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Crafting- Harvesting- and MMORPG's...or not? Is marketing the hardest part?
Angelof2070
Member Posts: 224
I have been thinking of alternative (fun, productive, efficient) forms of crafting, harvesting, and marketting in MMORPG's. I am a little stumped in one area: Marketting.
Here is the basic idea so far:
Everyone has "workers" as if they were perhaps a Knight with their own house/castle. These peasants are always working (roleplaying terms for giving players a set amount per day)
1) Economy. Money. Excluding progress (quests, adventures, pvp, rewards, trading) every player gets (x) amount of gold/resources per day/hour, regardless of level. This allows players to be equal so guilds cannot farm gold, gold farmers are almost eliminated (why not just buy a second account than to pay koreans for what would be obviously overpriced gold)? And also completely eliminate what I believe is the bane of MMORPG economy- Level 1's copper vs Level 50's platinum.
2) Progress. Allow players to WORK for more progress than the others. Quests, Mini-games (crafting, trading), and other means to increase production of gold/resources over the regular (set) amount. Quests being *one time* chunks of rewards, or semi-permanent (lasts a week/month/whatever) but very small *boosts* to overall progress (101g per day instead of 100g) that can be repeated up to a [cap].
What this does is rewards players for what they want: working for more gold, more resources. This is fair, as they deserve said rewards for time invested. This allows PLAYER SKILL and HARDWORK to better determine how much more one player gets than the other, as opposed to being rewarded for CHARACTER SKILL "I'm max level so I can farm 1000g an hour running instances! In your face level 10's who get 1gold per week!"
Here is a very simplified formula for the economy:
Player's Gold = Set Daily Amount + Hardwork Invested + Bonuses (Quests, Adventuring, Selling loot)
Harvesting for crafting materials is almost identical. But in addition to Quests/Adventuring/Trading, there is a harvesting mini-game. That if you leave it alone, you get (x) resource per day. But if you work hard to improve it, you get MORE resources.
Similar to RTS game harvesting. The difference being instead of sitting idle letting 3 out of 4 mineral harvesters to die by enemies, you send out a few soldiers and walk them around killing the enemy, or killing the enemy's base (think Starcraft, walking around marines to protect mineral gatherers from zerglings.)
By doing this, you gain large bonuses (more minerals). This allows EVERYONE to be a crafter and have resources and NOT have to harvest, but those who enjoy harvesting (via Quests that are like normal MMORPG's "mining an ore" or via the Harvesting RTS mini-game) to have more resources and thus are allowed to craft more/better items.
Crafter Players are the best crafters, but everyone can still craft, and in the longrun players who hate harvesting can still become the best crafters, it just takes longer (bc they have resources) unless they do adventure quests to gain resources (Doing an adventure quest which rewards a large chunk of resources)
In other words, you can harvest via:
Traditional MMORPG harvesting (mining nodes)
Traditional MMORPG Quests (adventuring, killing mobs, completing quests)
RTS style birds-eye-view harvesting mini-game, watching over your *peasants* and commanding "troops" to go places RTS style.
Crafting itself will be a mini-game (don't know what kind yet, all ideas welcome) but...
The biggest problem is marketting. Player trading. Why? Because of one key desire:
The desire to allow players to be a "Merchant" class which allows them to own their own stand, tent, shop, or even warehouse. While other players are Knights, Wizards, and Thieves, those who want a non-combat form of advancement can be Merchants.
But HOW do you make a system where every "Merchant" can have his own shop, preventing an Auction House, but allowing players to be *found*???
What if the game was heavily instanced into regions (ZONES, think Everquest 1 or Everquest 2) and there were only (x) amount of shops per city/town, and only (x) amount of tents per "outside the city", and only (x) amount of "stands" in the Marketplace?
The idea of having to calculate population vs % of total merchant players vs total players, % of cities, 4 different realms (think DAoC but 4 realms instead of 3), and the need for a universal (ease of access) feature like the Auction House without preventing players from being able to charge "a little more" for convience or whatever.
All I can think of right now is the ability to make the latter "shops" (store, warehouse) more desirable and rare than the cheaper shops (tents, marketplace stands). Allow stores/big shops to give "free repairs", which encourages players to goto those stores to purchase their items, as opposed to massive marketplaces where players are allowed to "Setup" a marketplace stand or tent. (Perhaps if 100 players are allowed to sell in each marketplace, having 80 stand spots but only 20 tents which are more visible, and perhaps a few "back alley" shops that allow you to sell "blackmarket" items, and a few "gate" merchants who sell RIGHT OUTSIDE the city gate)
Allow players to color/design their tents to be unique "Oh yea, the red fire tent, I love that guy he has such cheap potions!!!"
And finally, the idea to perhaps separate cities into rather a Marketplace city (100-200 Marketplace stands and Tents) or as a "Shop" city (10-20 stores)
The idea is for the merchant to desire the bigger shops, perhaps by also encouraging a "tax" on newbie merchant buildings but no tax on "max leveL" newbie buildings. That way players can work their way up from "panhandler" to "store owner"
But I want even newbies to be able to be a "panhandler" and I do NOT want "stores" to be so expensive they end up like CASTLES on Ultima Online (costing so much and being so rare, only 0.001% of players can ever even partially own one, let alone come close to buying one)
Comments
I dislike Auction House because it takes away from personal house merchants like there are in alot of games.
But I love the Auction House because it allows EASY access to what you want. Isnt a TIME SINK. And allows you to post your items easily, sell them easily, buy them easily, and trade with just alot more ease and less waste. It's very efficient.
I don't know how to give players the benefit of having their own "shops" while still keeping the efficiency of the Auction House.
Well, the easy way to differentiate between personal shops and an AH is to have a posting fee for AH items, a percentage of whatever you're asking for the item. This also has the side benefit of preventing people from spamming excessive prices during price-fixing attempts, as it becomes much less attractive to post stuff that may not sell.
As to the OP's post, a pretty simple way of allowing for questing to boost resources would be to have repeatable quests (say, on a weekly basis) that reward you with an item that speeds up how fast you harvest. It would be effective, but time or use-limited, but you could run the quest again to get a new item. So a combination of questing and harvesting could actually prove equally effective than just pure harvesting, and perhaps net you a small amount of gold/xp on the side, while breaking up the boredom.
As a side bonus, if the harvesting-improvement item was use-limited, it would be only of limited use to bots, who would quickly wear the item out, and then be stuck at a regular slow pace unless they regularly did the quest to renew the item.
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
i dont like this idea. there is a mmoRTS soon in beta. dawn of fantasy i think. why should a player be forced to do quests in order to be competive. and have npcs doing all the work for you. why not juswt buy what you need from a crafter or gatherer.
auction houses. why not have the auction houses live and have to pay a large fee. this would encourage only more valuable items to be placed in an ah
I dig some of the unique ideas here.
I'm not so hot on the idea of mixing gather/craft methods, as that just feels like a compromise. Seems better to commit to making one thing fun than to half-ass two or three different ways to do things (because a dev only has a finite number of hours to implement it all, so more systems = less time per system.)
If you compromised at all, I'd suggest removing the concept of "RTS" from it (inferring a seperate top-down interface, which also would split dev time) and just have your character be that knight/lord who goes out and supervises NPCs who gather for you. You'd defend them from attacks or use certain leadership powers to maximize their gather rate, and react to dynamic Gathering events (both beneficial and problematic.) You could have guardsmen NPCs who assist you, naturally, but avoiding a second interface just for gathering would be a good move I think.
I also think it's wrong to say this solves gold farming. You can't solve that unless you essentially remove the economy. Reading your post in order, it initially sounded like that's what you were aiming for, until I got to the point where quests/etc increase your income.
Basically it's effort spent earning more gold that gold farmers are selling. If effort can earn you resources (and those resources can be traded,) farmers are going to sell it.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Well it won't eliminate them entirely, but if 90% of an account's gold is from daily existence and only 10% can be worked for, then does that not put a cap on the price of gold?
90% average gold = $15 a month
Why pay anymore than $1 for 6% average gold?
To be honest, I don't even know if it would be worth the investment for gold farmers if they can only get 10% more gold. They'd have to do all the work to lower the prices by pennies. Even if one could work for 20% more, I still don't know if it would be worth most ppl buying when tempted with just having a second account all together.
Perhaps Bot > Gold Farming, lol.
The player is forced to do quests to be competitive because the player is forced to play the game to be competitive, and quests are one of the ways to play games.
Quests, PvP instances, personal harvesting, monster killing.
What else is there? Being spoon-fed resources so you dont have to be forced to do anything to be competitive? Oh...my system has that TOO, lol...
And npc's don't do all the work. It's more like every day you get (x) gold/resources, and you can work to increase them or not. Perhaps to prevent people from Hoarding or prevent ppl from leaving and coming back a millionaire, have the percentage lower the longer they don't log in, have taxes the richer people get, or perhaps change the entire system and make the daily amount very low compared to what you can work for. I don't know, economy is extremely complex and difficult. But obviously you CAN buy what you need from a crafter/gatherer, especially when EVERYONE even non-crafters and non-harvesters get (x) resources/gold per day by doing nothing.
The only "forced" part is to be forced to be wise with your resources and gold, because it is very limited.
Perhaps letting casual (non-daily) players to hoard gold and use it when they DO play will keep them balanced with hardcore players who play constantly everyday, spending more gold (but also gaining more, as they play) thus rewarding the hardcore players with more resources BUT preventing a huge gap by still rewarding casual players with enough to not be left far behind.
Similar to EVE, but instead of SKILLS, it's resources. All character skills/stats MUST be worked for and developped. Unlike eve.
Thanks, and thanks to everyone else too. All posts are appreciated regardless of the opinion.
SWG still wins in my mind in terms of gathering, crafting, and the overall economy.
Gathering isn't just clicking rocks you see randomly spawned around the world. You create special mechanical harvesters, certain areas have more rare ores and things like that. You had to ride out on your bike to get your harvests... it was a great system.
The MMO marketshare now is 99% EQ/WoW clones where leveling with quests and grinding is the key aspect of the game, and crafting/gathering is just a halfassed afterthought.
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Well it still boils down to the fact that gold farmers sell "effort". If I can earn more gold through effort, or if I can gather resources to sell for gold, or if I can craft items to sell for gold, then a gold farmer is going to take that and sell it for real world money.
Even if gold is non-transferrable, a gold farmer might sell the crafted items themselves for real world money. Heck, even if everything (xp, gold, items) advances at a uncontrollable fixed rate gold farmers are going to consider selling old accounts themselves as a way for new players to pay real world money to get ahead.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Well, you're right. I failed to realize they could just sell old accounts for large sums of money.
Eh, then I don't see any feasible way to stop them. And even so, their profit won't be as high as it is in most MMORPG's where they can get a guild of level 80's to non-stop farm instances.