Sure. They went the same route as Eve, except using real money to fund the economy. Eve seems to be more successful, and it's emergent gameplay seems to be far more profound and captivating. Perhaps this is what you're describing?

Yea Spiral Knights is free to play, but it funds the in-game currency through "real cash" in the same way Entropia does. It was the only thing I could think of off the top of my head without Googling.

I've seen it first hand, in production, in an experimental environment, for the purpose of such discussions for companies (like MG I suppose) to evaluate player behavior. It's very easy to control the cashflow in the game. Handling the game currency isn't the issue, it's what players do with it, which you can't control. Sometimes this is good, sometime this is bad.

It was a bad example, I apologize, but it's been cited many times as an RCE game, in many discussions on the subject. Usually people think you incompetent when you use less than the best examples, like calling Kenny G a jazz musician in front of Miles Davis.

http://i.imgur.com/6zR1x.jpg


An RPG by design requires grinding, some force it by design. You can't beat a boss, you grind levels until you're strong enough to do so. Farming, (if you're defining it as the act of grinding mobs for the sole purpose of acquiring loot), on it's own accord doesn't inflate the economy. When it's combined with mass sell-offs, like anything else, then the economy in the game tanks due to inflationary reasons. This I completely understand. Final Fantasy XI suffered massive inflation due to Chinese farmers selling Gil as a business. The only option Square had was to delete some billion+ Gil to force deflation.

This occurred due to 1) drops not being finite, 2) the currency not being finite.

Bitcoin will definitely solve 2), and I assume you're going to limit 1) as you see fit.

Definitely, but isn't this more due to the finite nature of resources in the game (money included)? When a player has to efficiently utilize "what I got" instead of endlessly farming to "get what I need", it creates another layer to the game due to the absence of farming.

However I would argue there will always be some form of farming, perhaps not on the scale of WoW or FFXI, but perhaps for small things. But then again you can make everything an "elixir", and increase the anarchistic capacity for the gameplay, which I would say creates some profound and emergent results.

Programmers may tell you they will write everything from scratch, but there will always be copy-paste.

I've already seen it first hand...not your product in particular, but definitely the experience you've described.

Ha. That gave me a good laugh, thanks for that. Very true. But that wasn't my intention to illustrate. Critically acclaimed success in a piece of art has an element of timing involved. For this reason actively trying to please the public is very much a moot endeavor. But at certain points in time someone develops something cool like Minecraft and everyone loves it. Repeating the formula never works because the timing no longer exists. "Right place right time" sort of thing I suppose.

That's usually the point of a publisher, even though the author still gets sent hate mail. C'est la vie.

I like to be thorough when it comes to my profession, even though I've been out of the industry for a few years. I am also very much enjoying the discourse.