So: how do you afford a horse/cat/mechanical ostrich/whatever, especially since it probably costs 10 times as much as you have saved by the time you hit 40?

There are a couple of ways, both of which get back to this dystopia vs utopia muddle. The first is the collective power of guilds. In City of Heroes, our "Supergroup" was largely a convenient way to keep a meta-friends list, keeping track of who all of our alternative characters were. It also provided an alternate chat channel, so that we could kibitz without having to be in the same team (since teams tend to be more goal-oriented, as opposed to long-lived social constructs). On the flip side, supergroups were easy & free to form, as long as you'd put in the minimal amount of effort to hit level 10.

Guilds -- or at least the guild I belong to in WoW -- seem substantially more interesting. (I never played EQ1 or EQ2 very seriously, so I have no idea how much evolution there has been in this idea here from those worlds.) Reasons for this include:

• The ability to send money & packages through the mail system. Some items are only purchasable from vendors in specific locations (for example, a cookbook that allows you to raise your max cooking skill cap). If someone from the guild happens to be in that location, they can find out if anyone else in the guild needs the book, and send it to them at cost, via COD letter.
• Professions. Many of the professions use items produced by other professions. There are several pieces of armor, for example, that require potions as part of their construction. Having a guild with a variety of different professions represented makes it easier for everyone to advance.
• Improved purchasing power. If your guild has a lot of high level folks in it, it's not a big deal for each of them to lend you 5-20g towards the 90g you need for your mount, because that amount is relatively smaller for them. I only had to earn 40g before I could get my cat, because my fellow guildies chipped in 90g. (Of course, now, I'm trying to earn back that other 50g so I can pay them back, but at least there's no vigorish.)
• A certain amount of minimum commitment; forming a guild requires at least ten folks, and a startup stake fee; later on, if you want the guild to have a "tabard" (that visually distinguishes the members of your guild with a particular sigil), there's also a pretty hefty stake that the entire guild has to cough up.
• And of course, mutual assistance, both for quests (late last night, it took 5 minutes to assemble a crew of people to help me finish a quest) and for defense (when the horde decides to occupy an alliance area and make life rough for folks who are questing). And, cough, cough, for doing your own raids, which we also tried for the first time last night.

And probably many other things I'm forgetting. The point is, there is an emergent altruism that I'm finding here -- we're helping each other because we like each other, and because we know that our personal generosity will be rewarded with generosity on the part of other guildies later (I give you potions & ingredients, later you give me some nice leather armor, etc etc). Without a guild, I'd still be saving up for my giant cat, probably up through late level 43.

"But how could you possibly have saved that much? Didn't you just say the game is rigged?" Well, so that's part 2 -- the Auction House.

The Guild is all about altruism; the Auction House is all about making a buck. I'm now officially fascinated by it. There's two kinds of things you might auction. First, there's the "nice" loot that occasionally drops. This includes magic armor & weapons, and certain kinds of material (fabric, elemental essences) that get used by the various professions to make nice things. Sure, you can sell this stuff to an NPC vendor, but you can probably make at least double that by auctioning it off. In fact, sometimes you can make more by selling items that get used to make stuff than you can by selling the stuff you made, because of the extra value to the other player of using these supplies to level up their own profession skills.

Second, you can sell the stuff you've made, or stuff you've collected by way of training up a profession. While some stuff just drops when you kill critters, other stuff only becomes available if you've become a skilled miner/herbalist/skinner. These items can occasionally be bought from NPC vendors, but rarely. Some of this stuff turns out to be very important (which you tend to only discover by talking to your guildmates) -- for example, I'd been collecting tons of fadeleaf which is useful for a few of my potions (invisibility and detect invisibility kinds of stuff), but it also turns out to be phenomenally valuable to rogues in the creation of "blinding powder," which they can use to stun an area. If I sold it to a vendor, I'd get maybe a few silver pieces (and, as we all know, 100s = 1g); auctioning, I can get 1-2g for it. That's a substantial improvement. Similarly, there are some potions that are hard to make but required for specific quests (like Frost Oil, which requires an herb that only grows in one place), which you can easily sell for a gold piece each. Make 90 of those, and that's your mount right there. The same amount of time spent doing pure adventuring would probably yield a tenth that much money. And happily, you can do this in conjunction with the adventuring.

What I find fascinating about this is that now I'm starting to think in terms of "well, suuuuure, if I was patient or got a guildie to help me, I could gather this material and finish this quest. But hey! Now I can use the shared fiction of money to value my own time and trade it in for the fruits of someone else's time!" Real economy, stripped down to basics. Everyone has a basic living wage from the regular "work" of leveling, but you can improve your experience by turning the fruits of your professions into things other people don't want to go out and gather for themselves. It's really really interesting. (And I haven't even talked about how this all also ties in with the ability to send packages & money through the mail, or devious strategies for controlling the price of items by buying out your undersellers, etc etc).  8:37:16 PM  (comments [])