Head-Meat wrote on Aug 18
th, 2020 at 6:02pm:
I have a friend who was into WoW. He had like the market on a particular crafted leather piece used for armor, and he controlled like 30% of the market on his server. Kinda fun. He had like an app hooked in he could check prices and sales, I think. (not logged in). It would be nice if DDO had something like that. Interestingly, he introduced me to DDO. I tried WoW for a while too. But, I couldn't get into it. Too trinity oriented AND the graphics are too cartoony to me.
WoW had actually economists on staff to help them build and design systems that would let players grind for money. So for example, I could go kill things for cotton cloth, and then craft that into bolts of cotton. And since cotton bandages were a thing, there was a constant demand for it.
Farmed item --> crafted item --> consumed item --> demand for for farmed item
Doesn't mean you didn't have to work for it, but the point being: all I had to know was "farm cloth, craft bolts, sell bolts". I didn't need any apps or spreadsheets or elaborate knowledge of which bolts were worth money and which were vendor trash. They all had value thanks to the nature of the game.
So I could, hypothetically, so next door to the human starting area, find a rapid spawn point, grind for weeks, and buy the most expensive item on the AH just by selling crafted bolts of cloth to other players.
DDO, if you want to make any "money"(shards) you have to have super special secret knowledge of which items sell, then grind intensely for them day and night until 1 drops because its only insanely rare items that have value.
Its frustrating, is my point.
And yeah, I too found WoW too trinity-oriented and cartoony. I played a lot around release and for the next year and a half. The big problem was no customization - or, not none, just "none allowed". If you weren't playing the single best build you weren't welcome in pugs.
I think thats why I like DDO so much - its about as polar-opposite as you can get, to the point where we could argue for years about the "best build" and never agree.