Game Economics

NOTE:  This is not a Wreckonomics post.


Been tearing about in Adventure Mode on Diablo 3.  They've added randomized dungeons chock-full (chock!) of shiny goodies, especially on the quite lootiful Torment Difficulty.  Unlike Best Shooter Ever, they ramped up the difficulty but clearly remembered what this whole solo play concept is, and actually made the legendary drops more frequent but also more meaningful.  Gearbox needs to take notes, especially since this is the big daddy of procedurally generated goodness.


Lootiful is my new favorite not-a-word now.


Unfortunately, they added a mechanic that I honesty am quite ambivalent about.  There is a new secondary currency called Blood Shards.  They're mysterious shiny bits of mystery, and since Scooby Doo isn't around, nobody really knows what the hell they really are.  Their only function currently is for this 'gambling' mini-game.  Pay X shards, get a loot drop.  One might get better goodies doing this on the insano Torment 3-6 settings, but right now it's really just been a roundabout way to turn shards into crafting materials, which already grow off trees at these levels.  Literally, tree demons drop this stuff.


It got me into thinking.  Games have been trying to do secondary currencies since friggin forever, but they've very rarely done it right.  Some examples, both good and bad:


Borderlands 2:  Several secondaries, particularly Eridium, Torgue Tokens, and Seraph Crystals.   Eridium started as the stuff for extra storage space and therefore useful, plus needed for access to the main bonus boss.  Later on, you got more bonus bosses that require Eridium to access, plus whole extra things like chests that enhance results and redonculous gambling machines of goodness, keep the stuff relevant and useful.  Tokens were used for specific vendors, mostly granting access to some nasty legendaries with minimum fuss, and were very easy to farm.  Crystals...well they were also used for special DLC vendors, but you either burned ridiculous amounts of Eridium to get them, or fought bonus bosses at max difficulty.  This requires a party to pull off, so frankly Best Shooter Ever dropped the ball for forced lone wolves like me there.


Final Fantasy VII:  One secondary, GP.  This stuff is pretty much putt-putt tickets for the Golden Saucer fun dome of terror.  Spend cash on the games there, do good, get GP.  Chocobo Racing (but not betting in CPU-only races) was very profitable for this stuff, especially for folks going for the Golden Chocobo.  The real use for GP was the Battle Arena, which had it own secondary (tertiary?) system called battle points that vanished if you left the lobby (total bullshit).  You got Cloud's level 4 limit break plus other nifty toys there.  Overall, the whole thing was fairly well done, since it really just amounted to getting goodies from doing random fun stuff, without slurping up your cash supply.


Star Ocean: The Last Hope:  One secondary, Fight Tokens.  While I do feel this game gets a lot of undeserved hate for not being Final Fantasy (and I smell that not the FF7 remake a lot of RPG nuts want), it has some flaws, some stemming from being a Square B-list title, some just quirks gone wrong.  One flaw is Fight Tokens.  You get them from fighting in the battle arena, and spend them at one specific vendor for specific goodies, most of which only available from there.  The flaw is that to get the stuff unique to this place, you need to either do Disgaea-style uber-grinding so you can afford them when they're useful as upgrades, or wait until the post game, then uber-grind the arena, but with less hassle.  In either case, the rewards (from the shop itself) are very underwhelming, and really the stuff you get are only good for crafting, and arguably not much good for that.  Glorified putt-putt tickets, given out for really boring grinding.  Bleh.


SaGa Frontier 2:  One secondary, Chips.  I already covered this in the Wreckonomics article for the game.  To wit:  You turn most of your gear into chips, which you can either convert into Crowns (the primary currency), with better rates for higher amount of chips, or use them (plus crowns) to make nifty high-level gear.  What you can make is dependent on your overall chip-stash size and in-game skill levels.  You really don't have much choice about getting this stuff, which can be a pain since that means either whaling upon critters until your weapons break for chips or finding the very vendors that convert stuff directly into chips.  The whole system really feeling like an attempt to both avoid the usual RPG lol-heug gold inflation problem and give a bit of magic-ey, crafty flavor.  Okay overall, but kinda feels half-assed.  Still not sure if right cheek or left cheek, though.


One final example, that doesn't really fit in.


Secret of Evermore:  Instead of secondaries, we actually have four primary currencies:  Claws, Jewels, Gold Coins, and Credits.  All four are indigenous to one particular region of the game, and there are merchants that exchange one currency for another (typically in the listed order).  Money was earned in the usual manner (i.e. killing stuff).  This was actually very workable overall, and helped give some character and contributed to the whole idea of diversity the game was going for.  Pretty well done, though I still can't figure out who decided individual jewels are crappier that gold coins in value.  Maybe the money jewels are flawed, or really cubic zirconium or something.  Other interesting economic features included a (limited time) trading bizzar where you could exchange one commodity for another, in hopes of various stat-bonus goodies, plus a token (spheres of annihilation if I remember correctly) usable in only one instance, in this case a cool undead ferryman doing business in the desert.  Technically a secondary, but really just a macguffin.


Anyway, as you can see, secondary currencies in games are not a new thing, but really, it's very rare for a game to do them any better than "Meh."  Hopefully Blizzard gets its crap together about it.  Maybe use it as an in-game fee to actually trade legendaries between players (dammit Blizzard).  Currency is only any good insofar as it actually being used and valued through use.