"Money Tricks" in video games

[Yuugami 252]

So I'm sure in plenty of RPGs, we as players often found ourselves with too much cash with nothing to spend it on or too little cash because equipment/items just happen to be too expensive. Often times, we find ourselves developing a trick to net as much cash with as little effort as possible, like the "Mr. Pringles" trick in Persona 4. 

 

Recently, I've been playing Resonance of Fate, which is a fantastic game, but something of interest for me was in the combination of the crafting system and the equipment "Compact Scope B". In Resonance of Fate, except for guns, you usually craft your equipment by finding/buying material for the recipe, and then going to a tinkerer to build the equipment or the gun part for a crafting fee. Money in the game is somewhat plentiful, but I found myself spending a lot of the tinkerer so that I can rack up on elemental bullets, grenades, and other gun parts I need.

 

As such, I run out of money somewhat quickly. 

 

However, usually in a RPG, when you buy equipment, you can often sell it back for a loss - buying a 3000 gold sword only to sell it and get 300 gold. However, in Resonance of Fate, the item "Compact Scope B" is interesting because selling it would actually net a profit.

 

In order to craft this part, you need to grab "Scrap Iron" and "Glass Shards", common drops from machine-type enemies. The crafting fee for the scope is 3000 gold, but you can sell this item for 4100 gold. What makes this especially interesting is that the scope itself isn't very useful past the first few hours of the game - however, they are plentiful to make and net a profit.

 

At a later point of the game, a shop opens up in a different area, where the traveling merchant actually sells "Scrap Iron" and "Glass Shards" for 250 gold and 150 gold, respectively (it might be 200 gold for the Scrap Iron, I can't be sure). This makes crafting a "Compact Scope B" incredibly easy, and a very fast process, as you no longer have to farm enemies in order to grab the material - you just buy them in bulk, and manufacture these scopes in bulk, and selling them for 700 gold profit per unit. 

 

You can imagine how the money starts racking up, as long as you're careful in making sure you have enough gold to craft at least one "Compact Scope B". It also helps that things are expensive in the game, and you can also buy clothes that modify your character's entire looks for the gameplay and cutscenes too, which is one of my favorite elements of Resonance of Fate.  You have plenty of things to spend your cash on.

 

Which brings me to my question - do you think "money tricks" are an inventive strategy in grabbing cash during your adventure? Do you think it's better to purposefully place a way to make quick cash through strategies like these, or do you think players should just grind enemies for money? I'm not sure if this "money trick" was placed in Resonance of Fate on purpose, but it does showcase an interesting mechanic, especially when combined with a crafting system.

Edited February 15, 2016 by Yuugami

[lonequeso 1,921]

Personally, I'm against hacks in general not just money. It seems to be a really hard thing to balance. I've played a ton of games where before long, I'd have enough cash to buy pretty much whatever I wanted. I haven't played a lot where money is scare. Usually those are MMO's and survival horror games. One of the most common ways to make money in RPG's is items that are there purely for you to sell to shops i.e. Nuggets in Pokemon. I'm okay with those as long as the drop rate is low so you actually have to put some effort into gaining them. I don't like having essentially an unlimited amount of money to buy stuff. It takes some of the challenge out of the game. I prefer games, especially RPGs, that require strategy and planning. Having to manage money effectively is one of countless ways to achieve this.

[ashm 12]

Exploiting money is not good. Player may grind and you will have trouble balancing money.

But that doesn't mean I didnt agree If an item sold more than its buying price, just make sure they can't exploitable (I mean rare drop etc).

The only game I've ever played that have this money trick is DIgimon world I. You can buy meat for 50, use it as bait, trade the fish etc and sold them for 2000. Even so, I'm quickly grew bored of it.

 

 

To suck money from player, you can always put extra feature.

For example collecting card and put it on album.

Buying bread to collect kinstone (from Zelda)

Collecting trophy

etc.

[+ Chaosian 617]

Money money, always a problem in games.

 

Combat Scope B sounds incredibly poorly balanced, and should have been caught by QA, and fixed. Buy $1000 for $100 is a terrible bit of economy for a single player game.

There is a very similar counter to this that is alright though.

TERA, I know for example, has a player market - players sell items for gold, which other players can buy. A sneaky player can invest a lot of money into this market by buying out all their competition's supply of an item, and then turning around and selling it marked up, for a profit. A bit of a skeevy business practice, and there's risk reward of being significantly udnercut by the next guy, but it's an effective way to game the market. It's emergent behavior that could come from any kind of market like this. It is not in any way free money.

 

I'm not one for just finding money on the corpses of animals so I'll give an example of value manipulation in another case.

I'm starting up yet another file of Fallout DUST (which is honestly better than Fallout 4, but whatever). It's an extremely hard mod that places a strong emphasis on survival. The player needs to constantly stay hydrated or they suffer from severe stat reductions, and eventually death. To get water the player can...

• Find it from adventuring. It's an uncommon find while scavenging, and a rare drop on enemies.
• Buy it from exceedingly rare merchants. The player will probably need to sell spare weapons and clothes to afford it.
• Drink from water sources. They're all contaminated in DUST so in doing so, the player gets slightly irradiated in the process.
• Purify it, by crafting pure water out of dirty water. This requires the player to have knowledge of how and where to do it, as well as supplies to purify with. While taking the most work it is essentially free, and makes use of otherwise common and useless items in the process.

Apply that all to money as you see fit.

Gold in monster stomachs, selling earned goods for money, positive money for punishment, or work / patterns for money.

[+ LadyMinerva 998]

Guild Wars 2 was also like that with their trading market. Most of the time, it would be hard to make any sufficient gold playing solo in an open world, so other than the content they have to make more gold (i.e. dungeons and PvP, and raids) most people would spend their time gambling on the trading post. I personally take the trading post as an advantage because I often grind a lot, gathering materials which sell for a lot of gold :3 Gold farming is quite common nowadays in MMOs, so these kinds of money tricks are very exposed if you know your way around it. So I like it for these kinds of games :3

 

With RPGs though, it's a little different, FFX-2 had a funny Money trick early in Chapter 1 where if you can somehow get 100,000 gil and pay Oaka's debt, then you would be opened to the very path where you can very much make like a huge amount of gil. But funny thing is, I don't find the money trick to be useful in FFX-2 and in my view, I don't use items that often like X-potions and attack items. Another reason is that I love to grind a lot, and I get the gil and items I want naturally, making the money trick in FFX-2 not necessary in my opinion, but except when you're bribing enemies xD The Lady Luck dressphere was another way of money making if you lined up 7 in the slot commands and you get an automatic bribe with bonus gil.

 

So in RPGs, I personally don't like these money tricks unless there's a reason for it, and with MMOs, why not? xD

[Shiggy 630]

In MMo the market is player driven so money tricks will simply devaluate the currency . So in the end it doesn't really matter how easy it is to farm money ( unless you rely a lot on NPC shops)

 

You can put a money trick in your game , you just have to remember it's there when designing what's in your shops  . For example you can put powerful and expensive consumable items but with limited number in inventory so the players that choose to go the money trick can progress in the game quickly if they use this item at the right time . They still have interesting stuff to do/manage but they get a different experience than normal and feel clever for finding the trick . Everybody wins !!!

[Rezanta 373]

Money tactics, eh? In Pokemon Y, you could battle in the restraint Le Wow, netting yourself 21-24 balm mushrooms as long as you did quick work (usually 2-3 turn limits and no k.o.ed pokemon). The place takes 90-100 grand to battle there. However, you net anywhere from 120 to 230 grand in profit. Most of the items, excluding things like Hyper Potions and certain pokeballs, cost anywhere from 9800, being the EV boosting drinks, to the 90,000 mega stones. After you buy the stones though, all you really spend money on is the drinks and healing items when needed. So, in terms, I'm against money breaking, but I tend to be dry every now and then.

[lonequeso 1,921]

One fun way to use money breaking is a good ol' fashioned casino. I've played a god amount of games that had some form of gambling mini game. With most you won the currency used in game. Pokemon was clever making had you win tokens which cost far more than the actual currency. 

 

Casino type games are random chance, and even if you stack the odds like an actual casino, someone is eventually going to win big. Especially since you can just save the game and keep trying if you really really really wanna score big. It will break the game sometimes, but gambling is kinda fun. I've actually won big before and didn't save the game to try and preserve some challenge.

[ashm 12]

Money tactics, eh? In Pokemon Y, you could battle in the restraint Le Wow, netting yourself 21-24 balm mushrooms as long as you did quick work (usually 2-3 turn limits and no k.o.ed pokemon). The place takes 90-100 grand to battle there. However, you net anywhere from 120 to 230 grand in profit. Most of the items, excluding things like Hyper Potions and certain pokeballs, cost anywhere from 9800, being the EV boosting drinks, to the 90,000 mega stones. After you buy the stones though, all you really spend money on is the drinks and healing items when needed. So, in terms, I'm against money breaking, but I tend to be dry every now and then.

But the main pokemon feature is battling with other player.  

The money you need would spent quickly at protein and other doping.

In game item itself (like fashion ?) are mostly only one time buy,

So having a way to exploit money in pokemon is actually a must.

 

 

One fun way to use money breaking is a good ol' fashioned casino. I've played a god amount of games that had some form of gambling mini game. With most you won the currency used in game. Pokemon was clever making had you win tokens which cost far more than the actual currency. 

 

Casino type games are random chance, and even if you stack the odds like an actual casino, someone is eventually going to win big. Especially since you can just save the game and keep trying if you really really really wanna score big. It will break the game sometimes, but gambling is kinda fun. I've actually won big before and didn't save the game to try and preserve some challenge.

Gambling is another good example, exploitable but player don't feel forced to do it.

[Kayzee 4,032]

Let's look at the problem from another angle. Imagine, if you will, a game that did it's best to model actual economics, or at least the minimal needed to seem a bit more dynamic and interesting. What features would this have? Well:

 

Points that make making money more difficult:

• Items could probably not be simply sold to any store you pop into, not everyone would be interested in buying just any old thing.
• Stores would have a limited pool of money they are willing to spend.
• Prices would not necessarily be fixed or agreed upon.
• Crafting would take time, effort, and skill, you couldn't simply make stacks and stacks of stuff in no time in a menu.

Points that make making money less difficult:

• You could probably start a business for crafting stuff and/or create a storefront of your own.
• You could hire people or send inactive party members to do crafting in the background.
• You could buy low and sell high and make a profit that way.
• You could probably make money many other ways then just crafting and buying/selling.

So what can we take away form this? In a more realistic setting, making money takes time, takes effort, and takes a monetary investment. I am not suggesting everyone go out and make a bunch of scripts/plugins to do all this kind of detailed economic stuff, but I am suggesting that you should try keeping in mind what making money would actually be like if you had. Are your "tricks" abstractions of more detailed interaction? Do you think your part members could, if the mechanism existed, do mass crafting and selling over such a short period of time? I think those are the questions to ask.