Droid Engineer Archive

Changes to the functionality of products that obsolete the items on existing vendors destroy what little we have of an in-game economy. It forcesplayer run businessesto flush months of hard work. They end up receiving noin-game payofffor that work.

When a combat player kills an NPC or another player, he is doing so for the XP, or the FP, or possibly for the sheer enjoyment of having done so. But no matterwhat the reason is, the player receives the payoffwith no fear of it being "taken away" with an upcoming publish.

When a crafting player crafts a product, he may be doing it for the XP. He may be doing it for the sheer enjoyment of it. But if he is a merchant with vendors, he is very likely doing it so he can sell the product at a later date as well. In fact, if players did not do it for that reason, there would be no in-game economy. The problem with the way this game is currently managed (at least in my experience) is that the "future sales" payoff for a player's in-game actions is regularly taken away from the player by the developers when a publish that changes that profession's schematics hits live with no compensation.

This is not the way to manage a MMORPG that is trying to cultivate an in-game economy.

I understand that it is hard to make changes without sometimes obsoleting past items and it is hard to work out what the compensation might be when this happens. But it is not impossible to do so.

Consider similar cases: when non-CH creature pets were weakened, a system was designed that allowed players to "trade-in" their newly invalid pets for valid ones. Yet if millions of credits worth of inventory on a players vendor is obsoleted by a change, there is no recompense whatsoever.

This is not fair.

At the very least, there should be a resource salesmen somewhere in game to whom merchants who have beenharmed by a recent change can turn in their obsolete wares for the raw resources that were required to create them. It doesn't have to be perfect, and could be "for a limited time" after each publish, but the lack of any sort of recompense on par with the way obsolete pets were handled says one thing: a failure to competently managing the in-game economy.

Some will know why I bring this up, but I will not go into those details. I think this issue transcends any immediate concerns.

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In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

T.S. Eliot