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Comment by namrog84 | Hacker News Reader

One of the challenges is finding the right proportional scale.

If the difficulty or fun of say blacksmithing nice items for the community. And you have it balanced out that you expect 20% of players be blacksmith. But then either 10 or 30% be blacksmiths either items skyrocket in price and make it unobtainable to most or the floor bottoms out making it not viable for most to engage in a market.

I think its solvable but itd require a lot of dynamic based systems to scale properly based upon number of players in each categories of life skill limits.

With that said, check out a game called Eco. They have life skill limits and force cooperation on small scale (30 day per server wipe). I think you can reasonably have 2 or 3 professions of 12 and people buy and sell from each other.

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I don't understand why MMOs could never figure out how to make resource gathering as fun (or more fun) than hack & slashing.

Stardew Valley and other games - Death's Door, A Short Hike, Toem, etc - figured this out.

Why haven't any MMOs done it?

Dunno, RuneScape seems fun? There's lots of types of materials, lots of ways to gather? True, most of the mechanics are just click-and-wait, but it's not like most MMOs where wood isn't any different from ore...

I'd argue that New World made gathering and to a lesser degree crafting a lot of fun. The rest of the game was kinda crap, but I did actually enjoy doing material farms.

FFXIV has a decent gathering approach

I play Conan Exiles which isn't exactly an MMO, but has the same sort of resource gathering grind. While my character is new, I don't actually mind it, but once I'm no longer just surviving, but thriving as a character, the basic resource gathering becomes mind-numbing due to the shear amount of stuff I need. There's no way to automate any of it.

In early UO, say Beta through the first few months of production, I knew a lot of folks who were primarily crafts folk. The town blacksmith, that sort of thing. After a while most players developed mules who had GM blacksmith skill or whatever so it became less of a thing.

But even then there were people out there. One woman I knew spent most of her time as an interior decorator for people's houses. It was a fun element that I never really saw in other games.

I do think to a large extent it came from the genre of game being new and every play style getting mushed into one game. People looking for the more pure social RP type role will congregate in a game catering to that, while the hack & slash adventure types will go elsewhere.

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