Money is really just a proxy that represents energy and resources. What functional level of simulation will the game be? Is it going to be like there are only so many trees, oil, resources in the ground and that dictates larger macroeconomic forces from a bottoms-up perspective, or are you going to do some sort of divine intervention and enact a top-down fiscial policy like in 2nd Life by arbitrarily printing gaming currency? Or will you let "emergence of complex systems" happen and allow a natural world-central-reserve and monetary policy to form based on the available resources on planet earth and the population?
If the latter, does this mean if someday the mmorpg gets too popular we will have to deal with "peak oil" and other resource limits to growth? Or will you magically create oil "out of thin air"?
I'm imagining that for gameplay's sake there could be some resources sparser than others, and technologies that use one material while it can be more easily used, available and cheap, but switching to another material (+tech development) as the first one is getting depleted. Cost of input materials can be determined by market, but ultimately (minus market speculations and niches), and for self-sustained economy it's driven by the energy needed for the extraction: if there are mines with 3% content of some metal, the overall energy needed to extract it will be considerably less than what you have to put into filtering out 3x that much gangue.
I don't think we should be afraid of total resource depletion, like say in the old AoE. First the land is enormous and civilization will be sparse, and second the economic model will be able to adapt, as in RL.
We aren't thinking of making an artificial game currency there. We would really like to leave it on the people and the game. Though there probably will be an artificial entity trading with energy and precious materials - the mothership - but I'd like it to be a part of the game as far as the economic rules go. Basically, adapting to the market. Losing and winning.
