Brinens and Things

>>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*.

That's totally valid - it's pretty much the most hostile possible way to have that layout.

>> Speaking as a player merchant, I *love* centralised marketplaces.

That's fair, I think. I like the idea of mercantile business being viable but I think you'd need to write an entire game around making player-to-player mercantile work viable and this wasn't it.

>>sense of stability and progression was the main *point* of MMOs

I was under the impression that the point was keeping your Skinner box and your social life in the same convenient package, TBH, but this is also a reasonable take about why they're good.

... further thought suggest that in fact the point of MMOs, and the thing which makes them good and novel compared to other games is that they serve many masters and have many populations who like them for many different reasons - that interaction of competing interests and needs is one of the things which makes them how they are.

>>SWG was a pretty early MMO

Early MMOs are fascinating and full of bizarre design choices. I love reading about them, and MMO design in general (if you have any good sources for modern-era high-level (i.e. non-game-specific) MMO reading I'd be much obliged - all of my non-game-specific sources date to the early 2000s right now) It fills me with a deep sadness that we will not be able to revist that age - MMOs are simply too expensive (In terms of people-to-make, infrastructure-to-maintain, and social-capital-to-populate) for there to be many weird ones, now that we have working patterns.

>>Right-tail chasing seems to be very helpful in driving player economies

That does seem to be the consensus on how you're supposed to do it, yes. I'm not sure I like that because it feels unnatural to me, but I suspect it could be well-designed enough that the hypothetical game which was good enough for me to play too the end-game would also be compelling while right-tail-chasing. (I care for systemic optimization more than numbers-going-up, so comparing "Spending mental effort to narrow your supply chain loops" and "Spending mental effort to optimize the grind for the next tier of resources", the former seems much more enjoyable.)

>>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

This is a unclear causal chain to me due to lack of familiarity with context. Could you please explain?