Greetings adventurers and entrepreneurs! Recent discussions on items and loot have made my mind wander into the subject of economy, specifically, the ways in which players have created somewhat out-of-the-box methods of making themselves rich (or tried to). I’m interested in everyone’s stories.
Perhaps as like many of you, I have dabbed in TunnelQuest. My gambles were nothing special, I did not make major coin, nor did I lose. However, I had success elsewhere…
Back the early years of EverQuest (Live), prior to Kunark, I had noticed that many players were reluctant to leave a good group, especially if they were encumbered. Coins had weight (another discussion!), so many players would dispose of their less valuable coins; gold and silver for example. In higher level dungeons, even plat would be trashed. My scheme; to travel around the world as my Druid and exchange coin. Gold for Plat, Plat for Peridots, Fine Steel for a Plat or two. I would take a cut, so it was never 1-to1. And on the side, if anyone needed a teleport or SoW, I could also offer my services. It was a good side hustle, something sandbox-esc but allowed to evolve due to the system and design choices made in EQ at the time. The Druid made the perfect class for it; teleports, speed buffs, invisibility, etc. Then…
In P99, for a short period, I found another way to drive the market. Less… honourable than that above. Again with my Druid, I decided to corner the Robe of the Oracle market. For those who don’t know, it’s a decent rob that drops from a mob who spawns on a given timer. If you know the time of death, you can calculate the respawn time. The demand however was in its requirement as a component of the Rogue Epic weapon quest. I can’t recall how long I had him locked down for, a few weeks? Maybe longer? But there was a period of time where almost all Robes were looted by me. Do you want a Robe of the Oracle? Come to me. It drove the price up, for a while, as demand peaked. But then I noticed that sales dried up. Maybe my efforts to drive up the price and corner the market enticed others to cash in and sell their Robes gathering dust in the bank or other characters. Or maybe people didn’t want to deal with such a shady Druid. It was fun whilst it lasted.
When it comes to Pantheon, I hope the design choices enable such a dynamic economy. I’m interested to hear your stories, especially from other MMOs (Eve springs to mind as one that’s quite mature in this regard).
Typically in MMOs one way for a new character to get coin is to harvest ore or wood or skins or the like or pick up other items in demand (like EQ2 collectibles lying on the ground) and sell them. Maybe not the game's first month when no one has money to spend but after a while. Much depends on how easy they are to get to and how useful crafting is. Selling low level ore to crafters doesn't work all that well in a game where you can get to maximum level as a crafter in a day (so they don't need much ore) and only maximum level crafted items have any real use. I know plans are for harvestable nodes to be less common in Pantheon than is the norm today - I just hope that many of them will be available to lower level adventurers (who may be high level crafters) so that we can sell or use them as we see fit and not have to buy them all.
One of my favorite activities in Vanguard and quite a few other MMOs was to go to areas that were just a *bit* too high for me (as in instant death if a mob attacks) to harvest useful things.
One of the earliest discussions, circa late 2013 to early 2014, about ways by chich players could earn money in Pantheon was the importance of local NPC economies that were using real world supply/demand calculations in their buying/selling prices. So a merchant in an area rife with wolves wouldn't pay much to buy wolf pelts as it already has loads of them, that local market is saturated. But, take your wolf pelts to somewhere else where wolves are rare and you'd get a much better price up to a point. Sell a merchant a few pelts and they are quite happy. Try to sell them 30 of them and their price starts to drop quickly because their supply is outweighing demand. Try to sell too many and now you're getting less per pelt than you would had you sold them to the original merchant.
The clever and industrious player can make their own 'silk roads', by finding which items sell better where but also which items can be purchased cheaper from one market and resold in another.
That said, a player might not want to move all these goods around themselves (for whatever reason) yet still wants them sold. Through a robust and secure contracting system a player could put up a contract that says "move this crate from Thronefast to Wilds End and deliver it to the Bank and in exchange you will get paid X gold if done in Y hours." Another player, seeing the contract and already going in that direction accepts the contract, puts down collateral (refunded upon successful delivery) and goes to Wilds End where, upon delivery, they get their collateral and the payment and the requestor gets notified their delivery was completed. The package needs to be secured in such a way that the deliverer cannot open it, cannot sell it, cannot trade it, cannot delete it. They are stuck with it until it is delivered. If it isn't delivered in time, their collateral is lost and the requestor gets their package returned.
Players, then, could be moving goods all around Terminus if that is how they wanted to earn money. People who build faction with enough races could make good money doing this.
IMO:
Profitable arbitrage can't exist in an environment/world/setting with internal or external instant communication. Which everyone has now, thanks to the Internet, and more specifically Discord. And /tell. And /gu .
Anything beyond that will simply be playing the game the way the game permits, and will be permitted until removed.
I will say, though, that if the game permits a single player to control all the production, perpetually, server-wide, of a required resource, that isn't good game design. It's bad game design followed by poor implementation, followed up by no mitigation or remediation. :)
I'm sure some paying customers will find some temporary niches of exploitation, regardless of the system designed and implemented. The degree of exploitation will likely come down to loop mechanic implementation details.
I have 100% confidence all the consequences or fixes will be reactive, rather than proactive, and not temporally effective enough, given history.
I think blocking quest or item drops is in poor taste. I think the idea was to put flags on items such as those so that only one person could loot them in their lifetime- like Jboots for instance, to prevent such blocking behavior. How much steak can you eat, kind of thing. Once you got one, you're good. If you dont need it, and you cant sell it, looks like you're destoying it because you cant sell it to merchants or to players. Not sure of the mechanic is in, but sush was the nature of the discussion as such behavior tended to lead or lean towards RMT behavior: one began to play not for adventure, but for profit. Ha, the old joke: parenthood is the only profession given to amateurs. Latin: amat= love. Professionals do it for money, amateurs- as per the root of the word- do it for love (aww).
Lafael said:Has anyone ever devised some money making schemes in MMOs they were a bit out from left field?
IMO:
Mathematically, if mobs drop currency directly, income is a factor of time. You kill x mobs in y time, you get z amount of currency.
Kill faster? More currency / time.
Beyond that, it's either exploits of the game itself, or taking advantage of bugs, or social exploits to take advantage of other players, they being other sources of currency.
The whole notion that you can take advantage of regional markets is absurd when the prices are known, instantly, at the source and destination, especially with any form of teleportation and/or instant communication. No informed customer is going buy an identical something for several times its value, when they can get it for the lower price, ~immediately.
Otherwise, what do you mean by 'a bit out from left field' ? These games only permit a very narrow/limited set of legitimate methods to obtain currency, typically.
So, people just make those methods efficient. AoE farming The Deep on Luclin is extremely lucrative, in addition to the XP gain. It is efficiency exemplified, and objectively very ... unfriendly game play. Do you mean illegitimate methods? If so, that will vary by game, and the tolerance of the owner/operator of said game.
Personally, I would start my design exercise by making all forms of all currency un-tradeable to other players directly, and see what ideas came out of that. :) There's been a couple of really good ones from these forums and others, over the years.
vjek said:Mathematically, if mobs drop currency directly, income is a factor of time. You kill x mobs in y time, you get z amount of currency.
Is it not more accurate to say 'if mob drops sellable (thus having a monetary value), income is a factor of time.? I've found that the stuff NPCs drop is a greater source of income than the direct coin NPCs drop.
In EQ1, I remember the huge increase in hourly income when NPC started dropping Bronze weapons then Fine Steel.
IMO:
Sure, that's fair, it just presumes there are NPCs with infinite money standing around waiting to buy all the weapons.
I just hope.. you know.. those same mistakes aren't repeated. But absolutely true, "sellable loot" is a more accurate term, presuming the above is also true.
See my original post, first example, as an example of what I was thinking.
Some others are people offering teleportation services, resurrection services, etc. I've seen some ingenious ways people have devised to make coin. Even in game casinos!
They don't necessarily need to be illegal or against the TOU, rather, perhaps something that was not originally considered possible.
This topic has been promoted for my CM content, please continue the discussion and have fun! :)
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If there is a popular quest that involves going underwater, one could hang out there on weekends and sell their water-breathing buff to those who want to do the quest. If one has higher Mastery Levels of it, and those increase its duration, one might even sell the buff to those who can only cast lower levels of it.
