| Devs arent dumb, well most aren't anyway. FFXI showed beyond a doubt that a localized bazaar and a central bazaar (Jueno) *can* work.
Not only that but auction systems like FFXI break the language and cultural barriers. Some games (Vanguard) may not approve, feeling this detracts from immersiveness and inter-dependency.
But I'm putting words in their mouths. We'll see. Either way this is a module that devs are going to be finding themselves hard-pressed to up the ante.
As for tradeskills it's all well and good now but I'm so tired of reviews like this one. Tradeskills and economy cannot be fully tested through a closed test, and certainly not in a short period of time. So instead the reviewer always pulls this same stuff out of his ass. "Oh the UI is great" "The menus are great" "Oh you can stack things, wuwu~" But it does not tell us a damn thing.
It's an X-factor, because frankly everyone and their mother tradeskills during the first few months. Then less and less, and finally only a few. Every single game that has been in beta recently has praised to death the almighty "Trade-skill" system. Look no further than SWG, the same review site posted how this was the end-all be-all of tradeskills systems. A game that even allowed you to *produce* your own resources!
3 months in, and no one was making high end stims anymore. Or if they were it was for themselves, their group, their guild, definitely not for the bazaar.
WoW won't suffer from this problem, regardless of how good or bad the game is, they will have 500k players in their first 2 months. The problem it's going to run into is a dilluted economy early on as you can be damn sure there will be tons of powergamers hitting this game early and hard.
The real question is, how will *this* affect tradeskills and the economy. That review is all well and good now, but when the game goes live, you'll most likely just be Tradecrafter_028414 trying to underbid everyone else.
Blizzard and every other company that plans to have a player-based economy in any way, shape, or form had better plan on having a tradeskill team for long-term balancing and tuning.
One of the things that's turning me off to FFXI right now is that there are only a few high end crafters, and they control the entire upper-end market, and no one has the Gil to throw away building up their skills to the point where they can craft X, Y, or Z item, because no one is buying the low end items enmasse like the first few months of the game.
Another reason for long-term balancing. I don't doubt WoW success, but I wonder about their ability to cope with these type of problems. |