Enthusiasm

I’ve written many articles in the past on inflation and the economic stability of an MMO. Many of these were on Tabula Rasa because well… honestly the inflation and economic state for the most part was pretty good at the time in which I was playing. Today I read an interview of Josh Drescher on Ten Ton Hammer titled “WAR: A Look at Living Guilds with EA Mythic Part 1“. This article got me thinking. Not about Keeps and RvR, more so it got me thinking about the economy within Warhammer.

Right now we know very little about how the economy works within Warhammer but we know this much:

• Paul Barnett hates grinding
• There is no money sinks like armor repairing
• There is no monetary cost associated with death
• Tradeskilling was presented to useful, but not a money sink
• Player equipment trade seems to be rather insignificant
• Keeps capture is a “significant event” with a “significant cost”
• Siege weapons are supposed to be costly
• Guild banner loss has a small monetary cost
• NPCs in PVE and PCs in RvR all drop gold

So the questions that arise are…

• What keeps the player economy in check?
• Does gold become a trivial thing that only matters to endgame guilds?
• Does gold matter at all to the individual player?
• What stops server gold inflation from getting out of hand?
• What does the individual with no guild have to spend money on?
• Does money become essentially pointless over time?
• Do the few sought after tradeable items become insanely costly?

After doing some research into how DAoC handled inflation, they did so very well through tradeskill money sinks. Some of the better items in the are crafted and very expensive to make. This lowered the amount of liquid gold in the economy, replacing that gold with hard assets in the form of gear. Of course this is assuming they used a BoE (Bind on Equip) system for gear. A non-BoE based equipment system is no better than having no money sinks at all. If gear is easily traded from one person to another, items keep their value in original gold prices and actually their initial value decreases over time as demand for lower itemed gear drops as a server grows. In fact if they don’t decrease in value, some rarer items increase in value and you have an item based economy (search Google on Diablo II’s economy).

I certainly hope Warhammer has some kind of A. money sinks and B. BoE / BoP based equipment system or else you’re going to find a very week economy within a few months from launch. Tabula Rasa underestimated this and I’m sure Age of Conan suffers from similar problems (because it also lacks a BoE / BoP concept, at least at lower levels anyhow). You cannot simply ignore the economy of an MMO. Human beings are capitalist animals. We need a tangible reward for the effort we put into something. An environment with too weak of an economy is boring and unaccepted by the human psyche. The perfect Utopian world where everyone has enough money for everything they need and never wants for anything is unrealistic and boring. Although it’s great for lazy people. Last time I checked Warhammer wasn’t for lazy people. Lazy people play that other game. People who want a challenge goto WAR.