Forgive me father for I have sinned… it is roughly 8 pm before I am sitting down to write today’s blog post. In my defense I have been out running around all day. Firstly to my hometown to go see my grandmother, and then later gallivanting all around the countryside in search of cheap Legos. But that is a tale for another day… namely tomorrow. Today I have a topic I have been wanting to write about since yesterday afternoon. I just have failed miserably at being near a computer today to be able to do so.
Trade Cartels
Yesterday a number of us got into a rather length discussion over twitter relating to my loot commentary, or on the lack thereof in Final Fantasy XIV. Shortly into the back and forth I got this comment from @DesslynStorm. Essentially to paragraph, they believe that all loot should come from crafters. I guess in an idyllic situation this would probably be an alright thing. The problem is that I have seen far too many games where a specific branch of crafters got a monopoly on a specific item and abused the hell out of it.
I love crafting systems and by extension generally love crafters, but in every game I have played where specific items were ONLY obtained through crafters, the Trade Cartel has reared its ugly head. Essentially this is when a group of crafters collude to price fix a specific item so that everyone can turn a specific profit on it. Without a doubt the most heinous of these has generally been the bag makers in each game I have played.
The Threats
On Argent Dawn in World of Warcraft, my warrior was a bit of an oddball. He was an enchanter and tailor, namely so that I could have someone to make bags. Bag space is one of those things that I put a premium on in whatever game I happen to be playing, and will generally go to whatever lengths it takes to make sure my characters have a decent amount of them. I occasionally made a bag and threw it up on the auction house undercutting the competition by a large margin. It was at this point I was approached by my first trade cartel.
A seemingly reasonable mage mentioned that I really should price my bags higher. I told him that I was making a profit and I wanted them to move quickly, so I was fine with where they were priced. This is the point at which the threats started pouring in… another crafter joined sending me tells. Going so far as claiming that they would ruin me on the server. Something that I laughed off because at this point I had been the leader of one of the largest guilds on the server for roughly three years. I was in a pretty active raid and knew the guild leaders of most of the other larger guilds personally.
The Retaliation
But the I am pretty sure that had it been real life, the next step would have been them trying to send someone over to my house to break my knee caps. They proceeded to start buying the bags and relisting them whenever i posted a new one. So at this point I made it my life’s work for the next few days to flood the market with cheap bags. If I was online I was farming humanoids for cloth and turning around and dumping them on the market at cost. No one puts babby in a corner! For awhile they were ravenously snapping them up, but at some point they lost their fervor and simply waited for me to get bored.
I imagine that I had run them out of their current gold, and probably made a handful of enemies for life. But I have encountered to a lesser extent these price fixing schemes in several other MMOs. Each time my instinct is to break the regime because I have seen what it is like when someone has fixed the market. Early on in the life of Argent Dawn, there was a single player that had almost all of the rare enchants. He was part of a big raid guild on my server, and as a result he had a few of the raid drop only patterns that no one else seemed to have. Additionally he could do crusader in a time when it was not commonly known where that dropped.
Since he had 100% of the market on these enchants, he charged truly ridiculous prices. When I finally figured out where Crusader dropped… I decided to break up his monopoly, but standing in Ironforge (the only auction zone at the time) and offering free crusader enchants so long as mats were provided. Again came the threats, because I was cutting into his profit margins. I am sure I had nothing to do with it, but as more people started offering free enchants with mats, he ultimately quit the server and went elsewhere. Functionally I just really dislike when someone tries to profit unfairly on others.
Exclusivity is Bad
If you had a game where the only source of gear were through the crafters, the average player would end up having to pay far more than they do currently to outfit themselves. I realize that Desslyn’s experience comes mostly from Star Wars Galaxies… and I feel that game is vastly different from the modern MMO in innumerable ways. Additionally I feel like the average player within that community had a level of altruism that we will likely never see again. So I feel like what worked in SWG will never likely work again in another game.
An example in Everquest 2, crafters can create what is arguably the best available gear in many occasions, the Master-crafted sets that occur every 10 levels. These require some rare materials, but not so rare that they are unattainable. Since only crafters are the source of them, they have total control over the market for them. On the brokerage system, almost all gear is extremely reasonably priced, however a level 10 set of Mastercrafted gear will go for several hundred times the amount of gold a level 10 character would ever have to spend without buying currency. Crafters have priced the privilege of having a good matched set of gear out of the hands of most players.
Multiple Paths
My personal stance is that all games should have multiple paths to acquire your gear. I feel like different kinds of players want to play the game in fundamentally different ways. Players who deeply care about crafting for the sake of crafting…. will always do it regardless if they can profiteer from it. I feel like there should be viable options for end game gear through Crafting, Quests, Exploration, PVP, Dungeons and Raiding. Any given player may like a mix of those things, and giving multiple options to achieve their goals in a game, allows each person to tailor their journey to suit their own tastes.
I have always thought it would be great, if you could really gain the best possible gear… by doing a series of extremely long and arduous epic quests. By the same token I think it would be cool if crafters could complete a series of trials to synthesize rare materials and with that craft top end gear as well. I see it as a risk vs time type equation. Dungeon and Raid loot might be instance, but it requires a large group and repeated running to get everything you want. Whereas with quests and crafting, it is more a cast of slow and steady wins the race… the end goal is achievable but likely takes a considerably longer amount of time.
Fallacy of Profit
I feel like the hidden root of the whole concept that all good gear should come from crafters, is that crafters by default should be able to make large amounts of profit from their trade. This is just a foreign concept to me. I am one of those people that crafts because I enjoy the relaxation sometimes of crafting. I am not a rabid crafter, but when I do craft I tend to do it because I like outfitting my friends in gear. In Rift I regularly farm up cloth to set new players and new characters up with a full set of 24 slot bags to begin their journey. I enjoy making things for people, and making them happy in the process.
So to view crafting from the point of a cold profit based calculus just makes no sense to me. Sure I feel like crafters should be able to get their money out of the items they make and maybe make a meager profit… but I feel if you go into a trade skill with the purpose of making money you are likely crafting for the wrong reasons. Crafting and the self reliance that it gives you should ultimately be its own reward without any need to tie it to monetary gain. So I guess I question the notion that a certain class of crafter has that they should automatically be able to get rich quick through their crafting endeavors.
Wrapping Up
I feel as though I rattled on more than enough. Additionally I am tired and sore from the days excursion. Right now I want to relax on the sofa and boot up Final Fantasy. One of my good friends managed to get onto Cactuar so I want to get him invited to the guild. Tomorrow hopefully will be a much more relaxing day. I hope all of you had a great day and that the weekend has turned out to be awesome.