One of my favourite games is .hack and a feature I always liked in it was if you didn't have enough money for X item you could trade him items till he agrees and you get it without paying.

Now this type of trading with npc I have never seen it in any mmo and in my opinion having such feature in a game could lessen the dependency of gold till stuff drop is not very low of course.

What do you think people if there would be in some game a system like that apart of buying it only with money?

---

Originally posted by bloodaxes
One of my favourite games is .hack and a feature I always liked in it was if you didn't have enough money for X item you could trade him items till he agrees and you get it without paying.
Now this type of trading with npc I have never seen it in any mmo and in my opinion having such feature in a game could lessen the dependency of gold till stuff drop is not very low of course.
What do you think people if there would be in some game a system like that apart of buying it only with money?

---

One notes that .hack was a *simulated* MMORPG, and the trades were simulated trades with PCs. Every MMORPG I know of has the option to trade with other PCs. Not as easy as in .hack? Well, no. I wish I had party members who were available at the drop of a hat any time I called, too, which was another endearing trait of the "PC" NPCs.

Originally posted by ChrisMattern

 

---

Originally posted by bloodaxes
One of my favourite games is .hack and a feature I always liked in it was if you didn't have enough money for X item you could trade him items till he agrees and you get it without paying.
Now this type of trading with npc I have never seen it in any mmo and in my opinion having such feature in a game could lessen the dependency of gold till stuff drop is not very low of course.
What do you think people if there would be in some game a system like that apart of buying it only with money?

---

 

One notes that .hack was a *simulated* MMORPG, and the trades were simulated trades with PCs. Every MMORPG I know of has the option to trade with other PCs. Not as easy as in .hack? Well, no. I wish I had party members who were available at the drop of a hat any time I called, too, which was another endearing trait of the "PC" NPCs.

Yes I know what you mean but this can be done in shops you don't have money? lemme see what you have maybe we can trade.

Well in Dofus, you can exchange specific items to specifi NPCs for special items.

lol so you think that if you "buy with items" you are somehow not paying?  I don't suppose I need to remind you that you could always sell these items for gold FIRST and then buy your items with that gold right?  I mean I don't see at all how this would lessen the dependence on gold if gold is the currency and every item in the game has a value of gold attached to it.  

All you would be doing is creating the illusion of buying items without gold.  You could start a trade with an NPC, pick an item to buy that costs 20g and put up items to sell that sell for up to 20g cumulatively.  When you complete the transaction the items are being sold for 20g and that 20g is then spent automatically, sure nice feature, but it doesn't really make much difference.

The only way to avoid attaching an absolute currency value on an item is to remove currency from the equation entirely, and go with a barter system, which could work, but inevitably players would choose a valuable item to become the new currency, kind of like the Stone of Jordan in D2, since gold in D2 is worthless.  And the only way around that would be to add item levels to every item in the game, but even then I would imagine you'd see people start trading with some form of unofficial currency.

If your angle is to get rid of gold farmers, you will only be changing their name from gold farmers to item drop farmers.

Seems I wrote it bad.

I mean that some special shops can make you trade stuff for other stuff he have in store. While other shops you need money to buy items from them, that's what I meant for lessen money dependency.

And no gold spam is almost impossible to eliminate unless you remove money trading, and auction but that would destroy a game.

 Good idea but it seems to have been done before. In Ultima Online you could drag your items to the vendors list and see your total add up on the bottom. Now if you sold 5 items for a total of 40g then got item A for 38g you would see 2g on the bottom of the vendor list. Maybe I am also just reading what you are typing wrong.

Honestly, most games already have this in that you can sell your items to the vendor, get cash, and then spend that cash to buy what you want. Of course, the vendors' selling prices are much higher than their buying prices. What you want is the kind of deals the .hack traders would give you, where you would often get equipment considerably more powerful than what you offered in trade. Real MMORPGs aren't going to give you that kind of a deal, for balance reasons.

I understand where you are coming from, using the value of an item to trade in at an NPC store.  Sometimes the NPC cash value of an item is no where near what the real value is.

It's a good idea, however I haven't seen it used much.

Guild Wars has 'Collectors' who were a little similar.

There will always be someone figuring out how they can exploit the system for profit. Once they manage item trading becomes more a problem than a solution. The only way to avoid this is by making the item trade disadvantageous, in which case the npc simply becomes a scammer for lowbies.