Guild Wars Fansite Friday #61
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 890
It's theoretically possible to create an online roleplaying game without a player-driven economy. For example, you could make every variant of every item in the game available for purchase from NPC vendors. But that would take away a lot of the feeling of accomplishment of finding a rare item. Even that might not be enough, because if certain vendors were difficult to find or travel to, then players would still trade amongst themselves at above-vendor prices. More broadly, you could simply disable the ability of players to trade items or to drop them on the ground. None of this sounds particularly fun, and given that Guild Wars uses randomly generated loot, placing every variant of every item in the game on an NPC vendor is certainly not an option for Guild Wars.
Players often wonder why we allow prices to float on the traders, and this is fundamentally the reason. Traders are not vendors; they don't offer an unlimited supply of rare items. They're just there to facilitate trade between buyers and sellers. If the traders quote buy and sell prices that are outside the range of what players think the true value of an item is, then players simply stop using the traders and switch back to using chat to find trading partners. Of course, for any given type of rare item, we could theoretically stop treating it as a rare item and instead put an unlimited quantity on NPC vendors for sale at a fixed price. But this tends not to be a good idea for two reasons. First, player perception of the value of items tends to change over time; if the vendor sale price can't adapt, then there will be times when the item seems undervalued and times when it seems too expensive and no one will buy it. As specific character builds go in and out of favor, the items that support those builds can experience wide swings in their perceived value. Second, Guild Wars will always have a player-driven economy because the game uses randomly generated stats on weapons and equipment. Those items can't effectively be sold by vendors, and the more we pull other types of items out of the player-driven economy by placing them on vendors and giving them fixed prices, the more we focus all price swings and inflationary pressures on the few remaining items that players still bid for, potentially pushing their prices far out of the reach of normal players.
