First, a definition:
Something is "fungible" if it's able to be replaced by or exchanged for an identical item readily. Barrels of oil and sacks of corn are fungible. Yeah, the oil inside and the barrel itself isn't atomically identical, but no one especially cares. The Mona Lisa is non-fungible.
In MMOs, a lot of the items are fungible. The potions are fungible, all of the trade goods, all of the raw resources, etc. A lot of the gear tends to be fungible, as well.
Sometimes, depending on how the game is structured, you end up with one-of-a-kind gear, or gear that's extremely rare. If there
was another piece of gear with exactly the same rolled stats, then it could be exchanged, but there isn't, so it isn't
currently fungible.
Some games create non-fungible gear by making it so that after players pick gear up, they aren't allowed to trade it to other players. WoW has the "soulbound" system. Gear is either "Bind on Equip", meaning that once you put it on, you can never give/sell it, or it's "Bind on Pickup", meaning that as soon as you loot it, you can never give/sell it. BoP gear is never fungible because it can never be exchanged. BoE gear is fungible until equipped.
So say that you were creating a game where all gear is generally fungible (which, as far as I understand it, is the design direction of Ashes). Then, you tie a large amount of your character's power to your character's gear (which, also as far as I understand it, is the design direction of Ashes).
It would stand to reason that since your gear is fungible and gear is power, and fungibility means exchangeability, then this directly implies that a large amount of your character power is strictly about how much wealth you have accumulated. Given that this is the case, the most efficient path to power in ashes is going to be whatever the most efficient way your character has to farm currency is.
I would
love for the following to be the gameplay experience: I have a ragtag set of armor. I have a bad chestpiece, a dull weapon, and slimy boots. I hear tale that the artisans can craft better boots for me if I bring them the leather from the hydra of the dunmire swamp, so I gather my adventuring buddies and slog through the swamp a few nodes over, defeat the hydra at the end of the dungeon, skin it, bring the loot back, and get better boots crafted. I hear that I can get my dull sword sharpened if I bring back the scale of a wyvern from the nearby mountains. I do so. I hear that a questgiver is willing to give me their family heirloom chainmail if I'll escort their caravan to the east. We get ambushed by bandits but I see them through.
The above is what I want. Here's the actual, min-max gameplay experience. I have a ragtag set of armor. I have a bad chestpiece, a dull weapon, and slimy boots. I know that the most efficient way to earn currency on my character is to farm nearby gnolls for hides for the next 6 hours, and then I'll have enough hides to sell so that I can buy all of the upgrades I need. I do so. Now that I have better gear, maybe I can handle a more efficient farming method!
The issue here is that when people are operating optimally, they only have 1 real gameplay option for getting upgrades: whatever their most efficient gold farm is. The players can choose to play suboptimally to keep things fresh, but a lot of them won't. Some percentage of the population would rather not have fun and play "correctly" and complain than have fun and play even slightly "incorrectly", much to the chagrin of the devs.
There was an era in diablo 3 where the most efficient way to play the game was to farm this single bridge in act 3 over and over. You would teleport to this one waypoint, speed-clear the bridge in about 4 minutes, back out, reset, and repeat. You would do this for
hundreds of hours and go
insane. But, there was a ladder to be had and races to be won.
The devs eventually were able to get players to stop doing this by introducing "adventures". The game gave you a random place in the campaign to repeat, and once you repeated that random section, you would get a big bonus. That big bonus at the end made the random section more efficient than the bridge on average. This made it so that doing adventures was now "the most efficient" and players were released from bridge duty.
World of Warcraft fixed the "spend all of your time doing your highest gold/hour activity" by introducing soulbinding. You
can't get your better boots in any other way
but to go to the dunmire swamp and fight the hydra. It was clunky and introduced a bunch of other problems, but it fixed that one.
So, I laid out my economic problem, and you may be wondering if I have a solution. I do, sort of, but I don't really like it, and I hope someone else has a better one, or can improve on mine.
Say that you're trying to craft a Turbo Sword and that requires a bunch of Iron Ore. You can either go gather the ore yourself, or you can do your most efficient activity and then
buy the ore. It's always better, in this case, to buy the ore from someone else whose most efficient activity is to harvest Iron Ore (specialization).
So here's the trick. Make it so that whenever you mine Iron Ore, you mine some Iron Ore that you can sell (fungible) and some Iron Ore shards that you can't sell, but serve as Iron Ore for the purposes of crafting. Now, you going out to mine Iron Ore to sell isn't economically efficient if you're just trying to sell Iron Ore to earn currency, but if you're doing it to craft a Turbo Sword, it's twice as efficient as the market. If that doesn't make it more efficient than whatever else you would have done instead, just adjust the rates until people are actually going out and doing their own stuff
and using the market.
Thoughts?
Edit:
It took a lot of doing, but we got there by page 4.
The TLDR for the folks who don't want to go through the relatively complex economics are the following ideas:
- Try to make sure the relevant important crafting materials are low liquidity
- Try to make sure the relevant important crafting patterns take multiple different low-liquidity materials
- If repeating a single economic activity is over and over is a valid option, some limits on this over longer than some amount of time should exist, to release optimizers from optimization-hell. Potentially give players the ability to intentionally subject themselves to optimization-hell-lite if that's how they relax.
