Crafting

[Snowreap]

The difference is currency is always secure whether you follow Snow's idea's or not. Currency never has to be carried more then 2 feet from a bank. Plus it is to easy to turn items into cash so cash is secure even if dropped while killed in pvp. I still go back to my body and loot the items in my inventory and sell it for cash. There is also no real way to control inflation with out changing currency.

That is why currency is bad for pvp.

I think you're assuming that items dropped on player corpses will be generated by the game like it is for NPCs (like WoW and WAR do). no no, cash and items dropped on player corpses should be deducted directly from the dead player's inventory (like Asheron's Call does).

the whole point is to make cash insecure. if I kill you in pvp and you drop cash on your corpse, I'm going to loot it unless your friends run me off before I get a chance. once I've looted your cash and items, they're no longer on your corpse for you to retrieve. at that point, the only way to get them back is to (ahem) "persuade" me to return them (as an aside, in Asheron's Call I didn't have to loot your corpse if I didn't want to, in fact I could open your corpse and add cash and items to it to compensate you for your trouble if I were so inclined, because a corpse was really just a special kind of chest which only the two of us had permission to open).

in real-life terms, if you go to a pawn shop and trade some item for cash, and then walk out of the pawn shop and get mugged, do you say "wow, it's a good thing I sold that item already! all I have now is cash, which is totally secure!"? no, because cash lost in such a case is lost permanently, unless you can track the mugger down (or extort compensation from his boss).

also, it's important to keep in mind that it's possible to limit the use of cash to lower-level players and gear. in Asheron's Call, cash (in the form of pyreal coins) had mass and volume. you couldn't carry more cash than you had the strength to lift, and you couldn't carry more than would fit inside your pack (in fact, the weight of items was measured in terms of pyreals -- if you found your packs full and needed to dump the least-valuable items, then anything that was worth fewer pyreals than it weighed would be the first to go. sometimes all of your loot items were worth more than their weight in pyreals, which meant that the best way to free up pack space would be to drop actual cash on the ground, and players frequently did this, much to the glee of lower-level players in the area. eventually, they changed things so that pyreals were weightless, but pyreals remained the unit of measure for weight despite this, which I imagine new players found confusing).

players therefore had a powerful incentive to convert cash into items with a higher value-density and a lower mass-density. for instance, the "platinum scarab" (a spellcasting consumable) was in common use as a player currency. a full stack of these items was worth something like 1000 times as much as a full stack of coins. these were most avidly used as currency by spellcasters who generally had low strength and always had to take care to keep their total burden under control, although non-spellcasters frequently used them as well, since they were almost universally accepted by players as trade goods -- it was rare to find a trader who would not accept platinum scarabs as payment, but it was normal for traders to refuse to accept pyreal coins!

platinum scarabs were considered a soft currency by the players, because they could be directly converted to and from pyreal coins by visiting an NPC who bought and sold spellcasting components (although you typically lost about 10%-20% of your value in the transaction), and the value of a scarab in pyreals (i.e. the exchange rate) was hardcoded into the game. as a result, anything which dramatically changed the availability of pyreals would directly impact the value of all the soft currencies that had an NPC-established "cash" value.

there were other items used as currencies by players which were considered hard currencies because NPC merchants wouldn't deal in them and they were therefore worth exactly what the players thought they were worth. the soft currencies were vulnerable to inflation due to farming (and exploits), while the hard currencies were vulnerable to inflation due to game changes (for example, a new type of armor might be introduced that reduces the value of the previous generation of crafted armor, which therefore causes a drop in the value of the ingredients used to make that older armor, even for players who had no interest in the older armor itself and who were only using the ingredients as a form of currency).

-ken