10-22-2009, 01:04 PM
I think that might be frustrating for the casual gamer.
It's one thing if you live and breath the gaming world so that you have a pretty good understanding of how much your 25 oak logs and 8 iron ore rocks are worth. When you don't play the game or follow the market religiously it would be pretty confusing trying to figure out how to get rid of your 8 iron ore rocks in order to obtain the basil leaves you want, if there was no fixed currency. You might have to spend serious time at an auction house trying to turn your 8 iron ore into 12 glass bottles, which you then exchange for 7 bags of coal, which you then use to purchase your basil leaves, all because there was nobody trading basil leaves directly for iron ore rocks (and also nobody directly taking iron ore rocks in exchange for bags of coal...)
Inventing a currency simply makes these transactions less troublesome for the gamer. Without much understanding of the economy you can turn your iron ore rocks into gold coins and then exchange those gold coins for the basil leaves.
Then the only question is "how do gold coins enter and leave the system".
I agree that if you didn't have a currency, players would have to invent one, but keeping up with what the current currency is might not be easy or obvious to your average moron gamer. I'm also not convinced that in the end, you've improved anything. You'd still have oak logs entering and leaving the system, just like gold coins would have, with the main end difference being that new players have no idea what the currency is.
It's one thing if you live and breath the gaming world so that you have a pretty good understanding of how much your 25 oak logs and 8 iron ore rocks are worth. When you don't play the game or follow the market religiously it would be pretty confusing trying to figure out how to get rid of your 8 iron ore rocks in order to obtain the basil leaves you want, if there was no fixed currency. You might have to spend serious time at an auction house trying to turn your 8 iron ore into 12 glass bottles, which you then exchange for 7 bags of coal, which you then use to purchase your basil leaves, all because there was nobody trading basil leaves directly for iron ore rocks (and also nobody directly taking iron ore rocks in exchange for bags of coal...)
Inventing a currency simply makes these transactions less troublesome for the gamer. Without much understanding of the economy you can turn your iron ore rocks into gold coins and then exchange those gold coins for the basil leaves.
Then the only question is "how do gold coins enter and leave the system".
I agree that if you didn't have a currency, players would have to invent one, but keeping up with what the current currency is might not be easy or obvious to your average moron gamer. I'm also not convinced that in the end, you've improved anything. You'd still have oak logs entering and leaving the system, just like gold coins would have, with the main end difference being that new players have no idea what the currency is.