GDC Talk - "Cursed Problems in Game Design"

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Deathfairy wrote:

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1- Kill things or do quests ===> Accumulate wealth ===> Buy better gear ===> repeat.
This is the most common for MMOS.

I am not sure what MMOs did you play, but ones i did: wow, rift, starwars. That is not how it worked to put it mildly. So unless you clarify this part the rest of your post is 100 percent moot.

Ragnarok, Perfect World, Runescape, Tibia, RPGMO, Tree of Savior, Tera, Priston tale, neverwinter and many others that i don`t even remember the name anymore

In other words bunch of failed games mmk. Runescape being the only exception and i didnt play it enough to make a call. In any case that is soooo far from "most common for mmo" not even funny.

Tera failed because it was a typical korean mmo, aka stupidly long grinding for little reward. Also you could just p2w the gear. Recipes for disaster. It also had a very bad first impression since the initial release to the west was literally 2 dungeons and that's it. The endgame was laughably empty.

WoW is still going. It's still the #1 mmo even after 15 years. It's a shell of its former self mostly because the current iteration of devs suck and it's that old.

The state of these games has little to do with its AH. Imo AH only starts turning into a negative in mmo's if you can buy all the bis gear with gold. 1 or 2 pieces? Ok fine. But not your entire character's gear. It would destroy motives to do the actual content in the game. And neither of these games cross that line.