Selenti said:
Mangoose said:
Selenti said:
My concern with that as an armchair designer is not that it gives the player that loot for *wearing*, but if they don't want it, it just adds a ton of easy money into the game, provided they can sell it and it's worth a lot (which both make sense).
Well obviously when you go that route (or any route) you'd have to balance the design choice with other choices. So perhaps a more "realistic" weight limit.
To me, that creates two possible results:
a) the person is just so annoyed they only grab one or two things, never come back
b) the person keeps coming back to get it all, and we're back at square one. The only solution I see there is to make the items just not worth much (which I think makes the world less compelling) or merchants just don't have enough money to buy much (which is just plain annoying, again).
I personally liked how The Witcher handled this: you could only carry what a person would realistically be able to carry while fighting monsters, running across the countryside, and doing other adventurer-style activities. You could hold the armor on your back and three or four weapons, but that was it in terms of equipment. One addition to this might be to make drops in populated areas quickly disappear, while stuff you find in deep, mostly-unexplored dungeons would take a longer time to go.
Another possibility, depending on the nature of the game, would be to limit a player's ability to sell based on in-game factions, reputations, etc. For example, if you were carrying a bunch of valuable armor, you might become a more tempting target for bandits - who, ideally, could quickly overwhelm even a powerful player through numbers and tactical ambushes, leaving him no choice but to drop the goods and run. Or perhaps it would be difficult to sell, with honorable vendors rejecting it because they suspect foul play must have been involved in acquiring it, and shadier vendors wearing down the player and forcing him to accept a low price. (PC: "15 gold for the lot? Do you take me for a fool?" NPC: "You should be grateful that I'm paying you at all. This armor bears the markings of House Valenti. How about I stroll on down to Lord Botswood's manor and let him know that you've been robbing the corpses of his liege lord's knights, maybe even doing them in yourself? No, I think you'll accept whatever price I offer.")
Or armor could rapidly decrease in value with damage, forcing the player to hire an expensive, high-end smith to repair expensive, high-end arms and armor in order to make any profit (presumably high-end foes would require additional resources to defeat). This would require very little effort on the part of the devs, and also encourage hard decisions on the part of the player when it comes to allocating resources, since getting your equipment repaired to 100% whenever restocking in town would no longer be a given.
TL;DR: There's plenty of ways to deal with the issue; it only requires a bit of creativity. The problem isn't
coming up with a way to keep the game's economy in check, it's that companies aren't willing to put effort into something that will please (some) hardcore gamers at the expense of most likely frustrating the majority of their customers.