Results tagged “Massive Multiplayer Online”

Today, Warhammer Online's Associate Producer James Casey featured one of the two "In Development" letters published by Mythic and GOA. I think it's worth mentioning, because I'd like to talk about some of the points he makes:

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One of the things we've been discussing with the Core Testers lately is the economy of WAR. We received some excellent feedback and we're formulating plans based on that discussion, however we want to open up the dialogue to all players for broader input.

As we continue to look at Warhammer Online (where it's been and where it's going), we're examining the game from a macro and micro (big picture, little picture) level. One of the more macro areas we have discussed is the overall game economy. To put it bluntly, it's not where we or the players would like it to be. The designs and decisions made during development left us in a hard position, where, in order to jumpstart the economy, we need to make some changes. Before we go into that, let us look at the status of the economy now.

The basic principle of a viable sustainable economy is supply and demand. If these are balanced, economies can sustain themselves. Tipping too far to either extreme can cause an economy to falter. In WAR, one can see examples where we made a misstep based on this principle; too much supply for the demand (plenty of gold, nothing to spend it on), and not enough supply for demand (not enough items are tradable). In a way, these two dynamics feed one another.

Let's look at an example:

Public Quests provide loot bags which allow the owner to choose an item that is specifically tailored to their class and bind on pickup (BOP). This does two things; limits the potential demand for the product because it is class specific and makes it so it can't be offered in trade because it is BOP. This feeds the problem that there are not enough items being available. Compounding the issue, if the item is not useful to the person that earned it, they will sell it, gather gold, and due to the lack of items in demand, they have little to spend their gold on. It's a vicious cycle.

So how do we look at ways to change our current economy to balance both supply and demand? To accomplish this we need to look at solutions that will tweak the way items are rewarded. Not just how useful they are to the individual, but also as potential trade goods in the economy. We have a good idea on how to do this, but we want to throw the issue out there and get some feedback proactively, before we settle on a design.

What we'd like are some thoughts on how to change our world drops, PQ loot, and the like to make them more viable and valuable to the economy which will hopefully balance supply and demand. Examples would be: making items BOE versus BOP, making items useful to multiple classes, etc. 

 

Making some changes will allow us to redefine the balance of supply and demand and give us greater flexibility in introducing items going forward, which will benefit characters of all ranks.

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I'd like to explain this a bit for those who didn't play Warhammer Online. When it comes to economy, the game came out with one idea on mind, keeping it simple and controlling the inflation at any cost (especially after some bad experiences the company had with DAoC), The result was that after the first months, economy was conspicuous by its absence. The crafting professions were supposed to be "supporting" and not too deeply involved in game mechanics (as apparently the only other option was to clone World of Warcraft). This meant you couldn't craft armors, weapons, clothes or basically anything useful for quite a while, until they got re-vamped, adding some extra flavor to talisman making (allowing players to customize their gear a bit with some saucy extra bonuses better than those they could get with random talisman drops) and alchemy (potion making, really reduced to a couple of overpowered potions).

Still, it's basically something done usually inside the guild. Why? Because being more simple doesn't make it less boring, the game really forces you to have "friends" at higher levels (so, usually, if you are somebody who would care for those extra stats and buffs, you'll have a 99% chance of being in a guild) and the often diluted realm pride, mixed with the auction house being only in the major cities (which means during the first 30 levels you won't be going there unless you specifically need/want to), means you really won't do stuff just to sell it. Also, as there's nothing you can buy, and money is "cheap", trying to exploit the system gets you nothing.

Because, yes, they also tried to fight with gold farming, making it unnecessary because gold was "abundant". Or better, because you really didn't need to buy anything expensive, and even if you spent a fortune in that ultracool weapon, it would mean almost nothing when it came to power increase. Not to mention the best gear was bind on pickup, so, in the end, you needed to get it yourself.

No crafting, no trading... yeah, this seems like the economy was broken. But is it broken at its core? It looked so obvious when the game came out, and it's almost hilarious the way it's now presented. As if somehow it was surprising for somebody. "Hey, look, we enforced a economy based on players not wanting to purchase stuff, and now it sucks". Offer and demand? I'd even mention interaction or usefulness. Also, I've only understood one "solution" by reading the letter, making some of the Bind-on-Pickup items Bind-on-Equip, or maybe not binded at all. It's a bit poor, considering this still doesn't make 99% of the items more desirable, and only the highest sets would get some actual market love. And I mean -the highest- sets, as getting high level armors got easier and easier over time.

Maybe the economy on this MMO can still be saved. Maybe it does need a complete re-vamp. Only time will tell if it'll be able to improve or not. However, it does already state something about what happens when you completely forget about it when developing your massive multiplayer online roleplaying game. I really hope, by the feelings I still have for this game, that these solutions shut my mouth up. And who knows, maybe at some point in the future somebody writes a developer diary saying something like "hey, segregating players by their levels makes them segregated, lololol!".

Or maybe, as Ozzy sang when he became a weird old man, "I'm just a dreamer".

I've written a bit about Mortal Online before, when I spoke about griefing in games nowadays. The other day I went to StarVault's site to check the latest build of the Beta client (which I've been testing now and then since day 0) and found that finally the Thievery skill had been implemented in-game, or at least, its skeleton.

Players will be able to rob other players. Isn't that awesome? It was, some years ago. Today it's almost a basic no-no in MMO design (griefer lure?) and, in the best (and rarest) cases, it's relegated to an interaction only towards NPCs. However, in Mortal Online's particular scenario, where there's free-for-all PvP and full-loot, it kind of makes sense. I mean, at least you're not killing the other guy.

The mechanic is rather simple, there are two skill checks: first, your character tries to see the inventory of his victim, then there's another roll to see if he (or she) is able to grab something without being seen. Unlike the classical Dungeons and Dragons approach, it seems it's not possible (at least, at this very moment) to grab something AND still be detected.

What can I say? While I love to see features like this implemented into MMOs (where they do belong, dammit!), a wrong way to do it may mean the quick dead of the game. Apparently gear won't be hard to get, or very relevant for the basic gameplay. If you don't go all powergamer, most of your equipment will be easy to replace with not much effort.

At least, it's good to see a developer trying to do the things the way they want. I'd also like to write a bit about Mortal Online's slavery and genealogy systems at some point, but hadn't really seen the first yet, and the second has been implemented quite recently. So, soon!