folly

for some time, a romantic era dwelt

mousewifegames on

youtube, twitter, & itch.io
|
I'll Be Pod for Castmas
|
follypersist most places on the internet but especially dreamwidth


the thing neopets is doing right now with its economy might be the most interesting thing to happen in the last hundred years of economics. I wish i could take a sabbatical from my day job just to detail the magnificence of the project and also be a fly on the wall for the decision-making processes going on there — economics might be a dismally inferior science of the real actual world, but if it ever were accurate to a closed system full of people, this could be it! a perfectly controlled economy of production, that still has individual purchasers and primary competitor secondary markets, and has a history of rampant inflation but also of sustaining beyond that? there really has never been an equal to this in history or in contemporary digital environments.

god like. Imagine SOJ economies, diamond block economies, but at such a massssssively larger scale and complexity of system and exponential velocity of interaction! There's no guarantee that their models are sound, or that reality will behave in a way that was modeled or modelable. The new set of login and quest incentives might simply run the economy too hot in terms of total NP per person, leaving everyone to stop commercial transaction (they can buy infinite of what they need from the increased supply), but there's a thousand equally likely very different outcomes.

I'm trying to come up with a good allegory:
what if the government gave you a UBI and increased the supply of houses being built and food being grown? What happens to prices when everyone could buy enough from a centralized seller and have some leftover? do people try and corner markets anyways? do prices for niche items skyrocket as everyone has all this money to spend and nothing else to spend it on? in the real world, you'd see an inflation of financial vehicles, but even the gambling is cleverly controlled in the world! i feel like a crazy person but this is the ground floor of the best experiment in decades no one is writing papers on


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @folly's post:

i dont think anyone can buy infinite of what they need because the inflation is still wayyyy too high for the average player who just logs in for daily bonuses and to whack a cass

people are writing about it though. you could be one of them! id be super interested in hearing more specific examples of what you mean

https://www.alexirpan.com/2018/11/10/neopets-economy.html
https://www.theringer.com/features/2021/3/1/22301181/neopets-stock-market-gamestop-social-network-future
https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bgoldfarb/comt109w10/reading/ito-horst_neopets-and-neo-economies.pdf
https://www.neopets.com/ntimes/index.phtml?section=384662&week=328
https://www.themarysue.com/neopets-economy/

Looking forward to reading through the Ito-Horst paper! But to be clear, what I really mean is the new era (mid-2023 onward) of neopets new management, and what seems clear to me already from the Faerie Festival and the new trick or treat event, alongside the new, very lucrative log-in rewards - a pursuit of handing out incredibly expensive items on a regular basis for free, alongside a daily income much higher than the average game-player (or even stock trader - that's how I made my millions). It's the idea that the faerie festival showed a way to affect low-mid secondary market prices in a significant way at the same time as these pressures on the market from the low (buckets of currency directly as free daily income) and high (here's paintbrushes et al for free, to use or re-sell) end. I'm familiar with earlier Neopian economic thought (and a lot of it is... neat), but this era I think is a much more interesting experiment, with potentially more elucidating results, than most anything we've seen before!

You're definitely right that I'm ignoring that other people could be writing about it right now, and that I could be one of them in the present and future tense! Re: everyone buying everything they need wrt inflation - I mean what I said in my post that there are a thousand equally likely very different outcomes. But it seems possible that through this direction of the site that we could get there from here, which previously otherwise seemed inconceivable to me!

Neopets its in a very funny place right now where TNT decided they want to make where you can actually get to the fun part of the game without having to play 3 hours a day for 3 months, giving paint brushes and potions for basically free open up the game to be explored in many other ways than what was allowed for the average player before

Right?? It's so exciting, it feels like we're at an inflection point and I'm so curious as to a) whether they'll pull it off in a way that stabilizes in a fun playable experience, and b) what new things would come next in that potential world! So here for it!

very excited! I hope they put new cool things to make de community engaging, on a colaborative and competitive way! I really liked when neopets not only made me help and negotiate with others but also made me plan and think ahead. This silly game is so much fun