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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

However, I think great games can be made on modest budgets with realistic expectations of profits and be successful.