One of the things that make MMOs so engaging is the presence of a player-drive in-game economy.

Some would argue that point, citing the fact that most player economies are badly overinflated and cater only to "greedy crafters." And I will agree with that.

So here is what I suggest...

Most MMOs make use of an auction house trade center type mechanic, where if a player sells something, whenever someone visits the auction house anywhere, they can see what everyone is selling. It's not a realistic setup, but in terms of MMO mechanics and for the sake of convenience, it works.

The Auction House is a game unto itself. Since I can sell what I find for any price, so long as someone is willing to pay, I can make money. This leads to prices becoming horribly skewed.

The solution is to add in a control mechanic. If i post something on the auction house, it may sell or it may not. Or it may take days to sell when I need some money now. So I can sell the item to an NPC merchant instead. I get paid the item's base value right then... Now here's what happens:

The item I just sold to the merchant shows up on the auction house at 2x the base cost. This establishes a control price on the market. It automatically undercuts the prices charged by the "greedy" players and makes the merchandise on the auction house move if priced more than the NPC merchant pays for it but less than what he charges. The sweet spot being roughly 1.5x base value.

This still gives the auction house prospectors the freedom to price the items for whatever they want, but if they want to guarantee sales, they'll sell for what the control mechanism will set as a fair market value.

Those who just want to unload their vendor junk loot quickly will sell to the NPCs. When they do, they introduce the control mechanism to the Auction House.

That could work, but probably not beyond a certain "tier" of item. I'd imagine that the highest quality items would always be sold at the auction house first, if only because the people acquiring them would be increasingly unlikely to sell at npc shops the longer they've been playing. Even then, it would help cash-strapped low-level characters acquire items from the auction house, so this is definitely worth exploring.

Though personally, I want player-owned shops, and not just an auction house.

Exactly. It doesn't matter what happens on the auction house with top tier items. If you are looking for them, you either have or are about to hit max level anyway, at which point money becomes irrelevant, more or less. And people will still sell top tier stuff to the NPC vendors, so even at top tier, the player-driven market will still retain some measure of balance to it.


Your not by yourself. However, unless an unconventional approach is taken with player-owned property, this could be problematic.

And this now leads into http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1372204-player-run-settlements/.

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That's not the type of in-game economy I was referring to, but I thank you, as it does bring up a very important point. For those of you for whom TESO will be your first MMO, do not be tempted to pay ANYONE any amount of money for gold or character leveling. They just phishing for credit card information more often than not. So when you see someone in-game posting something like what MrDarkSim posted above, report them, and keep playing.

Gold sellers are a force of nature in MMOs. They cannot be stopped. Unfortunately, we have no choice but to accept that they will be there and go on about our business.

Then there is the 200 people idling in one spot lagging the game selling their crap.

In my opinion the solution is to let the lazy whiners whine and don't do auction houses. Allow players to setup stores in Hubs instead. Concentrate on Player to Player trade. Also get rid of useworthy weapons and armor as loot. If you want player driven economy looted weapons and armor should be damaged down to the point where a crafter is need for repair. You also want to force one character per account or at least a hard choice between either crafting or combat or everyone will just sustain themselves and no real player driven economy is happening.

I actually would like to see a player-driven economy with both in- and out-of-universe currency. Ideally, that could be used as their payment method, by having the faction governments "tax" the transaction. So say you buy a sword for one real USD, ninety cents go to the player with the sword, and ten go to Zeni.

Obviously, the numbers would be different, I simplified them for an example, but that way they could make the real-monet marketplace (look that up on Extra Credits, a really great show) a seamless part of the world instead of a big iron spike of reality breaking the immersion. "Ten percent of this sale goes to the Ebonheart Pact war effort," could be the message. Hell, you could even make it so that certain items are taxed more in certain places, to make things interesting.

Like, say, an Altmer sword would have a higher tax in the Daggerfall Covenant, being an imported item, than an Orcish one.

All big dreams, but it sounds cool.

Well, if they instance the trade center they can control how many people are crammed into one area. And the Hero Engine is good with handling instances.

In all honesty, though, I haven't really experienced this problem very often.

A lot of games have areas where players are encouraged to go for trades. I don't play it, but my friend has a lot of fun playing economist in Mabinogi, an ftp MMO.

That would not be a good thing. You may think it is, but when you actually get in the game and see how much trouble it is to handle item purchases and sales if you have to run all over town to do it, you'll be wishing for an auction house. I know. I used to think that the auction house approach was stupid, but have come to realize just how good an idea it is.


Well, that would be cool. But when you consider the fact that the hubs will have fewer buildings than there will be people wanting to set up shops, you see the usefulness of an auction house.


I had a thought about this. In-game mail which has been used in many MMOs, would be perfect for this. In the regular ES games, "sheet of paper" is an item you can find which for all intents and purposes serves no useful purpose. I sat let it have a purpose. If I sit down at a writing desk, I can select, work order. On this order I can create a list of craftable Items I want made and how much I'd be willing to pay and send it to the player of my choice to make the items. The crafter can review the list and the offer, and either accept the work order or reject it. If accepted, it becomes a crafting quest that would logically list all of the objectives from the resources that need to be gathered to the items that need to be crafted and refined. When the crafting quest is completed, a shipping order would be worked up, which would require a package and a sheet of paper. The package would be sent to the customer flagged as cash on delivery in the amount of the agreed-upon offer from the work order. Customer cannot get item until COD is paid. Crafter cannot cheat the customer by changing the price.

If the crafter rejects the work order, he needs to indicate why. If the offer the potential customer made was too low, the Crafter can set the price he will accept. The customer can read the rejection letter and decide whether or not to agree to the crafter's terms. If the terms are accepted, the order can be sent back and the crafter can accept the work order and it becomes a crafting job. If the customer rejects the terms, he may attempt to haggle by increasing the offer. Or he can discard work order. Haggling can go back and forth until both crafter and customer come to an arrangement. Discarding the work order would end the process.

When sorting documents, work orders would be listed in the order received.

Direct communication between players would be possible, and would allow the same back and forth exchange, but would not require sheets of paper. When they agree, the work order is drawn up and when both agree upon it, it gets added to the crafter's inventory.

So this covers direct face-to-face player involvement and delayed/distant involvement.


I disagree. In Skyrim, a player may refine weapons and armor by using a grindstone or workbench. The result is an improved version of the item in question. Looted gear should always be standard gear with no improvements. If a player wants improved or enchanted gear, then a player crafter would be how to get it. A refinement order, which would require a package and a sheet of paper, plus the item in question would be required. It must be either accepted or rejected by the crafter. Gear to be improved would be flagged as quest items and cannot be removed from the crafter's inventory, except through the shipping order stage. This prevents an exploit where a crafter can detatch the item, claim it as his own and not go forward with the agreed-upon terms.


I agree with you here. When Star Wars Galaxies had only one character per account, the in-game economy flourished and symbiosis within the community was strong. Then they started monkeying around with things because of the Jedi-wannabe whiners, adding the hologrind which resulted in players taking professions they ordinarily would not have played, thus artificially shifting focus and creating voids within the player economy. People who once were armorsmiths were now bounty hunters, and people who were once bounty hunters were now armorsmiths. Trouble is the latter played primarily for combat and now being forced to do crafting, they figured they would milk it for as much as they could and charged outrageous prices. And then with the introduction of the NGE which added loot to the game that could have stats on it no crafter could apply, the economy became a broken mess that NEVER fully recovered.

One character per account per server is the best way to go in terms of establishing symbiosis within the community. Selling that concept to MMO players who are used to multiple characters per account will not be easy, so I think that the best thing we can hope for is multiple characters with combat and noncombat classes to choose from.

The important thing is that whether combat or noncombat, there must be something to do in the game that plays into the role the class in question exists for. If I am a crafter, I must have stuff to craft that is always useful, and there should be a reason for combat classes.. and even other crafting classes... to make use of my services. If I choose a thief, then there had better be plenty of areas in all dungeons that need breaking into, and plenty of traps to disarm, otherwise, I'm just a combat class limited to cloth or leather who can pickpocket...

Anyway, the services of a crafter should be desirable, not mandated. If I want to go through the game with just whatever basic gear I find, I should be able to do so. But if I want to make it the best it can possibly be, then I would need to go to a crafter or an enchanter.

By the way... Weapons and Armor need to wear out and break just like in the first four regular TES games. Repair hammers could be used by anyone to keep their gear in good repair, and those would be crafted by players, sold to NPC merchants and resold for a fixed price. So repair tools will always be an in-demand item so even if my crafter hasn't received a work order today, I can craft up repair tools and sell them. Someone will have need of them.

No out of game currency trading, please. That opens up a major can of worms that i would not want to see TESO deal with.

In-game currency only...

Thisus Maximus.

Using real-world money would just cause far more problems than it's worth. Not to mention, if a select group of crafters has a monopoly on a certain market, they could literally charge whatever they wanted. Now, they aren't just cheating people out of fake money, but real money.

And that would be the can of worms I referred to. And even the control mechanism I suggested would not be able to adequately assuage the amount of animosity on the part of one subset of players because of the greed-driven motives of other players.

If people lose fake money in an MMO for whatever reason, it's no real big deal. It's FAKE money and has no value outside of the game.

If people lose real money in an MMO for whatever reason, LAWYERS get involved. And if it proves to be the developers' fault, then they can be fined heavily.

I know that Second Life uses a real-to-virtual money exchange system. But there have been cases of fraud in that game which have had real world reprocussions.

So no. I have enough financial risk in the real world. I don't need real world financial risk from a game.

It wouldn't be required. It's... call it a shortcut. You can party up, get gold in the game, etc then buy it or just get the real money. If it would make you more comfortable, it could be heavily regulated by Zeni to only be certain types of items, to prevent real-world rich people from having an unfair advantage, inasmuch as I acknowledge fairness as a concept. In addition, it could be limited to certain areas, that are heavily demarcated with little pop-ups: "Entering live money market," along with other disclaimers.

Honestly, I just want to see a large-scale game adopt the system because I see an enormous potential for people to use talents that would otherwise go to waste to turn a profit out of professional gaming.

Well if a "non-auctionhouse/hub-based player-stores/PvP Trade" approach with best equip only available through crafter does work or does not work is dependent on the "worldsize/number of players allowed per server" scale. I already mentioned that in your thread about housing: If the world really is "only" as big as Skyrim it is almost inevitable to limit the playernumber to a few hundred per server or everything will collapse due to overcrowding.

I had my best MMO days yet in a niche cyberpunk game called neocron that in it's best days had no more than 500 players on a server at peak time. The size of the game world was pretty comparable to what Skyrim is in size. And that number of players was just perfect. There was enough to do for everyone that wanted to be a crafter as profession. The only way to trade stuff was to give it to the other player in person via PvP trade, which worked great. It oppened opportunity to true unique RP stuff happening aswell, as you really had to agree on neutral and safe meeting points if you traded with people from enemy factions. And more often than not one of the parties was just lured into a trap and stripped clean of his belongings because he didn't bring security along.

That strange habit of dev teams bragging about how they're able to host thousands of players on a single server is pretty often exactly just that: bragging about numbers beyond any sense and reason.

Does that system interfere with the ability to see the trade conversation, or is there still a trade channel? Forgotten Realms tried to deal with the lag by creating a Trade Realm, like an instance, but you had to actually go there in order to see what people were selling, which made it kind of useless.

That raises other issues, though. I don't know how the system you had in mind works, but could a crafter not just refuse to accept anything other than real-world currency as payment?

"Thadius: /2 Selling *insert linked item here*, $5 USD. Septims not accepted."

If you can make either virtual money, or real money, of course everyone would flock to the latter.

If people want to make money, they need to go out and get a job. I'm sure we'd all like to be able to sit back and make a living playing games. But I am sorry. People need to earn money by contributing to the REAL WORLD's society.

I'm currently unemployed. I want a job. I want to play games because they are fun, not to have them be my job.

Plus... I'm not sure how other countries handle income tax, but in the united states the law requires that you claim all income you make. That would mean that I'd have to keep track of every sale of items for real money. Either that or Zenimax would have to issue a yearly statement to us showing all of it so we can claim it.

So the issue extends way beyond just the scope of the game. There are real legal concerns that would face both the individual and Zenimax. So I say no to this idea... Vehemently.

Just throwing out an idea here, but if Zeni regulated p2p item sales in one way, why not another? If they were to implement the system at all, and then regulate it to only allow certain items to be sold for balance purposes, they could, in this hypothetical scenario, also regulate it so that certain items are real-money flagged, further limiting the range of options and requiring certain items to be sold for in-game currency or bartered for in-game items.

What is a job but the providing of a service? Broadly, the creation of artforms like a video game falls under the category of making money without contributing to the real worlds society, unless you, like me, believe that the current and future levels of the emotional impact of video games are equal to or perhaps at times exceeding older art media. If the service you provide is making a game slightly easier for another person, well then you or I could shake our heads at them as I hock my wares in Whiterun's market and I give you (because I like how you're challenging several implicit assumptions I now realize were mistaken) a free digital sandwich.

Farther, on an industry level, it becomes very meta. A sub-created fantasy world whose in-universe economy effects, in some small way, our own? I drool at the possibilities.

I shudder at the possibilities.

In Second Life, an online environment that is one huge sandbox, not beholden to any particulat IP 3rd-party commercial endeavor, is ideal for what you speak of, because the tools are there to create actual in-game assets that are actually unique. I can design custom avatars for players and sell them. They are my actual work. I can design furniture models and sell them. Again, my own work. Second Life was designed for this.

But I doubt we'll be able to create our own assets for TESO. Do you realize what kind of mess that will be? We'd be seeing things like car models sitting outside Fang Lair... Or Tie Fighters. Or people wearing Starfleet uniforms.

And while you suggest that people would flock to an opportunity to make real money, yes. But people would flock away from having to SPEND real money.

Read this:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20004004-36.html

Now do you begin to understand the potential slippery slope this is?

Which is why I think the economy on real-money saleable items should b every limited, especially/at least at first. Most items would be Tamriel gold only.

Without farther knowledge of the game and its internal systems, I really can't suggest more than what I've already put forward. It's not an expectation, or even a hope, it is just a thing. A floating thought. Since I even only barely plan on playing this MMO, which is intriguing to me, if I were to be involved in a player-based real money economy it would have to be the one from Tamriel.

EDIT: About your link (you posted after I started replying), that was a specific set of circumstances under a different team. I don't deny that was some dirty dealing, and that the exact same sort of things could happen in a real-money digital economy of any sort. It can also happen in real-world real-money economies, inasmuch as that happens, with the right legal teams. I would hope the fact that Second Life got slapped with a lawsuit would serve as a warning to Zeni to be extremely careful with their phrasing were they to attempt this route, and to under no circumstances do what they did with the terms of service. "Can is not will," basically.

Haven't you ever been to Coronet?