Untapped fountains of Ideas

adjutorus

I have played MMO’s for 20+ years now; the only ones back then were called MUDs. Since then I have played probably hundreds of MMO’s and I have yet to see a lot of the great aspects of these games touched. Some were not great games but had a part or two that would be wonderful and honestly brand new to this generation of gamers. This makes me wonder why doesn’t the gaming industry, which is nefarious for copying parts of other games, only go for the most popular games. What I mean is every kind of company from fast food joints, banks, and even sports teams try to build upon others ideas. Why not use some of the untapped resources from MUDs?



One such example is an aspect called trade runs. Trade runs in a game I played were unique in a few ways. It started with cities, towns, villages, even outposts in remote corners of the world. Each town had supplies, such as maybe grapes, corn, metals, gems and such. Now each town had a different price they sold these items for, and each also had a different price they bought them for. The more they had they cheaper they sold them for, the less they had the more they bought them for. Some items were exclusive to certain areas as well and sold greatly the further away you took them. Transporting them was done by purchasing one a few different types of wagons from small but cheap pack mules, to more expensive multiple horse drawn wagons. Now these wagons could only travel along roads which would make this task somewhat dangerous. Built into the trade runs was a system that would randomly attract the notice of bandits, gnolls, rabid wolves, and even occasionally a dragon. You had to fight these obstacles and win or outrun them to continue in your journey, if you lost and couldn’t make it back in time most of your wagon would be ransacked. These could range in difficulty depending on the level of the area you were in.



Now I was not a huge fan of PvP, but sometimes the profit to be made was just so tempting that I tested fate. You see, there were 2 types of PvP zones Neutral player killing and Chaotic player killing. Not huge areas to travel through but a challenge none the less. These added a different twist for a care bear like me. NPK was your typical 2 sided faction based pvp, couldn’t attack anyone from your faction. Chaotic was just like the name implied, it was a free for all and if you lost the winner could loot 1 to 2 items from you even if they were bound to you. Of course they were stunned for 5 seconds each item they looted and had only 12 sec to loot your corpse(from the time they enter your corpse), making them easy prey for another waiting in the shadows.



If you make it through these areas though your rewards, in the remote town on the other side were huge with the cargo you have to sell. And once again these routes were optional you could always travel much farther and get the close to the same amount, it just took longer. I spent many of hours just doing these runs as an alternative to just trade skills and item farming to make money. They even had a website that kept track of the prices around the world so you could map out the places to go before hand. And this was all 20 years ago LoL.



This was just one idea I always wanted to see come to life in a game, in MUDS everything was text based and left to the imagination. There are tons more that come to mind as I type this and maybe I will write some more hoping they catch hold in one of my favorite games. BTW I know my spelling and grammar are not the best so don’t bother flashing your grammar badges nvm

Loktofeit

 

Add to that design some historical data of the volume and price of goods sold, buy and sell orders, margin purchases, courier contracts, a barter system, and true player-driven supply/demand price fluctation and you have a typical day in the life of an EVE Online  industrialists.

Aganazer

This type of transporting goods is alive and well in EVE. Other than that, it is completely underused. In most games it doesn't work so well with bank vaults that teleport goods across the gameworld and instant player teleportation. I understand why they do it. They are trying to reduce the monotony of travel, but the real answer is to make the traveling more interesting rather than removing it from the game entirely.