Trade

Buy low, make an interesting journey, sell high. Trade, as gameplay element, was very popular in the earlier days of video games, having a big part in the success of games like Pirates! and Elite. But there isn't much of it in the MMORPG genre, which is a pity.

The only MMORPG that feature any trade are space-faring MMORPG like Earth & Beyond or EVE Online. Trade in EnB was unfortunately very badly done, with totally fixed trade routes, leading everybody to trade on the same Somerled - Prasad route. EVE has a brilliant trade system, where you can even give buy orders to be executed while you are offline, but unfortunately the rest of the game is rather boring. All resources originate from mining asteroids, and people can spend hours in large groups doing nothing but shooting asteroids with a mining laser. Added to that, in EVE there is PvP, and if you play a trader, another player can shoot down your ship, steal all your cargo, and set you back several weeks of gameplay, which is not really encouraging a trader career. And both EnB and EVE suffer from the fact that space travel isn't really all that exciting.

Star Wars Galaxies has highly evolved tradeskills, but no trade except retailing manufactured items. Gathering resources from different planets exists, but there are no limitations to transport. You can fit all the materials needed to build a large house in your backpack, and travel between planets is instantaneous using shuttles.

Fantasy MMORPG usually do not have trade, as their economics are too weird for that. There are many games like Everquest in which even the resources for tradeskills are gathered by killing monsters, not imported. Also most games do not have NPCs buying anything for more than a fraction of its value, and selling to players with any sort of profit is very difficult. There is also no wear and tear of items, meaning items come into the economy, but do not get out again, leading to "mudflation", a constant decrease in the value of items. All this is very bad for doing any trade.

So lets look at the 3 components of trade, buy low, make an interesting journey, sell high, and see how they could be implemented in a MMORPG:

Buying low could be achieved either artificially or in a player-based economy. Artificially is the easier approach, you can always have an NPC sell resources at a low price in unlimited amounts. Player-based low prices could be achieved if a resource can be mined in one area of the game, and sold in the same area via a bazaar or auction house. If it was easy to get the mined resource from the mine to the bazaar, but difficult to transport it further, players would be encouraged to sell the mined resource directly, even if they were aware that they were selling it low.

Selling high can also be either to NPC or to players. Both require transport to be difficult. If you have one NPC or player selling low and another buying high, you don't want players to be able to transport large amounts of goods between them in an instant. With NPC that would create a money-making machine without risk or effort. Players simply would transport the goods themselves. Players would only buy goods at higher prices if they wouldn't have easier choices. For resources, you would have to arrange a situation where for example iron could only be mined in one region, but only be forged into items somewhere else. Because if you could perform the tradeskill at the place where the iron was found, there would be no reason whatsoever to transport the iron.

So the critical component in making trade possible in a MMORPG would definitely be the journey part. The journey would have to involve risk and effort, so that it would be interesting, and that it would create added value. This clashes a bit with the other requirement of MMORPG to make traveling easy, so that people can easily gather to play together. One possible solution would be to have the usual range of fast transports, including teleports, but make these transports unable to transport resources.

Imagine a fantasy world with a civilized inner core area, and a big surrounding wilderness. Somewhere in the wilderness there would be an area where e.g. iron could be mined, and transported with rented mules to a mining village, where it can be sold either to NPC selling it on at a slight markup, or directly to other players. A trader would come with a caravan to the mining village, load up on iron, and travel with the caravan to a city in the civilized core area. During this journey, there would be a risk of being attacked by orcs, and each successful attack would steal a part of the iron from the trader, diminishing his profits. So he could either level up as adventurer to fight of the orcs himself, or hire other players as guards, or have guild mates guard him. Once arrived in the city, he would sell the iron either to NPC or to other players. The players buying the iron would transform it into weapons and armor with tradeskills, using the forge that only exists in the city.

Ideally prices and profits would be dynamic, but with a guaranteed spread. The NPC in the city would buy always at a price higher than the NPC in the mining village sells the iron, but would pay even more if iron was currently running low in the city. A player could do the whole chain by himself, mining, transporting, and transforming into items. But with a skill system in which you were learning by doing, specializing in only mining, only transporting, or only creating items would give some advantage.

The iron mining village could be the closest mining village to the city, mining iron could be easiest, and with iron you could create the lowest level items. Then further out there would be a village in which mithril would be mined, needing more mining skill, having a longer journey, and needing more skill for transformation into higher level items. Even higher level metals would be even further out. And that would just be the metals, you can imagine the same chain for wood, with lumbering camps.

All that could be in parallel to the usual activities of a fantasy MMORPG, hunting monsters, gaining xp, looting, leveling. There could be teleportation gates to any city or village you already visited on foot, but you would be unable to teleport any resources, mules or caravans. The beauty of this would be that fighting monsters could be very much a group activity, while mining, transporting resources, and crafting could be the soloing component of the game, thus offering different gameplay elements to different player types.

Alas, it seems that game developers have great problems getting a virtual economy to run smoothly. With the notable exception of SWG, crafting often seems grafted onto a game as an afterthought, involving mainly a lot of repetitive mouse clicks. So maybe it is too much to hope that we could have a game with a trade system that is fun to play. But one can always dream.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:58 AM Permanent Link