All MMORPG suffer a big case of inflation and we all know the cause of this is the fact that NPCs are respawnable and they drop game-currency. I've always wondered, why not just don't make it so NPCs drop coin (maybe just some junk items and for nameds/bosses their loot table). Why haven't anyone thought of this option? instead of worrying about inflation and creating money-sink items/mechanics... we can just eliminate the cause and greatly decrease inflation.
Not only you're going to handle inflation better but you also eliminate the 3rd party farming websites (gold sellers).
But then you'd ask "How am I going to get our in-game currency to buy/trade??" and I tell you "Simply with AFK jobs and Trading/Crafting"
Instead of going to farm in a certain area for gold you collect by killing monsters, how about towns offer jobs to players and those jobs can be done while the player is AFK. Say I'm about to go sleep so I take my character to my main town; in the game you can make your character do certain tasks while you log out. One of these tasks is "Work", you can select a job from a variety of careers (Security Guard, Cleaning Town, Store Clerk...etc) and your career can take off the better you perform in your job and the longer you stay in it. You get a certain amount of copper/silver per hour and this is the bread and butter of how players gain their coin.
Another way is to trade with the town (craft bread for the town to sell and it buys it from you for 8 copper a piece and sells it for 10 copper for instance)... and of course let's not forget the ability to sell your phat-l00t for $$ by trading/auction house.
What would make it even more interesting if the game give every town and city FINITE amount of gold to spend on town workers and to buy essential goods from crafters and while that would deplete the town's treasury the town makes it up by selling those essential goods at a 10% profit and tasks the Auction House per trade and the other rental things that might be implemented in the game if needed. If towns somehow suffer from depression and lack of funding; the town will start paying less for jobs and offering less to buy crafting goods and maybe asking more for rental/tasks. If things go bad the game can always add more, controlled, gold to towns every other week or so.
Adventuring can still be meaningful because the drops from bosses are still very lucrative if that's what you like to do; farming boss loot to sell. That still can work. But at least we eliminated the mind numbing gold farming which always lead to uncontrolled inflation.
It's just an idea which I am sure needs testing and tweaking. It's just the option of not making so NPCs drop currency (at least the majority of those NPCs). This is just a rough sketch, the details can be tweaked and all possible holes can be amended but just tell me about your opinion about the concept of the idea where NPCs drop no coin where you have to repeatedly kill them to become rich. It is a concept we've grown up with and I think it's hard to scratch it, but what if we can? Would this work? Would it be a better option?
And then you get bot armys of gold farmers getting money for nothing.
I honestly don't think there is a problem with gold drops from mobs, especially if they keep the amount dropped reasonably low even at max level and spread out the actually valuable item drops amongst many dungeons. Some/many of in which the inhabitants don't drop coin at all.
Laura said:All MMORPG suffer a big case of inflation and we all know the cause of this is the fact that NPCs are respawnable and they drop game-currency.
Actually it isn't the cause, but is a contributing factor. What you are dealing with is a world spanning economy and like an economy there are any number of factors that can affect inflation. To keep an economy in balance you just employ economic theories and practices. Just saying 'don't let NPCs drop money' is not a solution.
I agree with Iksar in that I think this will just encourage third party selling more than anything. Let me just roll 20 accounts so I can AFK farm money without having to press buttons.
I'm going to be honest in that I feel that economic inflation within reasonable bounds is a non-issue. Inflation is inevitable in just about any economy, it's only when it gets wildly out of control that people start to complain about it.
As long as new players aren't severely disadvantaged by not having money, it really doesn't matter how inflated things get.
I agree with the concept that this would only encourage 3rd party selling. Inflation will always occur but I cannot speak to its effects later on in the evolution of a game as I have never played any MMO past its first 3 years of launch. Most games I have played have not seen serious inflation issues within that time frame.
It did seem during their steams that the loot drop seemed high but it was also mentioned in the same stream that they were aware of this and that it would be cut back to appropriate levels.
Also, with VR's level of difficulty, group-centric play and adaptive AI I do not see gold farming being as simple as it may have been in the past.
So, they mostly talked about this with multi-boxing, but I think it can be applied here too.. They want to make the game pretty difficult to the point where one single person won't be able to just mass farm. Sure there are mobs they can solo, but the great places to farm you will need a very coordinated group. And they are hard mobs to kill. So even if someone tried to design a group of bots to do these areas to farm for cash, they risk the actual skill it takes to avoid grabbing aggro from pathers and avoid mobs spawning on top of you, etc.
Gold isn't the only issue here. It's the mass farming of materials themselves. In Archeage there were bots to do all kinds of things. People buy materials for crafting, bots would teleport all over the map and grab the material before you could. It was a huge cheat considering they could travel all around the map with nothing stopping them. Then they put up mass amounts of loot. So anyone who did take the time to farm, lost out on their time and money for doing so. And there was so much it wasn't even worth anything anymore.
While it's possible that specific hack or bot could be implemented in this game, I think the important thing is to specify a solid way to make money. AKA crafting. Where you can farm every day materials but the other really high end matierals needed to craft an item came from dungeons or group effort areas. In Archeage they had wayy too many ways to make money, so bots were created to do all of the above. Bots that mass produced trade packs and would run them in a slow cart all day long dropping prices for other players. They found a way to bot fishing. There was also the gathering bit I mentioned. And of course, farming. There were these loot bags that dropped from certain mobs and that doubled in time of War. So these bots would be killed over and over again and still return to the same spot. The bots were designed well enough to heal and buff, repair, etc. So even if you wanted to try and stop the bot, the person designed it to continue on even if it was killed multiple times. It would just run forever as long as the person allowed it to. So of course they ended up making money one way or another. And they made a CRAP TON of money this way.
Farming mobs was easy in Archeage, though. Wayyyy too easy. I think the one thing to deter gold sellers away from Pantheon is the fact that the combat system isn't going to just allow you to spam buttons. You don't get to mix up your class so you can heal yourself, be a tank, and kill mobs without ever being killed. And hopefully, the best loot that will help make all the money will come from crafting and group content. Which bots shouldn't be able to do what so ever. It's possible they may create one to barely survive solo. But VR's goal is to get people to group up. So even if you did want to solo, you'd eventually most likely find yourself grouping with other random people to further adventure across the map of Terminus. Unless you strongly feel you need to limit yourself to just playing solo, then you'll have to deal with the consequences you gave to yourself, of only playing solo.
Also, the fact that this game will be pay to play and as difficult as VR has described they want it to be, I find that may really deter gold sellers and any hackers/bots from trying to mass farm gold in this game.
TL;DR Pantheon is gonna be tuff stuff, pay to play, and mostly a game made for groups. Who is gonna pay $15/month for 10 bots and attempt to get them to group in hopes they make a little bit of gold to sell. Which by the time they do, people will have started crafting and selling to make much more gold that way. There's the chance that there will be gold sellers, but as long as it isn't as crazy as some of these free to play games with, I wouldn't bother worrying about it so much.
I'm not convinced that this is a problem that needs to be addressed to begin with, however, I'll assume for the sake or argument that it is.
I don't think your proposed solution would solve any problems. If anything, this would make botting for cash even easier.
Personally, I think an easier solution would be a 'progressive tax' on players with huge bank accounts. You're in the top 10% of wealthy players on the server? Congratulations, mobs drop 90% less coin for you. Maybe the AH or whatever takes a bigger cut. Maybe plat received from players for trades is taxed. Perhaps there is a stat tracking money earned over a lifetime if people find easy ways to subvert the mechanic by keeping their cash on-hand low.
These are just off the cuff suggestions for preventing the stratification of wealth and the importance of farming coin with side effects of reducing inflation and encouraging trade.
fancy said:I hope in the new forums you can upvote or like posts. Because I really just wanna like kilsins post right now :(
I agree and upvote this post :)
Honestly, I don't think there is a way to stop the bloat of currency unless you limit the amount of currency in the game. That would come with so many more problems that the current model.