Habitat Chronicles

KidTrade-inspired designs…

My original KidTrade posting caused quite a bit of controversy, as the design clearly demonstrated that a eBay-resistant trading economy was possible, but the biq question remained: Could such an ecomony be any fun when applied to current MMORG designs? This call to action was heard by several would-be virtual economy designers.

Several people produced counter proposals at the time, including Jenni Merrifield, who posted some design suggestions on strawberryJAMM’s Thoughtful Spot and [link missing – Ted, where’s yours?]

The initial designs presented some interesting thoughts, but weren’t as deep as the developer community was looking for.

Last month, that changed when the first full-fledged eBay resistent trade/market design proposal that would work with a ‘standard’ MMOG was published by Barry Kearns as Draft of “No-Cash”: a commodification-resistant MMO economy and the followup Detailed explanation of “commodities market” under No-Cash system.

The design is pretty elegant and interesting. Anonymous markets for objects, and person-to-person interaction for experience/skill points. Pretty clever.

I’m looking forward to more variations and trying out someone’s initial implementation! :-)

Theory | Posted by Randy at 4:02 PM | You can comment. Trackbacks are closed.