Albion Online isn’t letting up on the updates in the window of time from now to July when it launches for real, nope. Today, the studio’s put out its plan for some of the big changes it’s working on. Economy is first up on the list as Sandbox Interactive hopes to make almost all of the gear in the game player-made — even the drops. You know how Trove’s mob drops are actually player-crafted items? So too will it be in Albion once the team has its way.
“The way this works is that all items that can drop from mobs need to be supplied to an NPC black market first. The black market in turn creates demand based on mobs being killed. If the black market’s demand is not met for certain items, prices will increase, until a player is willing to sell the requested item to the NPC. Items sold to the NPC will then enter the drop pool, i.e. mobs can drop them based on the usual loot tables. However, the black market NPC is somewhat corrupt, and some items sold to him will be ‘lost’, hence creating a nice item sink which will be very important at the lower tiers. If we can make it work, you’ll even be able to see which player originally crafted the item that just dropped from the mob you killed!”
SI is also continuing work on the reputation system, a Hell Gate PvP redesign, a better UI for the market, item stacking, an updated tutorial, and game performance, plus it’s hoping to roll out more quality-of-life changes like configurable banks and crafting orders too. There’s some intriguing stuff buried in this doc, like “internal guild currency,” and finally, the team promises there won’t be another “food crisis” after the next test server wipe.
“Remember the food crisis in the first days post wipe? We will take steps to make sure that it does not get repeated on release. Instead of seeding food at high prices in the market place – as we did for the Galahad wipe – we will instead let all mobs drop food ingredients for the first 1-2 weeks after release, to allow the food economy to properly get going in an organic way.”
File that one under things we wish the real world could learn.
