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Items
A player-driven economy works according to the laws of supply and demand. To ensure enough demand in the long term, you can either have an item power creep (meaning that even the best items, after a few months, have to be replaced by even better ones, leading to a constant carrot on a stick chase) or you introduce significant item sinks.
As it so happens, Albion Online allows for full loot PvP outside of safe zones. And since land and resources are quite limited there is always plenty of reason for fighting.
When it comes to usage of items, there is two different play-styles at work: if you want to, you can play in ways that the risk of losing your items is extremely low or even zero. You likely won’t get silver or item-rich quickly, however, your personal wealth as a player will constantly increase. A really cool feature of Albion is that even lower end materials are used in high end crafting, thus, the materials and loot that you gather will always have a value and always can be sold - and often will be picked up by high end players for a very good price.
The other way to play is of course to be in the middle of fight at all times, joining one of the PvP focused guilds. These guilds constantly fight for control over the best and most valuable pieces of land in the world of Albion, and in doing so, a lot of items get lost and destroyed on a daily basis. These constant wars create a huge demand for resources and items and keep the economy flowing, and on top of that, they also prevent item inflation or devaluation.
Markets and Logistics
Each city in Albion Online has a local marketplace. Here, players can list items for sale, buy items or can create so called “Buy-Orders”, which are requests for buying certain items once they become available.
The end result is that in essentially all of these cities, items, resources and other goods are freely traded between players in a very efficient and transparent way. You can also “instant buy” and “instant sell” items as in other MMORPGs, the key difference being that your counter-party is not an NPC, but other players. This of course means that prices vary and that you need to be careful, too. On the other hand, if you are a good trader, strategically buying and selling items, you can turn a huge profit, provided that you can outsmart the other trades who try to do the same.
What makes all of this more exciting is the markets are local - so supply and demand and the quoted prices can vary drastically between cities. While a city in the mountains might have a strong supply of ore and metal, a city in the steppes might be short of it, meaning that prices are really high. You can take advantage of this by buying low in one location, transporting the materials over to another location with your Ox and then selling high.
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Or, for added thrill and tremendous profits, you can transport items to a city located inside of the PvP zones and sell them there - in particular, if a lot of fighting is occurring and people run short on replacement gear.
Symbiotic Relationship between Non-PvPers and PvPers
The player driven economy creates a symbiotic relationship between non-PvPers and PvPers in Albion. Note that I have deliberately not said “casual” and “hardcore” here, as Albion Online allows for hardcore non-PvP gameplay in the same way that it allows for casual PvP.
Generally speaking, activities such as gathering, crafting, transportation and trading provide the underlying item supply that PvP players need to keep fighting. As PvPers often control the highest end zones in the game, in return for being supplied by others, they can either pay significant amounts of silver to them or pass down rare loot and resources to more safer minded players that they could not get their hands on otherwise. It creates a very nice synergy.
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Another synergy comes from the risk-reward interaction created by the full loot PvP outside of safe zones. How is this any good for non-PvPers? It’s quite simple: if allows these players to earn huge pay-outs in return for some risks. High end stuff is rare, and on top of that, it’s dangerous to get, meaning that many people won’t dare to try. If you take the risk - and have the determination and skill required - you stand to profit much more than if the high end stuff was easy to get and only limited by the amount of time you put in, as it is the case in most MMORPGs.
A Player-Driven World Creates Meaning and Opportunity
In the world of Albion Online, anything that you do will directly impact other players - and everything they do will impact you.
Almost naturally, the market drives players to do things that are meaningful and relevant to the world. For example, if a big war is going on in the northern part of the world, the price of ore - even lower level ore - will increases significantly over there. So suddenly, gathering lower end resources makes sense, and might be a really nice and easy way to turn a good profit, the same goes for transporting it to that location from somewhere else.
On the other hand, if you have been saving for the epic sword that somebody is offering in the marketplace and somebody else buys it first - tough luck, either get another item or try and find another copy of the sword somewhere else.
All in all, the game is in constant flow, opportunities come and go and the world around you truly matters, you will always do best if you observe what is happening around you and adapt to it. Or, with some friends and some coordination, go ahead and change the world yourself by capturing a key territory, trying to monopolize the market for certain items or resources or constantly raiding key supply routes.
A player-driven world does not need NPC created quests to tell you what you need to do - it creates tasks, opportunities, risks and rewards naturally. This is not for everyone, but it is the core DNA of Albion Online.
Stefan Wiezorek, CEO of Sandbox Interactive
