> A common pattern was that players would have mountains of skullcaps due to building their tailoring skill, but were then upset when no shop would buy 3000 skullcaps from them.

That's not really a problem with the shopkeepers. It's a gross mismatch in how difficult they made it to progress in skill versus the artificial aggregate demand for those products. If your game design requires that your players craft 3,000 of something, it's probably a good idea to think about what they're going to do with 3,000 of that especially if your players are going to expect to make a profit or if they have limited inventory.

Well, the big problem is that most craft skills weren't difficulty-based.

That is, you had a fixed chance to craft anything based on your skill, each attempt made the same exact progress towards improving your skill, and skullcaps used up the least amount of cloth. I think some items may have been gated based on your skill, in that you couldn't attempt them until you passed a certain skill level, but that was it. With Tailoring, regardless of whether you suceeded or failed, an attempt would use up however much cloth it took to make the item you were trying to make, so if the item costs less cloth to make, you could make more skill checks on the same bolt of cloth (IIRC, a skullcap cost 2 yards to make, and a bolt was 50 yards).

Tinkering was even worse. I remember with Tinkering, you'd double click your tinker tools, then select your pile of ingots. At that point, it would check your skill, and if you failed your check, it would say "Tinkering failed" and maybe use up an ingot or two (my memory is hazy on whether or not anything was consumed). If you succeeded, it would bring up the menu where you could pick any tinkerable item in the game, and if you got to the menu, you could make anything you picked as long as you had the requisite raw materials.

IIRC, Blacksmithing was the only craft skill that was difficulty-based from the start.

People really exploited this during character creation when making blacksmiths. You could create your character with up to 100 total points in up to three skills, with a maximum of 50 points in any one skill. The optimal starting layout for a smith was 50 Blacksmithing, 49 Mining, 1 Tinkering. You'd want the some Tinkering because your mining and blacksmithing equipment would often wear out and the replacements were all tinkerable. If you put in any Tinkering at all, you'd start with a free set of tinker tools, and since the skill wasn't difficulty-based, if you needed to replace your shovel or tongs, you'd just repeatedly attempt tinkering on your ingots until you finally succeeded your skill check, no matter how many tries it took, and once you made it to the menu (this leads me to think that failing didn't use up any ingots, but I could be wrong, and my memory on this is hazy), you could make your new shovel or tongs.

They eventually made all the craft skills difficulty-based, but it took several years to implement.

That sounds a bit off - mining was next to worthless to start with as you gained it very fast. Probably 50 smith, 50 tinker would be better.

Yeah, this is not to say that there weren't other problems.

I just wish they'd have solved them via fixing these sorts of root causes instead of just dumbing down the virtual world.

You can't fix people.

I've seen this happen in a lot of MMO's principally WOW and Runescape - as the game ages players increasingly value convenience and you see the more "grinding" elements of the game relax. The more successful games are able to walk the line between respecting what players have "earned" and keeping pace with modern convenience features such as instant teleports and configurable UIs and macros.

Stories like these are tremendously valuable to entrepreneurs. MMORPG ecosystems are some of the most complex pieces of software ever made with ravenous (and lucrative) userbases if you handle it properly. There are plenty of stories of innovative success and massive incompetence to learn from.

Part of the issue is that it was a half-complete migration. Eg you were still gaining skill by generating 3k skullcaps, which leads to the problem of them existing. In order to have a proper economy, you need degredation of supplies (else everything inflates indefinitely, as supply is unconstrained). 3k skullcaps should be unwieldy (and players will naturally trash what they can’t hold), or naturally degrades, in which case they have to sell in much smaller batches, or be heavily used in other processes.

Otherwise they’re really just worthless sludge you get as a side-effect from normal play, and suddenly the dump for them vanished (the always accepting, infinite cash merchants).., and you’ve just got a massive pile of shit to deal with

Also there were things like the "Clean Up Britannia" event, where players were encouraged to cull their item collection in exchange for neon hair dye and other goodies: http://www.uoguide.com/Clean_Up_Britannia_(1999)

> once EQ showed up and redefined the genre.

I don't think I would frame it that way; more like it reverted the genre back to the Diku mold. See

1. https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/09/what-is-a-diku/

2. https://www.engadget.com/2015/01/03/the-game-archaeologist-h...

Fair point. I'd say that by genre I meant MMO and not MU*, but it was so nascent that I don't think it'd be accurate anyways. I was mainly channeling one of the key designers, Brad I think, throwing hand grenades into online discussions.

>players preferred "a CRPG where other people happen to be playing" than "a virtual world"

I'm absolutely stealing this. It summarises how I feel about modern MMOs vs the endless possibilities of a shared, persistent, virtual world that I think were never truly realised. (see my other post)

I've seen a game that fixed the 3000 skulls problem.

All items could be destroyed to create runes, that can be applied to another item to improve it. Let's say that a skull giving +10 force would give a few runes to add +1 and +3, the later being more valuable.

Everything was recyclable and there was a complete economy about recycling to provide for the one hundred different characteristics.

This still causes runaway inflation of item power, which results in mudflation.

The earlier economy you describe sounds a bit like Dartmud. I think they gave in eventually too and started supplying the shopkeepers with new money every so often, however some of them still retain in-game "opening hours".

Raph Koster cites MUDs (including Dartmud) as inspiration for Ultima Online [1]. UO as it existed around the T2A / Renaissance era was, in many ways, a lot closer in design to MUDs than it was to modern MMORPGs.

[1] https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/10/31/emmerts-serious-games-...