Would MMOs still exist in a communist society?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord's_Game

Video games in general would change a lot. Think of how many games have an internal "market" or faux currency system.

You have feudalistic games (strategy god games) in capitalism so I dont see why not.

Furthermore, very few MMO's that are popular are capitalistic. Games like WoW, runescape and wowclones all have no private property. Players cannot own pieces of land and extract surplus value from other players. All land is held in common, and some land is in the wilderness (the commons with skullbashing), anybody can use them. Merchants do not constitute capitalism because it doesnt follow the capitalist mode of production. Production is simplistic and a one-man operation. There is nothing stopping players from gathering their own resources, because all players are equal, except for levels but that can be trained easily. And even with those levels, the production of higher level players is not larger than that of lower level players in most cases.

Preventing capitalist relations and preventing devaluation of lower level methods in regards to products produced is vital for any MMO development because it breaks the fun of the game. Some guys making a ton of money speculating on the in game stockmarket is not capitalism.

I dont think there is anything with MMO's.

The only capitalistic MMO I could think of is the ancap game EVE online. But even that game needs a police force to create a litteral safe space in order to not destroy its playerbase.

While you can't "legally" own land, you can do it practically, and it happens a lot, with guilds and groups conspiring to monopolize territories and drops.

What mmo has groups so well organised that they can consistently control an area?

Also is this an mmo with single-worlds? Like in games like runescape you can just hop to a different world if the other one is taken.

Black Desert Online. It's really a fascinating example, both for how it treats productive property, but also the conscious design choices they had to implement in order to thwart capitalism/monopolies. The game is pretty economy centric, but the market (the literal in game market/AH mechanism) functions as an iron-economic regulator. For example, anything you sell is taxed at a base 30% rate right off the bat, and the allowed range of prices is regulated by an aggregate of highest/lowest prices sold for that item. So, you can't just arbitrarily raise the sale price 30% to compensate. To raise the overall average price, the overall average would have to be pushed up by constantly selling that type of item at the max price.

So, for item X, to put it on the auction house, you can only price is between 5 and 10 silver. If there is zero X on the market and you put up 100 at 10 reach, if they all sell for 10 silver then that will push the acceptable price range up too 6-11 then 7-12 etc. Still, even if you did manage to sell them all, you'd still be in for a 30% tax on the ultimate sale price, on top of whatever you're charged to put it on the AH in the first place.

This would typically describe selling component items like iron ore or that kind of thing, so the profits on raw materials are razor thin at best, encouraging players to refine them into other things instead, iron weapons instead of iron ore, etc.

I know it happens on a World of Warcraft vanilla private server I play on.

Interesting.

Ah that sucks. I think it wont matter in communism though, since I would like to see open source and the abolishion of copyright so people can build on the software and make their own servers. Nobody is forcing you into the game unlike capitalism, and you can make your own server with your own rules whenever you want. I think servers can impose their own rules if they want to, they could even have private property of virtual means of production, people will just leave for a better server.

Tricky discussion. If you legitimise ingame property as legitimate you dont have control over preventing exploition. This ingame wealth could serve as a form of currency that can be gained unlawfully by exploitation of other players.

this is how retarded your question really is. of course there will be. the content would just develop. instead of retarded grinding to get item drops you can sell which essentially becomes the games only goal, a trading place of virtual goods, you'll actually follow the story and change the world you're playing in.

What if I like grinding? If I wanted a story I'd read a book or watch a movie.

that's because you have the mentality of a wage slave that isn't much more developed than that of a bot

I enjoy chopping wood and other types of menial labor. Do I have the mentality of a wage slave too?

Too be fair if you're talking about Elysium it's because it's got 8k+ pop consisting of hardcore raiders from almost every continent in a game that is meant to be played by maybe 3k at most during primetime while region locked so off-hours actually exist.

no labour is the cornerstone of any soc. movement

Came to point this out

whisper Music on ascencion sargeras horde for an invite to named after the group of young hegalians that marx engels and stirner were a part of.

I want to make a total gift economy in this one guild on this classless server ffs people get it together.

So they purposely stagnate the market with taxes?
How do they deal with trades that happen outside of the auction house?
How is private property managed?

If you wanna grind, grind all you want. Why would anyone stop you from engaging in it?

How would you deal with malicious people?

Does anyone still play MMOs?
The only one left is WoW and it's hardly an MMO anymore, endgame is basically sitting in a capital city waiting for queues to pop, so is a good chunk of leveling and even if you go into the world everything is either phased or shared with other servers, it might as well be an instance.

Shit idea, runescape has a massive pvp zone and it's only used for skull tricking or extremely efficient activities where the individual brings nothing of value so when skull trickers come, they lose nothing
Dangerous pvp is always a mistake
(Skull tricking is abusing game mechanics to cause someone to get a skull which is an indicator that the individual initiated dangerous pvp recently and if they die, they drop all of their items on death)
my man i have toto appreciate how I'm not the only one who realises the economy in RuneScape is not capitalist (except arguably fucking partyhats but jagex should just dump 500 million party hats because junk items shouldn't have a large exchange value if they don't have a use value)

All of those would apply to scarcity socialist economy too tho.

They purposefully make abusing the auction house more or less unprofitable. Without it, theoretically it's possible for an insanely rich player to buy up all the steel in the market and then rack up the prices. If that happened, if someone cornered the market on some essential resource, then the whole economy would come crashing down. These taxes also incentivize guild control of regions, because not only do guilds get tax discounts on regions that they control, but they also get a portion of taxes collected from anyone buying or selling within that region (among other benefits).

Most items cannot be traded outside of the market house. Players can trade certain types of items, but generally things like money or resources or equipment can only be transferred via AH sale. Because of the mechanics of the AH this can be abused, and some players are able to make "illegal" transfers, but it requires specific conditions and coordination with the other player. The cash shop currency is pearls, and that kind of thing happens, but if you get caught your account can get sanctioned.

Just like how players can't trade certain items, they also can't make certain things, or it would be inefficient to do so. For example, to make a sword you not only need raw materials, but also the facilities to craft in. Say you needed ash wood, steel, and an earth crystal to make a level one sword or whatever. It's possible to collect this stuff yourself. You can mine the iron and coal if you know where the collection nodes are. You can even refine these into steel.

However, it's unlikely that doing so yourself would be as efficient as having a worker do so. Workers will ply assigned resource nodes until they run out of stamina and have to regenerate. A level one worker will generate more iron in an hour than a level one player. They'll also do this while you're off mucking about in dungeons or whatever.

To get a worker though you need the property to house them and the facilities to store what they gather. Every inhabited settlement has buildings that you can claim, which enable various functions. To activate these buildings, you have to allocate Contribution Points, which you earn by fulfilling special quests which give you Contribution Experience, and every time you level that you get a single point which you can allocate. These points are never lost or destroyed. If you dismiss a worker that you no longer need, you can retract the CP you invested in his lodging and reinvest it elsewhere. The more CP you have, the more that you can do, but generally the more you do, the more CP it costs.

So while it's heavily abstracted, you have a simulation of property management and commodity production where the more socially necessary labor that you perform, the more you can access and use productive property, which is "yours" for as long as you are using it, but the use of which precludes you from monopolizing all productive property. You can't have a Max level sword smith and foundry AND a Max level wand maker for example. But if you change your mind and want to change from the one to the other, the only thing stopping you is the effort involved in reorganizing your labor and property. In reality, one person occupying the blacksmith doesn't preclude other players from using that same building, but I think that's an interesting way of simulating property ownership, use, management, etc.

Also in regards to the market, certain other economic mechanics keep these heavy taxes from stifling production, and the rate of natural generation of essential items and equipment ensures that production is carried out more or less from necessity, but also that there is always a more or less "optimal" money supply. Weapons and armor are restricted to particular classes for example, so if a warrior finds a rare bow or something, if they don't have an alt that can use it, typically they just auction it and even with the insane taxes still generates a significant profit for them.

So since the market is generally driven by necessity, even though production for common items might continue at a "loss", because these items are necessary to progress and are generally produced through passive actions as one plays, the economy functions more or less unimpeded.

Runescape has a fucking shit system though, it doesn't matter if the zone is huge when the explicit purpose for that zone is PVP. Just let people attack each other whenever and have different consequences and states rather than KOS/no KOS with skull/no skull. Then you get far more interesting emergent gameplay like ambushes, territory disputes, and riots.
Runescape is a game for scrubs.

You're talking about the devilsaur mafia? Blizzard wouldn't allow for such robust cross-faction cooperation back in the day so the Elysium devs not cracking down on that is pretty shitty. Good example of how monopolies make everyone miserable though.