My ideal economy, or parts of it

Staples of a good crafting system:
1) Decay or other attrition of items. If every player only needs an item one time, there is no real market. Even WoW?s Auction House would dry up as soon as people stopped grinding tradeskills. The only market that would exist would be for materials required to make the highest tier potions and other consumables. This opens the door to corpse-retrieval, and even full-loot PvP (although I?m only a fan of these systems if the corpse?s owner has a few minutes of ?safe time? to get their stuff back before it spills out).

2) Higher interaction means higher quality. Some people like ?mini game? style crafting such as EQ2, other people like shake-and-bake crafting like EVE Online where you stick a blueprint and materials in a factory and tell it how many of the item you want and go about your business. I posit that if I?m willing to invest extra time and ?skill? (though we know that term is applied loosely) to crafting an item, I should be able to achieve a higher quality result than a person with the same related skill set who phones it in. Allow bulk-crafting, but diminish skill gains and max quality when this alternative is used, doesn?t have to be drastic.

3) When you discuss the merits of having crafted items be the strongest items in a game vs having uber-raid loot as the strongest, one of the arguments that comes up time and time again, that?s almost irrefutable, is the fact that the raider has to group up with some other people and coordinate with them to overcome an obstacle to have a chance to get their gear. Meanwhile, the crafter can generally sit in the safety of their house or town, or wherever, mindlessly clicking through dialog boxes. The risk is not the same. The counter-argument to this is that it generally takes crafters the same amount of hours of play time to get to that point that the raider did. One possible solution to this dilemma is to have the best materials for crafting only come from high-end content, but require a crafter to use the materials. In this type of setting, though, I think a better approach is through quests at certain skill tiers that are required to progress. Or perhaps require a crafter to complete certain tasks before they can open certain specialized crafting abilities. Example:
One possible example would be to gate progression based on completion of a quest, preferably one that the crafter will almost definitely have to have some help to complete. Requiring he make a bow from the wood of a treant (where the treant?s are relatively powerful creatures that require a reasonably skilled warrior or magic user to fell), or a cake where the icing is made using the blood of some other rare and pseudo-powerful creature. The components shouldn?t be available on the market, we want to avoid anyone being able to say someone bought their way to mastery. The crafter should have to be present to extract whatever ingredient they need, only they have the specialized knowledge to do so. It doesn?t mean it has to be within a solo instance, though?. That just requires people to grind combat skills for something they don?t want to do.

4) Incorporate and reward exploration and networking, and allow for greater variation, by using component qualities. There were two ways in which SWGs crafting system was, in my opinion, superior to everything before it and everything since. Experimentation was one of these, but more fundamental than that was the fact that not all metal is created equal to every task that?s put before it. Different metals have different characteristics in terms of flexibility, resistance to corrosion, conductivity, etc. Different liquids have different thermal conductivity, viscosity, etc. Then, in nature, almost all of these things appear in unrefined forms that mean iron from certain places is potentially stronger than iron from others based on the amount of impurities it was subjected to in its formation. You don?t have to get carried away with it, but if you were to say a sword has to use metal. Aluminum, copper, iron and iron are metals. An aluminum sword is lighter, and can be more precise than the other two, but it?s also much more susceptible to damage than iron, and isn?t as pliable or flexible as copper. You can make a sword from any of them, but they will be different swords. Furthermore, you could introduce a potential 10% variance in the ?quality? or ?qualities? of any given type of metal. If you want to make the sword with the absolute highest possible critical rating, you need to use mythic quality aluminum, but this is only 5% better than using standard quality aluminum, and only 10% better than using low quality aluminum, which really, in terms of hit rating, is the same as high quality iron. It adds complexity for those that want it, allows those who really want to make the best possible items to do so, but if Joe the Casual Gamer wants to log on and make a sword one day, he doesn?t have to bother with it all.

5) Experimentation was something else that SWG did right, but I think it was somewhat flawed in that there are certain stats on items that no one ever really cares about. It also didn?t differentiate much between crafters because the choice could be made every time you ran a batch of goods. I think a specialization system would work out better. Every time you gain 10 points (out of an assumed 100) in a given crafting skill you can choose from a list of focused customization perks that will apply to any items you craft from that point on. An example of a tier 1 weaponsmithing perk might add 1% to the durability of all crafted weapons, a tier 5 weaponsmithing perk (perhaps in a tree so there are pre-reqs?) might provide a 5% bonus to durability. I?m sure some stats would be chosen more than others (damage?) but, it would allow crafters to potentially make a name for themselves for certain types of goods. Go see Joe?s Jolly BattleAxes vendor? his axes last forever!

6) While I was originally fine with the auction-house concept, some other comments I?ve read have given me pause. People running around to different vendors in UO was part of the flavor, and I think there?s some merit to it? On the other hand, the vendor malls and generally poor organization of the contents (some of which was based on limitations of the engine, most of which was based on laziness) was problematic.
The auction house on the other hand makes it far more convenient to locate the goods you?re looking for, reduces the chance of glitches during transactions, helps self-regulate pricing and drastically reduces the problem of scamming, which while some might argue should be part of the game, most would agree is a pain in the ass.
I also feel like buy orders, something that EVE Online introduced and I have yet to see in another game, are a super-massive boon to an in game economy and also require some sort of centralized market to be truly effective.
Something else EVE does that might be looked to for a ?solution? is the concept of regional markets, and ?ranges? for orders? Depending on the relative commerce skills of the buyer and seller different goods can be purchased at different distances from the station they?re actually stored at. Maybe there?s something there for this, as well. What I definitely think needs to be avoided is the ability to shove 50 vendor NPCs in to a castle .. it really looked horrible.


Anyway, these are my thoughts. I will also say that the crafting and the economy are much more important to me than almost any other aspect of the game. We already know there will be stuff to do, but there are things to do in pretty much every current MMORPG? it?s just that they?re grindy and shallow and focus pretty purely on combat. In UO and SWG, the best sandboxes to date, you had to invest time in harvesting materials. In SWG it was fun, at least for me and the crew I played with, because we only wanted the best materials available for what we needed. Sometimes we?d spend days surveying, having to deal with the spawns in our way, then repeating the process to get back to whatever extractors we?d place to feed and empty them. It was what our game-play revolved around. Going and beating up mobs was something we did to take a break? and we enjoyed it. If SOTA doesn?t offer up some of that, I?m not sure what it will have to draw people away from all of the other offerings on the market.

 

Given there are no plans for a global auction house, my thoughts on the economy are:

Bots and gold farmers will exploit every single convenience you have in the game. While it's not a great idea to build your in-game interfaces and mechanics _entirely_ with this in mind, it is something to consider in design.

From my perspective, all harvested resources should have no sellback value. I too like the idea of a commodities market that is separate for raw resources used only in crafting. What this will likely mean in practice, though, is that every single crafting resource will eventually be the smallest amount of currency (whether that currency is local or global), for example, logs from lumberjacking would sell for 1g each, if gold is the smallest currency. However, this is still better than having those items simply sold to an NPC and lost from the economy.

UO Trammel today permits the player to purchase raw crafting goods from NPCs in very large quantities (qty 500, typically) and use these to skill up (or grind) crafting. I'm not opposed to NPCs selling crafting raws, but I think they should be at least 5-10 times the "value" of the raw, in calculating the final sellback price of a finished product. What that means is, if you can make a wooden chair, and it requires 5 logs and 4 units pieces of rope, and sells for 22g to the vendor. This breaks down to the logs having 2g of value each, and the rope having 3g of value each. However, if you wanted to buy the logs and rope from an NPC, they would charge between 10 and 20g per log and between 15 and 60g per rope. This would strongly encourage people to turn to the player provided commodities market, or to harvest themselves. This multiplier should be adjusted over time to account for gold devaluation/inflation, unless other mitigating controls are in place.

The goal of the above is to ensure that players can't grind crafting for money (bots will just use that 24x7 to harm the economy, even if it's 1g per minute) _and_ the absolute best case for a crafter/harvester is that if they obtain all the raws themselves, the best they can do is break even with cost of vendor supplied mats. Which brings us to the next idea.

Vendor supplied mats required for recipes are fine, but again there should be the option for crafters to make these at considerable discount when compared to the NPC prices, where the NPC prices should be at least 10 times the "value" of the player crafting making them. These economic drivers can strongly encourage the desired player behavior, if such behavior is desired. Any items that are dependencies for another crafting skill should be made trivially and in multiples/stacks very quickly. (if there is mutually exclusive dependency in the crafting skill design)

A few items from another post I've made, but bears repeating...

The ability to post requests for items/work-orders, in game, with money attached. This means you go to another NPC, and create a work order. In the work order, you post "I want a crafted piece of such and such armor / potion / food", and attach the money. Allow everyone else to search the work orders to find out who is offering what amount for the item to be made, with a timer which shows when the work order expires. First person to fill the work order gets the cash. The item has to have been made at least once in the world before it shows up in the list of available work orders to request.
I can't think of a way for the system to be exploited, but it would be nice if an artisan could tag the work order as "being filled" for 5/10/15 minutes once per day (per item) so it wouldn't show up in the search and/or couldn't be filled by anyone else. While they had one item "in the queue" they could NOT reserve another. Also, if said player disconnected, the reservation would be removed after 1 minute. The reservation system is optional. First done, first paid would work fine.

The regional auction house should have a recurring cost to post an item, based on a percentage of the selling price. So, for example, a player who wants an item on the auction house for a week would have to pay 1% of the asking price, per day. If they put the item up for 10 gold, they pay 7% of 10 gold, up front, when placing the item on the auction house/broker. This cost is non-refundable. If they put the item up for 100 gold for a week, they pay 7% of 100 gold, (7 gold) up front, when placing the item on the auction house/broker. This will prevent the auction house from being filled with ridiculously priced items, and keeps prices reasonable. This value can of course be tweaked, but 10% is probably as high as you'd ever want to go without it getting seriously annoying. Probably 1-3% would be best. Time limits on sales are a must. It would be a great feature to allow players to affect this non-refundable posting percentage via in-game quests, tasks, and systems. Care should be taken, however, in a multi-faction/organization system, that 99% of the players don't belong to this one organization simply to get a posting discount, leaving the rest of the organizations with no membership.

Why not have no recurring cost, and/or no initial cost? While this sounds great in theory, in practice it leads to an auction house filled with junk, forever. With no recurring cost, people put items on the broker thinking they'll sell eventually, so why make it cheap? Thus the items are there for weeks or months, stagnating the economy, because they never sell. With no initial percentage cost, prices inflate out of control, with players putting items on the auction house for thousands or millions of gold (for a variety of bad reasons).
The money collected from the auction could be dispensed on a regular basis back to the NPCs, producing a variety of effects. Either scripted events, changes in appearance, price fluctuations for consumables, political intrigue, or even bonuses to players that ally themselves with this organization. The variation on percentages could be the result of player involvement.

The addition of "extras" such as stats, resists, procs and such effects for any crafted item should be in the game at launch, not part of an expansion. It should also be extremely easy for any player to add whatever effect they can AFTER the crafter is done with the item, via an NPC or similar interactive object. The crafter makes the base item, the player gets to choose the effect after the item is made. Put simply, the enchantment process should be entirely separate from the base-item crafting process. Obtaining the "stuff" to create enchantments on crafted items is a different topic.

NPC vendors should pay less for items as they acquire more of them. However, players should also be able to purchase these "bargain" items sold to NPC vendors as crafting components other players have discarded or sold to the NPC. For example, the vendor in the starting area might have 1000 giant rat pelts in his inventory because all the starting players kill rats and sell the pelts to him. A clever player would then go and buy all those rat pelts from that NPC to use in crafting items, instead of having to collect them from adventuring. This would add the dynamic of "vendor mining" as it currently exists in EQ1, for example.

Finally, it should not be possible for players to sell items on the auction house for less than the vendor sellback price. That is, if a worn orc helm sells to the vendor for 10g, the player should be able to place this on their regional auction house for 11g or higher. Not 1-9g, not 10g, 11g or higher. If item prices are adjusted post launch, these same rules should be retroactively applied to all existing auctions. Specifically, that means if the value of an orc helm is adjusted, globally to 15g from 10g, a month after launch, all the 11g worn orc helm auctions should be immediately cancelled and returned to the seller. The "mandatory profit delta" could be larger than +1 vendor sellback price, if a design goal is to keep the auction house more junk-free.

 

I agree with the OP that the "best" stuff should generally come from adventuring + crafting. And that his may indirectly involve PvP as I may need access to certain forges or certain items may be considered contraband in certain locations. So in order to get the "glowy purple armor" people know that I had to coordinate vanquishing some dragon, smuggling materials from different corners of the world into some evil forge which is the only place... I don't have do do all of this myself...that may even be impossible. Role playing is about coordinating all of this with other people having various different kinds of expertise.

I completely agree on the work orders concept. It generally doesn't make sense to me to have "make to stock" equipment. Someone should commission a set of chain mail to be made, they should get measured for it, it should take real time to have it crafted.

I'm willing to break some role playing immersion in certain aspects of this game to stop scamming. While I really like the idea of having to build a reputation with people and trust them...the anonymity of the internet has pushed us all into prisoner's dilemma.

 

Long read but well worth it! Thanks vjek for linking to this thread.

 

As a buyer and as a crafter/vendor, what I would like to see is specialists, and the less possible clones. Say you're a smith, if you specialize in helmets your helmets will after a time be better than any that wasn't made by a specialist.

And that's where I agree a lot with what you say about metals: there should not be clear hierarchy between metals but very different properties. This would allow further specialization and less cloned products and vendors.

About buy orders in EVE Online they are useful to the economy but apply to very standard products.
Maybe we could define a minimum quality for products we want to buy.