Player Economy vs World Economy

A critical aspect of crafting is buying and selling. While UO crafting was pretty awesome it had serious issues on the long run.

One problem is the players represent a limited market. A handful of obsessive merchants can saturate a market with the goods pretty much kill demand.

Another problem was the infinite aspect to resources, you'd be able to mine ore and chop trees forever. Well minus the resource re-spawn time. As the supply is constant the value of goods are also constant. Being a merchant would be sort of boring after a while.

Where as in the real world, iron comes from location X, copper from location Y. The price of goods would reflect the availability of resources in an region. This defined the nature of towns, a town in a iron rich region would have a different economy than a town in the rich lumber region.

In UO in the case of npc shops everything was the same. There was no reason to travel. Merchant could do their trade anywhere. There is a lot of gameplay that is missed out here, such as merchants setting up caravans to ship their goods to another city to get a better price, or simply importing those resources and so on.

Another point to mention, what is the NPC factor of the economy. In UO the npc world and the player world was more or less separate. What I always thought would be interesting is a crossover, where npcs would buy from player shops and the effects of players on the economy would also effect the npcs. For example the cost of food, or weapons in the situation of war.

The game already has a siege system, a critical reason for warfare is the access to resources, destroying the competition and so on.

What considerations have been made in the greater concept of economy, especially in how the instances interact with the mmo context?

 

I agree player driven economy is very important for various reasons but unless the crafting system has various variables within the actual crafting process to allow for 'tons' of different 'needed or useful' outcomes then I can only imagine the amount of crafted items that no one would ever sell because of the same items saturating the market by other players.

So unless the crafting system is deep enough to allow for crafted items to be unique enough as something people would even want to buy, then I'd have to suggest also allowing for NPCs to buy our crafted items even if for a small amount but otherwise if no player wants our goods then we'd have to lose all our hard acquired resources for no return.

If not that then allow us to smelt down our crafted goods back to their resources so we at least don't lose out entirely. This would not be limited to metal back to ingots but also bows back to wood, furniture back to wood, leather goods back to leather, cloth goods back to cloth, etc.. Unsure how this would be applied to potions but you get my drift..

 

I have grave reservations about this. If NPCs buy ANY player crafting items then the player economy for those items will be completely ruined. Here's why:

The resources to make those items will be consumed by players who have no intention of selling to other players. They will be after the few gold pieces that the NPCs will give them.

On the occasion that a player would want to buy one of those items, the actual price would be the NPC price, because some crafter already has 100 of them to sell for that.

I completely understand the problems that you're trying to solve, but I don't think that fixes it. I would suggest something more along the lines of (a) NPCs only sell the items that a very new player would purchase (b) there are items that a crafter can make at every "level" of crafting that would have actual value to non-crafters of the same "level" (c) items must be "consumed" with use.

What do you think? Would that address the same problems that you were going for?

 

I'm more a fan of the character bound idea for equipment and repair. Once you equip a sword/armor/whatever, no one else can. That means when you upgrade you can only sell it to a vendor for limited gold; it disappears from the game and is out of circulation. The resources go back into the resource pool. This combined with wear and tear requiring repair (I'm a poet and didn't know it!) will keep equipment circulating from vendors and players and keep things moving at a good pace. It'll also give blacksmiths, leatherworkers, fletchers and other crafters opportunity to make money at repairing!

I feel that crafting should be the ONLY way to get the best equipment in the game, not grinding dungeons or running raids. That being said, recipies for the most powerful weapons, armor and items should be extremely rare, and consumable. They should also be extremely complex and require scads of rare materials in order to keep the volume of these items low. Crafters should be able to reap the rewards of their craft instead of being outstripped by random drops from MOBs that would never have that awesome equipment in the first place. It makes no sense.

I'm far more worried about the economy going south like it currently is in UO and everything costing millions of gold. This actually encourages purchasing said gold from internet farmers. The economy needs to be strictly controlled and monitored to ensure that new players are not at outrageous disadvantage on logging in. Nothing more discouraging to new players than being millions of gold behind everyone else from the get-go. The economy needs to be considered for the long game, for the good of all the players and the health of the game.

I might mention that I am extremely biased against gold farmers and RMTs. Just wanted to throw that out there for context.

 

They could script the game to count crafted items. When it detects a surplus of a particular item, probably because players are not buying the item, then some NPCs could initiate a temporary desire for the item, be it their village is going to war and they are in need of weapons or there was a flood/fire in the village and all the furniture was ruined. This would also create reason for crafter's to travel city to city to see if any NPCs have a particular need.

Updates on other villages could be provided by town cryers or billboards.