Hey guys, we aren't going to add PvP centric features, and we aren't going to add item destruction (which is why PvP can onstensibly help an MMO's economy). Those are not the only way to make an economy work, and in my opinion they cause a million times more problems than they solve.

We've already tried the notion of item destruction with our player base during alpha (in the form of crafting recipes that have a chance to destroy your items -- nobody used them no matter how good they were). Losing items is literally never a fun thing to happen. If the game offers any alternative methods to get or use gear that avoids a chance to lose items, players will always take those routes every single time. Human beings are loss-averse. We could MAKE players lose items by forcing universal item loss. But this is a fun game, not a punishment simulator. We are not going to be destroying players' items.

And even if we did, PvP economies are always shitty anyway. Yeah, the crafters get more work, but players are miserable, always hoarding their best gear and never using it because it might break or get lost. Using "good enough" gear all the time, and always trying to make sure you have a big pile of shit gear to use in case problems arise. That's not fun. It's boring meta-management in order to prevent bigger losses. We already have plenty of meta-management and I'm not adding more in order to appease PvP hawks.

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That said, don't mistake the in-game item creation recipes for all of the game's crafting. Those are recipes for solo players -- or players with close friends who also play -- to create gear. They aren't supposed to replace group hunting for gear. Group monster-hunting and solo item-crafting are two alternative ways to reaching the same goal of having good gear. Neither are designed with inter-player trading in mind.

At the highest levels of the game (which are not yet implemented), crafting will take on additional roles in the form of temporary but long-term buffs (e.g. sword makers can add +10% damage to your sword that lasts for a real-time month). Other transaction-based crafting interactions already exist, such as trading augmentations.

Those sorts of interactions will become more critical at high level. But they will never be needed at low level because low level players already have more than enough things to worry about as it is.

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The idea that PvP or item-loss "fixes" a game's economy is based on the notion that players will stick around and suffer through a lot of punishment, literally suffering for years because the game is just so damned good otherwise. The idea that a UO-style Trammel scenario could work in a major modern game is 100% fantasy. Players have hundreds of MMO choices now, and since they don't HAVE to suffer through that shit, they simply won't. Rule of thumb: if a game design requires the constant anguish of players in order to work, it's not coming back.

But hey, maybe there's a game design that's fun enough for that. (This isn't it.) And maybe there's a community out there willing to slog through constantly being beaten back to the stone age in order to play this fun game for years. But Project: Gorgon's community has not shown any willingness to do that. I guess more importantly, I personally am not willing to do that, so it ain't happening.

But if you have a brilliant idea for how to make it work, a way to keep PvPers from the inevitable burnout that creates ghost-towns ("it's dead now, but it had a great crafting community for a while" being the epitaph of too many MMOs), then I encourage you to give it a shot. I'd love to cross-promote with other indie MMOs who tailor to different audiences. But please don't try to shove those ideas here where they very clearly don't belong.