Honestly all MMORPG's lack one thing, a working, functional, bank system. Your probably like, "What are you talking about noob? They have working banks in MMORPG's!"

Now let me explain my self here.

In just about every bank system I've seen in games, all banks allow you to store items and gold. Have you ever been to a bank, went inside the vault, and seen enough space to sort thousand's of knights. mages, and warriors armor and weapons as well as millions and millions of gold? There simply wouldn't be enough space. It's unrealistic and makes the economy suffer.

Solution: Allow items and gold to be stored, but to store an item, the face value of that item x2 must be placed in there if you plan on storeing more then a day.

I've noticed that money that sits in your bank, doesn't work. It just sits there, whats the point of putting money in a bank if it isn't going to gain interest, I'd rather have that money sitting in my inventory, rather then putting it in some stupid bank where I'd have to travel back and forth if I wanted to buy something.

Solution: Add interest to the banks, the way my MMORPG's system works is it randomly generates a percent (between 5% and 100%) and then finds the value of the current money stored and adds that percent to the balance. Thats what MMORPG's need, it helps the economy and gives players some extra gold, also reduces RWT, and Gold Farmers. Ni Hao.(RWT = Real World Tradeing)\

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Well if you were going to do a more realistic banking system, it would probably be better to seperate storage from banking, like having storage buildings.

Aside from that you would want players to be able to take out loans as well, the reason being that without the ability to take out loans then the savings rate would be very high. Sure people would occasionally use their money to buy things but overall there isn't much incentive to spend money. Loans couldn't just be a source of free money though, players would have to pay it back plus interest.

Also, if you want the economy to work then the interest rates shouldn't be random, nor anywhere near as high as 100%, make them reactive to player's actions and theinterest rate have a more logical backing. If the devs want a more active role then they could influence the interest rates by controlling some sort of NPC central bank to help stabilize the in game economy.

These are just some things that they lack in the economies. If you have something else post it here. 

Well if you were going to do a more realistic banking system, it would probably be better to seperate storage from banking, like having storage buildings.

Aside from that you would want players to be able to take out loans as well, the reason being that without the ability to take out loans then the savings rate would be very high.  Sure people would occasionally use their money to buy things but overall there isn't much incentive to spend money.  Loans couldn't just be a source of free money though, players would have to pay it back plus interest.

Also, if you want the economy to work then the interest rates shouldn't be random, nor anywhere near as high as 100%, make them reactive to player's actions and the interest rate have a more logical backing.  If the devs want a more active role then they could influence the interest rates by controlling some sort of NPC central bank to help stabilize the in game economy.

And at that note why not a financial system, player driven businesses could issue bonds and stock to get funding etc.

Of course if you were planning a closed economy then this all becomes much harder to do.

Added to the main post. TY! 

The primary problem with having a game banking system that gives loans to players is how do you make the players repay the loans.  You could probably garnish their income from loot or auction house sales or limit game services that are available to them but that is going to put a lot of restriction on other areas of gameplay you might not want.  You could have a colleteral system but that would be a ton of accounting for the game.  THen you have to consider the cases of fraud where a players are quiting the game or simply rolling another character so they take out the biggest loan they can, give the money to friends and then don't play the bankrupt character again.

Penalize the member, for every day of a mispayed loan, make their EXP decrease by 30%, and make them spend a day in the bunker on a 2000 Gold/Currency Bail. Teaches them to pay back. 

As for fraud: Player's caught commiting fraud = Perma IP ban!

Originally posted by ChrisRadio

Penalize the member, for every day of a mispayed loan, make their EXP decrease by 30%, and make them spend a day in the bunker on a 2000 Gold/Currency Bail. Teaches them to pay back. 

 

As for fraud: Player's caught commiting fraud = Perma IP ban!

Teaches them it's better to open an account with a frudulent credit card, take a big loan, and E-bay the gold rather than paying ti back. That or just charge back a credit card. IP bans are problematic. Alnost no one has a fixed IP any more.

A system of loans by an in-game bank would have loans often not repaid for the same reason that loans from other players often aren't repaid.  If you go considerably into debt, so that you'd have to spend quite a bit of time farming just to pay off the debt, then it's likely that you wouldn't particularly feel like playing that game anymore, so you could just quit.  What could the bank do to you?  Seize any future loot you get?  You don't care, because you'll never play the game again.  Indeed, that could drive a lot of players who get into debt to quit (and hence stop paying the monthly fee) even if they'd otherwise have been interested in continuing to play the game.

Don't mix reality into games, you think I like putting my money into a bank. Or watch interest rates, no it sucks but it's part of our society.

Putting a real life system in a game not only kills the fun just annoys the hell out of people. It's not done because devs know it's a buzz kill. Games are suppose to be our alternate reality not our 2nd reality within our 1st reality.

Originally posted by ChrisRadio

Honestly all MMORPG's lack one thing, a working, functional, bank system. Your probably like, "What are you talking about noob? They have working banks in MMORPG's!"

 

Now let me explain my self here.

In just about every bank system I've seen in games, all banks allow you to store items and gold. Have you ever been to a bank, went inside the vault, and seen enough space to sort thousand's of knights. mages, and warriors armor and weapons as well as millions and millions of gold? There simply wouldn't be enough space. It's unrealistic and makes the economy suffer.

Solution: Allow items and gold to be stored, but to store an item, the face value of that item x2 must be placed in there if you plan on storeing more then a day.

I've noticed that money that sits in your bank, doesn't work. It just sits there, whats the point of putting money in a bank if it isn't going to gain interest, I'd rather have that money sitting in my inventory, rather then putting it in some stupid bank where I'd have to travel back and forth if I wanted to buy something.

Solution: Add interest to the banks, the way my MMORPG's system works is it randomly generates a percent (between 5% and 100%) and then finds the value of the current money stored and adds that percent to the balance. Thats what MMORPG's need, it helps the economy and gives players some extra gold, also reduces RWT, and Gold Farmers. Ni Hao.(RWT = Real World Tradeing)\

 As with all systems the decisions you’re talking about making here need to be part of a much, much larger system before anyone can make judgments about the merits of your ideas.
However, it sounds to me like you came up with this idea in a vacuum and really haven't given much thought to the system as a whole.

I have spent 5 years working on a system of my own. What I leaned early on is that you cannot separate your ideas about how the economy works from almost any part of the game. How big the world is, how much you can carry, how the transpiration system works, how players buy and sell items, what players can actually buy with money, systems of reward and penalty, where money comes from and as you pointed out, where money and items are stored are just a few things that will affect your economic system.

Having said that, it's ironic because I think you’re on the right track (but I don’t think you fully understand why). The system I have created meets some of the goals you want to see as my system attempts to make all money in the game accessible to all players all the time. This system is designed to ensure that player factions with the most wealth with become targets of those without. The "banking system" also creates a clear and discernable link between money and the items it can buy. As a result the system will "self balance" in the event that the population or play habits of players change. The system is neither a traditional faucet and drain or closed loop, it is a hybrid system that incorporates methods from both systems.

I believe that MMORPG's should be fun and part of creating a system that would be fun was to change where money comes from, what players can do with it once they have it and what they can do with it. As a result the end game isn't an end at all, but the beginning of several opportunities for players to accomplish things that have, in the past, been overlooked or minimized.
-------------------------

Lending- as someone pointed out, lending isn’t really possible or for that matter even necessary. Players want to play the game and earn rewards, not take loans. Loans would most likely cause inflation and ruin almost any economic system.  Trying to enforce a repayment system is a system that would use more developer cycles than the payoff in player fun would be worth.

Realism- While it is important to keep the system you’re playing in "realistic" in some sense. To say that immersion is ruined because the bank holds too much seems a bit out of context. The banks, or more precisely, the vaults in the game are too large, but characters who never eat, items that can't be bought or sold, being able to carry three suits of armor (or more) and 10,000 gold on your person are all things that you can accept.
Realism is not a goal of the MMORPG designer. Creating a system that works in relation to all it's parts should be a much higher priority.

Interest-  The idea of paying players interest, unless it meets some specific design goal, is silly.  Most MMORPG's have problems with inflation (too much money chasing too little product).  This would only compond the problem.  

I like it when people throw ideas out, but if I can offer a piece of advice to anyone wishing to throw their ideas out in a vacuum, tell us what problem your ideas are trying to solve.  I think most people are looking at the game world though the "glasses" of the real world and not looking at issues within the game world and how to solve them.   

Originally posted by Talinguard

I like it when people throw ideas out, but if I can offer a piece of advice to anyone wishing to throw their ideas out in a vacuum, tell us what problem your ideas are trying to solve.  I think most people are looking at the game world though the "glasses" of the real world and not looking at issues within the game world and how to solve them.   

Any system will fail if enough stress is applied to it.  When you come up wiht a new idea or design you then have to take a step back and consider where the failure points in your system are.  Then you have to figure out what the consequences of your system failing at that point are.  Finally you have to make a decision whether your game can live on with that kind of failure, whether you can put additional 'bracing' in place to allevate or even eliminate that failure point, or whether you can realisticly restrict the load on the system so the failure point enver comes into play. 

So in the loan system an obvious failure point is fraud.  How the rest of your economy is structured will determine how much fraud can your economy tolerate before it gets completely borked.  There are ways to strengthen the loan system against fraud but the consequences of those support systems might be too much (ie players quitting).  You could also restrict the loan system so fraud is not as attractive but teh downside is that you lose a lot of the appeal of the loan system and make it cumbersome.

I will add that personally I wouldn't go near a realistic banking system with a 10 ft pole, the reason is if you start doing something like interest rates, then you need something like loans to make it work because interest rates pay out money (facuet) and the repayment of loans with interest take money back in (drain), then to make loans work you need some sort of system to ensure repayment, then you had a close economy then you would need something like a central bank to set reserve requirements and probably a FDIC type organization incase there is a in game bank run and if you allow player ownership of banks then that is a whole other problem as you would need some ability to loan funds between banks to meet their reserve requirements, and something like credit to assertain risk etc.

Basically with the way banking works, if you were to add one realistic factor then all the others follow suit or you have a broken game.

So it would be a big mess I would think and I am not sure it would that fun in the long run.

When it comes to banking the system has to be intuitive and self sustaining. From a practical standpoint, you don't want your developers spending inordinant amounts of time trying to figure out how to shore up flaws in a banking system, when they could be making improvements in other parts of the system.

Originally posted by ChrisRadio

Honestly all MMORPG's lack one thing, a working, functional, bank system. Your probably like, "What are you talking about noob? They have working banks in MMORPG's!"

 

Now let me explain my self here.

In just about every bank system I've seen in games, all banks allow you to store items and gold. Have you ever been to a bank, went inside the vault, and seen enough space to sort thousand's of knights. mages, and warriors armor and weapons as well as millions and millions of gold? There simply wouldn't be enough space. It's unrealistic and makes the economy suffer.

Solution: Allow items and gold to be stored, but to store an item, the face value of that item x2 must be placed in there if you plan on storeing more then a day.

I've noticed that money that sits in your bank, doesn't work. It just sits there, whats the point of putting money in a bank if it isn't going to gain interest, I'd rather have that money sitting in my inventory, rather then putting it in some stupid bank where I'd have to travel back and forth if I wanted to buy something.

Solution: Add interest to the banks, the way my MMORPG's system works is it randomly generates a percent (between 5% and 100%) and then finds the value of the current money stored and adds that percent to the balance. Thats what MMORPG's need, it helps the economy and gives players some extra gold, also reduces RWT, and Gold Farmers. Ni Hao.(RWT = Real World Tradeing)\

__________ User Posts - Thanks for these!

Well if you were going to do a more realistic banking system, it would probably be better to seperate storage from banking, like having storage buildings.

Aside from that you would want players to be able to take out loans as well, the reason being that without the ability to take out loans then the savings rate would be very high. Sure people would occasionally use their money to buy things but overall there isn't much incentive to spend money. Loans couldn't just be a source of free money though, players would have to pay it back plus interest.

Also, if you want the economy to work then the interest rates shouldn't be random, nor anywhere near as high as 100%, make them reactive to player's actions and theinterest rate have a more logical backing. If the devs want a more active role then they could influence the interest rates by controlling some sort of NPC central bank to help stabilize the in game economy.

 

These are just some things that they lack in the economies. If you have something else post it here. 

the primary reason I play is to escape reality - especially banks, why then would I want realistic banking in my FANTASY world? 

Originally posted by ChrisRadio

Honestly all MMORPG's lack one thing, a working, functional, bank system. Your probably like, "What are you talking about noob? They have working banks in MMORPG's!"

 Virtual Banking in EVE Online

Now let me explain my self here.

In just about every bank system I've seen in games, all banks allow you to store items and gold. Have you ever been to a bank, went inside the vault, and seen enough space to sort thousand's of knights. mages, and warriors armor and weapons as well as millions and millions of gold? There simply wouldn't be enough space. It's unrealistic and makes the economy suffer.

Solution: Allow items and gold to be stored, but to store an item, the face value of that item x2 must be placed in there if you plan on storeing more then a day.

How does arbitrary fee make for a realistic or 'working' banking system?

I've noticed that money that sits in your bank, doesn't work. It just sits there, whats the point of putting money in a bank if it isn't going to gain interest, I'd rather have that money sitting in my inventory, rather then putting it in some stupid bank where I'd have to travel back and forth if I wanted to buy something.

Solution: Add interest to the banks, the way my MMORPG's system works is it randomly generates a percent (between 5% and 100%) and then finds the value of the current money stored and adds that percent to the balance. Thats what MMORPG's need, it helps the economy and gives players some extra gold, also reduces RWT, and Gold Farmers. Ni Hao.(RWT = Real World Tradeing)\

Injecting cash into the economy out of thin air = bad for the economy. Consider, also, someone that doesn't use his account or someone with ridiculous amounts of money would just generate a crapton of artificial cash, inflating the economy.

In the real world, interest isn't a gift from the bank because they feel generous. It is the amount that you are charging the bank for borrowing your money.  An NPC bank has no need for borrowing your money, therefore it would have no need to pay you any.

Player run banks would be able to give interest, but they'd do so only because they are investing your money in other ventures with varying degrees of risk. Player run banks also run the risk of being robbed or failing.

If you want a more engaging banking system, it needs to g into the hands of the players and you need to allow for failure. Without those two, banking will remain rather static.

Originally posted by elderotter

the primary reason I play is to escape reality - especially banks, why then would I want realistic banking in my FANTASY world? 

Not that I disagree with your assesment about banking, but the answer regarding relisim is is one I have heard a thousand times and is false.  The fact is that you do want realisim in your game.  Most games offer many facets that have some level of realisim to them

What you don't want is an overly complicated system that tries to solve a problem that most of us arn't sure exists....

i agree with lynx 100%

todays banks i think are fine in the mmos we see today. like cactus said, if you tried to input loans into todays mmo systems, every benefit and fault would come with it. what if the player can not repay the loan? who is going to enforce? what if the whole point in trying to take out a loan is a scam to just get more money to invest into a charecter into a 2nd account?

there are to many loop holes in a system like this. the idea behind the mmo bank is just a universal storage room for all players needing to store assets.

being a player from eve online, i did see it funny as how the bank charges you acquisition fees and doesnt pay you interest on holding your money. but the fee was never anything big to truely worry about.

if you want to know what mmos are lacking today...is risk and a sense of TRUE accomplishment and achievements..and i will point to warcraft and war hammer.

there can be no sense of real achievement since there is no real sensation of loss. everything is obtainable through quests & once they are obtained, you can never lose them. the game should just be renamed to world of craft or just hammer online. because in war, there is casualties, and when there is casualties, there is HEAVY LOSS.

i heavily blame games like this for creating todays care bear mindset due to the many simplifications they have been given. the world has been given to them and forgot to teach them the one important thing behind getting such things. discipline.

a world where you can truely be free of tyranny and poverty...now THAT is what i call true fantasy. for me, id rather know what it is like to fall. so i can understand what it feels like to pick myself back up. a marvelous quote from the dark knight movie.

i know we are all looking for that perfect mmo for us to call home. but i think these different ideas people are wanting are just to different & may not be ready or appropriate for todays "current" standard.

sometimes thinking out of the box isnt a good idea, since you have to consider that it somehow has to fit with whats already inside the box. no mmo can be perfect, but it can be fun, if we all just took every great experience one mmo had and brought it to the other.

Originally posted by Talinguard

Originally posted by elderotter

the primary reason I play is to escape reality - especially banks, why then would I want realistic banking in my FANTASY world? 

 

Not that I disagree with your assesment about banking, but the answer regarding relisim is is one I have heard a thousand times and is false.  The fact is that you do want realisim in your game.  Most games offer many facets that have some level of realisim to them

What you don't want is an overly complicated system that tries to solve a problem that most of us arn't sure exists....

I want some realism, but not the stark bs that banking represents.  I also do not want a man standing outside the city selling insurance policies, nor do I want telemarketing in my games.

The reason why ppl put their money and items in the bank because many games drop money and items from the player inventory when they are killed.

A realistic banking may not be a nightmare for programners to write but it certainly will confuse players and because of that, it soon invite swift condemnation. Games must be player-orientated not layered with complex features and functions, especially one that penalize the players. Paper rpg is still okies but for MMO, the company will go bust asap.

Was thinking of adding a loan system myself. It would also be great if people who took a "Loan" out with certain faction became a "mark" for collection if they default on the loan! Then they could be added to some kind of collection terminal or under world NPC who wants payment anyway possible. This system would fit perfect for the current system i'm fleshing out.

I will be using a bounty hunter type profession simular to old SWG. So it make's sense for me to use this for content for them to persue.Great idea for adding collections. In my design document, Bouny hunter will need content to keep them busy so adding collections to terminals and allowing loan default's to be collected will be a nice add-in.

As far as a banking system, I was hoping to make it feasible for players to be able to access the bank as only a storage for money. a personal storage system might be added for the bank  as a safety deposit box. My economy will be fully player driven. so a solid bank system will be required.

I have another great idea: Why is it the banks fault that we get so much junk to fill it with?

We just get too much crap from doing anything. Quests rewards are usually some useless gear piece I don't want anyways. Same thing with many drops, scrap all crap and give us gold and gems instead.

I think GW2 goes the right way with armor that can be upgraded instead of changing the crap every 3 levels and getting 10 armor sets from quests at the same time.

Make armor drops rare, make it possible to upgrade it instead and scrap all junk and vendor trash items. This also solves the issue with carrying more than you have in your crap bank, you don't have too.

You are treating the symptom, not the problem here.