Ahaha, I got the best idea ever.
If I’m going to experiment with new forms of economic systems, why not communism? So, maybe, this will become the base of my dream mmorpg and the chimera I’m building with Chris. And there are also very good premises for it to work, in the non-reality.
The actual implementation isn’t really so alienated from the few forms we have already in the game. There’s already planned a guild system under a bigger structure with three hardcoded factions. So the players will keep fighting for their realm, expanding it, its resources, conquering new territories, spawing NPCs, guards and so on. It’s part of my general purpose of pulling out the purpose of the game from the single character power treadmill to the “outside”, the environment, the role of the player in a bigger structure, with a more direct commitment and responsibility. Not anymore faked in a fixed, artificial arena.
The crafting will have odd quirks, the crafters will never be the players (there are exceptions I won’t discuss here). Instead the players will be able to spawn both crafters and resource gatherer NPCs and plot simple schedules structures for them (player-controlled robots). The player won’t have to press a key and stare a progression bar, all the work will be automated through NPCs. The economy (and currency) will exist on a bigger level, all that the players will need to control will be at an higher level, dependent to the guild (the guilds will be able to claim and manage the RTS level of the game) and, then, the realm. Private propriety? No thanks. Everything related to the gameplay and the single player (loot, magic items) won’t enter the economy. What is part of the economic level will exist at the “upper” level, so the creation and management of the resources already (by design) “shared” between all the players under that faction – already built to be part of that shared/trade level without disrupting and damaging the “game”.
Most of the game comes from that layer. The players are brought together because they share goals and means. They aren’t anymore within artficial structures excusing their actions.
They ARE the structure. They ARE the state.
Now tell IGE to try to enter this system to broke it, they would be required to actually… play the game. This model not only is impermeable to the Real Money Trade, but it also preserves all the fun elements unique to this sub-genre.
Quoting an old comment from Raph:
Hmm, I think that one thing that people who want to just axe economies are missing is that economies can and DO provide gameplay. There’s strategic gameplay, large-scale cooperation gameplay, PvP gameplay, and other types of gameplay that kill-the-foozle doesn’t offer.
We may quibble all we want about whether harvesting is currently as fun as it should be (it isn’t), the act of crafting is as fun as it should be (it isn’t), or the juggling of inventory is as fun as it should be (it isn’t). But it’d be dumb to say that running a business in a game can’t be a fun endeavor or add gameplay–there’s entire single-player genres of game based on it, and they are some of the most popular games in the world–Rollercoaster Tycoon, anyone?
The reason to have game economies that have complexity to them is the same reason why you have PvE combat with complexity to it–to have it meet the minimum threshold bar of fun. Worrying about wwhether dupes unbalance your economy is the same as worrying about whether buffs are overpowered, frankly. It’s just another axis of gameplay.
Does your game NEED it? No. But given that it is one of the axes of gameplay that makes use of persistence, and persistence is one of the key things these games offer that other games cannot , well, leaving it out may be considered to be at least underutilizing the genre. Not a bad thing if you have a specific other area of focus, but not the One True Way either.