I think Eve Online is the classic example. It's not technically true that players are limited in the sense that you mean. Rather, the limits are emergent.

The areas with the most valuable resources also have the least game provided security, so players are forced to band together into large organizations to protect themselves - essentially true virtual countries.

There were four games I played at EA Redwood Shores: UO, Battlefield 2, EVE Online, and Microsoft Excel (because EVE).

Really is a shame what happened to that franchise.

Haven't played since, though. What happened?

It’s like some unholy amalgamation of every shooter genre that’s been popular with kids in the past few years. It’s like hero shooter meets battle royale meets call of duty meets the battered corpse of what used to be Battlefield. It really feels like some out of touch suits said “see what kids like these days and rip it off”.

The previous game had its own controversies, and many veteran developers apparently left due to the stifling of creative control.

If you don’t mind a shitpost-ey video, I saw this the other day and it probably explains everything better than I can in an HN comment: https://youtu.be/d0lXNq2jrG8

It’s spends a lot of time on performance issues and bugs, but those are usually forgivable to me, at least as long as things get patched.

Also there’s a complete lack of content. Twenty something guns if I recall correctly, and lack of content can kill games, even otherwise good ones.

The first game had something like 10 weapons and 10 maps if I recall correctly, but is considered a wildly successful game despite that.

If items had a finite lifespan and you could replace them quickly like in Minecraft, then the downside of losing your items would be far more acceptable.

This is also the reason why MMO economies tend toward deflation. Players craft thousands of food items that never perish and just pile up in some auction house or automated market place.

If every player sold their items when they quit there would be more items than players.

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/22688/why-did-sto...

If the difficulty or fun of say blacksmithing nice items for the community. And you have it balanced out that you expect 20% of players be blacksmith. But then either 10 or 30% be blacksmiths either items skyrocket in price and make it unobtainable to most or the floor bottoms out making it not viable for most to engage in a market.

I think its solvable but itd require a lot of dynamic based systems to scale properly based upon number of players in each categories of life skill limits.

With that said, check out a game called Eco. They have life skill limits and force cooperation on small scale (30 day per server wipe). I think you can reasonably have 2 or 3 professions of 12 and people buy and sell from each other.

But even then there were people out there. One woman I knew spent most of her time as an interior decorator for people's houses. It was a fun element that I never really saw in other games.

I do think to a large extent it came from the genre of game being new and every play style getting mushed into one game. People looking for the more pure social RP type role will congregate in a game catering to that, while the hack & slash adventure types will go elsewhere.

Stardew Valley and other games - Death's Door, A Short Hike, Toem, etc - figured this out.

Why haven't any MMOs done it?

"sup, u gm angler?/" https://web.archive.org/web/20030731200633/http://spla.sh/bp...

It is still as fun today as it was back then.

There is no combat, just challenges of various types that range in scope from things you can do on your own to things that require the active cooperation of many people.

For example, solo player might delve into the mysteries of flax genetics just for the fun of solving a complex puzzle, but they have the alternative of buying seeds sold by other players.