The thing I miss the most about Eve Online is the immersive free market economy. I long for a true, in-depth economic MMO more than the space veneer around the order book. Buy low, sell high. Specialize in industry, trading, transportation. Add a little bit of light PvP to inject chaos and it's more fun than playing the stock market.
(I am actually designing such a game, but I'm open to suggestions)
My main activity in the game was stealing loot from under carebears' noses to sell for profit. A true rat scouring the battlefields for scraps. That must say a lot about me.
We are trying to build this with seed.game. We don't have everything you're mentioning (yet), but parts of it!
Looks really interesting. Any plans for a Linux client? Or do you maybe test and build with proper Wine support?
Dune: Awakening tried this. Was kind of fun while it lasted (and before the bug stole all of my resources I was trying to sell. The support was zero help on getting that resolved. That killed it for me immediately).
Usually I don't care about the economy in MMOs, but in New World it was fun and different when it launched. I played almost exclusively for the economy. Buy and sell orders and separate auction houses between cities. There was many unexpected ways to make money with trading and crafting. The only major source of gold was a single main story quest early in the game, so if you weren't careful you would go broke and struggle. The economy wasn't that advanced, but it was fun watching the players ping pong back and forth with supply and demand.
The crafting systems were so trivial that didn't make the economy game of New World particularly engaging. One core mechanic I seek is the division of labor; if everyone can and is expected to become a master in every skill, there is no niche to corner, and trivialises the experience.
There are very few games (actually, only EVE comes to mind with its skill system) that require you to specialize if you want to compete over everybody else.
I haven't played it, but a commonly suggested alternative for EVE Online that revolves around spreadsheets and a free market is Prosperous Universe.
>I long for a true, in-depth economic MMO
Schwab?
Check out Offworld Trading Company.
I enjoyed off world trading company but it’s a very different kind of economic simulator- much shorter and gamified loops - which isn’t a criticism, just not exactly the same itch.
What has changed about the EVE economy that you don't like?
> Buy low, sell high. Specialize in industry, trading, transportation
I did all of this, quite profitably and for quite a long time, in EVE?
I don't like how EVE is run, and the pay-to-win mechanics added over the years to entice the whales.
I'm looking at the problem with the eyes of a prospective game dev, and saying that there should be more games focused on free market economy, which is often just a half-arsed mechanic on the side, not the core game.
I played EVE for many years, and I really hated the addition of skill injectors. When I first started playing, the only way to get your skills up was to spend the time training them. Now it just takes real money cash.
There's a legitimate argument for some P2W mechanics, though. To keep a game going you need new players, and if you're looking at losing every PvP encounter for years as you skill up your character you probably won't stay.
The thing with EVE is that, even with all the ISK and SP in the game, you can't just buy your way to a win - you can't buy skill. You can have perfect skills and buy the best ship and modules and all that, but if you don't know how to fly, you're going to lose your ship immediately and it won't even be a fight.
That, coupled with your second paragraph (the new player experience being so rough) and I've never really been too upset about the stuff CCP sells.