Wowstability

I’ve been reading about other MMOs and lately I’ve read some stuff about Warhammer Online. Apparently, gold in Warhammer is as useless as your copper in World of Warcraft. There are some still some things you can purchase with gold, but most of the time if you want an item in WAR, you go get it because  most of the items you need are obtainable by playing PvP (at least from what I’ve understood).

Mark Jacobs, the lead designer in Warhammer Online, created the game with warding off gold sellers in mind. As he said in his blog:

I HATE GOLD SELLERS WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING.

Gold sellers/farmers in WAR are quite rare as the game was made for you to enjoy without being to dependent in gold. But somehow, this seems to have backfired:

3) “Our economy… we just missed the mark. If you look at the reasoning behind the economy, you’ll see things like, ‘Hey, we’re not going to let gold farmers in our game.’ ‘We’re going to try to make sure we have controlled inflation.’ We had all the best reasons in our game, but what it caused us to do was build a game where economy is not important enough. Economy brings people together.” – From Warhammer Online’s Three Major Mistakes

I guess they’ve missed out one very important thing in human nature: we are all greedy. Human greed is insatiable. Even in a game, we want the best mounts, the most expensive pets, the best enchants, the best items, etc. And since all these require a huge amount of gold, players have a sort of another goal on the side to keep on obtaining wealth in WoW. Thus, making them play some more and stay longer in a game that’s constantly changing because of the economy, and in the end making the game more interesting.

And when currency is almost useless, people get bored and thus, quits playing WAR. While I haven’t tried playing WAR, the closest thing I can compare this to wow, is playing battlegrounds all day to purchase almost every item with honor points. But still, don’t take my word for it. I’ve yet to try playing WAR.