Building a better action MMO by starting with crafting and economy

Thursday 16 February, 2012 at 10:29 pm / 0 comment

Building a better action MMO by starting with crafting and economy

I think that all MMO player-types would benefit from an MMO that was designed, from the ground up, around a hardy crafting system and in conjunction with a flexible, player-controlled economy. I don't think most of today's auction houses are player-controlled. At least, players have so little control that auction houses aren't very playable as a game feature. I see them largely serving the purpose of the NPC vendor in a single-player RPG. Prices may fluctuate a little, but not much. Prices on items quickly stabilize and that's what players want. They want predictable and a playable economy allows for unpredictability. Currently, prices quickly stabilize and we want to know what the price is supposed to be for any given item, so we can plan that around upgrading our characters to actually play the game. I would change it back to a very unpredictable, EVE-like economy and add a crafting system. I think this could lead to a better gaming experience for PvE, raiding and PvP alike.

First we need to take Runes of Magic’s flexible content design of having most (or all) player amenities in hubs in every zone and put that into a sizable world like Azeroth. It would help to emulate EVE and have multiple zones filled with the same level of mobs, but interspersed between higher-level zones. The result wouldn’t be anywhere close to providing the possibilities that EVE’s economy does. Location isn’t the only determining factor, but it would go a lot further towards making a more varied economy than we see in any other MMOs right now. You can browse and sell from any location, but the buyer needs to come to the location that was used to list the item.

A weapon sold from Stormwind could be more expensive than the same weapon sold from somewhere in Northrend, because it’s easier to get to Stormwind safely. This is, of course, assuming any player can go anywhere, without the level-requirements currently in WoW. I’m only using WoW as an example for how this works. Insta-ports to specific locations definitely would be a player-work-around in this system, but I think that’s okay. At the very extreme, it would mean this economical system really wouldn’t change anything from the way auction houses currently work. On the other hand, we may see still see some changes and unexpected player behavior.

The next part would be changing the crafting system. Like I always yammer on about, crafting would, first and foremost, be the source for the best items in the game, but they’d be breakable. In fact, they would definitely break. I can’t take full credit for this as a friend thought this up as we talked about how to improve MMOs by starting with crafting and economy. I’m simply tweaking his idea. The items would have two durability ratings: a durability and a quality. The durability would wear-out and affect attributes in the same way current durability works on items in MMOs like WoW and RoM. You’d be able to repair the durability, but each time you did, the quality rating would go down. Once quality reached zero, the item would be destroyed. No ifs, ands or buts. The quality could not be capped too high, either. This is important. We don’t want quality to last so long that there’s essentially no reason to have it, or it’s so long it actually doesn’t affect change. The items would have to break, and often. It would take testing, but maybe playing around with skills, items or enchantments that could create higher quality versions of identical items could add some fun.

I like some current crafting systems the way they are. WoW has a good one, and I like RoM’s only a little bit more, but they are fairly similar. I like RoM’s crafting a bit more because it has the predictability of WoW plus a touch of randomness. RoM’s equipment allows for different modifiers and qualities. When crafting a recipe, a player has a chance at scoring some of the bonuses.

These two ideas can be fleshed out a lot more. I don’t go into grave detail on either one, but there’s room for expanding or adding your own input.

Jeremy Stratton

Jeremy is an Autodidact, Gamer, Bibliophile and self-proclaimed writer. He loves to be an obstinate cynic and an optimist about videogame design and currently writes and livestreams for Massively.com. He also loves to cook Eastern dishes and play amateur Photographer.