Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Difference between revisions

In short, Adam Smith Hates Your Guts.

 

 

It's worth noting that, in [[Real Life]], a person like the player character would have a ''perfectly inelastic'' demand for the commodity, meaning that they will manage to raise the funds ''and'' be willing to fork them over simply because they need to buy it in order to finish the game. Any merchants who [[Genre Savvy|are aware of this]] [[Truth in Television|can and will charge absurd amounts of money]], because they know it will sell regardless.

*** Somewhat understandable, actually. Flights through higher-level zones would realistically have a greater chance of attacks from flying enemies, so the flightmaster demands compensation in case you get his mount killed.

** The most flagrant example, however, is that because enemies drop magic items and other pieces of manufactured equipment, equipment manufactured by players is actually cheaper than raw materials. A herbalist/ miner, or skinner/ herbalist or other combo of raw material gathering professions is a good way of amassing a huge fortune quickly and buying all that ? equipment from the players that have the manufacturing skills almost cheap as free.

*** The most reliable money sink, of course, is armor repairs. If you play end-game content, this can drain you of several hundred gold a night on progression days.

** Also somewhat averted in ''WoW'' with faction rep discounts, getting to a higher reputation with a faction causes all vendors allied to that faction to offer you increasing discounts on all items.

** The game actually does a good job at keeping your resources just ahead of demand, which with the multiple solutions to any given puzzle means that you could be drowning in lockpicks while carrying around seven different guns in the false hope that one of them might have enough ammo to get you through the next firefight. On an economic basis, part of the plot is that the economy is screwed on a massive scale.

* In ''[[Tales of Eternia (Video Game)|Tales of Eternia]]'', not only does each successive town charge more for the inn, but the moment you visit an inn, every other inn you've ever been to increases ''their'' prices to match the new one.

* Also averted in ''[[Tales of Symphonia (Video Game)|Tales of Symphonia]]'' to some extent. Shops will still charge you, but certain events such as the dragon tours and trips to Thoda Geyser will not charge anything as the people can't take the Chosen's money.

* The player can choose to avert this themselves in any ''[[Tales Series]]'' game by taking advantage of the fact that many commodities - especially food - don't cost as much in some areas as in others. It's possible to make ridiculous amounts of money as a merchant if you know the differences.

** The trope is also literally inverted. You can recruit Adam Smith himself into your Continental Congress, in which case he loves you and wants you to succeed. Unless a rival colony snatches him away from you.

** The Firaxis remake makes the latter impossible, as once you get a Founding Father, he's yours. No other colony can get him. Whether or not this is good depends on whether or not you were able to get him first.

** Also in ''[[The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker (Video Game)|Wind Waker]]'', Tingle charges ridiculously high prices for his goods and services that are necessary to advance in the game, even requiring the player to get a wallet upgrade for the sake of a single extra Rupee.

* In ''[[Etrian Odyssey (Video Game)|Etrian Odyssey]]'' on DS, the price to spend a night at the inn goes up with every level that your party increases, as does the price to revive a fallen member at the hospital. Items and equipment are also rather pricey -- in the first two games, a single Nectar costs a whopping 500en. In ''The Drowned City'', healing items get a much needed price drop, such as Nectars now only costing a mere 50en. Ironically, the shopkeeper here is a major [[Money Fetish|Money Fetishist]]; probably best if she doesn't find out she's selling this stuff at such a staggering discount...

* ''[[Civilization (Video Game)|Civilization]]'' has an odd variant of this trope. The 'prices' of buildings and units, in the form of hammers (required production to build it), stays constant, no matter which era you're in. Thus, erecting a building in a newly built town will take exactly the same number of turns in the stone age as it will in the modern era, after building cranes, construction equipment and unionised labour has been invented. At the same time, buildings and units you unlock with better technology that you research later are prohibitively more expensive in terms of hammer cost. This leads to odd situations where you have a new town in the modern era where building a TV station (which is unlocked in the modern era) takes over eight times longer than building a library (unlocked upon learning how to read) or a Colosseum (unlocked by construction), and training a unit of riflemen takes four times as long as training a unit of longbowmen (which would be the opposite of [[Real Life]]).

[[Category:Money Tropes]]

[[Category:Adam Smith Hates Your Guts]]