Profile: aka_mythos
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• • How to stop farming and gold selling?

  • The way you stop people from gold farming is simple. Do in the game what works in real life. Impose an income tax, have it set up so that the more you make in a given amount of time the higher the tax rate. So you make 10 gold in an hour, 1 gold tax. You make 100 gold in an hour,  30 gold tax. Make 200 gold an hour 50 gold tax. You end up with a tax system that looks like a US tax code... haha; punish people for making too much too quickly.  Hell you could even go the route of  1970's Sweden and impose a 100% tax above a certain amount in an hour. Take this idea and even out the wrinkles and place the tax brackets in the right place and you can make it that much harder for people to get money for farming.  Down side is this can be worked around.

     

    Alternatively a game could just have fixed values for every item, ie all "broad swords" are worth 10 gold, and then make it so all transactions must be equal or within a certain percent deviation from equal. You can only get a 10 gold "broad sword" by paying 10 gold +/- 2 gold. You then restrict free gold transaction; transactions where someone give gold to someone else for nothing. Thus gold is restricted as a medium only for trade and not as a resource.

     

    Another way is for the game developers to program in some sort of a flexible sales tax; a ratio based on your level relative to the amount of gold you have. The more gold you have disproportionate to what you should have at your level the higher a sales tax you pay. This would cut down on the amount of gold people would buy because at lower levels when they're expected to have 10 gold but have 5000 they'll be paying an arm and a leg for everything they buy even from other players.  Thus until you get to the point of a game where you're expected to have a pile of gold it is of no great benefit to.

     

  • Posted: 7/23/08 11:08 PM
    Developers Corner
• • Players are confuzzled...literally...nobody has a clue...

  • I have to go back to the idea I was describing before. I think too much of the number play gets in the way even with pen and paper games I think calling a +5 sword breaks down the role play element though it is acceptable because it serves the purpose of distinguishing the relative power of the item. Having a description of what abilities items have is fine, knowing how it fits into the equations in the background is invasive to a computer based RPG; knowing how all the numbers work and being obsessed with it eliminates the advantages that a computer based game has over a pen and paper one. I think most MMORPG ignore this inherent advantage to the roleplay experience by putting it all out there.

    I do strongly agree with markoraos in saying that an MMORPG's game system should be developed enough to play that it could be converted to pen and paper, its just when we play on PC we shouldn't have to bother with dealing with all the numbers. By dealing with a number-centric game play we take the all the weaknesses of both PC and pen and paper based with only some of the advantages.

  • Posted: 6/28/08 10:32 PM
    Age of Conan
• • Players are confuzzled...literally...nobody has a clue...

  • I agree,  I think its silly to want all the data and stats. I've always found it gets in the way of the RPG element of mmoRPG's. I think its always been laziness on the part of game developers that we see a magical colored number come up out a monster when we hit them, why can't we just have approximations in the form of different animations based on different thresholds of damage. I've never understood the fascination with the statistics; If people really want games that put such an emphasis on statistics the game should go full tilt and include a graphing calculator and a college calculus text book. Competition is fun and all but such care about the statistics means you're munchkining more than anything else and thats never been in the spirit of RPG's. Its playing the system not the game.

  • Posted: 6/28/08 12:57 AM
    Age of Conan
• • Huxley: New Screenshot

  • Its a persistent world. Game play appears to be free with a micro-payment system not so much for weapons but for alternate skins that change your appearance, much in the same way the different armors in halo3 make you more distinctive looking but don't actually change your characteristics. They also are claiming over a 1000 individual weapons all distinctive.

  • Posted: 6/21/08 11:02 PM
    General Discussion
• • General: D&D 4th Edition - Learning from MMOs

  • 4th edition, having tried it, feels like a mmorpg. It seems to me that they watered d20 down for the sake of making it easier to program into games. I enjoyed 3rd and 3.5, I found it better than 2nd edition; even though I thought 3.5 could get overly complicated at times 4th is overly simplified. My friends and I are sticking to 3.5. Maybe 5th will be better. PnP games though the inspiration for mmorpg, despite this odd co-mingling, they really are two separate entities.

    All the web utilities really could have been done for 3rd its really about time. I really don't know if 4th will bring anything to the table. Most independent developers want to continue working with 3.5, mostly because its establish but also because 4th ed isn't free for them to make modules for. Bye bye open gaming license.  All that said you have to question what will come out of 4th that benefits the players.

  • Posted: 6/21/08 10:50 PM
    General Discussion