The thing is that characters are not you. If you make a purely player skilled based crafting system then a new character can start out just as good at crafting as the best character in the game because your player skill moves from your 99th player to join the server account 10 years ago to your totally new 1 day old character.
Each character needs to have separate skills defined by their own skill progression.
Character specific numbers allow this.
This is why in a PnP rpg you can start a new character on a quest and not have to start with level 99 content because the player is so good at the game that their new character can hit 99 level creatures right from the start.
In strict PvP games we can focus on player skill because there are no non player characters who can't scale to the player.
In any case time = character skill and RPGs are about playing a CHARACTER. Your character is NOT YOU.
That is the definition of ROLE PLAYING.
Nobody's talking about purely player skill-based crafting here. We're only saying that having a game where economy is predominantly based on time investment is shallow. And it is.
Time Investment Contests are ultra-shallow, ultra-casual gameplay. If you're only interested in the ultra-casual audience, then fine that makes sense. But MMORPGers tend to appreciate games with a sense of mastery and decisionmaking.
All you have to do is have skill be involved in a significant way to avoid the problem. As I said before, as long as gameplay isn't predominantly a Time Investment Contest, players are going to be interested in it.
RPGs are not only about watching your character do awesome things. If an RPG fails to provide interesting decisions, it dies. Player skill = interesting decisions. The worse an RPG's decisionmaking, the worse it does.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Player driven economies don't really work well without outside influence by developers. Eve is a pretty good example of a player economy but CCP still exerts manipulation here and there with some game changes. Examples being component and resource requirement changes and changes to the ice field respawns in certain security systems.
Player driven economies also don't do very well in games that don't have permanent gear destruction through a durability system or true player-professions dedicated to crafting and harvesting.
These crafting and harvesting career-paths need some type of customizability in the products they produce or harvest and a type of reverse engineering system - with some type of skill depletion when not practiced. Earth and Beyond had a pretty good system of RI and crafting and even though it was far from perfect, it was far more player-driven than anything we see today.
The thing is that characters are not you. If you make a purely player skilled based crafting system then a new character can start out just as good at crafting as the best character in the game because your player skill moves from your 99th player to join the server account 10 years ago to your totally new 1 day old character.
Each character needs to have separate skills defined by their own skill progression.
Character specific numbers allow this.
This is why in a PnP rpg you can start a new character on a quest and not have to start with level 99 content because the player is so good at the game that their new character can hit 99 level creatures right from the start.
In strict PvP games we can focus on player skill because there are no non player characters who can't scale to the player.
In any case time = character skill and RPGs are about playing a CHARACTER. Your character is NOT YOU.
That is the definition of ROLE PLAYING.
Nobody's talking about purely player skill-based crafting here. We're only saying that having a game where economy is predominantly based on time investment is shallow. And it is.
Time Investment Contests are ultra-shallow, ultra-casual gameplay. If you're only interested in the ultra-casual audience, then fine that makes sense. But MMORPGers tend to appreciate games with a sense of mastery and decisionmaking.
All you have to do is have skill be involved in a significant way to avoid the problem. As I said before, as long as gameplay isn't predominantly a Time Investment Contest, players are going to be interested in it.
RPGs are not only about watching your character do awesome things. If an RPG fails to provide interesting decisions, it dies. Player skill = interesting decisions. The worse an RPG's decisionmaking, the worse it does.
The interesting decisions in RPGs are about role playing your character. My character isa crafter, my character fights dragons, my characters favorite crafting is alchemy.
In any case the best games are games where you don't become a top tier player without much time investment, because its what you do with your time investment that makes the game interesting. Its how each players decision as to how to invest their time interacts with each other players decision.
You don't have to spend as much time as another player does to be relevant. You could spend 1/10th as much time as another player and if you were smart you could be a big player.
Just because old games had too much focus on time investment and other poor systems doesn't mean we should go the direction of WoW. We can improve on EQ or UO without adding all the garbage we got in WoW. In any case WoW, the most popular MMORPG ever had an incredible amount of power based on time investment.
Name me one MMO that doesn't focus primarily on time investment? And shortening the leveling time is not a valid way of lowering time investment. Fix the cause not the symptoms.
Sure, a heavy focus on time spent is shallow. But a lot of players want shallow.
I think it's more than that.
I'd say you are right, when it comes to the majority of players but you can still have a very diverse and in-depth crafting and economy in a game where most just want shallow. There is only a select few who really get into the economy of Eve Online but it works because there is still an interface where people can simply go and buy what they want without knowing why it costs what it costs.
I think it's more that the developers don't want to spend the time and effort into making and then proping up an in-game economy until the players take hold and get it moving themselves. Creating a player driven economy is just as complex as creating balanced interaction between character classes and abilities.
There's so much love on these forums for this old feature or that old feature (and I share a lot of that love like in fearsome worlds, death penalties, non-instant travel, strong communities, forced group play/not-strong-solo) but I don't understand love for games where even everyday players are suppressed by a controlled auction house/market place. I don't understand love for non-soulbound gear (as far as boss drops) because I'd rather the player be part of the group that earned it, than gone off to buy gold (or felt forced to buy gold) to get into the gear.
I'm not sure what you mean by "players suppressed by a controlled auction house"?
I hate the idea of soul bound items. Why can't I sell an item that I can't use or no longer need? Used goods should be part of the economy as well.
I don't believe the game economies can possibly work in today's paradigm. Nobody wants to lose their items so everything lasts forever. There's no reason to buy new items unless it's an upgrade. Crafters flood the market trying to train up their skills with items that nobody needs.
I'd like to see a system where gear is indepenent of the characters level. You can make it so that the items are simply multipliers of the characters stats. That way level 1 and level 100 characters are buying and selling the same stuff. Needless to say gear must decay over time or some be destroyed when you die.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. -- Herman Melville
The real problem is that in ye olde time the economy was based on gold (and to a lesser degree, silver, copper and gems). In the real world those things are rather limited, particularly with the knowledge people had a thousand years ago. In a game however economy is rarely limited. You can usually farm a mob, node or however you get resources closed to unlimited times.
Actually, that's not the reason for inflation at all. But that's wandering way off topic, so I'll make a separate thread.
Most games don't have much of an economy because the developers intended for the game not to have much of an economy--because most MMORPG players don't want a game to have much of an economy. A deep economy gives you as much of a chance to lose your shirt as it does to get filthy rich. A lot of players are clueless about economics, and will lose their shirt by being stupid, then go to the forums to complain that the game is broken, and demand that it should be changed such that whatever they did makes you get rich.
Where do I sign up for that game?
The only game I've played where you can play the market to "get rich or die tryin" is Eve.
I have to wonder what some players are thinking when they use the market / auction house in any game. They craft a bunch of items then put them on the market but undercut the lowest price by 30% - 40%. I understand sometimes they just want to get rid of the stuff but why lose money when you don't have to? I guess traders will hate me for pointing this out because it's how they get rich but I must rant sometimes.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. -- Herman Melville
There's no reason why a game has to have only one source of all of the best gear. I don't mean making crafted gear comparable to mob drops. I mean making some equipment slots have all of the best gear be crafted, and other equipment slots have all of the best gear be mob drops, etc.
For example, in Uncharted Waters Online, all of the really good land battle weapons come from adventuring discoveries. While there are some crafted weapons, I'm not aware of any that do even half of the damage of the good adventuring discovery weapons. Meanwhile, apart from the item mall, all ships and nearly all good ship parts are exclusively crafted. There are also some scattered items that come from mob drops, or from standing in exactly the right spot and searching however many hundreds of times it takes to get lucky.
FF XI is a terrible example of a player run economy. There needs to be an ecosystem where fighters need to continually purchase gear from crafters, which keeps the prices at a reasonable rate and encourages competition. Item damage was a non-factor in FFXI, which meant that top level players would hoard their gear and crafters were forced to sell low level gear just to make any money at all. Beginner crafters were forced out of business, veteran crafters were forced to continually deal with item inflation while selling increasingly worthless items, and the economy spiraled into the mess it is today.
A better system would be something like what's in Fallout New Vegas. No matter how good of a gear set you have, you will have to continuously buy more or spend a crapton of money to keep things repaired. You should be able to combine items like in Fallout instead of straight repairing them. In this scenario veteran crafters would gain the most profit by tending to veteran players, while new crafters could compete among newer players. With this balance in economy the currency continuously is moving and prices should be kept relatively in check.
Controlling the supply of money in the game is another issue, but that could be done by having some sort of tax on players to keep the global income in equilibrium.
The interesting decisions in RPGs are about role playing your character. My character isa crafter, my character fights dragons, my characters favorite crafting is alchemy.
In any case the best games are games where you don't become a top tier player without much time investment, because its what you do with your time investment that makes the game interesting. Its how each players decision as to how to invest their time interacts with each other players decision.
You don't have to spend as much time as another player does to be relevant. You could spend 1/10th as much time as another player and if you were smart you could be a big player.
Just because old games had too much focus on time investment and other poor systems doesn't mean we should go the direction of WoW. We can improve on EQ or UO without adding all the garbage we got in WoW. In any case WoW, the most popular MMORPG ever had an incredible amount of power based on time investment.
Name me one MMO that doesn't focus primarily on time investment? And shortening the leveling time is not a valid way of lowering time investment. Fix the cause not the symptoms.
Only if you're unusually hyper-fixated on roleplaying your character.
The overwhelming majority of players aren't.
RPGs which allow their progression systems to demolish good gameplay actually are pretty rare. In WOW the power based on time investment in no way prevents the game from strongly rewarding player decisions, because you're fighting even-level stuff. And WOW isn't even the ideal implementation of difficulty vs. reward. CoH was closer, since fighting tougher monsters (which made decisions even more crucial) actually yielded a higher rate of overall rewards (unlike WOW, where the highest rate of rewards while leveling involved fighting monsters slightly below your level where your decisions were less important.)
But again, it's extremely rare for an RPG to allow time investment to remove the need for good decisionmaking. That would be like an RPG where all mobs are level 1, and as soon as you hit level 2 and above the Time Investment completely removes the need for skillful play. What RPGs are like that? Certainly no good ones...
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The interesting decisions in RPGs are about role playing your character. My character isa crafter, my character fights dragons, my characters favorite crafting is alchemy.
In any case the best games are games where you don't become a top tier player without much time investment, because its what you do with your time investment that makes the game interesting. Its how each players decision as to how to invest their time interacts with each other players decision.
You don't have to spend as much time as another player does to be relevant. You could spend 1/10th as much time as another player and if you were smart you could be a big player.
Just because old games had too much focus on time investment and other poor systems doesn't mean we should go the direction of WoW. We can improve on EQ or UO without adding all the garbage we got in WoW. In any case WoW, the most popular MMORPG ever had an incredible amount of power based on time investment.
Name me one MMO that doesn't focus primarily on time investment? And shortening the leveling time is not a valid way of lowering time investment. Fix the cause not the symptoms.
Only if you're unusually hyper-fixated on roleplaying your character.
The overwhelming majority of players aren't.
RPGs which allow their progression systems to demolish good gameplay actually are pretty rare. In WOW the power based on time investment in no way prevents the game from strongly rewarding player decisions, because you're fighting even-level stuff. And WOW isn't even the ideal implementation of difficulty vs. reward. CoH was closer, since fighting tougher monsters (which made decisions even more crucial) actually yielded a higher rate of overall rewards (unlike WOW, where the highest rate of rewards while leveling involved fighting monsters slightly below your level where your decisions were less important.)
But again, it's extremely rare for an RPG to allow time investment to remove the need for good decisionmaking. That would be like an RPG where all mobs are level 1, and as soon as you hit level 2 and above the Time Investment completely removes the need for skillful play. What RPGs are like that? Certainly no good ones...
If you think WoW requires hard decisions you are nuts. I mean sure if your goal is to powerlevel your character as quickly as possible you have to make the decision to read a guide on the internet about the optimal sequence of activities to gain the highest amount of exp, but since when is hitting search on google difficult?
The interesting decisions in RPGs are about role playing your character. My character isa crafter, my character fights dragons, my characters favorite crafting is alchemy. In any case the best games are games where you don't become a top tier player without much time investment, because its what you do with your time investment that makes the game interesting. Its how each players decision as to how to invest their time interacts with each other players decision. You don't have to spend as much time as another player does to be relevant. You could spend 1/10th as much time as another player and if you were smart you could be a big player. Just because old games had too much focus on time investment and other poor systems doesn't mean we should go the direction of WoW. We can improve on EQ or UO without adding all the garbage we got in WoW. In any case WoW, the most popular MMORPG ever had an incredible amount of power based on time investment. Name me one MMO that doesn't focus primarily on time investment? And shortening the leveling time is not a valid way of lowering time investment. Fix the cause not the symptoms.
Only if you're unusually hyper-fixated on roleplaying your character.
The overwhelming majority of players aren't.
RPGs which allow their progression systems to demolish good gameplay actually are pretty rare. In WOW the power based on time investment in no way prevents the game from strongly rewarding player decisions, because you're fighting even-level stuff. And WOW isn't even the ideal implementation of difficulty vs. reward. CoH was closer, since fighting tougher monsters (which made decisions even more crucial) actually yielded a higher rate of overall rewards (unlike WOW, where the highest rate of rewards while leveling involved fighting monsters slightly below your level where your decisions were less important.)
But again, it's extremely rare for an RPG to allow time investment to remove the need for good decisionmaking. That would be like an RPG where all mobs are level 1, and as soon as you hit level 2 and above the Time Investment completely removes the need for skillful play. What RPGs are like that? Certainly no good ones...
If you think WoW requires hard decisions you are nuts. I mean sure if your goal is to powerlevel your character as quickly as possible you have to make the decision to read a guide on the internet about the optimal sequence of activities to gain the highest amount of exp, but since when is hitting search on google difficult?
Google would be dependence on time rather than skill
Never played it, but I have never played a MMO where the player run economy was stifling to anyone, and where if you didn't want to pay for stuff, you couldn't easily enough make your own crafter.....I just don't get the reference though, since I didn't play the game. I think in a good player economy, people should be free to just play/adventure if they wish, and they easily earn enough for gear...Then people that wish to just craft or both have plenty to do also. I believe in gear decay, and while it is nice, I do not like stuff that makes things invulnerable to decay/loss...It usually kills crafting/economy flow imo.
It sounds like he is upset that the established crafters make higher quality gear, and he can't sell his mediocre gear that he gets while grinding ot master level. Oh well... Another example of things being too hard for a casual player.
Horse manure. I'm beginning to think people like you enjoy the prospects of holding everyone else's heads underwater for ever and ever until the end of time(or until the game shuts down) simply because you spent 16 hours a day playing a game or rushed to get to the new crafting goodies first. That's not a matter of 'easy' or 'hard', that's a matter of being a bigger nerd than everyone else and having a gross amount of free time on your hands.
I can't relate to FFXI but I remember when I first started playing World of Warcraft at launch, I had no idea there was an auction house at all for awhile(at the time there was only one per faction and unless you rolled a dwarf or gnome Alliance side, you wouldn't naturally come across it). Hey it was my first MMO, give me a break. Anyway I remember buying white vendor gear and using the random quest reward here and there for equipment, and when I found out about the auction house there was all this great and affordable gear on it.
What's the WoW auction house like now? Everything is unaffordable for the level range that the gear is intended for. You're getting silver coins for early quest rewards but gear that's for your level up on the auction house costs like 50-60 gold coins. It's all unaffordable, unless you pick up gathering professions and sell crafting materials... then you buy your gear with the profit made from that. For people that have played the game before, it's not an issue... they know about it, plus they can feed their new characters with gold from their higher level ones rather than earning it while leveling(the leading cause of this inflation most likely). God help the new people that don't know about this before they start playing though.
Now Playing: Mission Against Terror, Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Dark Souls, League of Legends, Minecraft, and the piano. =3
No. LOTRO is an example where that doesn't hold true. The loot drops/quest rewards may, often, be 'better' but they're rare enough and you out-level them fast enough that you're going to have to either craft or buy if you want to gear-up to max. It's only at the end-game of raid-gear does crafting take more of a back-seat.
And the same with Everquest 2. At times the crafted gear you can make is better than any quest/drop reward you can have. At other times its not. Like LOTRO, it's really only at end-game does crafting start to take a back-seat.
FF XI is a terrible example of a player run economy. There needs to be an ecosystem where fighters need to continually purchase gear from crafters, which keeps the prices at a reasonable rate and encourages competition. Item damage was a non-factor in FFXI, which meant that top level players would hoard their gear and crafters were forced to sell low level gear just to make any money at all. Beginner crafters were forced out of business, veteran crafters were forced to continually deal with item inflation while selling increasingly worthless items, and the economy spiraled into the mess it is today.
A better system would be something like what's in Fallout New Vegas. No matter how good of a gear set you have, you will have to continuously buy more or spend a crapton of money to keep things repaired. You should be able to combine items like in Fallout instead of straight repairing them. In this scenario veteran crafters would gain the most profit by tending to veteran players, while new crafters could compete among newer players. With this balance in economy the currency continuously is moving and prices should be kept relatively in check.
Controlling the supply of money in the game is another issue, but that could be done by having some sort of tax on players to keep the global income in equilibrium.
There it is again "FFXI is a terrible example". I'm not arguing the point either. You're not the first person in the thread to say it and considering I loved the game but loathed the economy, I can see yours, and others', point.
For those unaware, the only penalty for dying in FFXI was losing 5% of your experience into the level. Different levels of Raise would regain some of the lost exp, and this penalty did have its affects when you watched some idiot die, delevel to 74, and couldn't equip a fair portion of his gear. -.- lol. Experience was the loss rather than item-decay or anything like it.
I can see too where your example would have worked extremely well in FFXI. A pair of dusk gloves being a necessary sacrifice to repair a set of dusk gloves +1. A Haubergeon -1 (I know there wasn't one in game.) being necessary to to repair a Normal Quality haubergeon.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug. 12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
If you think WoW requires hard decisions you are nuts. I mean sure if your goal is to powerlevel your character as quickly as possible you have to make the decision to read a guide on the internet about the optimal sequence of activities to gain the highest amount of exp, but since when is hitting search on google difficult?
No, WOW rewards good decisionmaking (skill.) I'm not saying it's hard or easy, but that it rewards good decisionmaking better than other MMORPGs.
Lineage 2 required me to repetitively always use the same exact rotation against every mob. No decisionmaking Not because I was lazy (as you were with WOW) but because there is literally zero optimization to be had: every mob plays the same and your character plays the same for each mob (at least for the first 8 straight hours of gameplay.) Conversely in WOW all sorts of dynamic events can require creative use of the abilities at your disposal, which allows a skillful player to perform considerably better than an unskillful one.
Lineage 2 is just the extreme case, but other games are just the middle of the spectrum with WOW being near the top (for MMORPGs; many games involve superior decisonmaking systems outside of WOW, obviously.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If you think WoW requires hard decisions you are nuts. I mean sure if your goal is to powerlevel your character as quickly as possible you have to make the decision to read a guide on the internet about the optimal sequence of activities to gain the highest amount of exp, but since when is hitting search on google difficult?
No, WOW rewards good decisionmaking (skill.) I'm not saying it's hard or easy, but that it rewards good decisionmaking better than other MMORPGs.
Lineage 2 required me to repetitively always use the same exact rotation against every mob. No decisionmaking Not because I was lazy (as you were with WOW) but because there is literally zero optimization to be had: every mob plays the same and your character plays the same for each mob (at least for the first 8 straight hours of gameplay.) Conversely in WOW all sorts of dynamic events can require creative use of the abilities at your disposal, which allows a skillful player to perform considerably better than an unskillful one.
Lineage 2 is just the extreme case, but other games are just the middle of the spectrum with WOW being near the top (for MMORPGs; many games involve superior decisonmaking systems outside of WOW, obviously.)
You have provided no proof that when you played Lineage it wasn't possible to have an optimizing strategy. I think it was just a long time ago and you didn't know what you were doing.
There it is again "FFXI is a terrible example". I'm not arguing the point either. You're not the first person in the thread to say it and considering I loved the game but loathed the economy, I can see yours, and others', point.
For those unaware, the only penalty for dying in FFXI was losing 5% of your experience into the level. Different levels of Raise would regain some of the lost exp, and this penalty did have its affects when you watched some idiot die, delevel to 74, and couldn't equip a fair portion of his gear. -.- lol. Experience was the loss rather than item-decay or anything like it.
I can see too where your example would have worked extremely well in FFXI. A pair of dusk gloves being a necessary sacrifice to repair a set of dusk gloves +1. A Haubergeon -1 (I know there wasn't one in game.) being necessary to to repair a Normal Quality haubergeon.
Honestly, the only thing that could have saved XI's economy would have been a global launch and active devs monitoring it. Neither occured and we got the mess we had.
I'm still in shock how a game with a player run economy could allow intergrated servers with the majority of the world joining a year after the JP's. Now, i'm a fan of intergrated servers, but not how they were handled.
I guess what i'm trying to say is, i've only had negative experiences with player-run economies. I'm not saying they're bad or good.
When I think player run economy I think UO or Eve not FFXI. From what I remember the crafting system in FFXI wasn't anything to be excited about. Node locations and mob that contained crafting drops were camped to hell and back, had to gather all those damn crystals, no item destruction so there is no way to control inflation. If you are looking for a good craftng games there are way better ones then FFXI.
Now I realize that different games are different but FFXI is a shining example of how player-run economies can be exploited and *can* be the worst part of gameplay.
In FFXI, high-level crafters ran the economy, so much so that it was nearly impossible to cap a craft without buying "gil" (gold). In FFXI each craft had 100 skill levels, and you could rank up off of a synthesis .1, .2, .3, .4, or .5, and often times, the higher you got, a synth wouldn't rank you at all. A good drop that you could go farm solo or with a friend often didn't sell for very well or there was so much competition...
I'm not creating this thread to whine about the economy in a game too difficult to explain in a few words. I'm saying that I, for one, appreciate games where having gold is nice, with worthwhile crafted options, even where crafted options are superior, but I can equally appreciate where things are controlled by drops.
Farming (here specifically being farming the same weak mobs for drops to NPC or auction house) doesn't stay fun for very long and player-run economies are carefully controlled by the players to make farming, or buying gold (generally a TOS violation, and always an immersion-breaker), the only option to continue your existence in the game.
There's so much love on these forums for this old feature or that old feature (and I share a lot of that love like in fearsome worlds, death penalties, non-instant travel, strong communities, forced group play/not-strong-solo) but I don't understand love for games where even everyday players are suppressed by a controlled auction house/market place. I don't understand love for non-soulbound gear (as far as boss drops) because I'd rather the player be part of the group that earned it, than gone off to buy gold (or felt forced to buy gold) to get into the gear.
Maybe others have stated this already, but FFXI AH was an anomaly, not a rule. Basic mats being MORE expensive then their crafted items was specific only to FFXI's market system, because WoW and others you could atleast make money buying ore and selling bars (ingots in FFXI). Maybe a very small profit, but still a profit. Not the gawd awful FFXI AH where you could buy ore and sell ingots and take a HUGE loss...
FFXI was the only game where levelling crafting WAS a money sink no matter how you spun it, and I blame either the jp players for being so inept at selling things for profit, or RMT for ruining it. every other game I've played, including vanilla wow, you could atleast make a profit or break even while crafting, and farming atleast made you enough money fast enough, that farming wasn't such a grind like FFXI.
You have provided no proof that when you played Lineage it wasn't possible to have an optimizing strategy. I think it was just a long time ago and you didn't know what you were doing.
Well I only lasted the first 8 grueling hours of L2 (both attempts).
From the 5 minute mark to the 8 hour mark both classes I tried had zero opportunity for any optimization whatsoever (apart from "don't pull multiple mobs." obviously.)
Your class literally doesn't get any meaningful tools during that time (although at some point you get frostbolt-fireball-fireball-fireball instead of just fireball spam), and no mobs use any meaningful abilities which can be optimized against.
Literally from level 1 to 20 the only active abilities you have are (in wow terms) frostbolt, fireball, and a different elemental type fireball.
The toolkits of classes in Lineage 2 are perhaps the worst I've ever seen in an RPG. They're basically nonexistant in the first 8 hours, and if you haven't given me a fun game to play in the first 8 hours your game is crap.
WOW on the other hand, offers solid toolkits for just about every class. There's variety to the abilities and a way to play them "right" (which means there's a wrong way, and there's skill to playing the game right.) Again, WOW could clearly be better than it is but it's still one of the best (the best, imo) games at providing tactical decisions (skill mattering) during combat, which is part of why it's been so successful.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Maybe others have stated this already, but FFXI AH was an anomaly, not a rule. Basic mats being MORE expensive then their crafted items was specific only to FFXI's market system, because WoW and others you could atleast make money buying ore and selling bars (ingots in FFXI). Maybe a very small profit, but still a profit. Not the gawd awful FFXI AH where you could buy ore and sell ingots and take a HUGE loss...
Others had stated that a few times. I said in the OP that XI was my only real experience with a player-run economy and that it wasn't a good one. Still, while most people seem to despise me for hating player-run economies, XI players understand where I'm coming from even if they disagree.
If anything, the total response gives me hope for other player run economies; that XI really was, as you say, an anomaly.
FFXI was the only game where levelling crafting WAS a money sink no matter how you spun it, and I blame either the jp players for being so inept at selling things for profit, or RMT for ruining it. every other game I've played, including vanilla wow, you could atleast make a profit or break even while crafting, and farming atleast made you enough money fast enough, that farming wasn't such a grind like FFXI.
That's the first time I've ever heard anyone refer to the JP players of that game, in any regard, as inept. I think it was quite the opposite though. I think they were apt players that managed to keep a very tight bottleneck on the economy.
RMT, and SE's reaction to RMT, was a big problem with the economy as well though. The only farmable mega-drops were popsets once they made most NMs (elites) rare (bind-on-pickup).
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug. 12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
Never played it, but I have never played a MMO where the player run economy was stifling to anyone, and where if you didn't want to pay for stuff, you couldn't easily enough make your own crafter.....I just don't get the reference though, since I didn't play the game. I think in a good player economy, people should be free to just play/adventure if they wish, and they easily earn enough for gear...Then people that wish to just craft or both have plenty to do also. I believe in gear decay, and while it is nice, I do not like stuff that makes things invulnerable to decay/loss...It usually kills crafting/economy flow imo.
It sounds like he is upset that the established crafters make higher quality gear, and he can't sell his mediocre gear that he gets while grinding ot master level. Oh well... Another example of things being too hard for a casual player.
Actually, it sounds more like a case of yet again poor crafting design/game economy that can't make mid-level gear relevant and useful. A game such as EVE has no such issues.
Stop blaming the players for not wanting to do things that are boring, pointless and stupid.
You get no medals for managing to persevere through this BS.
Agreed.
I actually dont like a crafter centric loot system, but if there is one, then as Kyl indicated, there should be a way to make your money without having been one of the early crafters.
IMO a crafter system like EQ is best. Plenty of things to be bought like baking goods, but yet nice lootable stuff as well. I dont fancy a system that is strictly about farming money to keep buying the same items.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
Comments
Nobody's talking about purely player skill-based crafting here. We're only saying that having a game where economy is predominantly based on time investment is shallow. And it is.
Time Investment Contests are ultra-shallow, ultra-casual gameplay. If you're only interested in the ultra-casual audience, then fine that makes sense. But MMORPGers tend to appreciate games with a sense of mastery and decisionmaking.
All you have to do is have skill be involved in a significant way to avoid the problem. As I said before, as long as gameplay isn't predominantly a Time Investment Contest, players are going to be interested in it.
RPGs are not only about watching your character do awesome things. If an RPG fails to provide interesting decisions, it dies. Player skill = interesting decisions. The worse an RPG's decisionmaking, the worse it does.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Player driven economies don't really work well without outside influence by developers. Eve is a pretty good example of a player economy but CCP still exerts manipulation here and there with some game changes. Examples being component and resource requirement changes and changes to the ice field respawns in certain security systems.
Player driven economies also don't do very well in games that don't have permanent gear destruction through a durability system or true player-professions dedicated to crafting and harvesting.
These crafting and harvesting career-paths need some type of customizability in the products they produce or harvest and a type of reverse engineering system - with some type of skill depletion when not practiced. Earth and Beyond had a pretty good system of RI and crafting and even though it was far from perfect, it was far more player-driven than anything we see today.
My 2c.
The interesting decisions in RPGs are about role playing your character. My character isa crafter, my character fights dragons, my characters favorite crafting is alchemy.
In any case the best games are games where you don't become a top tier player without much time investment, because its what you do with your time investment that makes the game interesting. Its how each players decision as to how to invest their time interacts with each other players decision.
You don't have to spend as much time as another player does to be relevant. You could spend 1/10th as much time as another player and if you were smart you could be a big player.
Just because old games had too much focus on time investment and other poor systems doesn't mean we should go the direction of WoW. We can improve on EQ or UO without adding all the garbage we got in WoW. In any case WoW, the most popular MMORPG ever had an incredible amount of power based on time investment.
Name me one MMO that doesn't focus primarily on time investment? And shortening the leveling time is not a valid way of lowering time investment. Fix the cause not the symptoms.
Sure, a heavy focus on time spent is shallow. But a lot of players want shallow.
I think it's more than that.
I'd say you are right, when it comes to the majority of players but you can still have a very diverse and in-depth crafting and economy in a game where most just want shallow. There is only a select few who really get into the economy of Eve Online but it works because there is still an interface where people can simply go and buy what they want without knowing why it costs what it costs.
I think it's more that the developers don't want to spend the time and effort into making and then proping up an in-game economy until the players take hold and get it moving themselves. Creating a player driven economy is just as complex as creating balanced interaction between character classes and abilities.
I'm not sure what you mean by "players suppressed by a controlled auction house"?
I hate the idea of soul bound items. Why can't I sell an item that I can't use or no longer need? Used goods should be part of the economy as well.
I don't believe the game economies can possibly work in today's paradigm. Nobody wants to lose their items so everything lasts forever. There's no reason to buy new items unless it's an upgrade. Crafters flood the market trying to train up their skills with items that nobody needs.
I'd like to see a system where gear is indepenent of the characters level. You can make it so that the items are simply multipliers of the characters stats. That way level 1 and level 100 characters are buying and selling the same stuff. Needless to say gear must decay over time or some be destroyed when you die.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
Where do I sign up for that game?
The only game I've played where you can play the market to "get rich or die tryin" is Eve.
I have to wonder what some players are thinking when they use the market / auction house in any game. They craft a bunch of items then put them on the market but undercut the lowest price by 30% - 40%. I understand sometimes they just want to get rid of the stuff but why lose money when you don't have to? I guess traders will hate me for pointing this out because it's how they get rich but I must rant sometimes.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
There's no reason why a game has to have only one source of all of the best gear. I don't mean making crafted gear comparable to mob drops. I mean making some equipment slots have all of the best gear be crafted, and other equipment slots have all of the best gear be mob drops, etc.
For example, in Uncharted Waters Online, all of the really good land battle weapons come from adventuring discoveries. While there are some crafted weapons, I'm not aware of any that do even half of the damage of the good adventuring discovery weapons. Meanwhile, apart from the item mall, all ships and nearly all good ship parts are exclusively crafted. There are also some scattered items that come from mob drops, or from standing in exactly the right spot and searching however many hundreds of times it takes to get lucky.
FF XI is a terrible example of a player run economy. There needs to be an ecosystem where fighters need to continually purchase gear from crafters, which keeps the prices at a reasonable rate and encourages competition. Item damage was a non-factor in FFXI, which meant that top level players would hoard their gear and crafters were forced to sell low level gear just to make any money at all. Beginner crafters were forced out of business, veteran crafters were forced to continually deal with item inflation while selling increasingly worthless items, and the economy spiraled into the mess it is today.
A better system would be something like what's in Fallout New Vegas. No matter how good of a gear set you have, you will have to continuously buy more or spend a crapton of money to keep things repaired. You should be able to combine items like in Fallout instead of straight repairing them. In this scenario veteran crafters would gain the most profit by tending to veteran players, while new crafters could compete among newer players. With this balance in economy the currency continuously is moving and prices should be kept relatively in check.
Controlling the supply of money in the game is another issue, but that could be done by having some sort of tax on players to keep the global income in equilibrium.
Only if you're unusually hyper-fixated on roleplaying your character.
The overwhelming majority of players aren't.
RPGs which allow their progression systems to demolish good gameplay actually are pretty rare. In WOW the power based on time investment in no way prevents the game from strongly rewarding player decisions, because you're fighting even-level stuff. And WOW isn't even the ideal implementation of difficulty vs. reward. CoH was closer, since fighting tougher monsters (which made decisions even more crucial) actually yielded a higher rate of overall rewards (unlike WOW, where the highest rate of rewards while leveling involved fighting monsters slightly below your level where your decisions were less important.)
But again, it's extremely rare for an RPG to allow time investment to remove the need for good decisionmaking. That would be like an RPG where all mobs are level 1, and as soon as you hit level 2 and above the Time Investment completely removes the need for skillful play. What RPGs are like that? Certainly no good ones...
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If you think WoW requires hard decisions you are nuts. I mean sure if your goal is to powerlevel your character as quickly as possible you have to make the decision to read a guide on the internet about the optimal sequence of activities to gain the highest amount of exp, but since when is hitting search on google difficult?
Only if you're unusually hyper-fixated on roleplaying your character.
The overwhelming majority of players aren't.
RPGs which allow their progression systems to demolish good gameplay actually are pretty rare. In WOW the power based on time investment in no way prevents the game from strongly rewarding player decisions, because you're fighting even-level stuff. And WOW isn't even the ideal implementation of difficulty vs. reward. CoH was closer, since fighting tougher monsters (which made decisions even more crucial) actually yielded a higher rate of overall rewards (unlike WOW, where the highest rate of rewards while leveling involved fighting monsters slightly below your level where your decisions were less important.)
But again, it's extremely rare for an RPG to allow time investment to remove the need for good decisionmaking. That would be like an RPG where all mobs are level 1, and as soon as you hit level 2 and above the Time Investment completely removes the need for skillful play. What RPGs are like that? Certainly no good ones...
If you think WoW requires hard decisions you are nuts. I mean sure if your goal is to powerlevel your character as quickly as possible you have to make the decision to read a guide on the internet about the optimal sequence of activities to gain the highest amount of exp, but since when is hitting search on google difficult?
Google would be dependence on time rather than skillHorse manure. I'm beginning to think people like you enjoy the prospects of holding everyone else's heads underwater for ever and ever until the end of time(or until the game shuts down) simply because you spent 16 hours a day playing a game or rushed to get to the new crafting goodies first. That's not a matter of 'easy' or 'hard', that's a matter of being a bigger nerd than everyone else and having a gross amount of free time on your hands.
I can't relate to FFXI but I remember when I first started playing World of Warcraft at launch, I had no idea there was an auction house at all for awhile(at the time there was only one per faction and unless you rolled a dwarf or gnome Alliance side, you wouldn't naturally come across it). Hey it was my first MMO, give me a break. Anyway I remember buying white vendor gear and using the random quest reward here and there for equipment, and when I found out about the auction house there was all this great and affordable gear on it.
What's the WoW auction house like now? Everything is unaffordable for the level range that the gear is intended for. You're getting silver coins for early quest rewards but gear that's for your level up on the auction house costs like 50-60 gold coins. It's all unaffordable, unless you pick up gathering professions and sell crafting materials... then you buy your gear with the profit made from that. For people that have played the game before, it's not an issue... they know about it, plus they can feed their new characters with gold from their higher level ones rather than earning it while leveling(the leading cause of this inflation most likely). God help the new people that don't know about this before they start playing though.
Now Playing: Mission Against Terror, Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Dark Souls, League of Legends, Minecraft, and the piano. =3
Visit my fail Youtube channel(don't leave me nasty messages!): http://www.youtube.com/user/Mirii471
No. LOTRO is an example where that doesn't hold true. The loot drops/quest rewards may, often, be 'better' but they're rare enough and you out-level them fast enough that you're going to have to either craft or buy if you want to gear-up to max. It's only at the end-game of raid-gear does crafting take more of a back-seat.
And the same with Everquest 2. At times the crafted gear you can make is better than any quest/drop reward you can have. At other times its not. Like LOTRO, it's really only at end-game does crafting start to take a back-seat.
There it is again "FFXI is a terrible example". I'm not arguing the point either. You're not the first person in the thread to say it and considering I loved the game but loathed the economy, I can see yours, and others', point.
For those unaware, the only penalty for dying in FFXI was losing 5% of your experience into the level. Different levels of Raise would regain some of the lost exp, and this penalty did have its affects when you watched some idiot die, delevel to 74, and couldn't equip a fair portion of his gear. -.- lol. Experience was the loss rather than item-decay or anything like it.
I can see too where your example would have worked extremely well in FFXI. A pair of dusk gloves being a necessary sacrifice to repair a set of dusk gloves +1. A Haubergeon -1 (I know there wasn't one in game.) being necessary to to repair a Normal Quality haubergeon.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
No, WOW rewards good decisionmaking (skill.) I'm not saying it's hard or easy, but that it rewards good decisionmaking better than other MMORPGs.
Lineage 2 required me to repetitively always use the same exact rotation against every mob. No decisionmaking Not because I was lazy (as you were with WOW) but because there is literally zero optimization to be had: every mob plays the same and your character plays the same for each mob (at least for the first 8 straight hours of gameplay.) Conversely in WOW all sorts of dynamic events can require creative use of the abilities at your disposal, which allows a skillful player to perform considerably better than an unskillful one.
Lineage 2 is just the extreme case, but other games are just the middle of the spectrum with WOW being near the top (for MMORPGs; many games involve superior decisonmaking systems outside of WOW, obviously.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You have provided no proof that when you played Lineage it wasn't possible to have an optimizing strategy. I think it was just a long time ago and you didn't know what you were doing.
Honestly, the only thing that could have saved XI's economy would have been a global launch and active devs monitoring it. Neither occured and we got the mess we had.
I'm still in shock how a game with a player run economy could allow intergrated servers with the majority of the world joining a year after the JP's. Now, i'm a fan of intergrated servers, but not how they were handled.
I guess what i'm trying to say is, i've only had negative experiences with player-run economies. I'm not saying they're bad or good.
When I think player run economy I think UO or Eve not FFXI. From what I remember the crafting system in FFXI wasn't anything to be excited about. Node locations and mob that contained crafting drops were camped to hell and back, had to gather all those damn crystals, no item destruction so there is no way to control inflation. If you are looking for a good craftng games there are way better ones then FFXI.
Maybe others have stated this already, but FFXI AH was an anomaly, not a rule. Basic mats being MORE expensive then their crafted items was specific only to FFXI's market system, because WoW and others you could atleast make money buying ore and selling bars (ingots in FFXI). Maybe a very small profit, but still a profit. Not the gawd awful FFXI AH where you could buy ore and sell ingots and take a HUGE loss...
FFXI was the only game where levelling crafting WAS a money sink no matter how you spun it, and I blame either the jp players for being so inept at selling things for profit, or RMT for ruining it. every other game I've played, including vanilla wow, you could atleast make a profit or break even while crafting, and farming atleast made you enough money fast enough, that farming wasn't such a grind like FFXI.
Taru-Gallante-Blood elf-Elysean-Kelari-Crime Fighting-Imperial Agent
Well I only lasted the first 8 grueling hours of L2 (both attempts).
From the 5 minute mark to the 8 hour mark both classes I tried had zero opportunity for any optimization whatsoever (apart from "don't pull multiple mobs." obviously.)
Your class literally doesn't get any meaningful tools during that time (although at some point you get frostbolt-fireball-fireball-fireball instead of just fireball spam), and no mobs use any meaningful abilities which can be optimized against.
Literally from level 1 to 20 the only active abilities you have are (in wow terms) frostbolt, fireball, and a different elemental type fireball.
The toolkits of classes in Lineage 2 are perhaps the worst I've ever seen in an RPG. They're basically nonexistant in the first 8 hours, and if you haven't given me a fun game to play in the first 8 hours your game is crap.
WOW on the other hand, offers solid toolkits for just about every class. There's variety to the abilities and a way to play them "right" (which means there's a wrong way, and there's skill to playing the game right.) Again, WOW could clearly be better than it is but it's still one of the best (the best, imo) games at providing tactical decisions (skill mattering) during combat, which is part of why it's been so successful.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
Agreed.
I actually dont like a crafter centric loot system, but if there is one, then as Kyl indicated, there should be a way to make your money without having been one of the early crafters.
IMO a crafter system like EQ is best. Plenty of things to be bought like baking goods, but yet nice lootable stuff as well. I dont fancy a system that is strictly about farming money to keep buying the same items.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.