My experience with Invictus has thus far been encouraging. There are no gear or gold drops from either bosses or trash mobs. Instead, they drop crafting materials NPCs can use to make gear. Crafting materials purchased at the AH are bound on purchase. Gear loses durability over time and is expensive to maintain. Once an item has reached its maximum enchant level it can’t be sold. However, used gear can be sold. The only way to honestly procure gold is by successfully completing battles and/or selling crafting materials. My highest level character is in mid game at L40 and has just enough gold to meet her needs but not all of her wants. That’s about the way things should be at that point.

@Jereme
The economy aspect of kol has largely unchanged (wasnt playing back then thou, it just sounds about right,I quit pre-ascension and started playing again in January).

Ive seen a bad MMO (it had great pvp, and some nice item related things, quests sucked, leveling was a grind, bad balancing) been absoultly destroyed by the developers attempting to “add features” to the economy. The kind of item that was super rare, was instead being worn by a week old character, and there was nothing added at the highend.

@Luke
Kol is worth a look at, its MSORPG (massively single ….), in that the game is your own “instance”, with the exception of clan dungeons, the joke side is there, but its only one aspect of the game. It would be quite interesting to see a review of yours on kol, but it would probably take some time to get momentum going

I have just discovered the Guild Wars 2 blog. I liked Guild Wars 1 quite a lot. Although it had typical MMORPG flaws, it was not as bad as WoW. So I was intrigued to see what Guild Wars would do about it and especially the economy part. To my surprise, one of the authors for the game storyline is Ree Soosbee, who also wrote the first stories for my favorite table RPG (Legends of the 5 Rings). That’s already a good point. They hint that the economy has been addressed in the game. I am still sceptical, but it is probably the only game I will buy this year, so I’ll let you know once I’ll have reviewed it. They also claim that they addressed the grinding/spreadsheet problem of others MMORPG’s. While I am excited about it, I am not expected too much, to be honest. But I was amused that their blog was pretty much answerign all of Luke’s (or mine) grievances about MMORPG. Do they read you? ;)

The real reason why the economies are hard to balance is that things don’t decay online. In the real world, everything decays, breaks, needs maintenance. Even the most rock-solid house made by the most talented architect in accordance with the most stringent guidelines needs maintenance. And then there’s stuff like food which takes a big bite out of everyone’s budget (well, maybe not the obscenely wealthy). In an MMO, once you’ve shelled out for that horse, there’s generally no ongoing cost. Get a car (or a horse) in real life and your transport keeps on costing, and not insignificantly.

Most MMO economies are a giant pot of ever-increasing currency with little or no outflow.

I think this is a perfect opportunity to plug Cory Doctorow’s “FTW” if you haven’t read it, its free digitally and well worth picking up the physical copy too. Its more about gold farmers and such, but it has a great explanation of how in-game economies work and how people try to mess them up and such.

Also in your eve online description you say “pressing a button every” and don’t finish the, and I am sooo confused on what you were going to say :D

I actually found that my favourite in-game economy, is also my favourite MMO and the only one I have actually wanted to play after the trial and actually paid for, which is Pirates of the Burning Sea.

@ Jereme Kramer:

I keep hearing about KoL but I have never actually tried it. I always thought it was basically a joke game that someone made to make fun of MMO’s but it seems that a lot of people play it quite seriously out there. :)

@ Adrian:

Yeah, very true. Then again, I think the original Ultima was a bit like that. Every once in a while I hear veterans telling stories about that game and how it was hard core (full looting upon death, pvp, crafting took forever, you could actually own in game land, etc…).

Game economies will always be broken. People pay for items giving experience (such as raw resources), while the end product of those items are worthless compared to the average uniques or special items.

In MMO’s, the best item is the only thing good enough to use. Something less makes you vastly inferior. This is also linked to many players becoming the best they can be (e.g. hitting the level cap).

But that’s the way it should be. If MMO’s copied real life in the trading/market business, it would take ages and ages to have a serious thing going on.

There is a turn based game called Kingdom of Loathing that had very strange market dynamics. There is a flea market that all users can participate in, but it is frequented mostly by lower level players that don’t have access to the player run shops in the mall (there are various advantages to selling in the mall, mostly that you get charged per item to have it in the flea market). In the flea market, raw materials that low level players come across naturally based on the areas they adventure in are relatively highly priced, with the low level items crafted from them were at a slightly higher price. Higher level items were mostly unavailable, however.
Once players matured into the upper levels, they invariably started using only the mall, which had its own pricing dynamics. Raw materials were usually unavailable, or they were bought immediately. Items were generally priced in accordance to the level you needed to be to obtain them, and it worked fairly well. Of course the people that had been playing long enough to be at insane levels obtained large amounts of money, but there were frequent sinks for this.

The economy drastically changed when it became possible to start over at level 1 as a new class and keep all your items, and one class specific skill. Raw materials started to become plentiful and cheap as people acquired all of the skills needed to make/find them, and items began to be priced by rarity, where items that took many turns to gain were relatively high priced, but even then, the prices always fell. It became that in the mall, the only high priced items were the ones that you needed to donate to get, or ones that were newly available in the game.
The nice thing was, though, that the flea market economy seemed to me at least to be relatively untouched as it was only used by new players who hadn’t yet acquired a store.

It has been several years since I last played, however, and it could have all changed by now.