Please stop trying to make this game so easy.

I find it strange a lot think if we don't want to PVP all the time that we are looking for an easy game. I'm looking for challenging puzzles and general adventure throughout the game. It's a falsehood to say we all want an easy mode.

 

So true. It seems that just about anything you can think of is "breaking immersion" for someone right now.

 

I have labeled a specific line in the quote because that is precisely what I'm arguing against. "better gear" is just a side-effect to dungeon crawling; it's not the purpose. The purpose is to have fun killing the crap out of monsters, exploring unknown environments and meeting strange NPCs along the way... or, dare I say, complete a quest!

If the concept of acquiring better gear is your only motivation to delve into dungeons, then the game wasn't fun for you to begin with. The economy can only cover up that fact from you.

Like I said before, a good economy is far from being a bad thing, but it's also not the pillar that prevents a game from crumbling down. Worse case scenario is that the dev team will notice people's behavior online and they'll make adjustments to fix the economy.

I can't think of a single game that was ruined by the lack of economy (or just having a bad economy altogether). Sure, you could come up with a few games that you didn't like because you felt that the economy was bad, but those games are probably still kicking. If there are not, there's nothing that would point to the economy as being the culprit other than your own intuition... and you can't use that as a fact.

If SotA ends up like you're describing, then the game was never fun to begin with and then, at that point, its saving grace wouldn't be a fixed economy but a revamp in gameplay mechanics instead.

 

Try not to waste too much time clicking links, but this explains much of why games intentionally deviate from reality far better than I could:
Acceptable Breaks from Reality

 

That's a lot of acceptable breaks from reality. Aren't they going to be immersion breaking?

 

Of course everyone would like this game to be enjoyable without incentives, and I think it will be exactly like that for the first 1-3 months. My concerns lie with long-term success.

How many times are you going to be enthralled by a torch puzzle? How long until a repeatable quest becomes tedious? How long until you know how an area or dungeon is laid out before you begin adventuring?

We must be concerned about the long-term and not rely on “hot fixes” by the developers to fix something that didn’t need to be broken in the first place.

Crafting and loot drops are tied together because they will have a similar (or same) desirability. Without a plan in place to enable the removal of a significant (TBD) portion of gear, there will be a bottleneck and both crafting and adventuring will be affected by a poor economy.

My concern is that with developer plans to protect players and items through eliminating corpse runs, using loot ransom, no house decay penalty for items, easy item repair, and even the ability to recover an item from a mob; that this will contribute to devaluation and over-supply of items in the market.

 

Funny thing is, with a lot of those, not doing them is seen as immersion-breaking