Game servers for SA-MP, FiveM, VC-MP and Liberty Unleashed

This post will be about inflation.

To start with, what is inflation? Here is a short but concise definition from the Cambridge Dictionary:


The reason I came up with this topic is this pollthat was conducted recently. The result of this poll disappointed me, but I will continue about that later in this post.

Theoretically, inflation in itself is not bad. When prices increase slowly but gradually, players have an incentive to spend money, rather than saving it and waiting for a better moment to purchase a certain good. In case of deflation (prices decrease gradually over time), players would postpone purchases and keep sitting on their pile of money because they think the goods will become cheaper over time, and the server economy would gradually come to a standstill. Therefore, a low and stable inflation is generally perceived as healthy. Some examples of inflation on WTLS 2 are minigun and a FT Rustler. Approximately 7 or 8 years ago, minigun used to be worth $3,000 per bullet on WTLS 2. Nowadays, you often need to pay $25,000 or more for every bullet. Recently I even managed to sell minigun for $42,000 per ammo, which I already discussed in this blog post. FT Rustler (with explosive bombs) used to be worth approximately $10,000,000 a few years ago. But right now, you need to pay up to $30,000,000 for the same FT Rustler. Inflation is quite apparent, don't you think?

For me, inflation has been a problem for years. I do not always play, I can be inactive for months or even longer than a year. Prices of cars, weapons, etc. will have increased while I am gone but my money balance in-game stays the same, so my purchasing power will have decreased. I can now buy less stuff with the same amount of game money. With $3,000,000 I could have bought 1,000 ammo of minigun 8 years ago. Nowadays, $3,000,000 may get you 120 ammo of minigun if you are lucky enough. Of course we need to bear in mind that the income of jobs, missions, gangs, etc. has also increased throughout the years. But I cannot do jobs or missions if I am inactive. And even if I am active, I am too lazy to do jobs regularly, but you may have guessed that already if you read this blog post.

How do I solve this? If I keep all my wealth in game money my purchasing power will decrease over time. I solved this by buying certain assets that are almost certain to increase in price over time. I decided to purchase considerable amounts of minigun. Most of my wealth is in minigun, since it has increased significantly in price over the years (and will undoubtedly keep increasing even further), and it is relatively easy to sell minigun compared to FT vehicles. And I should not forget to mention that I like using minigun, so I need to have large reserves of minigun ammo anyway. For diversification purposes, I also decided to purchase other assets like FT Rustler, Infernus, RPG and drugs. My game money balance is usually quite low, I always try to keep a couple of millions on me to have some liquidity. Thus, I am fairly well protected against inflation.

However, my concerns are still not taken away. Some time ago, players could easily farm hefty amounts of tokens by simply going afk in-game, which creates a lot of money and induces inflation. I was dumbfounded to see that players could do this unpunished, but thankfully that feature has been largely reversed. However, I still think the inflation can be lower. I advocate for even more measures, like removing token rewards for non-stop playing completely and reducing the percentages of non-stop bonuses. Furthermore, I would encourage lowering the percentages of summer bonuses as well, and keep the income of jobs, gangs and missions to the current level for a longer while, instead of increasing them every now and then. This should slow down inflation and make it reach lower levels, atleast in theory.

Referring back to this poll, I was disappointed to see most players voted "no". But I was not surprised. Why would players, who afk for hours as if their lives depended on it, vote for removing them? Obviously they will not advocate for removing those bonuses if they largely profit from these same bonuses, thus in my eyes the poll outcome was fairly obvious from the beginning already. As far as I am concerned, holding a democratic poll is not suitable in this situation. If you ask everyone if they want a money tree, most people will instinctively vote yes. But is that beneficial for the server economy, or the server overall?

To conclude, inflation can be a challenge, especially if you are inactive from time to time. My suggestions above will not be well received by everyone, feel free to hate on them. But that is simply how I view it. In my eyes inflation is too high and measures should be taken to slow down the economy. But if we do end up like Argentina with skyrising inflation, atleast I will have been able to protect myself as best as I can against the ferocious wealth-destroying claws of inflation.