The Real World economy is often an enigma. For most of us, cause and effect are impossible to pick out from the near total chaos. This is especially true for the politicians who are constantly blathering as if they actually understand this crap.
Brief semi-partisan political aside: If you are a "job creator" (i.e. rich guy) who owns a business that makes and services thingamajigs, and someone gives you a million bucks in a tax break, you won't start hiring. You won't start hiring until there's a demand for more thingamajigs, and that requires money going to consumers. Hence supply-side economics is crap and rich people aren't "job creators", although I'm certain some do enjoy "trickling down" on the rest of us. Aside done.
Game World economies are plenty chaotic, but they are a great deal more limited, and so are easier to understand and manipulate.
Pretty much all players (and designers) agree that a healthy, dynamic in-game economy is an important part of successful game design. There needs to be an effective way for money and items to circulate. It also provides something of a money-sink to keep inflation at bay.
Players also love the tantalizing prospect of getting rich by playing the market. But that almost never happens...almost.
I've seen two guildies in different games get steenking rich in-game by using market forces like a 2x4 to bludgeon the competition. The games were different, the economies totally different, but the end results were the same.
XYLEM--GEM MASTER OF CENARIUS (WORLD OF WARCRAFT)
Xylem was an occasionally played alt of a guildie. He wasn't at cap but was high-level enough it was clear he wasn't a bank alt or gold-seller. And he was the first character to hit the money cap in WoW.
BTW, the cap was a little over 200k gold because WoW used an unsigned integer to keep track of your riches. 2 to the 31st power is 2,147,483,648 which was the maximum number of copper pieces you could have (100 copper to a silver, 100 silver to a gold). Note that they later changed it after my buddy Xylem hit the cap. Also note, any extra just vanished, so he didn't go to negative money or have integer overflow and crash the server.
How did he amass what was at that time a ridiculous, to many almost unimaginable, amount of gold? Pure, simple market control. He picked a small niche, but one that was used by almost everyone, gems.
In WoW a lot of the best gear has sockets which can hold gems. These gems can provide a wide array of stat buffs depending on the their color, quality, and cut. Pretty much everyone needs gems, at least occasionally, so it was a very fluid market.
I don't know if Xylem started out by saying to himself "How can I control the server market for gems?" or if his world domination simply grew out of time, but regardless his methods worked.
He had several things going for him that any would-be competitors probably didn't have.
He's a smart guy with a good grasp on market dynamics. There are plenty of smart people playing the game, but browsing any auction house in any game will show you that smart doesn't neccessarily translate to the market.
He had a good idea as to the reasonable value ranges of the various types of gems, the price norms that they would tend to return to over time.
He had patience. He was in it for the long haul. I think initially he was just looking at it as a way to make some good money, but over time the "mini-game" of playing the gem market was entertaining by itself. I myself find in-game economics fascinating, so I can certainly understand. Too many people are looking for a quick score on the AH, but if you want to control the market, patience is a must.
He was ubiquitous. He'd check in every few hours for a couple of minutes. Long enough to check his mail and check the AH. He'd buy any gems he knew were undervalued and make sure he had gems up for sale, usually undercutting anything else. He kept an eye on all of the dynamics involved: cut or uncut gems, which cuts of which colors were selling at what prices, and so on.
His smarts and patience allowed him to slowly exert control over the gem market, server-wide. His control wasn't iron-handed. I'm sure there were other people making money on gems, but nowhere near as much and not as reliably.
And that's how you amass over 2 billion copper pieces.
STRY'KER--WEAPON MASTER OF ECLIPSE (STAR WARS: GALAXIES)
My character in SWG was a smuggler (named "Lens", the first time I'd used that moniker). I was working on my slicing skill. Slicing allowed a smuggler to open locks and also permanently improve weapons. But I needed a consumeable to do my slicing, a consumeable that could only be made by a weaponsmith. I stumbled over this guy named "Stry'ker" who was a weaponsmith and I asked if I could pay him to make some of these consumeables I needed. After we'd finished our transaction, I innocently asked "Have you ever considered selling pre-sliced weapons?"
And so a market titan was born.
I got to skill up my slicing and he got to be the first weaponsmith on the server to offer pre-sliced weapons in his store. This initial success stoked his monopolistic fires and he was off to the races.
Now the economy of SWG was far, far different from WoW. It was much more interdependant and vastly more complex.
If you want to make a sword in WoW you take, say, 10 metal ingots of the right kind a push a button. In SWG...well, I'll try to keep it brief...
To make a rocket launcher (I'm using info from late in the game's lifespan here) you needed steel and 4 other ingredients...but wait, there were 15 different TYPES of steel, each with a possible range of values in 8 different traits (things like "shock resistance" and "conductivity"). Note...a range of values, because there could be endless different varieties of each type of steel, all with different values.
And the end result of the weapon construction would be based on the values in the traits. Oh...but there's more, because the rocket launcher also needs a heavy weapon core. And has two optional components as well. And, for instance, the heavy weapon core comes in regular and advanced. And the advanced heavy weapon core requires 4 ingredients. And two more components. And three more optional components.
Get the picture? And that, dear friends, was me keeping it brief.
Stry'ker started out doing what all crafters did, he prospected for good materials and set up automated mining/harvesting equipment, then would slowly make his components and assemble his end product.
But over time, he realized how to control the market. Whenever a new type of ingredient spawned with stat values in the traits that were superior to anything available before, he would publicize that he was buying as much as you could deliver to his easily accessible store at a higher credit/per unit price than anyone else. So he would end up with much more of the best materials than any competitor.
He would then, using the best materials that were available on the server, crank out flawlessly made weapons that competitors _might_ be able to match, but not in his numbers or at his prices.
He would also pay top value for the rare-drop components needed to make the highest quality, hand-crafted items.
If you went to his store, you could choose to buy superb weapons that couldn't be bettered by anyone else (although a few could match them) at good prices or buy individually crafted items unmatched on the server at very high prices. Covering both the mass consumer and top-end price-is-no-object consumer in the same location made him the unrivalled weaponsmith on Eclipse at that time.
His vendors became the anchor for the Misfits Mall, our guild's superstore. Unfortunately, due to the way SOE architected server loads, we were too successful. We had so many people shopping at our vendors that they became unusable due to increasingly long lag times. Too many shoppers, too many clicks, too many database inquiries.
Regardless of that, Stry'ker had, through an enormous amount of hard work, patience, and a completely ruthless application of market forces, taken control of perhaps the single most important crafting market in the game.
IN CLOSING
I have witnessed two different cases of someone "winning" the free market in an in-game economy.
The mechanisms they had to use were very different because the economies of games can vary so widely.
But they had several things in common too. They were two smart guys with an excellent grasp on the basics of the markets they were going into, on the normal values of the goods in that market.
Second, they had patience in abundance. You can't "win" quickly. You will have to suffer through market irregularities and have to ride those out and have confidence that over time your approach will work.
Lastly, they had to use the market forces at their disposal. These forces are as amoral as gravity, and just as unrelenting. Even in a make-believe economy, knowing what force to apply and when to apply it can make a profitable transaction.
Doing it over time makes a market master.
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