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How do you feel about a player driven economy?
Well... considering that we seem to have reached a dead zone by way of new information. Stupid E3 '07... 
I figured I'd start a topic that I know affects the game and the players whom inhabit the game. NCSoft has stated and confirmed that the economy of Aion WILL be player driven via Auction houses and other means.
IMO... I really like player driven economies and I really like AHs (Auction Houses)... takes me back to my days in FFXI. It's just something I've become accustomed to. Main reason I like them is because it takes away the noobish /shouting in towns of people trying to sell their junk.. clogging up the chat channel to the point you pretty well have to turn all your chat filters on. Also, it helps cut lag down in primary towns. Lineage II is a splitting example... you go to one of the primary towns and you lag so bad you can hardly move... there are 100s! of personal shops set up... wtf?!
Honestly, I think it's because L2's crazy personal shops that NCSoft decided to move to an AH system. Plus.. I think it adds another level of immersion.. something we (in the real world) recognize as natural. A bunch of PCs sitting around with AH messages is NOT natural at all... and only adds to the "game-ish" feeling.
How do the rest of you feel about this subject?
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Well as a player of L2 the personal shops were good and bad. Bad because its a pain because it causes alot of lag, A pain to get around town. And everyone will be setting their shops up in that one busy town. It is good because you dont have to keep checking up on your item in the auction house because the player came to you to buy your item.
I personaly like player driven markets but they are rarely implimented right. Theres no build in protection vs the out of game gold sellers causing massive inflation. I dont accualy think that will be fixed, to be honnest, because from a subscription game developers point of view gold sellers equal accounts too. As long as they dont devistate the game they will be allowed with only token attempts to clear them out.
So far the game I enjoyed the market in the most was EQ (pre auction house). For some reason everyone who wanted to sell something ended up not in a city but in this underground mountain pass between two zones in East Commons. It was indeed a lag / spam fest and there was no real system for trading items (you gave someone something and they gave you money) but it had an active feel and you delt with people personaly. You could haggel, barter, etc. Every other game I have tried puts you two steps removed from the market and feels more like the want adds in a news paper.
Well player driven markets do work [look at EvE]. Its all about exicution.
"Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god."
-- Jean Rostand
Whoa, whoa, whoa...
Lineage 2 is not moving to an auction system. They are adding an auction system that has a time limit on it. You will still have 24/7 shops and shouting.
Personally, I like the shops and shouting as it makes the city actually seem like a city. But that's just my preference.
As far as the whole player run economy... meh. Sometimes good but sometimes not. Quite frankly I hate the L2 economy and don't think it's fun (others do). I play for sieges. That's pretty much it.
As long as Aion can keep inflation down then fine. But as I've seen in LOTRO, players like to charage as much as they want oftentimes gouging other players. To me that is just not acceptable and helps promote the buying of ingame currency.
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The problem with player run economies in MMOs is they are not truely economies. Wealth is generated by killing lots of mobs and the RANDOM appearence of valuable objects. Crafting plays a roll but most of the time not substancially enough. Hardly a basis of a healthy economy. EVE is maybe the only game I have seen where it looks like it really works out (to a point)
The other issue with MMO economies is the inflation. This ties directly into the grind, level mechanic and the increase of disposible wealth from killing random mobs.
As the average player level increases, prices usually rise as a result of more wealth flooding the "economy". You can't really stop inflation at this point. Its like a compound interest problem. It just keeps getting higher and higher. L2 tried it but failed in the core design which was grind based. You can see it in WoW also. Prices have inflated mainly because of the amount of extra wealth that exist as the bulk of the population hit level cap years ago.
The other issue is in order to have a working economy (in a game anyway) there has to be NEEDED and worthwhile products and services. Most MMOs don't have that. They are extreamly underdeveloped. Again EVE and SWG are about the only games I have seen that do this well. (SWG ...well not so much anymore but in the past....SOE tried to substitute the player driven economy with an item/reward driven economy....it blew up in their face, like most mmo economies usually do)
In the end, as long as a MMO economy is level and loot based, its never gonna work out. As the average level of the player increases, inflation will follow as monetary rewards increase with levels. Random or specialized items (that have disproportionate benefits) gained by killing specific mobs (bosses and such) will always disrupt player created crafting.
Aion is probably not going to be any different. As far as I know, its gonna have loot and levels.
Aion is a bit less random then that though. If you farm a specific area, and a specific type of monster, the monsters will get stronger, or new monsters will appear, which will bring new loot tables. If, for example, the angels tend to mine more, a new type of ore might appear, which results into the ability to create new weapons and armors for crafters which influences the economy. So the economy is a lot more player driven then in other MMO's.
the problem is it would suck if it was a one-sided thing for example im thinking that there will be more Elyos than Asmodians and the Asmodians would quit and join the Elyos because the Elyos would get better items,equipment, etc than them
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Whoa, whoa, whoa...
Lineage 2 is not moving to an auction system. They are adding an auction system that has a time limit on it. You will still have 24/7 shops and shouting.
Personally, I like the shops and shouting as it makes the city actually seem like a city. But that's just my preference.
As far as the whole player run economy... meh. Sometimes good but sometimes not. Quite frankly I hate the L2 economy and don't think it's fun (others do). I play for sieges. That's pretty much it.
As long as Aion can keep inflation down then fine. But as I've seen in LOTRO, players like to charage as much as they want oftentimes gouging other players. To me that is just not acceptable and helps promote the buying of ingame currency.
No no.. that's not what I meant at all. What I meant was.. because of what's going on with L2... they decided to try AH with Aion. Not that L2 was switching to AH system. My bad.. didn't mean to cause confusion...
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Main problem with player driven economies is that most ppl are greedy. On my old wow server copper ore was selling for 2g a stack but iron ore was selling for 1g a stack. The harder to get and rarer ore is less then the ore thats everywhere. So what i used to do was lower my copper ore to 1g a stack and buy all the iron ore. Soon it dropped copper ore to 75s a stack and iron ore was at 2g a stack. Didnt take long and I basicly had control of the ore market and prices where more reasonable for those starting out . In any of the mmo's you can easily change the whole economy just by being agressive with your pricing.
THis is an example of suply and demand if prices are too high sell for a lot less.
"Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god."
-- Jean Rostand
Guess what I forgot to say was when everyone is making the price the same like what was happening on my wow server there was no supply and demand issues. it was just a tradelock.
i dont see any problem with player run economies bieng loot based.. thats where most people get things to sell.. and i dont see why its a bad thing.. but if you need more crafted items in there, you just have to make it worthwhile to craft. but not too easy... i liked the way the AH worked in FFXI, aside from the inflation caused by RMT...
Meh, there are good and bad points for both.
Loot based economies generally run over the crafters. I don't think there is a single game where they co-exist peacefully. I don't craft anymore so really it doesn't matter to me. I find that loot based economies with crafting mixed in as a secondary skills (WoW and LotR) are extreamly easy to make mass amounts of money in. Games like EVE and old SWG, its generally a bit of a pain because you need to hunker down in really get involved with it. If you are not into playing create the pixel for very long stretches, its a very very dull aspect. Dig or mine rocks, sell it / refine it or make junk no one really wants or needs and add it to a list of hundreds of others all doing the same thing...for hours of fun and excitement....weeee.
Sometimes, I just don't see the point in some games of even having a crafting skill. If all you make is secondary gear to loot, it really just turns into a pointless chore. But hey, people buy up that ore like its running away or something in whatever game so who am I to argue? Dig your way to riches in fantasy grinder land.
But this gets into the whole issue of what kind of games MMOs are trying to be. In the old days MMOs were world simulations / sandboxes so crafting came hand in hand. Now they are action, linear focused so crafting is a side thing and most of the time tied into the grinding as you can not progress in crafting until whatever base adventure (grind) class you advances to a certain point.
RMT is going to happen no matter how you slice it because to many people just don't want to deal with this aspect of the game. Its a dull timesink chore. MMOs are and will continue to be completely vulnerable to RMT because of this as long as they remain a tedious chore based gamestyle.
Hopfully Aion finds a way around this.
see but the good thing about crafting being boring is it keeps it so less people do it.. in FFXI the craftable items are comparable to the drops, but its hard as hell to get the crafting skills up high enough, which keeps the masses from all crafting themselves.. and to top it off, the mats are usually pretty difficult to aquire.. but i gotta say, my favorite was UO crafting. that and the way gear all worked was definitely unique.
You can check out my posts in the Economy thread on page 2 of the Chronicles of Spellborn official forums, but I proposed a finite-currency economy which dynamically adapted to player population and excluded gold farming.
One games crafting I really did appreciate was DAoC. (I only played FFXI a very short time) I liked how crafters could make just about any type of item and improve them by adding gems into sockets (a la Diablo). The crafting itself was a mind numbing chore but the end results were pretty good. You could make a decent living without killing braincells "maxing out". You could make armor or weapons for the different level BG's back in the day. I remember having a jewel crafter and an armor crafter and making orders in the SI Mid city (forgot the name) for people bound for the Thid BG. You were able to mix and match bonuses and as a result, you got some unique stuff. I haven't played WoW in a couple of years but didn't they go that route also? It works but there needs to be a balance between crafted and looted and thats were many games screw up OR the player base changes.
What can a game do when it puts all the posibilities in the players hands (total crafted) but the players start whinning for phat lootz? It is pretty easy for a Dev team to start down that road of the "item of the month". When in doubt about what to do to make the players happy and retain customers, throw in a new suit of "epicz" armor.
I believe the only items in DAoC better then crafted (back in the old days) were the "epic" quest rewards. I have no idea what its like now. SWG on the other end of the spectrum, all I wanted to do was kill stormtroopers and blow up star destroyers in a dynamic type environment. Something you still can't really do today. (what weird fricking end result game that turned out to be) Scanning or whatever for resource spots out on empty planets (pre-CU) or setting up hair salons while you waited for a dancer to heal you while dozens of Jedi battled it out around the Darth Vader NPC didn't exactly conjure up the atmosphere of SW to me....
It made a fine space sim but by no means does that game have anything to do with SW other then the skins.
Great ideas, wrong IP.
Player Driven Markets can be really good. the example of the best Player driven Market I can think of was how the Orginal Star wars galaxies system was with all the best Items in-game made by player crafters (seprate issue dont get distracted) and the use of selling in Malls built by players. Often you would see 1 item ussually a basic worthless Item on the bazzar and its descrition was in fact the location of the crafters shop /mall. this was really the only true Player driven econmy I can think of before SOE ruined that game.
Now if they can do a simular system (mind you I like wow AH it serves its use) and Jump on and kick off RMTers really fast it can be a great thing, I dont know how there doing the loot vs crafter made area of this game, at all so, we cant even begain that discussion.
WOW use to have the worse reputation for gold sellers, and recently they got rid of 99% of the gold spamming ads , By not allowing lvl 1 characters to mass spam or even whisper, you cant mass mail . and they added a option to right click on a persons name right on chat and "report as spam" which automatically adds them to your ignore list.
Point of that referance is , if they can use simular tools to stop RMT. It can be really good. Your right about global Auction houses I found those very useful in both RF on-line and in WOW. Also EQ2 had a intresting way of selling items too didnt they.
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player driven economy... id play FFXI for a few years... its probably what i see is the closest thing to an economy... WoW... Is all loot n sell... in FFXI i acturally had to farm beehive chips... thunder clusters and everything to make ends meet... What bothers me was how FFXI manage their auction houses.... yes of course there was gil (money) sellers in the game and they jacked up the prices in such high lvls it would take me forever to get enough money by farming...
so what im getting at is... AION would be good to have a player driven economy IF...
The game started to have gil sinks. which are basically how they monitor their auction houses and make sure nothing goes off the roof thus creating inflations...
*oh and FFXI had like 4 different auction houses? yea more diversity means more profits!
I love a player driven economy, especially since as mentioned - in L2 the fourty million and five people sitting around setting up shops in the city was a serious mood killer for me.
I just hope they take farming/botting seriously as in a no-nonsense approach.
I guess this will all depend on how the community of the server is. I mean you could seriously have just a bunch of idiots who are trying to ruin the economy and make the game no fun at all.
Then again you do have people who know what they are doing and can make the game an awesome experience.
And yes, the whole 1 billion shops in the middle of town was idiotic in L2, though there was a stable economy....it was really no fun. There was no variety in L2 either so with this player driven economy anything can happen.
I think it makes a game more interesting. I remember the player driven economy in Runescape
Aion is a spectacular game... ...stunning gameplay, super graphics, great ideas, dream-like, fantastic evironment, great videos, great screenshots of the game and i can go on with great things forever.......
about the economy... ....i think its:
but it depends on how many people on every server.. ...they could wait with it until the server gets more population.
You just sold me on this games concept- I love it. What about crafting? How involved is crafting per gameplay?
You just sold me on this games concept- I love it. What about crafting? How involved is crafting per gameplay?
No info about crafting yet, but this is what we know so far, this is from a developers interview:you can find a lot of info in this interview:
http://www.aionfuse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23