I posted this in another thread but i would like to explore it further so im reposting here.. Its a way to have a mmo without concepts like money, experience and levelling.

Moneyless economy at the start

the game has something called "orders". There is an order for each type of profession whether it is a tailor, cook, fighter, mage, log cutter, or blacksmith.

the defining feature of the order is the request system. All the request system does is hook up combatants with crafters and vice versa to make equipment and supplies that are needed ingame.

as a fighter well say i can go out in the world and collect materials from monsters that i will need to make a sword. Ill take these materials and submit a request for fabrication. My request goes to the order, so every blacksmith in the game can see my request and fill my order. The reverse is also true. As a blacksmith i can put in an order to the fighters order for supplies needed to make a certain item, which i am capable of making..say that sword.

To the blacksmith all they see is " sword required for fighters order", and they complete the request. There would also be a failsafe after a couple of days so that an npc will complete your order should no make the sword.

this would not only apply to swords, but bridges, houses, castles, upgrades for pvp guards and anything in the game that needed creating. Think of the server more like an army if you will. They dont care about money, they want results on the battlefeild.

so in addition to player orders there would also always be npc orders for items to keep the system liquid and these items would upgrade town guards, castle guards, keep guards, pvp defences, and anything else that can be upgraded. Of course all these "tasks" require materials..

which leads me to the donation system. Since theres no money what will players do with all that treasure. Anything they dont need can be donated to the common good of the server. Each npc order will accept the types of materials required to make their specific items, and there will be other npc orders that will accept anything as a catch all. Donatins will improve your standing with whatever npc order you donating to, and this will improve the services that you can receive as a player.

no..this does not give you phat l33t likes wows faction grinds. This works by the incentive order system where the higher the standing the more incentive the other tradesman (or vice versa) is given to complete your order.

Each player will have tabs in their "book" once for each order, one for their guild and one for the server. Some orders may be merged for simplicity. This will ensure that players always have a large number of tasks they can accomplish (or ignore) if they wish to do so. No tasks is one way though. a blacksmith that completes an order for armor for the pvp keep indirectly helps the combat players to fight and pvp the opposite is also true.

Materials is key

Once you have a system of essentially player generated tasks, the core of all these tasks is essentially materials required to fuel these tasks. I like the notion that materials are more different than better..gold has its attributes (such as deflecting heat) but so does every material, so no material is technically the ultimate material. So i wouldnt have gold platemail..i would have gold platemail with bone spikes for attribute x, silver buckles for attribute y, and emeralds for attribute z.

So then materials are worth based on their effect, and not some assigned number. Gold is awesome vs fire but worthless vs ice and so on. Players may try to make their own economy with these materials as a base, and that is ok if its the players that will it. This might be different on every server though, so the goldfarming people might have a hell of a time doing their thing. Also harvesting of materials is dependant on the skill to harvest them ( bone comes from skeletons/undead...wood comes from chopping trees..). The cool thing is that more materials would be added to the game all the time and the rarity of materials would rise and fall. Today gold is hard to find and bone is not...tomorrow the opposite may be true.

Character Advancement

Gaining new skills

i see advancing your character to utilize a similar system. Every player would simply have to find the particular skill scroll to get it going, and this could be found in a treasure chest, off a monster, could be crafted by the above system (if you have the correct ingredients) or simply learned by being repeatedly exposed to the skill.

Mastery

Once you have figured out the skill it then simply becomes use based ( and we dont care how you use it, thats your business) and it progresses slowly by use from beginner to grandmaster. Other than by use, being in an order is the only way to speed up skills, and only skills belonging to an order are sped up.

Skill Modulation

once you hit grandmaster in a skill, any skill, you get the ability for skill modulation. This means that you can change the parameters of the skill, adding more of something takes away from the rest. The modulation skill also progresses from beginner to grandmaster.

Order Bonuses

You can only be in one order at a time, and the order your in slightly speeds up the learning of all skills associated with that order and gives you a small amount of points that you can use to improve skills. You can still learn everything else but it will be slower and they wont be subject to the order bonus. The order bonus is not large but it affects everything across the board that is relevent to the order.

Order limitations

Order has the limitation that you are slightly limited on what non order skills you canuse. If there were 10 skills to equip at any one time, 5 of these would be reserved for your order and the other five could be anything.

This system ensures that players have access to the greatest amount of content available (i.e all of it), but also very gently guides them along the basic orders (you could change orders) to ensure that it wasnt completely random.

So you might have to play a long time to completely unlock every skill and grandmaster it, and then grandmaster the modulation of it and then determine the best order and best setup of your skills...but its still just a skill, and doesnt make you inherently more powerful than anyone else..just more flexible, which i believe is the key to long term playability. The cool thing is that you dont have to get all the skills. You just go after the ones you want and improve them. Get the ones you need first, collect the others later. limitless gameplay here.

A couple things about your economy:

I think it was Richard Garriott who said (and I'm paraphrasing here, because I can't find that article) that one player's inconvenience is another player's entire reason for playing. Allowing people to get craft requests filled all the time removes most of the reasons why anyone would craft. You lose any possibility of being well-known as a reliable crafter because the whole process is so anonymous; no one has to contact you or seek you out. There's no making a name for yourself. Also, any notion of profiting from a tradeskill is gone if A) people can expect to have any craft done immediately for free if they have the materials, and B) there's no currency anyway.

If the expectation is that players who go out and gather/loot materials will be able to effortlessly have an item made from those materials—and that seems to be the case, especially since you noted that unfilled orders will be completed by an NPC anyway—why involve crafters at all? It would be even easier to just allow everyone to put materials together, like Minecraft. If you've got silver and an emerald, you put them together and there's your Emerald Necklace. From the player's point of view, the only difference is that when they put the silver and emerald in the box, they have to wait a few minutes or hours for the necklace to pop out. There's no interaction with the human being doing the crafting, so why require a human being to do it? Just give them the item.

Crafting in most MMOs involves grinding craft levels on crap that nobody wants. Either you're doing repeatable craft quests of some kind that raise your craft skill without producing any actual items, or you're making a whole pile of some cheap item that you vendor or throw away. No matter how great the demand and no matter how few crafters there are, I don't think it's possible to have crafters who spend their whole time creating actual useful items. It's always going to be faster, cheaper, and/or more convenient to grind on crap than trying to level your craft skill solely by making and selling honest-to-God someone-is-going-to-buy-this-and-wear-it-for-twenty-levels Fine Mithril Helmets. If unwanted items (meaning nearly everything, since you can't sell items) get traded in for better faction, that's going to be the bulk of gameplay for crafters. It's not anything like a player-centric crafting economy.

Originally posted by Disdena

A couple things about your economy:

I think it was Richard Garriott who said (and I'm paraphrasing here, because I can't find that article) that one player's inconvenience is another player's entire reason for playing. Allowing people to get craft requests filled all the time removes most of the reasons why anyone would craft. You lose any possibility of being well-known as a reliable crafter because the whole process is so anonymous; no one has to contact you or seek you out. There's no making a name for yourself. Also, any notion of profiting from a tradeskill is gone if A) people can expect to have any craft done immediately for free if they have the materials, and B) there's no currency anyway.

This is not really the case though. You can easily bypass this system and go ask someone to do it for you. You can be well known by having your name stamped into the item. The more you make the more well known you are. Profit is not a good thing really, Money makes you think it is, but the physical world shows you it is not. In a game you can have a higher standard and that standard is the greater good ( no not comunism, solialism or any other ism and no im not religous either..).. the greater good is more like an army of people working together to solve a problem. Greed doesnt need to factor in at all. Someone needs something, you make it for them.  Problem solved. They get the item, you get the skill increase and your name stamped into it.

If the expectation is that players who go out and gather/loot materials will be able to effortlessly have an item made from those materials—and that seems to be the case, especially since you noted that unfilled orders will be completed by an NPC anyway—why involve crafters at all? It would be even easier to just allow everyone to put materials together, like Minecraft. If you've got silver and an emerald, you put them together and there's your Emerald Necklace. From the player's point of view, the only difference is that when they put the silver and emerald in the box, they have to wait a few minutes or hours for the necklace to pop out. There's no interaction with the human being doing the crafting, so why require a human being to do it? Just give them the item.

Sure it would be easier not to do anything at all, but you need baseline systems that make sense and provide fun for other people, but are not completely limited by other people. Remember that there are alot of things where players just want the work done. Upgrading guards, upgrading keep walls etc. Since you can have every skill in the game, you could do it yourself, but again, in order to improve that skill you need tasks to complete.

Crafting in most MMOs involves grinding craft levels on crap that nobody wants. Either you're doing repeatable craft quests of some kind that raise your craft skill without producing any actual items, or you're making a whole pile of some cheap item that you vendor or throw away. No matter how great the demand and no matter how few crafters there are, I don't think it's possible to have crafters who spend their whole time creating actual useful items. It's always going to be faster, cheaper, and/or more convenient to grind on crap than trying to level your craft skill solely by making and selling honest-to-God someone-is-going-to-buy-this-and-wear-it-for-twenty-levels Fine Mithril Helmets. If unwanted items (meaning nearly everything, since you can't sell items) get traded in for better faction, that's going to be the bulk of gameplay for crafters. It's not anything like a player-centric crafting economy.

Well crafting here has a purpose, players need things and the server needs things (npc) and you have the ability to progress by making it for them. You dont need to make any worthless crap. When the keep holds because the door ( made by rungard) holds, and the guards hold (made by rungard) them out of the keep then all of a sudden crafting makes sense. What youve described makes no sense to me, and i do understand that people find it difficult to adapt to life without money. People need a purpose higher than making money, and in a server based pvp game such as this, that purpose is to fuel the war machine . Money serves no purpose here.

 

I havent gotten into the quality and degradability aspects of items, and the skill of the crafter would make a difference, so for some items you may need to seek out a person or have a guild crafter and such, but the baseline system is always there, and you wont require quality all the time. You wouldnt expect a baseline system (the npc) to create the ultimate quality item either. Only players would have the ability to "improve" items.

I cant figure out why people, who spend there whole life battling money in the real world, would want to see that concept in a game. Thank you for your commentary. It is much appreciated.

Originally posted by rungard

Originally posted by Disdena

This is not really the case though. You can easily bypass this system and go ask someone to do it for you. You can be well known by having your name stamped into the item. The more you make the more well known you are. Profit is not a good thing really, Money makes you think it is, but the physical world shows you it is not. In a game you can have a higher standard and that standard is the greater good ( no not comunism, solialism or any other ism and no im not religous either..).. the greater good is more like an army of people working together to solve a problem. Greed doesnt need to factor in at all. Someone needs something, you make it for them.  Problem solved. They get the item, you get the skill increase and your name stamped into it.

I don't feel that a "Made By" stamp has that much meaning to it, but that's something I could chalk up to opinion. When I think of people respecting me as a good crafter, I'm thinking of people who immediately contact me when they get their hands on some money or some materials, because I've helped them before and they know that I'm trustworthy, charge good prices, make friendly conversation, whatever. I cannot see that same level of respect coming from an auto-order-filling system. If you shove 12 leather scraps and a spool of thread into the request receptacle and out pops a Patchwork Tunic "Made by Shylion", I'm certainly not going to go around recommending Shylion to people; I know nothing about him because I've never interacted with him. I'm not even remotely grateful to him.

Sure it would be easier not to do anything at all, but you need baseline systems that make sense and provide fun for other people, but are not completely limited by other people. Remember that there are alot of things where players just want the work done. Upgrading guards, upgrading keep walls etc. Since you can have every skill in the game, you could do it yourself, but again, in order to improve that skill you need tasks to complete.

Maybe you misunderstood. Let's say I need 6 cannons and 20 flags to upgrade a keep. I gather up a whole bunch of iron, wood, gunpowder, cloth, all the stuff I would need to make those. In a normal craft-centric game, I'd have to know someone or find someone with ironworking skills, perhaps work out a price for their services (or not, if I know them or they're generous), perhaps meet them in person (depending on the mail system) to trade the materials, and have them trade the finished products back to me. Then if that crafter is not also a weaver, I repeat that whole process with someone else to make the flags. In your game, I dump all the materials into a magic teleport bin, and then sometime later someone with a relevant craft skill clicks Accept on my request, and then my bin has cannons and flags in it. All the interaction is removed. And that's okay, if you don't want hunting down a crafter and haggling over prices to be part of the game. It's obnoxious to some, and top-notch quality gameplay to others, and you're not forced to include it. But if that kind of social gameplay doesn't belong in the game, why not remove the last little bit of inconvenience and just have the magic teleport bin craft the items for you?

Well crafting here has a purpose, players need things and the server needs things (npc) and you have the ability to progress by making it for them. You dont need to make any worthless crap. When the keep holds because the door ( made by rungard) holds, and the guards hold (made by rungard) them out of the keep then all of a sudden crafting makes sense. What youve described makes no sense to me, and i do understand that people find it difficult to adapt to life without money. People need a purpose higher than making money, and in a server based pvp game such as this, that purpose is to fuel the war machine . Money serves no purpose here.

But how many difficult items are needed, compared to the number of easy items? And how many low rank crafters are there compared to the number of high rank crafters? Let's go ahead and say I'm working on my carpenter skills, and I can make something basic like a door. Am I really going to camp the request queue hoping that someone puts in an order for a door, so I can be occupied for 10 seconds filling that request? Or am I going to take the faster and more convenient route of gathering some wood myself and crafting 200 wooden figurines to throw away? I have a very hard time believing in any system where the most effecient means of progression is by helping other people. Doesn't seem easy to make a game like that.

 

I cant figure out why people, who spend there whole life battling money in the real world, would want to see that concept in a game. Thank you for your commentary. It is much appreciated.

Welcome.

 

I don't feel that a "Made By" stamp has that much meaning to it, but that's something I could chalk up to opinion. When I think of people respecting me as a good crafter, I'm thinking of people who immediately contact me when they get their hands on some money or some materials, because I've helped them before and they know that I'm trustworthy, charge good prices, make friendly conversation, whatever. I cannot see that same level of respect coming from an auto-order-filling system. If you shove 12 leather scraps and a spool of thread into the request receptacle and out pops a Patchwork Tunic "Made by Shylion", I'm certainly not going to go around recommending Shylion to people; I know nothing about him because I've never interacted with him. I'm not even remotely grateful to him.

Lets see... I think the made by stamp is the ultimate form of crafter expression...but thats just me. I think the part that your missing is that this system doesnt take the place of player interactions..after all when your making 300 grommets..how many players are you talking to when your doing this? None.. your trying to increase your skill. So rather than grommets, you get to fill orders of other players and server npcs in defence of your realm. The other layer is still there, but weve added a base layer for when "business is slow". You will still have your guy who makes great stuff, and you still will have to deal with him for some things, but remember that nobody plays 24/7 so its nice to place your order, log off.. and be pleasently suprised when you next log in, that someone helped you out. You may not know them, but you might run into them at some point....So its not less, its actually more.

Maybe you misunderstood. Let's say I need 6 cannons and 20 flags to upgrade a keep. I gather up a whole bunch of iron, wood, gunpowder, cloth, all the stuff I would need to make those. In a normal craft-centric game, I'd have to know someone or find someone with ironworking skills, perhaps work out a price for their services (or not, if I know them or they're generous), perhaps meet them in person (depending on the mail system) to trade the materials, and have them trade the finished products back to me. Then if that crafter is not also a weaver, I repeat that whole process with someone else to make the flags. In your game, I dump all the materials into a magic teleport bin, and then sometime later someone with a relevant craft skill clicks Accept on my request, and then my bin has cannons and flags in it. All the interaction is removed. And that's okay, if you don't want hunting down a crafter and haggling over prices to be part of the game. It's obnoxious to some, and top-notch quality gameplay to others, and you're not forced to include it. But if that kind of social gameplay doesn't belong in the game, why not remove the last little bit of inconvenience and just have the magic teleport bin craft the items for you?

Again we need to keep in mind that its a base system. The base system doesnt prevent you from doing anything yourself or to go get a guild crafter or find another crafter. You dont have to work out prices because were in a wartime pvp setting where the money doesnt matter. You can still do all these things if you want to. You have to provide a base mechanism for crafters to produce goods that the server and its players will find useful. Theres no interaction with this very conversation..or is there...of course there is. I make a post and you respond to it. No , i dont have to go to your shop and haggle it out, but in a wartime pvp setting, why would you? You cant have the bin do the work because we need the orders to keep the crafters feeding the war machine. Its not about profit, its about teamwork. If im playing a pvp war game, most likely i dont want to spend my time looking for certain crafters...i want to kill enemies and fortify towers. However there may be times when i want something really special and i seek someone out and go from there.

But how many difficult items are needed, compared to the number of easy items? And how many low rank crafters are there compared to the number of high rank crafters? Let's go ahead and say I'm working on my carpenter skills, and I can make something basic like a door. Am I really going to camp the request queue hoping that someone puts in an order for a door, so I can be occupied for 10 seconds filling that request? Or am I going to take the faster and more convenient route of gathering some wood myself and crafting 200 wooden figurines to throw away? I have a very hard time believing in any system where the most effecient means of progression is by helping other people. Doesn't seem easy to make a game like that.

Youll always need more easy items because its a pvp game, so guards are expendable, walls are expendable and these will need to be replaced frequently. On the other hand when your building your character you want the best, but youll settle for less if thats all thats available. It can be replaced afterall. In a game like this its in the pvp combat players to have as many highly skilled crafters as possible. That equals better a equipped server. You also dont need to camp the request window. Its there wherever you go in the world like your email. The door you speak of has purpose, the figurines do not. When you make the design one that players benifit from helping players you create a new mode of player interaction. You can see this working in games like GW2. Remove the greed component and everyone has a blast. Quite simple actually.

And you should believe in a system where the most efficient means of progression is helping other people. We call that community in some places.

 

lets discuss item quality for a few moments.

It is my view that in otder to have both a good pvp and crafting experience , that items cannot last forever. I believe Daoc did it best but i have some tweaks to the system that you might find interesting.

Every item in the world is subject to quality. Its the ultimate stat for items, whether they ae swords or bridges or catapults.

the system is pretty simply. its a 5 tier quaity system

60-69% Low Quality---70-79% standard----80-89% high quality-----90-97% exceptional quality----98%-100% Masterpeice.

the item behaves exactly according to its quality. Thus a low quality item has is only 60-69% as effective as a masterpeice damage wise, and is also only 60-69% as Durable and would  be more likely to break than higher quality items . So it does less damage and breaks faster. Think of your door example again. with 50 guys out front, are you so sure you wouldnt want to have one of old rungards exceptional quality iron doors in the way? 

during the crafting process, your current skill gives you  the spectrum of quality and there would be gameplay mechanisms in place so that crafting would be alot like 1 vs 1 pvp. This has been done in other games, except here you get no hints when to use the skill. You have to figure it out yourself. Say were making a sword..you have to know whento heat, when to hammer, when to fold, when to cool and the game tells you nothing. You have to practice. As your skill goes up the ranges of these events widen a little, but you still have to be in the ballpark. So a higher skilled crafter might have a little easier time but it still requires player skill, just like in pvp. You could also form a crafting group to improve your odds again. Even at the highest skill, masterpeices would be difficult to produce reliably unless the player was exceptionally talented. Not by chance, by skill. There might be some subtle graphical cues, but they would be subtle. It would be nice to incorperate optional kinnect style controls for things like this so it could be done completely graphically. If the processes were semi authentic it would also be cool. There is a right way to make a sword. In the end i see crafting like a virtual workshop where you dont just press combine, you actually have to "fight" the same way a player would fight another player.

You could also improve existing items for a smaller resource cost, so you could go around improving existing items in the world and gain skill from that.

these are just for the basic items though. To make them special you need to add magic abilities to them, and its my thinking that the gem systems work best where you get slots in items that you can place enchanted materials in to improve them. The enchantments would use the same system of quality as well.

i dont see any reason why you cant enchant a door or a wall or a cannon or a bridge.

Originally posted by rungard    Profit is not a good thing really, Money makes you think it is, but the physical world shows you it is not. In a game you can have a higher standard and that standard is the greater good ( no not comunism, solialism or any other ism and no im not religous either..).. the greater good is more like an army of people working together to solve a problem. Greed doesnt need to factor in at all. Someone needs something, you make it for them.  Problem solved. They get the item, you get the skill increase and your name stamped into it.

Who is your target audience then, because it certainly isn't human beings.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by rungard    Profit is not a good thing really, Money makes you think it is, but the physical world shows you it is not. In a game you can have a higher standard and that standard is the greater good ( no not comunism, solialism or any other ism and no im not religous either..).. the greater good is more like an army of people working together to solve a problem. Greed doesnt need to factor in at all. Someone needs something, you make it for them.  Problem solved. They get the item, you get the skill increase and your name stamped into it.

Who is your target audience then, because it certainly isn't human beings.

 actually it is human beings. Tell me. When your playing your favorite war fps, how often do you..umm.. stop into a store to buy a new machine gun? It doesnt make sense to do that.

so why then, does it make sense in a server vs server pvp game....it doesnt. If you want teamwork.... focus on the team.

If they had a game called economy online, would you play it?

Originally posted by rungard

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by rungard    Profit is not a good thing really, Money makes you think it is, but the physical world shows you it is not. In a game you can have a higher standard and that standard is the greater good ( no not comunism, solialism or any other ism and no im not religous either..).. the greater good is more like an army of people working together to solve a problem. Greed doesnt need to factor in at all. Someone needs something, you make it for them.  Problem solved. They get the item, you get the skill increase and your name stamped into it.

Who is your target audience then, because it certainly isn't human beings.

 actually it is human beings. Tell me. When your playing your favorite war fps, how often do you..umm.. stop into a store to buy a new machine gun? It doesnt make sense to do that.

so why then, does it make sense in a server vs server pvp game....it doesnt. If you want teamwork.... focus on the team.

If they had a game called economy online, would you play it?

Your game design isn't based on how humans behave, though. People didn't suddenly get selfish and greedy when money was invented - they invented money to facilitate their greed. "Greed does not need to factor in at all,"  only makes sense if your target audience is some alien race that doesn't have greed as a goal or motivator. If your players are human beings, especially internet human beings,  then greed will be present and the players will game your greater good mechanics to their individual benefit.

"If they had a game called economy online, would you play it?"

Not only would I play it, but I'd get a job with the company and write their monthly newsletter.

I have to agree. You can't get rid of greed by getting rid of money. Money doesn't cause greed.

What's more, obstacles don't prevent altruism. I think maybe that's what you were trying to do by removing currency and allowing people to effortlessly craft for one another in service of their realm. If it's not hard to do something, it's not particularly nice to do it either.

If I announce that any warrior under level 20 is welcome to a free suit of my crafted plate armor, that's a very considerate and generous thing for me to do (since I could have sold that armor instead). But if the game doesn't give you any means to profit from making armor, and instead there's a button that will teleport the items into the inventory of the nearest naked noob, it's no longer a super-nice thing to do. It's the norm. It's what everyone does and is expected to do. It just barely deserves a "thanks".

When I'm playing an Engineer in Team Fortress, nobody goes out of their way to thank me for building a dispenser where they can pick up free ammo. It's my entire function as an Engineer, and it's the only thing that I can do with an ammo dispenser. It's not particularly nice of me, in the way that it would be nice of me to give out free ammo in a game where ammo is usually sold.

So if you try too hard to facilitate altruism, you end up devaluing it. There's nothing especially generous about offering your services for free when it is incredibly easy and there is no other alternative.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by rungard

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by rungard    Profit is not a good thing really, Money makes you think it is, but the physical world shows you it is not. In a game you can have a higher standard and that standard is the greater good ( no not comunism, solialism or any other ism and no im not religous either..).. the greater good is more like an army of people working together to solve a problem. Greed doesnt need to factor in at all. Someone needs something, you make it for them.  Problem solved. They get the item, you get the skill increase and your name stamped into it.

Who is your target audience then, because it certainly isn't human beings.

 actually it is human beings. Tell me. When your playing your favorite war fps, how often do you..umm.. stop into a store to buy a new machine gun? It doesnt make sense to do that.

so why then, does it make sense in a server vs server pvp game....it doesnt. If you want teamwork.... focus on the team.

If they had a game called economy online, would you play it?

Your game design isn't based on how humans behave, though. People didn't suddenly get selfish and greedy when money was invented - they invented money to facilitate their greed. "Greed does not need to factor in at all,"  only makes sense if your target audience is some alien race that doesn't have greed as a goal or motivator. If your players are human beings, especially internet human beings,  then greed will be present and the players will game your greater good mechanics to their individual benefit.

"If they had a game called economy online, would you play it?"

Not only would I play it, but I'd get a job with the company and write their monthly newsletter.

 

 So yor solution to greed and poor player behavior is to do nothing and accept it? I disagree. If you look at a game like guild wars 2, if youve played that beta.. they have put in mechanisms that limit bad behavior seen in other games like killstealing, loot stealing and other things like that. As a consequence those behaviors dissapear because they have been designed out of the game.

this is no different, except its a little grander in scale. Its clear that you have no faith in human beings, but i believe that people are generally good, but also need to be shown the way. Lots of kids play these games, my kids will probabally play these games. Designers need to reinforce good behaviors and make bad behavior inefficient. Unlike the real world, a video game can be made any way. Why emulate something that is no good if you dont have to?

Originally posted by Disdena

I have to agree. You can't get rid of greed by getting rid of money. Money doesn't cause greed.

What's more, obstacles don't prevent altruism. I think maybe that's what you were trying to do by removing currency and allowing people to effortlessly craft for one another in service of their realm. If it's not hard to do something, it's not particularly nice to do it either.

If I announce that any warrior under level 20 is welcome to a free suit of my crafted plate armor, that's a very considerate and generous thing for me to do (since I could have sold that armor instead). But if the game doesn't give you any means to profit from making armor, and instead there's a button that will teleport the items into the inventory of the nearest naked noob, it's no longer a super-nice thing to do. It's the norm. It's what everyone does and is expected to do. It just barely deserves a "thanks".

When I'm playing an Engineer in Team Fortress, nobody goes out of their way to thank me for building a dispenser where they can pick up free ammo. It's my entire function as an Engineer, and it's the only thing that I can do with an ammo dispenser. It's not particularly nice of me, in the way that it would be nice of me to give out free ammo in a game where ammo is usually sold.

So if you try too hard to facilitate altruism, you end up devaluing it. There's nothing especially generous about offering your services for free when it is incredibly easy and there is no other alternative.

 so why did you choose the engineer? Was it to help your team or was it something else? Do you need to be thanked for doing something that benifits others? Do people always need to be compensated in some way for doing anything that benifits others, even though they would of done it anyway for fun?

i dont think promoting good behavior devalues anything.....but poor behavior.

Originally posted by rungard

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by rungard

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by rungard    Profit is not a good thing really, Money makes you think it is, but the physical world shows you it is not. In a game you can have a higher standard and that standard is the greater good ( no not comunism, solialism or any other ism and no im not religous either..).. the greater good is more like an army of people working together to solve a problem. Greed doesnt need to factor in at all. Someone needs something, you make it for them.  Problem solved. They get the item, you get the skill increase and your name stamped into it.

Who is your target audience then, because it certainly isn't human beings.

 actually it is human beings. Tell me. When your playing your favorite war fps, how often do you..umm.. stop into a store to buy a new machine gun? It doesnt make sense to do that.

so why then, does it make sense in a server vs server pvp game....it doesnt. If you want teamwork.... focus on the team.

If they had a game called economy online, would you play it?

Your game design isn't based on how humans behave, though. People didn't suddenly get selfish and greedy when money was invented - they invented money to facilitate their greed. "Greed does not need to factor in at all,"  only makes sense if your target audience is some alien race that doesn't have greed as a goal or motivator. If your players are human beings, especially internet human beings,  then greed will be present and the players will game your greater good mechanics to their individual benefit.

"If they had a game called economy online, would you play it?"

Not only would I play it, but I'd get a job with the company and write their monthly newsletter.

 

 So yor solution to greed and poor player behavior is to do nothing and accept it? I disagree. If you look at a game like guild wars 2, if youve played that beta.. they have put in mechanisms that limit bad behavior seen in other games like killstealing, loot stealing and other things like that. As a consequence those behaviors dissapear because they have been designed out of the game.

this is no different, except its a little grander in scale. Its clear that you have no faith in human beings, but i believe that people are generally good, but also need to be shown the way. Lots of kids play these games, my kids will probabally play these games. Designers need to reinforce good behaviors and make bad behavior inefficient. Unlike the real world, a video game can be made any way. Why emulate something that is no good if you dont have to?

How you got any of that from my post is beyond me, but whatever. There is a difference between reinforcing good behaviour and designing a game that doesn't take into consideration how people can and will play the game. However, you seem rather confident that you can do this, so I'll wish both you and your game good luck. This world could use another Ghandi. 

Cheers!