4. The idea of having to throw things away and having to shower off afterwards reminds me of the people who want us to have taxes in the game. It is as if they want all the things that are boring or stupid about the world to be replicated in game. It is supposed to be immersive but it is also supposed to be an escape from reality. Getting online and having to take out the trash makes me think eventually you will want me to have an NPC wife who nags me about the trash 24x7 just to be realistic like my r/l wife. :-)
- Venge
Ohh, I'm not so sure about this one, though I do agree with you on your other points. Now, this argument doesn't come so much from an RP stand-point as much as from a game-design stand-point, so bear with me for a second.
In every RPG game, you have a bunch of players generating cash, call it tria or gold or dollars or whatever. The more experienced your 'toon, the better, generally, you are at generating this cash. You run into a SERIOUS problem when there are a bunch of actors in an economic system generating - directly - the means to purchase goods and services, but no equally effective means for UN-generating such things. This is called MUD-flation and is a problem in almost every game I've ever seen that allows trade between characters. It is a basic principle of economics that an excess of purchasing power increases prices, returning the relative ratio of purchasing power/price to some stable point. In other words, more money just lying around in the system inflates prices because people have more money to pay for stuff. If money stops coming IN to the system, the system will tend to settle at the new, but higher, prices. The problem with MUDs and MMOs is that money is
constantly being generated. A viable economic system in an MMO of any variety will have mechanisms to REMOVE money from the system as well as the standard 'monsters drop gold' system of creating it.
Repair bills (and not allowing characters to repair themselves or others), taxes (items sell for a fraction of the price that they are bought from vendors, sales to other players take a percentage out of profit &ct.), quests that require 'donations' (especially repeatable ones that give some in game benefit) and activities that don't directly generate money, but still 'improve' the character in some way are all good, even great, ways to reduce MUD-flation.
Bad ways to reduce MUD-flation include
Argumentum ad Baculum or direct developer involvement, like globally reducing a player's bank account by a certain percentage, or other ways of 'resetting' the economy; taking items out of the game, this just moves the burden onto OTHER items; drastic changes in mob drop-values, this is effective, but drastic changes are equally chaotic and are very often victims of the "Law of Unintended Consequences". These don't actually solve the problem at hand, which is that there is too much money coming into the system and not enough going OUT of it. I can start another thread if you'd like a more in depth (and formulaic) discussion on the matter of game-economies, but that's the basic outline - actually, I think I will start a new thread... this is an important issue.
Taxes are a GOOD thing in MMOs so, "Let there be Taxes!"
