Grinding Away and the Wizinvisible Hand

Lately I've been very quiet on the Realms of Despair for a variety of reasons. When I have been on I've mostly been working on making gold to finish dressing my druid. Grinding for gold isn't the most fun part of the game and I try to avoid it when I can. The catch is with the druid I want to put on it a Bone Helm of Ryuukoroshi, a Breastplate of the Ravager and a Shield of the Ravager which to make adds up to a total of 340 million gold coins.

To make gold the most obvious place is Mithril Hall - between the mobs in the gorge and Midas touch on the items from the mobs like Drizzt Do'Urden, Wulfgar and Bruenor Battlehammer you can make around 6-7 million coins per repop. With a few well placed characters in other areas you can almost double that amount. Either way though it is one of the less fun parts of the game. Sure you could run other mobs and sell the equipment to make the gold but in some ways running another mob and then finding someone to buy the item can be even more of a challenge.

Between repops while golding gives you plenty of time to think and read. One of my favourite sites to read is Imaginary Realities. It's something I'm adding a link to on this site after I finish writing this post. Imaginary Realities always has interesting ideas on how muds work and what others have done successfully. It is also a way for people to spread the news about what is great about their mud. Realms of Despair even gets a mention in an article by Richard “KaVir” Woolcock titled What Do I Do Now? where he says:

Of course the first step was to make sure newbies knew that a “what” command was available, as it’s only intuitive once you know about it! I therefore decided to borrow an idea from Realms of Despair, and include the information in the prompt:  

It would be great to see someone from Realms of Despair write something for Imaginary Realities and Kavir's article has some great ideas I'd love to expand on some other time. "1001 things to do in the Realms of Despair" is an idea I have for another blog post...  But for now I wanted to briefly discuss the RoD economy and some ideas from Griatch's article titled A Case for Bartering in Multiplayer Games

One of the most often debated topics by long time players of the game is about the economy - just look at these posts about it by Tharius and Xenapan. One common thread is that gold has little use. While it is needed for potions and repairs it has few uses besides creating some more expensive items and losing it in gold sinks like housing or the billions spent on the Festivus raffle. As a result other items are being used in the MUD's barter economy.

What I'd like to see is some sort of NPC that players can give items to and set a trade price for in gold or equipment. When another player makes an appropriate trade for the equipment up for grabs then they would hand over the items and store the trade until the first player logs back. This could make trades easier, safer, anonymous and save players from having to go to the effort of scripting trade bots. It would take some thought and coding skills but is doable.

On the plus side I think the Council of Elders does a pretty good job of staying out of the economy and letting the Wizinvisible Hand take care of things like inflation. One of my favourite things is when you realise that a particular player or group has a monopoly on a particular item through their skills/secrets/teamwork and encourages others to have a go with the attitude of "If they can do it so can we"

My other favourite part of the Realms of Despair economy is this:

>rent
There is no rent here.  Just save and quit.

Which is what I'm doing now.