[MUD-Dev] A world without charity

[Eamonn O'Brien]

All this talk of who owns whos sword and ebay trading lately got me
thinking, and so I started to wonder why players can trade items for
money, and the answer is simple, because in game mechanics generally
allow you to hand an item over to a player and to recieve nothing in
return, an act of charity. So this got me thinking, if the game
prevented acts of charity such that all you could do with an item
was junk it (i.e. remove it from the game world, not drop it) or
trade it for an equally valuable item what would this do to the game
world?

Item values could be assigned on a simple scale, 0 junk to 10
godly. Once it was mostly accurate it could be tweaked once the game
was running by moving items which proved to be more valuable up 1
notch on the scale, which is basically a boost to the item since it
becomes more valuable so no nerf cries should be heard (items valued
too highly should not be a problem, a poor item rated at 4 instead
of 3 will not damage the trade system since it will be lesser than
all items it could be traded with, which should not damage the game,
at worst it becomes a trade token within that value bracket). As
long as relative pop rates for the items were similar (which
presumably they should be for equally powerful items) so that there
is no easy pop item to trade for a very rare item of similar worth
then it should become very difficult for any out of game trading to
occur. Players would be less likely to hand over cash for an item if
the game required them to hand over an equally powerful item with
the trade anyway. Also when the expansion comes out with bigger
better items, you can just expand the value scale up to 12 and rank
the new items accordingly. As long as you keep relatively few
classifications to prevent making trading impractical it should
work.

If you want to allow newbies to be helped, then you can easily
permit free trade of the lowest grades of items.

This system could solve several problems:

  1. Twinking. Since you cannot give items to your newbies until
  they find equally useful items, twinking becomes a much more
  restricted option.

  2. Muling. Without the ability to freely transfer items, mules
  become much more difficult to manage, which should reduce server
  space used for mules. (Note I dont doubt players will still hoard
  items, but since presumably you have some sort of item limit per
  player this should end up fairly limited). I would certainly
  imagine it would be a better situation all round.

  3. Account Trading. Since getting a high level, well equipped
  account is harder, it should reduce the tendancy to trade them,
  though conversely this may make accounts more valuable. How do
  full account trades generally work? I imagine it is either a full
  transfer of billing information (which should be easily
  preventable by the operators, just make sure you are always
  billing the same person for the same account), or just a transfer
  of the password to have the player transfer all the items to their
  own chars which would become very difficult under the above
  system.

Problems with this system.

  1. It prevents genuine acts of charity.

  2. It would be difficult to reconcile this with any craftsman
  classes. Craftsmen who created items would end up with a bunch of
  high level items that are presumably pretty useless to them. There
  are several ways this could be managed, allow craftsmen to melt
  the items to get components to build new items or something
  similar might work, though any trade-up cycle would obviously have
  to be carefully controlled to prevent the easy creation of trade
  items, conversely if craftsmen was the only way to allow for
  trading up then it would make those classes a lot more useful in
  game.

  3. It reduces the use for gold in game (oh no, i hear you cry, my
  10 billion gold coins, now useless).

  4. It is a little clunky. Values have to be a bit arbitrary.

  5. Players will complain when they cant trade so come up with some
  backstory nonsense about why items refuse to be just handed over.

  6. You may have to make some sort of group loot system (let your
  players bid with all that gold they no longer need) or the grabber
  will not be able to give over the item.

Anyone think this could work, and more importantly can anyone tell
me why it wouldnt work?

Eamonn
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