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Player-driven economies in MMOGs are really complicated. It's probably been the source of more debates internally, with other developers, and with the MMOG community in general than just about any other topic.
I'll put out a few thoughts, and some aspects of how I feel about MMOG economies and the challenges.
At the high-end game, money ceases to be a problem for players, because they can get more than enough by killing vast numbers of easy to kill mobs. Thus, money sinks are implemented - btw, money sinks should be present at all levels of the game, not just the end-game.
So, there must be a *desirable* way to remove items from the economy. There are several methods that have been used in a number of games - bind on pickup/soulbound/nodrop is one. Offering players a chance at something for destroying items (disenchanting in WoW, deconstructing in Horizons) is another - imagine a game where you can both disenchant and deconstruct items - do you disenchant your flaming mace of death for the chance of obtaining a valuable flaming essence with which to enchant another item, or do you deconstruct it in the hopes of obtaining a rare metal to fashion a different type of weapon? Another tangent on this would be to allow a player to deconstruct an item in order for the possibility to learn to craft it - a rather destructive form of reverse engineering, true, but if the crafted replicas of the original have a chance of being worse or better than the original item depending on player skill, then some people might be willing to gamble the item away for a chance at being able to make a masterwork equivalent with better stats and such. Of course, crafting such a replica would probably require many attempts, and of course, the materials have to come from somewhere.
This leads to another point. In EQ, there was a time when it was very hard to obtain certain ores and metals for smithing. If Mithril veins are rare, and there is a demand for mithril armour, then what is there to prevent the players from smelting mithril weapons from some long lost dwarven halls-turned-dungeon into mithril bars, with which to craft said armours?
Allowing players to sacrifice magical items to deities in temples, or requiring an offering of magic to spawn some NPC (which may be hostile, or may be a questgiver) at the Shrine of Volcanic Doom for a *chance* at something else (the randomness is important) are also viable item sinks. Requiring items to be repaired, but without going to the extent of destroying the item when it reaches 0 durability could be a money sink (WoW), but it could also be an item sink if the repairs required specific materials ("Yes, I can repair your Mithril Battlehammer, but I need a couple of mithril bars to do so. You don't happen to have a Mithril Dagger on you? It might just be enough if I deconstruct it")
Another possible item sink would be to allow players to 'retire' their old weapons into a weapon rack in their homes. Once there, the item can no longer be taken out, but when examined, a large image of it along with some lore text could appear on-screen for anyone to see. Perhaps some people, rather than sell off their old Crimson Steel Longsword for a couple of plat, would rather stow it away in their homes to show to friends and relatives when they come to visit.
Finally, the developers of the game could drop a number of clues that hint to the possibility of upgrading certain high-end drop items. If a player thinks his Epic crossbow of footshooting can be upgraded into something even better, chances are they aren't going to sell it off just yet. This essentially removes the item from the economy, because the item isn't going to go out into the market. Rather, players will hold on to items that may have otherwise been sold off to some newbie. By withholding the item from sale, the player is effectively creating artificial demand by limiting supply - something akin to what happens in our own world with diamonds - someone keeps the supply artificially low to main inflated prices on an article which isn't quite as rare as the general populace believes.
Other ideas? |
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发表于 2005-4-5 11:21:00
