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The same problem exists in other games, like Ultima Online and FFXIV. There's a solution for this, which was used in EVE Online: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/b

The same problem exists in other games, like Ultima Online and FFXIV. There's a solution for this, which was used in EVE Online: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-and-the-digital-housing-crisis https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-a... It works in real life too: https://gameofrent.com/ https://gameofrent.com/

Waterluvian 2y ago
Sorry, what’s the fix? Undeveloped land tax?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  Land value tax, property tax which excludes the building. Forces speculators to pay society equal to the value theyre wasting
- meibo 2y ago
  FFXIV just added a lottery and zoning rules, which IMO are the most boring ways to fix it. Arguably it came with the expected trade-offs zoning laws have in real-life, in that zones intended for their equivalent of guilds are often empty/dead now since there are not that many active guilds, and "legacy" wards that still have personal housing and guild housing intertwined are a lot more active and diverse.
- BirdieNZ 2y ago
  Land value tax.
  - ffhhj 2y ago
    Best solution, must be applied to domains and patents, increasing tax as time passes.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
larsiusprime 2y ago
Oh hey, thanks for linking my article! I fleshed that out later into a full fledged policy paper / how-to guide: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-value-tax-in-online-games-and https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-value-tax-in-...
- dejobaan 2y ago
  You should write a book about this stuff!
  - nwah1 2y ago
    Ha. He did...
- someone7x 2y ago
  Great article, except for an unexpected reminder of how "gamedeveloper.com" just totally thrashed the history of "gamasutra.com"; the link in their own article to their own past article is broken. Finding all my gamasutra.com bookmarks nuked one day with the rebrand still makes me salty. Rant aside, this is what it tries to link to about 2/3 through the article: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/how-i-used-eve-online-to-predict-the-great-recession https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/how-i-used-eve-online-t...
  - BizarroLand 2y ago
    I made the wild statement oh so many years ago that if America wanted its people to own houses, it could fix the current system by implementing a land value tax that only kicks in on your second property and multiply by the number of properties you (or your business) owns in one city/county/state. For instance, In King County, WA, property taxes are 1.1%. If you own one 1 million dollar property then that's $11,000/year you have to pay. Set land value tax to 1.1% * (number of properties you own - 1). Say you own 2 1 million dollar properties in King County. That would be 1.1% of $2,000,000 property taxes, or $22,000/year. Plus an additional $11,000 for the first one, for $33,000/year. Fine. But then if you buy a third one, then it goes $33,000/year property taxes PLUS (1.1% * (number of properties you own - 1) = $22,000 * 2 = $44,000, or $77,000/year to own three 1 million dollar properties. It would quickly and effectively destroy any rent profit available, and make holding the properties for investment purposes an exponentially untenable position. If they rolled out this tax over a 7 year period there would be plenty of time for the market to gently deflate as conglomerates and corporations divested their investment properties.
TheHumanist 2y ago
You must mean 'existed' in Ultima Online. Hardly anyone plays it anymore, unfortunately. Still my favorite gaming memories.
knome 2y ago
It seems like a good fix for games with magic systems would be to allow players of appropriate wizarding classes to build portals on available land that go from one place to another. Your towns can stretch infinitely in player controlled non-euclidean spaces. The wizards might charge and compete with one another for tokens that allow passage through various portals. Players could trade and buy tokens to eventually do the equivalent of walking from Gerlach Nevada, through an alley in New York, across a road in LA, take a ferry from San Francisco up to Sausalito and pop into Gerlach Wisconsin, or whatever the appropriate local variant might be. Portals might require regular maintenance, the carrying of materials between sides without use of a portal to keep them running. Degradated portals could appear visibly damaged and do fun things like teleport people to the wrong location, or even locations otherwise unavailable to the main map, making an industry of building and ruining portals, with long distances costing the most but opening availabilityto the largest number of liminal spaces.
- crote 2y ago
  That's just repeating the problem - or even making it worse. Land is still finite, so there will be competition for portal locations. Connectivity is valuable, so land with easy access to a lot of portals will raise in value: who wants to walk through 20 portals when you could also reach your destination in 1 or 2? This means there is a very strong incentive for the formation of a portal monopoly or cartel. Anyone in control of a central portal hub is able to make a lot of money by opening a new portal from that hub to a far-off location. That far-off location was previously worthless, but the presence of a portal suddenly makes it extremely valuable. And being able to charge people for portal passage makes it even worse: Not only can you profit from land speculation, you're now basically charging rent on the land you sold too! The only way to really work around this is to have essentially infinite land, accessible from a single central portal. But as the linked article mentions, that's quite immersion-breaking.
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    This train of thought reminds me a lot of Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga, in which wormhole technology is discovered by a duo not unlike Jobs and Wozniak, and commercialized, and arguably monopolized. As a result, this leads to considerable differences in opinion about the proper usage of wormhole technology in the setting between the two founders and in the wider society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga

Waterluvian 2y ago

Sorry, what’s the fix? Undeveloped land tax?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
HDThoreaun 2y ago
Land value tax, property tax which excludes the building. Forces speculators to pay society equal to the value theyre wasting
meibo 2y ago
FFXIV just added a lottery and zoning rules, which IMO are the most boring ways to fix it. Arguably it came with the expected trade-offs zoning laws have in real-life, in that zones intended for their equivalent of guilds are often empty/dead now since there are not that many active guilds, and "legacy" wards that still have personal housing and guild housing intertwined are a lot more active and diverse.
BirdieNZ 2y ago
Land value tax.
- ffhhj 2y ago
  Best solution, must be applied to domains and patents, increasing tax as time passes.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

larsiusprime 2y ago

Oh hey, thanks for linking my article! I fleshed that out later into a full fledged policy paper / how-to guide: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-value-tax-in-online-games-and https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-value-tax-in-...

dejobaan 2y ago
You should write a book about this stuff!
- nwah1 2y ago
  Ha. He did...
someone7x 2y ago
Great article, except for an unexpected reminder of how "gamedeveloper.com" just totally thrashed the history of "gamasutra.com"; the link in their own article to their own past article is broken. Finding all my gamasutra.com bookmarks nuked one day with the rebrand still makes me salty. Rant aside, this is what it tries to link to about 2/3 through the article: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/how-i-used-eve-online-to-predict-the-great-recession https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/how-i-used-eve-online-t...
- BizarroLand 2y ago
  I made the wild statement oh so many years ago that if America wanted its people to own houses, it could fix the current system by implementing a land value tax that only kicks in on your second property and multiply by the number of properties you (or your business) owns in one city/county/state. For instance, In King County, WA, property taxes are 1.1%. If you own one 1 million dollar property then that's $11,000/year you have to pay. Set land value tax to 1.1% * (number of properties you own - 1). Say you own 2 1 million dollar properties in King County. That would be 1.1% of $2,000,000 property taxes, or $22,000/year. Plus an additional $11,000 for the first one, for $33,000/year. Fine. But then if you buy a third one, then it goes $33,000/year property taxes PLUS (1.1% * (number of properties you own - 1) = $22,000 * 2 = $44,000, or $77,000/year to own three 1 million dollar properties. It would quickly and effectively destroy any rent profit available, and make holding the properties for investment purposes an exponentially untenable position. If they rolled out this tax over a 7 year period there would be plenty of time for the market to gently deflate as conglomerates and corporations divested their investment properties.

TheHumanist 2y ago

You must mean 'existed' in Ultima Online. Hardly anyone plays it anymore, unfortunately. Still my favorite gaming memories.

knome 2y ago

It seems like a good fix for games with magic systems would be to allow players of appropriate wizarding classes to build portals on available land that go from one place to another. Your towns can stretch infinitely in player controlled non-euclidean spaces. The wizards might charge and compete with one another for tokens that allow passage through various portals. Players could trade and buy tokens to eventually do the equivalent of walking from Gerlach Nevada, through an alley in New York, across a road in LA, take a ferry from San Francisco up to Sausalito and pop into Gerlach Wisconsin, or whatever the appropriate local variant might be. Portals might require regular maintenance, the carrying of materials between sides without use of a portal to keep them running. Degradated portals could appear visibly damaged and do fun things like teleport people to the wrong location, or even locations otherwise unavailable to the main map, making an industry of building and ruining portals, with long distances costing the most but opening availabilityto the largest number of liminal spaces.

crote 2y ago
That's just repeating the problem - or even making it worse. Land is still finite, so there will be competition for portal locations. Connectivity is valuable, so land with easy access to a lot of portals will raise in value: who wants to walk through 20 portals when you could also reach your destination in 1 or 2? This means there is a very strong incentive for the formation of a portal monopoly or cartel. Anyone in control of a central portal hub is able to make a lot of money by opening a new portal from that hub to a far-off location. That far-off location was previously worthless, but the presence of a portal suddenly makes it extremely valuable. And being able to charge people for portal passage makes it even worse: Not only can you profit from land speculation, you're now basically charging rent on the land you sold too! The only way to really work around this is to have essentially infinite land, accessible from a single central portal. But as the linked article mentions, that's quite immersion-breaking.
- aspenmayer 2y ago
  This train of thought reminds me a lot of Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga, in which wormhole technology is discovered by a duo not unlike Jobs and Wozniak, and commercialized, and arguably monopolized. As a result, this leads to considerable differences in opinion about the proper usage of wormhole technology in the setting between the two founders and in the wider society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga