Crafting

[Snowreap]

by the time players reach the endgame, it's a good bet they will have discovered for themselves which items are good to use as a currency. and you can bet that the items they choose will be readily available only to other endgame players. furthermore, they will only be willing to trade their currency for items that they need at their level.

you should not assume that players will know what items are good as currency, or be able to figure it out, at the beginning of the game. having no currency at all is very bad idea.

in the example I gave, Asheron's Call players were using platinum scarabs as a currency item. remember when I said that platinum scarabs were a soft currency? that's a big part of the reason they had the staying power they did. the hard currencies didn't retain their value as the game progressed, because players' needs changed. shadow fragments and crystal fragments used to be valued items of hard currency because everybody needed them to make no-drop armor. then a patch came out that introduced an alternative armor, and the old no-drop armor was no longer a must-have item. as a result, the value of fragments plummeted. this was disastrous for players who returned to the game after a long absence and found that their stockpiles of fragments were worth a small fraction of what they had been.

platinum scarabs, on the other hand, retained their value from patch to patch because they had a very well-defined value in terms of pyreal coins. they were used as a high-density form of the default currency, not as a distinct currency separate from the default. the example I gave was of players augmenting the game's built-in currency, not replacing it.

you can only rely on hard (player-defined) currencies if the economy is fairly static. that means you have to get it 100% right on day one -- no patching things in later. because every patch will change the way players play, and therefore change what items they consider suitable currencies. this creates a situation where players can never take extended breaks from the game, because if they do they will return to a game where the currency has changed and their pre-break savings have been wiped out ("what do you have all those things for? people haven't used them for money since the february patch.") . this is about as fun for a player as returning to the game to be greeted by a message "welcome back to the game! in your absence, you lost 50% of your XP. get out there and level up! again!"

-ken