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Can I Interest You in a Fancy Cape?
If you’ve spent any time playing MMORPGs in the past two decades, you have more than likely experienced firsthand just how much an in-game item can be worth to the right buyer.
Trading of items and in-game resources is at the core of most MMORPGs.
Sometimes, these trades happen in-game for gold, but more often than not, the most valuable items are sold outside of the game itself for USD.
So when we started building the core economy design for Ember Sword back in 2018, there was one long-lasting issue MMORPG players always face that we knew we wanted to find a solution for. From Ultimate Online to World of Warcraft, Runescape, and all the others, it has always been the case that:
Long-time players always want to safely trade their most valuable items outside of the game.
That might not sound like an issue. But it is.
And for 3 separate, yet interconnected, reasons:
- Trading of game items outside the game is almost always against the Terms of Service of the game developer, which forces players to trade on insecure grey/black markets where there is no trusted middle-man to facilitate the trade. This leads to very high rates of scamming.
- Those players who are fortunate enough to not get scammed may still get banned if the developer finds that they’ve participated in “real-world” trading of in-game items.
- Trading valuable items often ruins the experience for other players, as it creates a Pay-to-Win environment where those with the most money can acquire the best items instantly.
Read more: https://medium.com/embersword/ember-sword-game-economy-2-0-game-design-meets-economy-design-a211ac8c7179
