Rarity

In MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) a problem that many developers have run into is something that got called mudflation. It's when items which were ment to be rare and valuable, end up becoming easy and cheap to obtain on the player market.

A common solution to mudflation is to make items that cannot be traded or sold to other players after they've been equipped. This causes any item that players actually use, to disappear from the player market preventing the market from getting flooded with hand-me-downs.

I've started wondering if perhaps a game seeking to maintain a strong player driven economy, might be better served by instead examining the issue of rarity. If an item's market value gets driven down by how numerous they are, then perhaps it simply isn't rare enough.

Many MMOGs balance their loot drops using the same methods used by single player games. However, in a multiplayer game, a player driven market will be filled with items acquired by the many, many hours of gameplay already enjoyed by previous players. A single player game does not have this, instead the number of hours worth of loot acquisition is restricted solely to the hours put in by the current player. This drastic difference pretty much guarantees that a system designed for one game type won't work well in the other game. The standard system is to just have a % chance of a given loot item dropping from specific monsters. As the total number of monsters slain steadily increases over the life of a MMOG, this results in an ever increasing number of items in existence that were ment to be rare.

Alternate methods of creating rarity and value:

Limited quantity: In EVE online, there were some ultra rare items of which only a specific number were ever given out. Some might even be described as priceless. These items can be traded and often go for crazy high prices when compared to the price of other items with similar functional ability. Having the total quantity of certain items be limited based upon the size of the player base might be an effective way to keep certain items rare.

Increasing utility: A very basic way to increase value is to provide a way for players to make use of old gear. The most common method I'm aware of is to let it be broken down for parts to use in crafting. If the price of the good goes too low, people will start buying it for scrap. If the devs think an item's market price is too low, they can increase the amount of scrap it gives to raise it's value. This can also be a form of item destruction.

Item destruction: EVE Online makes heavy use of item destruction to keep rare items rare. Death in that game results in most of the gear which was in use, being destroyed. Thus, items which are most useful also end up getting destroyed frequently, keeping them from ever being too abundant. Personally, I think it might work to have games with two modes: normal without gear destruction, and a hardcore mode with gear destruction. Then if the two modes share markets, the destruction by the hardcore players can help drain the entire market of valuables. Not everyone wants to deal with gear destruction, but some people do like it, and letting them get stuff destroyed could help the games economy. An alternate form would be to have some regions with gear destruction, though it would be important to make it clear to players that entering such areas is dangerous, as anyone who lost stuff by accident would be rather upset.

Ultimately, the experience some games are trying to create doesn't fit well with an MMO environment: the idea of an item simply needing X hours of effort to acquire item Z runs into problems when people who have done it can give the item away to someone else. It's like trying to fit a single player game into a multi-player environment instead of trying to focus on what creating a living world full of players really means.