(I'm going to use some Runescape terminology in this post because it's the MMO I'm most familiar with: let me know if anything isn't understandable from context.)
I feel like, at least in my psychology, there's a significant difference between degrade-to-broken and degrade-to-dust, plus a significant difference between repair-with-currency and repair-with-items, plus a significant difference between only-high-level-gear-degrades and all-gear-degrades. And SWG expects me to repair all my gear with items when the items are nonrenewable, of unknown total-quantity-in-existence, *and* of unknown location? Screw *that*.
And if *you* can't find any items to repair with, the crafters probably can't find any to craft with either, and so when your weapon degrades to dust you're forced to switch to a *different* type of weapon, with different pre-installed perks. *And* you have to live with the knowledge that maybe there *was* another weapon of the type you're accustomed to out there, and you just couldn't find it.
(Speaking as a player merchant, I *love* centralised marketplaces. Before the Grand Exchange there were so many goods that I just didn't sell, or sold for a pittance to NPCs, because it was so much of a pain in the ass trying to find a buyer for them that it wasn't worth it. You can find a buyer for damn near any tradeable item in Runescape now, no matter how obscure, and that's wonderful.
If you want to leave open more arbitrage opportunities you can have something more Flight-Rising-style, where you can do things like buy in bulk and then resell in smaller packages at a higher price, or notice when someone is doing a quicksale and snap them up for resale at market price. (I hear you can do some quicksale-snapping through the Grand Exchange, but it's trickier and I haven't tried it yet myself.))
I'm not opposed to randomised and/or finite resources in *all* contexts, but MMOs are extremely not the place for them. In roguelikes it's okay because you can just go up a meta-level: resources within a game may be randomised and/or nonrenewable, but *games* are a reliably renewable resource. You don't care very much about each individual character, and so you don't mind their hardship.
Whereas with MMOs, you have a single character you nurture over the course of years. I always figured that a sense of stability and progression was the main *point* of MMOs. That's the fantasy they're selling: a world where tomorrow is always brighter than today, where the rug will never be pulled out from under you.
I see from some of the dates he mentions that SWG was a pretty early MMO, so maybe the genre hadn't settled into that niche yet. Maybe other people don't even get the same things out of MMOs as I do. (I *know* I don't get the same things out of Flight Rising as most players do.)
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>>"Because people won't need to participate in an economy if they don't have upkeep costs to a certain level of power"<<
Right-tail chasing seems to be very helpful in driving player economies. Runescape does this well, I think: there are quite a few tiny improvements you can make to a high-level build in exchange for vast sums, so you pretty much never have to go "what would I even *spend* these resources on"? In Flight Rising, significant swaths of the economy are driven by people competing over rare familiars: if you've ever bought a secondhand gene scroll, you've likely bought a secondhand gene scroll from a Boolean hunter.
no subject
I feel like, at least in my psychology, there's a significant difference between degrade-to-broken and degrade-to-dust, plus a significant difference between repair-with-currency and repair-with-items, plus a significant difference between only-high-level-gear-degrades and all-gear-degrades. And SWG expects me to repair all my gear with items when the items are nonrenewable, of unknown total-quantity-in-existence, *and* of unknown location? Screw *that*.
And if *you* can't find any items to repair with, the crafters probably can't find any to craft with either, and so when your weapon degrades to dust you're forced to switch to a *different* type of weapon, with different pre-installed perks. *And* you have to live with the knowledge that maybe there *was* another weapon of the type you're accustomed to out there, and you just couldn't find it.
(Speaking as a player merchant, I *love* centralised marketplaces. Before the Grand Exchange there were so many goods that I just didn't sell, or sold for a pittance to NPCs, because it was so much of a pain in the ass trying to find a buyer for them that it wasn't worth it. You can find a buyer for damn near any tradeable item in Runescape now, no matter how obscure, and that's wonderful.
If you want to leave open more arbitrage opportunities you can have something more Flight-Rising-style, where you can do things like buy in bulk and then resell in smaller packages at a higher price, or notice when someone is doing a quicksale and snap them up for resale at market price. (I hear you can do some quicksale-snapping through the Grand Exchange, but it's trickier and I haven't tried it yet myself.))
I'm not opposed to randomised and/or finite resources in *all* contexts, but MMOs are extremely not the place for them. In roguelikes it's okay because you can just go up a meta-level: resources within a game may be randomised and/or nonrenewable, but *games* are a reliably renewable resource. You don't care very much about each individual character, and so you don't mind their hardship.
Whereas with MMOs, you have a single character you nurture over the course of years. I always figured that a sense of stability and progression was the main *point* of MMOs. That's the fantasy they're selling: a world where tomorrow is always brighter than today, where the rug will never be pulled out from under you.
I see from some of the dates he mentions that SWG was a pretty early MMO, so maybe the genre hadn't settled into that niche yet. Maybe other people don't even get the same things out of MMOs as I do. (I *know* I don't get the same things out of Flight Rising as most players do.)
---
>>"Because people won't need to participate in an economy if they don't have upkeep costs to a certain level of power"<<
Right-tail chasing seems to be very helpful in driving player economies. Runescape does this well, I think: there are quite a few tiny improvements you can make to a high-level build in exchange for vast sums, so you pretty much never have to go "what would I even *spend* these resources on"? In Flight Rising, significant swaths of the economy are driven by people competing over rare familiars: if you've ever bought a secondhand gene scroll, you've likely bought a secondhand gene scroll from a Boolean hunter.