I talked a little while ago about the problem with getting more money than you know how to spend in RPGs. City of Heroes, my massively multiplayer drug of choice these days, was notorious for having this problem. In the high-level game, characters accumulated massive amounts of "influence" (since heroes, of course, didn't accept money for their heroism) with very little to spend it on.

With the latest free expansion, Issue 9, the designers have attempted to kill multiple birds with one stone. The "invention" system is crafting by another name, but crafting which requires rare salvage items and no special skills. Anybody with the right materials can successfully craft these new inventions, which run the gamut of new costume pieces to really potent enhancement "sets" that affect multiple aspects of the power in which they are "slotted" as well as increase your characters overall power when you use more than one of the same set together.

While I can't speak with authority, I suspect this will make the high-level game MUCH more interesting. Customizing and "maxing out" your character just became substantially more intricate of a process.

Naturally, inventions costs tons of influence - a very potent money sink on its own. But they've also implemented a blind-auction market system that allows people to freely trade with each other even when they are not online. The trick is that there's a 5% non-refundable "listing fee" for sellers, plus another 5% (effectively) when the item sells. The "listing fee" helps keep speculation in check. Sure, you can try to sell a piece of salvage on the market for 10 million influence... but you'll have to spend a half-million influence just to try and find a sucker for that price.

That seems to have helped keep prices "reasonable." Though the definition of reasonable may vary from player to player. But more importantly --- with all this money trading hands (my 25th level character was able to make 2 million on one rare piece of salvage... which is a respectable amount of influence at that level), a ton of virtual "cash" is being drained out of the economy on a regular basis. That 2 million influence sale I made pulled 200,000 influence permanently out of the economy.

And did I miss it? Oh, a little, but I had an extra 1.8 million influence I hadn't had earlier, so I wasn't much in the mood for complaining. What astonished me later was how quickly I spent much of it making new enhancements and making more trades.

We'll see how things progress, but on the surface of it, it seems like Cryptic has figured a pretty good medium-term solution to the money-sink problem. There is definitely a theoretical limit to the effectiveness of it, as it is possible for all existing characters to reach a fairly optimum state and no longer use the invention or trading system. But if an MMORPG ever reaches such a static state, it's got one foot in the grave already. One downside is the risk of mudflation, now that the floodgates are open on inventions.


(Vaguely) related silliness
* RPG Design: What Am I Going To Do With All This Money?
* RPG Design: Quest Abuse
* The Backwards MMORPG Experience
* Why I Gave Up On Dungeons & Dragons Online
* City of Heroes Jargon
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