I don''t think lack of hard currency would suck at all. Do you say to your friends "look at me, I have $32543.12 in the bank"? No, you say "look at me, I have a Ferrari Testarossa and a large mansion". Status is measured by material possessions and the money is just the means of obtaining them in the real world. We only use money rather than direct trades because it is more convenient. But in a game world we can make it convenient to trade assets directly. Trying to ensure everything has arbitrary values, mapped to some currency type, is a very difficult task, and seems pointless when you can let the players do it themselves. As for removing NPC shopkeepers, well there are lots of human players who would happily play traders. Remember that ''shopkeepers'' weren''t exactly common in the settings these games are generally based on anyway. It''s just another modernisation which has been forced into games for some reason or other, probably simplicity. Why shouldn''t everyone in the game be a travelling trader? When you pass someone in the forest, why not ask if they have anything to trade? Set up a little transaction dialog, allowing each person to add or remove items from the trade. After each item is added, both players have to tick the ''agree'' button, then the transaction goes through. Problems of inflation no longer really apply since you are not applying any arbitrary value to anything.
Niphty... you said
"And MUD''s.. aren''t exactly the kinda game i was speaking of". Bear in mind that Everquest, Asheron''s Call, Meridian 59, and Ultima Online were all made by people who came from text muds. UO had several people from Legend Mud, for example. Brad who worked on EQ played on Sojourn Mud, I believe, and this led to a lot of controversy since EQ is essentially a text mud superimposed on a 3d engine. In fact, this similarity alone shows that ''real'' games and muds are far closer than perhaps you think
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And there is far more prior study into economics and player trading on muds, which date back to 1979, than ''MMORPGs'', which do not date back nearly as far
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Applying maintenance costs on items is a common way of reducing the amount of spare income. Rather than tax the money they have, tax the use of the items. One problem here is that you discourage spending
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Leading to more hoarding, in some cases, rather than less. Another problem is of finding the right balance. If maintenance costs are too low, you''ve not solved the problem, just delayed it. People will still earn loads of money, it just takes them a little longer as they are paying to maintain their items. If the costs are too high, you''ll discourage spending, as noted above, and perhaps frustrate players who can''t maintain the type of items they come across. it''s worth trying, but you have to take it carefully, and it seems to me more of a damage-limitation exercise than a solution.
Kressilac... higher level players do hoard. They do this on all the games you mentioned, but especially so on Ultima Online. (I can dig up references from Raph Koster aka. Designer Dragon to confirm this if necessary.) But it is also true that they give out massive amounts of money, to friends, guild members, those who swear allegiance, etc. The analogy here is to compare these high level players to Bill Gates: someone who has so much money, that they can give out small fortunes, and yet still be hoarding masses of it. A lot of money in real terms does come back into the system, but a higher proportion is actually tied up, in many cases indefinitely. A player with 5 million gold pieces rarely spends to take their gold below 1 million, for example.