Don't pay in gold, barter instead!

Love the picture, the economy is great when you can kill people and take what they're selling.

players will just use some item as a defacto currency. why? because currency simplifies things.

I remember the days of standing around and trying to trade stuff in AC.
The standard was the "SIC" or 'Sturdy Iron Key" and a crystal that I forgot the name of, back in the very early days of the game. The players mostly congregated at a particular town (I forgot the name) and everyone just spammed away like mad. If you wanted something you had to sort through it all and send the guy a tell...
Until the trade bots came....

Interesting times...

Dunno if I would want to go back to that, the problem with "bartering" is that you can't have any sort of central automated market because there is no standardized currency or values.
You end up asking to trade the uber helmet for 2 keys, a crystal and goose...it gets sorta weird and unwieldy...and very time consuming as it was all manual...or players will come up with bots to do it for them...

Devs are typicaly lazy and do not want to give customers what they want, they follow productions schedules and what they want, nothing more.

Devs have no clue when it comes to making hard choices for the good of the game or doing something that would truly make customers say, "now that took some effort".

Instead they follow what they want and not what we want, or worse yet, what they think we need. The first thing that is noticed is the economy or lack of one and is the first thing to fail in an MMO.

Devs are afraid to CAP economies to prevent them from running on greed which simply adds to a games exploitation. Economies with infinite resources and no item controls result in items being priced out of range of the average player and gives gold farmers everything they need to function.

Imagine Vivendi getting rid of all the gold farmers in WOW (easily done, dont let them tell you differently) they would lose millions of paying subs.

An economy that is ran by degradeable resources and degrading weapons and armor, and items (to the point of any type of repair) is a highly achievable and coveted thing and has only been done by two MMO's that i know of, neither of which had any rampant inflation. In some cases resources were even seasonal in these MMO's. Having caps on an economy is needed, or greed will take over, the old standard "what the market will bear" is as big a joke as the folks that still use the phrase, and we see what the market will bear does in real life to greedy pos's.

A games survivability is based on a few things, is it simple? Is it colorful? Does it cater to the closet everybodies? Two games come to mind (grin), both show the poorest examples of economies in MMO's but both are doing well, go figure. We can only hope the folks playing these games do not migrate to better MMO's when they finally do come down the pipeline.

Oh, cool. I didn't even think of implementing bartering into my Immersion Project! :)

Cool idea! One of the rules I have is to make my character have some kind of job...a trader, crafter, skinner...whatever. This is a nice idea.

Beau