CLSWiki: Drac/MMOEconomy

Random Musing on economy in MMO's I've played. Admitidly this is limited to GW2, WoW, and a bit of D&DO and LotRO?

For those unitiated the economics go thusly:

Adventurers go on quests and receive rewards.
Adventurers kill monsters, which drop loot, some of this loot is useful, some is junk or "vendor trash".
Adventurers can via various methods, acquire raw materials: Looting monsters, gathering from the landscape (farming, gathering herbs, mining, skinning, chopping down tress etc).
Unwanted items can often be broken down into crafting materials.
Adventurers have skill levels in a variety of crafting disciplines, which they level up by refining raw materials into items.
Raw materials are usually leveled. E.g blacksmiths start out by making copper weapons, then onto iron, steel then (insert magical metal here).
At the top of the crafting trees are usually epic/legendary/super-special items that can only be made by crafting.
There is a centralised auction house that players can use to trade with each other, effectively ebay for your MMO.
Players can sell their useable loot to NPC vendors if they don't want to use/break down/trade to other players.
Some loot, particularly specific quest rewards, cannot be traded, this is known as "soulbound" to your character and can only be sold to NPC vendors or broken down.
Some loot soulbinds immediately (usually quest loot), some loot soulbinds when it is equipped, allowing the person who loots it to trade it if they don't want it. This is usually the way with high level items as it keeps them rare.

The exact mechanics vary from MMO to MMO, but its usually similar.

This leads to an issue, very similar to larp: gear is cheap. Everyone is running around killing monsters and looting their bodies for weapons, armour etc... Each adventurer only needs 1 or 2 pieces of an individual item (depending on what stats they boost). Why buy when it just comes to you for free? This ends with the prices for most items on the Auction House being just above minimum - basically nobody wants to buy unless its a bargain and fits their build. (E.g. every 10 levels or so I will have a look in the auction house and see if there is anything cheap around my level that can replace any old gear that I have not managed to loot a newer, shinier one recently. There is always something, for peanuts)

On the other hand, crafting materials are very expensive: because all the crafters need them, and need lots of them. For levels 1->the end, the crafted output is more often than not a by-product of the process of levelling up the crafting skill to top level. Basically you take a load of expensive raw materials, and refine them into crafted items that nobody wants.

How to prevent this so crafting is worthwhile? Aka how to make a vaguely realistic economy, or at least how to make crafting worthwhile?

First thing I am thinking, is limiting useful loot drops.

Creatures do not drop useable loot, why does that spider have a 2 handed sword? See: http://www.sewers.dk/HeroesofWoW/?Num=08 for the giggle.

Humanoids are more difficult. Eve online has it easy here, it's easy to believe that there is only rubble to salvage after you have just blown up somebodies spaceship. It's a bit trickier with Sword and Sorcery. I am thinking that people rarely drop usable armour, most of it is in the form of armour scraps (ala guild wars) that you can salvage into raw materials. This makes some sense - you just killed them, their armour is probably knackered. Weapon drops are infrequent, and usually crap - the loot algorithm will only drop things many levels below the monster level / looted equipment always has inferior stats.

This I think would make crafting much more valuable throughout, rather than just for endgame content.

Discuss.

I note if all useful equipment is magical and bound to a particular target and cannot be rebound then you can easily have all looted equipment needs to be melted down to make useful unenchanted equipment.--Taxellor

: Ahh yes, forgot to mention that, the almighty soulbound!