Imagine an MMO where coin isn’t an abundant commodity. It is easy if you try. Monsters would not drop it as loot and would instead only reward players with appropriate items. Animals would drop pelts while orcs might carry an axe or club. Every item would have some function. Weapons and armor can be used while other items would be trade skill components. Other items might be for bounties or quests. No loot should exist just to be sold for coin. That would only be a secondary function.
Imagine if you had to barter once again like players did in EverQuest 1. It isn’t that hard to do. Coin would exist but it wouldn’t be as important as it is now. It would only be generated by selling items that could have other uses to NPC merchants. Much like Ultima Online, however, they will simply not take an infinite supply and they would gladly sell to players what has been sold to them. Players would have to converse, negotiate deals, trade supplies and actually work together to get what they want. Coin could be used only to even out slight imbalances.
You may say this would lead to great difficulty making trades but I point out that it worked in EQ1. It would most certainly slow things down a bit and remove the “immediate gratification” of the auction house where a player never has to say two words to another player to get what they want. For an MMO that focuses on crafting and/or social connections, however, this would go a long way to further those goals. Instead of auction houses players could browse UO and EQ style player made vendors. There was quite a bit of excitement in doing that back in the day.
Imagine no bind on pick up. I wonder if you can. All items would be bind on equip and could be traded once in hand. Whether the item was from a raid, group, crafted or raid crafted you could exchange it for something else. Loot waste would be reduced to almost nothing. Developers would, of course, have to give up on their desire to secure raid loot but I think in a niche game that would be fine. After all, without coin floating around everywhere, it would be hard for someone who doesn’t raid to trade for a raid item.
You may say nobody would be interested in this style of economy but I’d say it has already proven successful twice. It would be neat to return to a system where everything dropped has a value beyond vendor bait. Collecting and trading commodities by region was always an interesting experience in EverQuest and UO. Returning to a game where interaction was encouraged could certainly be interesting. I hope some day others will agree and we can try a new direction of player interaction instead of a solo-centric one.
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I love the idea. Definitely a niche though. The mass market wants quick and easy. WoW’s level of economy is probably about as far as they want to go.
However, I think great games can be made on modest budgets with realistic expectations of profits and be successful.
I’m afraid this is an area where the game design has been driven by fear of RMT.
Imagine in this world that the best way to earn gold fast is camping the spoogles. Unfortunately the only place spoogles spawn has 200 bots who farm them 24/7 and train anyone else trying to farm there.
Gold is worth less when it’s abundant. A game where gold is rare and therefore valuable would be very heavily dominated by botters and farmers.
That’s why WoW is directed towards instanced loot and bind on pickup gear.
I hear you completely Stabs but I think that is actually part of the problem. Developers seem to be so afraid of their shadow sometimes and let themselves be fearmongers. They might think, “If we let players do X then they can do Y! We can’t allow Y.” Of course nobody knows why Y is bad. They’ve just always been told that. Perhaps there is an easy way around it? Lets look at how to deal with some of the issues you mentioned in the system.
One easy one is training. That is more of an EQ1 legacy. It is harder to train in games these days and can be made next to impossible.
The next thought is on the coin itself. Just because coin is rare doesn’t mean it is high value. Platinum was comparatively rare in classic EQ1 and basically worthless. Players wanted trades because coin did nothing. You had no repair costs. It was just something you used to shore up inequities.
Coin is only purchased because developers make it a necessity to day to day life with repair costs, vendor items, mounts and other frills. If players do all of those functions with items they make from components gained slaying monsters or harvesting the value of coin goes down.
You can also make business harder on bots. So lets say spoogles are the in demand item. There are some problems though. A bot can only sell so many to the NPCs before they won’t take them anymore. This limits their inventory of coin. As such, they have to sell spoogles on the AH or as a RMT. At the same time, if they sell spoogles to the NPCs there is an inventory available to players.
We’re also assuming a traditional EQ1 approach though where a certain item spawns in a certain place only. If spoogles drop off every mob of appropriate level the bots cannot lock down an entire content tier and the value of the item will go down because a monopoly is impossible. Further, if the “rare” and in demand items drop in instances that can only be done at a set interval you can easily break the bot farming lock.
No matter what your game is you’re going to have bots. I just don’t see a game like this having any more trouble with bots than WoW does. There are ways to innovate out of the problems.
I think ending all the consumable item and upkeep costs of raiding in a game like WoW would be great. Back in EQ I could log in just for a raid and log out if I wanted, there was no need for farming anything. That alone would mean a big reduction in demand for botters.
As well, the path to wealth (if that was your goal) in EQ was as you say, through manual trading. And the items of value were often in dungeons or camps far too difficult for a bot to deal with.
With the WoW style we have games where we have to farm, and its so devoid of challenge and involvement that its both possible and desirable to automate the process.
You really hit on what I was trying to get at Ryan. The game would not have a bunch of unnecessary “bills” that we have inherited in our MMOs. You don’t need thirty potions for your raid. You don’t need to repair constantly. If coin was just there to facilitate slight trade inequities and to exchanges commodities it might be quite a cool economy.
I have to say I also miss the EQ1 days of bartering. Early MMOs had items that literally would never be sold for coin. A Ykesha or FBSS would be traded, never sold. There simply was not enough platinum to equate to the actual value of those items.
Even though it was something of a pain, I do miss sitting in East Commons or North Freeport (depending on your server) and watching the auctions scroll by. I remember people spending days making smart trades and working their way up to an item they had been wanting for a long time. You also knew the best stuff in the game and what other items were the equivalent of them immediately. Sure, the auction house is way more convenient but not nearly as interesting.
A charming idea no doubt, and I personally like the concept, but I do feel there would be a large back-lash from the majority of the current MMO community. Like Darkfall and EVE, compared to the “WoW” that so many people try to design, this is a niche trade concept.
What I really want to see is the REAL world to go back to the barter system so I can trade my bass guitar for a mans cow. The guitar is then traded for a comic book, which is traded for a remarkably shiny tin can.
That’s awesome.
MMO devs need to stop swinging for the fences. Design for the niche, make a solid design with modest expectations and requirements, and ignore the “mainstream” who won’t play the game anyway.