the Bourse - because Illium is used entirely differently to the other three, the market is even more closed. The other three are needed, Illium is just a nice to have. The other three have a giant buyer in the form of the senate that distorts the price for everyone else (because it’s easier to translate those three to Empire level effects). It all adds up to a situation where there’s plenty of Illium out there, it just doesn’t move much.
I suspect it will take years for it to get to that point. First Mithril et al ratchets the price of resources up, then resources ratchet up sundries. I would also point out that sundries are driven purely by what the market will bear demand side- unlike the in game material stuff for which supply side considerations also factor in. It may be that the price of a pint of beer will always be one ring - simply because the cost to manufacture it is always the same and the number of pints of beer out there remains the same roughly.
[quote]
The alternative problem is that people stop thinking of the Imperial currency as a medium of exchange and go back to a Maelstromesque situation where money is more like a cushion for barter deals that don’t quite match. That’s what I really want to avoid.[/quote]
Maelstrom got there after a couple of years. Early on currency had value, but it swiftly fell over because the source of currency was the old world. The old world however had very little that the new world wanted to buy, so the money only ever flowed one way until the New World was awash with it beyond what it could reasonably spend. Factor in a load of other larp economy related problems, and inflation got a hold and then that was the value of money sunk.
(Edit to add) Which I meant to say Empire won’t have the same situation aiding the problem. I think inflation is always going to be a problem in larp economies, but at least Empire isn’t going to suffer from an ever increasing bucket pouring into a bathtub with only a very holes in the bottom.
If PD want to stop inflation they will make the resources more easily accessible.
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[quote=“Bucklund”]If PD want to stop inflation they will make the resources more easily accessible.
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That doesn’t do anything to address inflation.
What we could do instead (and a few are coming in, I believe) is put in more money sinks. Inflation of strategic resources basically happens because the Senate <-> Bourse cycle is a drain that sucks in cash from other parts of the game, and doesn’t let it back out, so it just builds up. Anyone who pays cash to a Bourse resource holder to buy a resource is putting that cash into the cycle, and any cash the Senate spend to buy resources stays in the cycle.
Construction costs will help address this, and stunts like last event’s mass mana-buying also help mitigate it, but basically the cause is that the Senate doesn’t have many methods to do things by removing money from play, and where it does they tend to remove a small quantity of money and pay a large quantity to Bourse players to keep in the cycle.
Increasing the number of Bourse seats or the quantities of resources they provide would temporarily push it down (as the basic price it’s converging towards is [Senate budget for event]/[Number of Bourse resources for event].), but wouldn’t make much of a difference to the cycle overall - and making purchasing them more accessible for the average citizen simply speeds up the return to previous prices.
No I meant more citizens just find it, in mines and looting off enemies.
You make it less rare. 
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[quote=“Bucklund”]No I meant more citizens just find it, in mines and looting off enemies.
You make it less rare. [/quote]
OK, but d’you know how much mithril you’d need to throw into the system to do this?
To make the rate of Bourse resource gain the same as the money supply, you would need to - instead of re-selling existing seats - add new ones. Double the Empire’s resource production this year. Double it again in the next two years. Et cetera.
That’s a fuckload of mithril. That’s too much mithril. That’s also the amount of mithril you’d need to add to keep the price of mithril constant. (It’s actually what we were trying to do with the mithril-creation ritual.)
Alternatively you could make mithril supply price-elastic - a Bourse seat allowed you to convert rings into resources, providing a (tiny) input of resources for free. Bam, problem solved - at the cost of the fortunes of a randomly chosen 50% of the IC oligarchy through no fault of their players. Not exactly equitable.
Alternatively, as I believe is being done, you could add ways for rich people to better the world by spending their money - basically you could massively expand the existing plot auction system. Conveniently, this looks exactly like one of the many ways that we can solve the problem IC.
I’m not really interested in saying ‘solve this problem OOC, our economy is borked’. What I’m interested in doing is putting handles and descriptions on the problem so that we can talk about it IC as a problem with negative effects, rather than papering over it because it’s so close to the abstraction layer.
Increasing the supply of resources (mithril et al) would not help the fundamental issue of the money in your wage packet (or character pack) going down in value relative to all other goods (mana, ambergelt etc) that a PC can obtain via their personal resource.
Every event a large amount of money floods into the system, due to the number of people with business and farms, as well as everyone’s basic income. Cleverer people than me have tried to estimate how much, but I am lazy and thus am going to take a wild stab in the dark at around 1000 crowns via basic income, another 400 from the senate (after upkeep) and 1000 from land/businesses. If we don’t want rampant inflation to continue, something akin to that much money needs to leave the system (not go into other players’ sweaty hands) every event.
Otherwise we reach the stage where 18 rings costs more than you would have to pay a child to carry it for you and a basic farm will just about make enough money for a pint of ale every event. And casting Streams of Silver gets you excommunicated by the Synod for being a gross crime against Prosperity, or possibly declared a sorceror for mis-use of mana.
Weeeelll…
To a certain extent if inflation runs rampant across the board beyond the Bourse commodities and reaches down to the other resources, there’ll be a natural rebalancing to strengthen the ‘ring’. Basically if you’re not League/Marches you’ll increasingly come under pressure to pay the non-inflation linked transfer fee to ditch your farm/business for a mana site/mine/forest/herb garden.
At the same time, the ‘are you having a laugh’ tipping point on ministeries raises to equally suck more money out.
It’d could be argued that’s already happening as I’ve not seen a lot of shift in those prices (or that of child labour) even though Mithril has shot up.
You can’t pay 20 rings to turn your business/farm into a source of Mithril.
I think so far the attractor that is the Senate<->Bourse cycle is sucking in the spare money to a great extent, which has been keeping inflation down on the rest of the field at the cost of rapid and brutal inflation in Bourse resource prices.
I’d agree with both of those. Though I would also feel that it is a design bug rather than a feature if certain nations have a major problem that you have to take an ever-more worthless resource to be able to vote.
As a League player with a military unit, I would find it really weird if my 5 random units of resources/season (when supporting armies. Why would I not be supporting armies? That is a rhetorical question) became more valuable than what I would have earned from the upgraded business I gave up.
Roughly 160ish Thrones from everyones 18 rings every event, and the money from senate taxes are in the minus’ atm, so all the money the Senate gets is through the Bourse and only the Bourse (and we still got 1300 or so Thrones last event).
From where I play, inflation in Empire is not a PD problem (as already said), it’s an in game problem. While PD can introduce new things like construction costs ultimately these have to be used by the players/characters, not PD. Inflation is a wonderful thing, a wonderful IC thing.
Overall, inflation in systems should exist, and the ability to manipulate said inflation in positive and negative ways.
To scroll back a second:
On the Illium front I would argue that, frankly, all uses of Illium are wasteful and inefficient.
So you might as well do something awesome and spectacular in the process.
Why are they wasteful and inefficient? Current stuff from an IC perspective maybe, there is other stuff not done yet/discovered/implemented that need illium