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Original post by lessthanjake Quote: sunandshadow wrote So the shops' quotas are going to fill up and stay full of beginner-craftable items, making it annoying/expensive for new people to begin learning to craft because they either can't sell their product at all, or have to run around to several NPC stores trying to find one which will buy? Ideally, new players would ALSO be buying the beginner-craftable items from the NPC shops, making the quotas not full anymore. You could say that higher level players would simply sell more daggers at that point, but most likely, higher level players would have a better incentive to sell high profit mid-level items at that point. Also, if NO ONE is buying daggers, then they shouldn't continue to be made. That's not economically realistic at all. You don't create that for which there is no market. If new players are buying daggers, then other new players will have room to craft and sell them. If new players are buying more expensive items instead, then other similar new players will surely have the ability to craft more expensive items.

A player who can craft an item won't be buying that item. In my experience at least 50% of players want to craft. That means even if every single player needs a dagger, less than half of those players will be buying their dagger. That means the average craftsperson should only be making about 2 daggers - 1 for themselves, 1 for a player who doesn't like crafting. Is making 2 daggers enough to level up a player's crafting to be able to make the next highest level of item? And, perhaps not every player needs a dagger. In that case the demand per craftsman is even smaller.

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Yeah. In EVE you lose items all the time. It isn't an annoyance (ok, it can be. but it usually isnt), and it does actually provide fun. The key to the fun is that it provides a direct way to damage your PvP enemies. The physically lose stuff they worked to get when you go to war. Noone can fight forever, and someone walks away from the fight a loser. And, to top it off, not everything is blown up, so the winners can often walk away with loot from the people they just killed. At the end of the day, someone won. WoW PvP is a joke. Noone gains anything, and noone loses anything. Like a stalemate of TF2, you just run around popping eachother and waiting for the respawn timers. At the end of the day, nothing changed.

You are talking about a death system here though, while I was talking about items deteriorating over time. I don't think it's fun for my sword to deteriorate and become useless if I use it for a while. That's an example of realism that is detrimental to fun. Having people lose stuff when they die is a whole different issue, and relates to the ideal death system, which I haven't really fleshed out in my mind much. I tend to think EVE's system of death is a pretty good one, but it might not be appropriate for the game I'm talking about, as the point of the fighting PvP is for national interests, not to get a ton of people's items. Thus, one shouldn't necessarily need the incentive of items to fight PvP.

Also, as a sidenote, I think it is perfectly fine for an MMO to have a PvP mode where you lose nothing when you die and simply respawn in a few seconds. It would be like the MMOs version of team deathmatch in a FPS. But that should only be the death system if you choose to fight in instanced arenas set up for that, not if you're just fighting randomly in the persistent world.

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EVE's items and characters defiantly scale over time, but not even close to WoW. This also helps the economy. A +5% damage amplifier is just as useful to a 2month old character as it is a 2year old character. Sure, the 2 year old character might be able to afford the top tier amplifier that gives him a 10% bonus, but that 5% extra costs a lot of money and he can still be killed by n00bs if he makes a bad move. In WoW, your so epic at level 80, a level 1 has no chance of killing you. The WoW way is so unblanced that it breaks the economy, since items are only useful at particular levels. This means super low demand for 99.995% of the items in the game. 00.001% of the items are cool items for level 80 characters, and the other 00.004% are there to get your trade skills maxed out. In EVE, a good 50% of the items are useful no mater how long you've been playing, and the other 50% are equally useful, but rarity causes their prices to be out of reach of new players.

There are pros and cons to both types though. Having so many tiers of weapons makes it so you frequently get the cool feeling of "OMG I just got this new awesome weapon!" If players are using the same items 2 months in as they are 2 years in, then you might have better balance between levels, but you have less cool moments and feelings of achievement in getting a new item.

However, in a game with heavy nation vs nation PvP, a massive disparity between the power of players of high and low level would not be ideal, as the low level players would get killed right away if they tried to contribute. So, in this case, I tend to agree that there cant be TOO many tiers of items. However, the constant resource stream means that with too few tiers of items, you'd hit a situation where everyone has the best stuff, which you don't want. It would be a balancing act. Ideally, there would be many tiers of weapons, but the difference between the best weapon and the worst wouldn't be too absolutely ridiculous.

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Free money is bad unless there is a free sink. EVE has "free money". You can build on planets, and mine resources in the background. But it also has a "free sink" for that, since those resources only really ever go into the production of player-owned-station fuels that get burnt at a constant rate. So it can only deflate in value, since the only reason to get that resource is to spend it on your upkeep costs. Free money without a sink is really bad, since it removes effort and risk from the equations. That results in money being worth a lot less.

It doesn't really remove effort. You still need to fight and do stuff to level up. And really leveling up is the main achievement in a MMORPG. You don't measure your achievements based on how much money youve gotten, but rather on what level youre at.

And most MMORPGs don't really have any risk in getting money. The only difference is if you want money, you have to spend a long time boringly farming resources. My game would take away the boring farming time and just give you the money. The risk isn't any different. In my mind, it just removes some of the grind.

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A player who can craft an item won't be buying that item. In my experience at least 50% of players want to craft. That means even if every single player needs a dagger, less than half of those players will be buying their dagger. That means the average craftsperson should only be making about 2 daggers - 1 for themselves, 1 for a player who doesn't like crafting. Is making 2 daggers enough to level up a player's crafting to be able to make the next highest level of item? And, perhaps not every player needs a dagger. In that case the demand per craftsman is even smaller.

Yes, but you are advocating something that makes no real life sense and is only a game mechanic that creates grinding. No one actually creates an item for which there isn't a real market. A real life person running a shop wouldn't accomodate an up and coming craftsman by buying 10,000 daggers from him when he knows he will only sell 100 of those. So they shouldn't in game either. And really, in a game, all doing that represents is an unrealistic game mechanic that forces the player to waste hours of his life doing boring tasks just to get to his goal. That's bad.

The up and coming craftsman would have to make items for which there is still a market. If that's not daggers, then he shouldn't make many daggers. The best bet would be to make some weak health/mana potions or arrows or something. There will still be a market for a ton of those as they are constantly being used up. I believe this is the better way to do it. Players shouldn't be crafting useless items in order to level up the skill; that's bad game design.

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Original post by lessthanjake Yes, but you are advocating something that makes no real life sense and is only a game mechanic that creates grinding. No one actually creates an item for which there isn't a real market. A real life person running a shop wouldn't accomodate an up and coming craftsman by buying 10,000 daggers from him when he knows he will only sell 100 of those. So they shouldn't in game either. And really, in a game, all doing that represents is an unrealistic game mechanic that forces the player to waste hours of his life doing boring tasks just to get to his goal. That's bad. The up and coming craftsman would have to make items for which there is still a market. If that's not daggers, then he shouldn't make many daggers. The best bet would be to make some weak health/mana potions or arrows or something. There will still be a market for a ton of those as they are constantly being used up. I believe this is the better way to do it. Players shouldn't be crafting useless items in order to level up the skill; that's bad game design.

I didn't actually advocate anything. If you want an alternative, I suppose I'd suggest that each person only craft what they themself will use and not sell crafted items at all, with the possible exception of consumables like healing potions. Or, you could limit the number of items any one player can craft by making every crafting recipe include a crafting ticket, which could only be obtained as quest rewards. The people who didn't want to craft could then sell their tickets to players who did want to craft, and the total number of items produced would be limited by the number of characters in the world and the level of each character. Those are the two options I've personally considered, when speculating how MMO crafting could be made less dysfunctional.

Although, it's true that I don't think 'real life sense' is an important or particularly useful goal in game design. I only posted because I could see the idea of npc buying quotas just wasn't going to work, so it's better to shoot it down and replace it in the design phase, rather than waste time going down the wrong track.

In most MMOs, gold is both a physical commodity AND money. They're actually suffering the same problem that Spain did which it conquered south america -- an oversupply of money. Which is inflation.


Overabundance of items is a slightly different problem -- this is down to imbalances between wear rates and production rates. For example, in the real world, armour was an expensive item. It took a trained artisan serious time to make a set, it cost multiples of annual salaries to buy.

On the other hand, it lasted practically forever. Some people turned up to the English Civil War in the 1600s wearing armour two centuries old. People used great-grandad's sword, which had taken weeks to make a hundred years earlier.


So the problem here is that crafting is too fast. It has to be because otherwise it would be boring for players to do it; and very few people in history have got rich making crossbows.

There just weren't ever that many soldiers. Most of the population of the world through history were farmers who produced tiny surpluses that were taken off them by men with swords.


Maybe merchants could provide gearing here? Crafters can make things in a day, but merchants only get 1 to sell on for each 10 purchased or something?



The problem with gold is that its value plummets. Why? Why is gold valuable? It's rare; you can't just make more of it. It's portable (in a way that land isn't)... and that's it really. So its value plummets because it becomes common. It becomes common because we're printing a lot of it. Why are printing a lot of it? Because it's the output to quests.

So why not make it the input as well. Fix the amount of gold in the world as a multiple of the number of players.

Every time a player completes a quest they've never done before they get the gold. If they do it again, there's no gold there. Unless the gold can be pulled from somewhere else -- which needs the rest of the economy to react to the signals.

Merchants might buy items, but they need gold to do it. If the gold is in the dungeons waiting to be quested for they can't offer high prices for items. Gold needs to be moved -- if players have to defend the merchant's gold shipments from the orcs in the first place, then every quest of that type where they lose the gold replenishes the supply to go into the dungeons. Gold has to be given to the quests in order for them to function.

What does this do? Well it means that if there's no gold in the villages, then the gold is in the dungeon and questing becomes rewarding. If there's no gold in the dungeon, it's in the economy and players will find crafting rewarding. Of course, that'll attract orcs to steal the gold...


Trying to balance sources and sinks will always be a pain and it'll only get worse as the games get more complex. The solution is to stop making the gold to begin with and balance the economy itself. Don't provide mechanisms which can change M0. Have mechanisms which provide money velocity.

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Yes, but you are advocating something that makes no real life sense and is only a game mechanic that creates grinding. No one actually creates an item for which there isn't a real market. A real life person running a shop wouldn't accomodate an up and coming craftsman by buying 10,000 daggers from him when he knows he will only sell 100 of those. So they shouldn't in game either.

Again back to all my EVE stuff, cause I really think they have a solid economy and grasp on all this.

*You sure would buy 10,000 daggers, especially if they are undervalued. Just melt them down into materials and sell those, or make what you actually wanted.

*You sure would buy 10,000 daggers! There are tonnes of them here, but none close to the battlefield, you could make a profit by gunrunning to the battlefields where all those daggers get wasted (as throwing daggers of course).

*You sure would buy 10,000 daggers! EVE's Buy orders are HUGE for this. You set a reasonably low price, huge range, and long order time. People are impatient, and if the market is reasonable, will just quick-sell the daggers. If your buy order was the top price in the area, the daggers end up in your possession. No work on your part, and you can collect the profit a few days, weeks, or months down the line depending on the sale volumes. If you carefully place buy orders near where items drop, you can quickly reap the profits of other people's grinding. And the lack of buy orders is the biggest problem I see propagated by other MMO economies. It makes the exact situation you outlined a problem. Who's going to make or buy or sell daggers if they aren't in demand? Your right, noone. But having buy orders lets you create demand. And having only one resource for all items and the ability to transmute between them, creates relational value between things. Stupid items end up being atleast worth their material value when no other reason exists to pay for them. Something like WoW fails not only in the lack of buy orders, but also this shared resource, as just about every craft item has a unique set of input resources. Thus it becomes hard to relate values between any two items.

Also, in EVE, building 100,000 rounds of ammo costs a minimal amount of resources and time. Ammo is consumed quickly, and needs to replenish quickly. A titan (biggest ship) takes about a month to craft, and costs a fortune in resources, and you need the shipyard, and the station, and the fuel for the station, and protection for the station for a month. In the end it gives items real value based on resources and time such that a titan costs about 7,600$ if you lose it. Having time sinks that are more than a wow *craft this* animation that takes 30sec will make your epic enchanted sword much more rare and valueable. (and no, you don't have to babysit the build. they are fire and forget, but each person can only run so many build jobs at a time.)

Sunandshadow’s point is an important and valid one. Unless you are planning a drastically different levelling and crafting system to existing MMO games you are going to really frustrate low level crafters. Since the demand for their production is always going to be far less then output.

There are 2 kinds of crafting in most games crafting for profit and crafting for experience.

You normally get a situation were a level 1 crafter can only build a couple of items and typically needs to craft at least 100 of them before they level up and can start building level 2 items at which point they may need to make 200 to get to level 3 and so on. So how are going to solve that problem when you are also making shops buy only by so many of an item?

If you everyone who wants to go down the weapon crafting route can only build daggers and sticks with a nail in them at level 1 and needs to make at least 100 of them those items. You’re never going to match supply with demands as there is never going to be 100 level 1 players for every player who wants to be a crafter.

Unless you are planning a grind less crafting system then you always going to have the market flooded with low level crafted items as each crafter will probably be turning out enough goods to satisfy 100 other players because of the effort required to improve their skills and their attempts to earn money from crafting.

Is it realistic? No, but then nothing about MMO is realistic. Escpically considering most people in 1st world countries are involved in the service industry any way rather then manufacturing.

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Original post by KatieFix the amount of gold in the world as a multiple of the number of players.

That's an interesting idea. There does need to be some amount of inflation in in any MMO because players enter the game with no money, and becoming rich or at least rich-er and fulfilling shopping fantasies are part of the story experience of a role playing game. The game is not fun if you have to be too frugal or worried about money - that's what most people's real lives are like, and what they are playing games to escape. A major motivator for players at all levels is that there is something cool they want to buy and will be able to afford if they save up a little. If you have bought everything you want, there's suddenly much less motivation to do any kind of solo play. On the other hand if you want something but it takes a month or real time to earn it, you may have ceased to care by the time you can finally afford it. And if there is an expensive barrier to some type of multiplayer play within the MMO, that type of play may suffer from the fact that only a small percentage of players will have unlocked that type of play, so there will be few team members, opponents, or trade partners available.

Some games approach the economy by making the average daily (or hourly) income of a character approximately the same regardless of level. In that case, the most expensive items really do cost months or years worth of effort. Mounts, guilds/clans, and houses are three typical examples of expensive things players will save for several days of real time to be able to buy. And usually these expensive items aren't crafted, they are only available from NPCs, so they are a pure gold-sink; even more so if they are not resellable for one reason or another.

Other games do consider it appropriate for higher level players to earn more money per day than lower level characters. WoW has a particularly ridiculous ratio between the money a level one character earns and the money a top level character earns, but some games try to keep this more modest, such that a top level character's time is worth maybe 4 or 5 times what a starting player's time is worth, but not 100 times or more. Increasing by a factor of 1 every 10-20 levels seems quite reasonable to me, assuming a standard leveling structure and pace (about 2 months of heavy play to get a top-level character).

Some games try to create the illusion that players are earning a lot more money at higher levels, but then drain most of that money back out by increasing the cost of consumables, bank fees, and/or transportation for higher level characters. Permanent expansions of storage space and selling space which increase exponentially in price are a particularly good gold sink for mid and high level characters; a game could even give players only one character slot to start with and require in-game payment to unlock more. On the other hand, BAD examples of gold sinks are auction house fees, any kind of rent, and taxation on all trades of money or all trades of anything between two players.

Regardless of whether a top level character has the same earning power as a bottom level character, all games have the problem that when a player quits a the game they often give all their money and stuff away. There is unfortunately no real way to detect when players are giving each other gifts instead of trading, and no way to detect when a player is quitting the game. All you can do is make sure you are providing a big enough range of gold-sink vanity items that all players with extra money will be tempted to spend it on those instead of driving up prices on staple items, unless you are somehow insuring that staple items are never rare, because prices will only go up on items there is a shortage of.

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Again back to all my EVE stuff, cause I really think they have a solid economy and grasp on all this. ...

EVE's economic system IS actually really great. I agree. As someone who is aiming to get a PhD in Economics, the really complex economy in EVE is really compelling to me. HOWEVER, EVE's system is also wayyyy too complicated for the average player. I have heard of a lot of people who gave up on EVE because it was too complex. So if I were actually making an MMO, I would try to make it less complicated. This would probably mean the economic system wouldn't be as detailed, but I think it would make for a more fun game for most people.

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A titan (biggest ship) takes about a month to craft, and costs a fortune in resources, and you need the shipyard, and the station, and the fuel for the station, and protection for the station for a month. In the end it gives items real value based on resources and time such that a titan costs about 7,600$ if you lose it. Having time sinks that are more than a wow *craft this* animation that takes 30sec will make your epic enchanted sword much more rare and valueable. (and no, you don't have to babysit the build. they are fire and forget, but each person can only run so many build jobs at a time.)

That's why I was saying that the best items in the game should take a really really long time to gather the resources to make. Obviously requiring protection for the station that creates the object is beyond what I was talking about (and is pretty cool), but I do want the crafting system to have a sense of achievement when you make an awesome item, because you will have planned to make this item for quite a while.

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Sunandshadow’s point is an important and valid one. Unless you are planning a drastically different levelling and crafting system to existing MMO games you are going to really frustrate low level crafters. Since the demand for their production is always going to be far less then output. There are 2 kinds of crafting in most games crafting for profit and crafting for experience. You normally get a situation were a level 1 crafter can only build a couple of items and typically needs to craft at least 100 of them before they level up and can start building level 2 items at which point they may need to make 200 to get to level 3 and so on. So how are going to solve that problem when you are also making shops buy only by so many of an item? If you everyone who wants to go down the weapon crafting route can only build daggers and sticks with a nail in them at level 1 and needs to make at least 100 of them those items. You’re never going to match supply with demands as there is never going to be 100 level 1 players for every player who wants to be a crafter. Unless you are planning a grind less crafting system then you always going to have the market flooded with low level crafted items as each crafter will probably be turning out enough goods to satisfy 100 other players because of the effort required to improve their skills and their attempts to earn money from crafting. Is it realistic? No, but then nothing about MMO is realistic. Escpically considering most people in 1st world countries are involved in the service industry any way rather then manufacturing.

I would absolutely want a grindless crafting system. There is nothing particularly fun about spending hours and hours making hundreds of lame items in order to level up your crafting skill so you can finally make something worthwhile.

I would have a player who decides to take up crafting as a profession be immediately able to make a fairly solid range of items. They'd have to devote some talent points at level up to upgrade their crafting if they want to make the VERY best items, but from the beginning, they'd be able to make some solid stuff.

On the flip side, creating items would require buying a lot of resources. Since there would be a cap on how much of any resource you could buy per day and resources cost money, this means that crafting would require careful planning and time. You wouldn't have the money to buy resources for a ton of crafted items, and anything you decide to make would take time to gather resources for. This forces careful planning, because you want to make sure you are devoting yourself to the right long-term project. However, I would think this system would create a great sense of achievement once an item was created. You don't really get that sense of achievement with the grind-based craft systems.

At the same time, it is important that crafting works this way because of the set up of the game. Nations are fighting for control of territories that provide resources. The idea is that the nations want those territories so that they will have more resources and therefore can craft better items for their soldiers, which will give them even more of an advantage. Within this paradigm, then, you really don't want to encourage players to make 1,000 useless daggers. If a nation has the most territory but is spending all its extra resources on the creation of useless grind-necessary items, then they don't really have an advantage over the other nations, and without a clear advantage for more territory, the incentive to fight for the territory decreases. We don't want that.

I believe this would eliminate grinding from the crafting system, and instead focus crafting on outfitting the players in the nation with the best items they can afford, all while making crafting feel an actual sense of achievement when they make something.

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Original post by lessthanjake Quote: Again back to all my EVE stuff, cause I really think they have a solid economy and grasp on all this. ... EVE's economic system IS actually really great. I agree. As someone who is aiming to get a PhD in Economics, the really complex economy in EVE is really compelling to me. HOWEVER, EVE's system is also wayyyy too complicated for the average player. I have heard of a lot of people who gave up on EVE because it was too complex. So if I were actually making an MMO, I would try to make it less complicated. This would probably mean the economic system wouldn't be as detailed, but I think it would make for a more fun game for most people.

What is so complicated about EVE's economy for the average player? Maybe I'm somewhat elitist, but anyone who isn't smart enough to figure out the basics of the economy that is needed to play the game,... likely shouldn't be allowed out of their house as they're clearly not smart enough to function well in society.

(Unless of course things have radically changed in the few years since I last played.)

I was about to post a reply like "is EVE too complicated for the average EVE player?", but held my tongue. :D

That said, I don't think that such games are too complex, some people don't have enough time to figure out the specifics of deeper games. I notice this in myself, when I was 14 I played extremely complex strategy war games; now in my twenties I don't have time to learn any new ones, so I stick to old ones and learn very few new ones (and play the more 'accessible' games of their respective genres, particularly in the FPS category).