Crafting

[Hoofhurr]

See there you are wrong. You want it to be an unhappy medium because the cash should never be enough for what you need to buy and never be worth keeping around at the same time.

[Dustie]

I'm confused. I'm going home.

[Snowreap]

The difference is currency is always secure whether you follow Snow's idea's or not. Currency never has to be carried more then 2 feet from a bank. Plus it is to easy to turn items into cash so cash is secure even if dropped while killed in pvp. I still go back to my body and loot the items in my inventory and sell it for cash. There is also no real way to control inflation with out changing currency.

That is why currency is bad for pvp.

I think you're assuming that items dropped on player corpses will be generated by the game like it is for NPCs (like WoW and WAR do). no no, cash and items dropped on player corpses should be deducted directly from the dead player's inventory (like Asheron's Call does).

the whole point is to make cash insecure. if I kill you in pvp and you drop cash on your corpse, I'm going to loot it unless your friends run me off before I get a chance. once I've looted your cash and items, they're no longer on your corpse for you to retrieve. at that point, the only way to get them back is to (ahem) "persuade" me to return them (as an aside, in Asheron's Call I didn't have to loot your corpse if I didn't want to, in fact I could open your corpse and add cash and items to it to compensate you for your trouble if I were so inclined, because a corpse was really just a special kind of chest which only the two of us had permission to open).

in real-life terms, if you go to a pawn shop and trade some item for cash, and then walk out of the pawn shop and get mugged, do you say "wow, it's a good thing I sold that item already! all I have now is cash, which is totally secure!"? no, because cash lost in such a case is lost permanently, unless you can track the mugger down (or extort compensation from his boss).

also, it's important to keep in mind that it's possible to limit the use of cash to lower-level players and gear. in Asheron's Call, cash (in the form of pyreal coins) had mass and volume. you couldn't carry more cash than you had the strength to lift, and you couldn't carry more than would fit inside your pack (in fact, the weight of items was measured in terms of pyreals -- if you found your packs full and needed to dump the least-valuable items, then anything that was worth fewer pyreals than it weighed would be the first to go. sometimes all of your loot items were worth more than their weight in pyreals, which meant that the best way to free up pack space would be to drop actual cash on the ground, and players frequently did this, much to the glee of lower-level players in the area. eventually, they changed things so that pyreals were weightless, but pyreals remained the unit of measure for weight despite this, which I imagine new players found confusing).

players therefore had a powerful incentive to convert cash into items with a higher value-density and a lower mass-density. for instance, the "platinum scarab" (a spellcasting consumable) was in common use as a player currency. a full stack of these items was worth something like 1000 times as much as a full stack of coins. these were most avidly used as currency by spellcasters who generally had low strength and always had to take care to keep their total burden under control, although non-spellcasters frequently used them as well, since they were almost universally accepted by players as trade goods -- it was rare to find a trader who would not accept platinum scarabs as payment, but it was normal for traders to refuse to accept pyreal coins!

platinum scarabs were considered a soft currency by the players, because they could be directly converted to and from pyreal coins by visiting an NPC who bought and sold spellcasting components (although you typically lost about 10%-20% of your value in the transaction), and the value of a scarab in pyreals (i.e. the exchange rate) was hardcoded into the game. as a result, anything which dramatically changed the availability of pyreals would directly impact the value of all the soft currencies that had an NPC-established "cash" value.

there were other items used as currencies by players which were considered hard currencies because NPC merchants wouldn't deal in them and they were therefore worth exactly what the players thought they were worth. the soft currencies were vulnerable to inflation due to farming (and exploits), while the hard currencies were vulnerable to inflation due to game changes (for example, a new type of armor might be introduced that reduces the value of the previous generation of crafted armor, which therefore causes a drop in the value of the ingredients used to make that older armor, even for players who had no interest in the older armor itself and who were only using the ingredients as a form of currency).

-ken

[Vllad]

See there you are wrong. You want it to be an unhappy medium because the cash should never be enough for what you need to buy and never be worth keeping around at the same time.

It is impossible to achieve both.

You either have to save up currency to afford what you want or you always earn more then you need so you are constantly spending it. You can't spend if you are saving and you only save what you don't need if you have enough.


Snow,

Your thread proves my entire point.

The players will determine what to use for currency if you don't provide them any. Having currency is easily kept safe and can be converted, hid and laundered. Even if when killed you drop your entire inventory that still doesn't solve the inflation issue. That cash you earned is still in the game.

The only idea I have seen so far to remove currency is to have NPC's do it.

That means you have to use NPC's for everything. You want repairs, equipment, you want things farmed, walls built and towers constructed? Then you have to pay NPC's do all of that and the PC's have to pay for it. I agree this works and it could be balanced to remove tons of currency out of the game to control inflation.

The problem with that is it will not go well with crafting. A compromise will do neither well. Those are the games we play today.

I think "crafting" is more important for pvp then "currency for fast transactions" is for pvp.


Vllad

[Snowreap]

by the time players reach the endgame, it's a good bet they will have discovered for themselves which items are good to use as a currency. and you can bet that the items they choose will be readily available only to other endgame players. furthermore, they will only be willing to trade their currency for items that they need at their level.

you should not assume that players will know what items are good as currency, or be able to figure it out, at the beginning of the game. having no currency at all is very bad idea.

in the example I gave, Asheron's Call players were using platinum scarabs as a currency item. remember when I said that platinum scarabs were a soft currency? that's a big part of the reason they had the staying power they did. the hard currencies didn't retain their value as the game progressed, because players' needs changed. shadow fragments and crystal fragments used to be valued items of hard currency because everybody needed them to make no-drop armor. then a patch came out that introduced an alternative armor, and the old no-drop armor was no longer a must-have item. as a result, the value of fragments plummeted. this was disastrous for players who returned to the game after a long absence and found that their stockpiles of fragments were worth a small fraction of what they had been.

platinum scarabs, on the other hand, retained their value from patch to patch because they had a very well-defined value in terms of pyreal coins. they were used as a high-density form of the default currency, not as a distinct currency separate from the default. the example I gave was of players augmenting the game's built-in currency, not replacing it.

you can only rely on hard (player-defined) currencies if the economy is fairly static. that means you have to get it 100% right on day one -- no patching things in later. because every patch will change the way players play, and therefore change what items they consider suitable currencies. this creates a situation where players can never take extended breaks from the game, because if they do they will return to a game where the currency has changed and their pre-break savings have been wiped out ("what do you have all those things for? people haven't used them for money since the february patch.") . this is about as fun for a player as returning to the game to be greeted by a message "welcome back to the game! in your absence, you lost 50% of your XP. get out there and level up! again!"

-ken

[Diggles]

nice examples snow. I think the essences and shit from WoW would probably be a mirror of what you're talking about somewhat

[Kakarat]

You guys want a game that can evolve itself?... have the player base able to create currency. Yes. Coins from ore. Of course, the more printed/made in the game, the less value they are. I don't know how you would stop everyone from making an alternate toon and just creating their own gold. You could limit the amount of 'coin smiths' in game. Not sure if that is truely viable.

Or you could go with the multiple currency. You have 10 races in the game. You might have 6 or 7 currencies. Some races don't know how to create money, where as some flurish at keeping the going rate of it high.
You could implement something in game where the currencies are connected to real-world. Have the Human currency connected to 'Euros'. Dark elf currency connected to 'Pounds'. Have the values reflecting real-world currency. But I am thinking that is flawed as well. The game should balance and reflect what the currency value is not the real-world.

Just a couple more ideas to toss out there!

[Diggles]

You guys want a game that can evolve itself?... have the player base able to create currency. Yes. Coins from ore. Of course, the more printed/made in the game, the less value they are. I don't know how you would stop everyone from making an alternate toon and just creating their own gold. You could limit the amount of 'coin smiths' in game. Not sure if that is truely viable.

Or you could go with the multiple currency. You have 10 races in the game. You might have 6 or 7 currencies. Some races don't know how to create money, where as some flurish at keeping the going rate of it high.
You could implement something in game where the currencies are connected to real-world. Have the Human currency connected to 'Euros'. Dark elf currency connected to 'Pounds'. Have the values reflecting real-world currency. But I am thinking that is flawed as well. The game should balance and reflect what the currency value is not the real-world.

Just a couple more ideas to toss out there!

This would do'able if you were able to keep limit the amount of the resource (ie..rare metal like gold/silver/plat) and keep track of how much is in player hands.

And then the inability to DESTROY currency. Like gold and steel these days, it never really ever goes away, just melted down and reused.