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Making/Money: Conservation of Mass - Part 2
Welcome back for Part 2 in our series on closed-resource economies in MMOs. Last week we discussed how starting out in this *completely hypothetical* system might work, what some of the basic rules of operation might be, and what it would take to keep money available to players. Today, we continue on our chosen path to talk about how loot and gear could be distributed so that raiding, quests, and all the other content we enjoy would still be available even through endgame. First, a quick recap of the groundwork we already laid out. Rule #1: Server character limits. Yes, this would create the need for more servers in the game. But it would also enable the developers to determine a starting point for the goods, resources and money available at server start. Rule #2: Items and money must leave the game in order to come back in as loot or gathered materials. That means that they must be consumed in some way, either by being dropped and deleted, or by being given to an NPC. Consumed items could return as they had left the game, as the resources used in their creation, or as another item entirely. Rule #3: More gold sinks. In order to keep the loot flowing, there would need to be additional, enticing or mandatory ways for the gold to leave the game. An example might be to have service-oriented NPCs, such as the Work Orders in Lord of the Rings Online or the Saw Mill in RuneScape. Mounts or housing are always popular ways to get money back from players to NPCs as well. Still with me so far? Excellent. On we go!
CoX Server Cap reminder
As Lighthouse announced on 6 February, NCsoft has made significant investment in the CoX servers to assist with the current concerns for Double XP weekend as well as for future events, but there's still the possibility that servers will reach loads that risk performance degradation. At such times, they may have to lock players out of specific servers until the load lessens. While this is an unpopular decision with players who want to use specific servers, NCsoft feels that it's a necessary step to take in order to ensure game play for all players on the server is not severely negatively impacted.Based on this concern, they have instituted a server cap, and when servers that have reached their maximum allowable capacity they will show as grayed out with a status of Full. Unfortunately, the server load seems to be hitting the West Coast servers particularly hard, as Freedom and Virtue were bouncing between yellow and red most of Friday afternoon and well into the night. Then again, as Lighthouse noted, "The Freedom server is accommodating more players than it, or any other City of Heroes server has, ever has before in recent history. In reviewing the last several years of log files I can't find where we've even been within 30% of the new number." That being said, if you have any issues with, concerns over, or questions about the server cap, please don't hesitate to visit the official forums.
