(04-21-2014, 10:11 PM)synaesthetic Wrote: I've always said the best way to make an MMO with a vibrant, thriving economy is to make equipment fairly easy to come by, but make sure that when it breaks, it actually breaks and can't be "fixed."
The best idea that I've had to solve the usual gear grind vs. consequences argument in any MMO (though this applies to themeparks in particular) is to disjoin equipment from "stats."
Take this hypothetical: you have clothes, armor and weapons that you can equip and use, and these may allow you to do something and give a logical bonus. The big bonuses, though, would come from intangible things like setting talents and skills or acquiring "mods" which stand in for the idea of "gear" as a themepark MMO views it.
This way you wouldn't ever need a vanity system because the concept would be superfluous and irrelevant; your clothes are mostly cosmetic. You'd get a suit of chain armor and all it'd have is a defense modifier. To get bonuses to your raw stats and derived stats you'd need to take passive skills or find mods that you can link to your character.
You get a sword, and it lets you do sword attacks. You can set active sword skills and use the sword to perform those attacks. You can set sword mods to make yourself more deadly with a sword (for damage-dealers) or more defensive (for tanks). But all the actual sword, on its own, lets you do is hit people with a sword and use sword skills. Then you get into incomparables--i.e. the weapons are all zero-sum, balancing speed, accuracy and power together to cancel out. You use mods (rather than gear) to "get positive."
Rambly post is rambly, but the idea is that you could make a system in which gear is both desirable and easy to obtain, and a world where everything is essentially a consumable item. There's a real easy way to do this, too; simply give all items hitpoints and whenever the hitpoints reach 0, the item is broken and suffers penalties, and if the hitpoints reach some negative number, the item is destroyed and can't be repaired. The more damaged an item is when it is repaired, the more maximum HP it loses. Eventually the item can't be repaired further and can be discarded, sold as junk or recycled for raw materials to build something else.
You could even "have your cake and eat it too" by creating legendary weapons that can't lose maximum HP, but cost a lot to repair (as they're magical, exceptionally-crafted artifacts that only a few master artisans could possibly maintain) and make these drop from some big fuck-off dragon. Then you'd have both the whole "get loot and feel good about it" bit. You'd save your legendary sword for fighting those big fuck-off dragons, but use your normal sword for dispatching random highwaymen.
Ironically, Square's already had better ideas themselves (not that they'd remember, the dumbasses). Â A few incredible advancements in gear/stats/grind they've come up with and then completely forgotten...
1. Â Vagrant Story - The game where you didn't get weapons, you got parts. Â Combining different parts created different weapons with different ranges, damages, and damage types. Â Essentially, you get a part, but that doesn't mean you've gotten Min-Max sword A, you could use it to make all manner of other weapons. Â Then mix and match.
2. Â Final Fantasy VII - Materia. Â Our materia system is a joke compared to what we had in FFVII. Â Essentially, Square could have completely eliminated the class system with materia. Â Remember back in the day (just in case anyone here hasn't played FFVII... it's marginally possible) that materia wasn't just an add-on, it was a complex system by which you could increase or decrease weapon damage, equip spells, and alter stats and abilities. Â Essentially, while FFXIV's materia system is a sort of WoW-style gem system, the slot arrangement was a lot more important in FFVII. Â And you had to level the materia up to get the better effects out of some. Â It was awesome having a discussion about the best party/materia setup and what spells you stick that important All materia on. Â And who had Ultima. Â And KotR. Â Imagine if Square installed that as a gear/class mechanic in an MMORPG instead of copying other games.
Bushido Blade - Probably less well known (and not technically developed by Square, though I still count it), but a fighting game with the cleanest UI I've ever seen. Â Nothing on screen except the fighters, you select a character and a weapon and you end up somewhere in an explorable castle against another character and weapon. Â How no health bar, charge bars, or other stats? Â Because any strike to one leg would drop you to one knee, limiting your mobility and often your attack variety. Â Get hit in the other, any you were crawling or rolling. Â Get hit in the offhand, and you were fielding the weapon one-handed, which was okay for one-handed weapons like a rapier but was horrible fielding something heavy like a hammer or naginata. Â Get hit once, anytime, in the head, torso, or sword arm and you died. Â That was completely unforgiving. Â Being disabled sucked, but even if you disabled someone completely, every enemy was a threat. Â That might be hard in the real world with lag online, but if all the computers timed individually, you might be able to get away with something like that. Â Nowadays, you could calculate speed vs. ability to glance blows with armor, something that really happens.
I'd say the best way to have a vibrant, thriving economy in a game is to make sure that, instead of making gear more temporary, make it more upgradable and more dependent on upkeep. Â Imagine applying a system above, particularly Vagrant Story weapon construction and FFVII Materia slotting, to an MMORPG gear system. Â You may change weapons once in a blue moon to experiment with new range, damage type, or skills, but you can easily hot-swap in and out pieces, spells, et cetera that changes the weapon. Â The best part about that is, parts and materia you'd gather at the beginning of the game, like All or Weapon Empower, would still be just as useful later in the game, and thus you might still be buying, selling, and servicing things a level 1 crafter could do even in the endgame. Â At present, it's just working a certain metal until that's completely outmoded, and gear is so bountiful in so many games (as the main reward from quests, dungeons, PVP, and so on) that it's not even necessary to buy it.
I'd say the best way to REALLY keep an economy fired up wouldn't be the EVE way, but to really make people fine-tune their weapons, armor, equipment, spells, and so on to suit themselves specifically. Â Sort of the Diablo 3 method of customization, just throw so many spells, modifications of those spells, and passives at people that they're never bored, they're all trying different combinations of things just to see what works for them.
Blazing Corpse spiders > Ghost Firebomb, IMO.