so your saying zog that "sheep" would buy perfect pvp pieces? pvp drives the crafting and loot markets. that 10 percent of the UO population pays probably 90 percent of the total gold paid for armor in the trade forums.
if you dont think that encourages people to loot monsters and craft then i dunno what game your playing.
The big problem is that you're confusing two things. I'm talking about
wolves, which means predators. You're talking about PvPers, who are not the same thing. There can be "sheep" who wish to fight each other by consent, thus producing more goods and services that others want in order to further their own consumption. They would be in stark contrast to a wolf that does not produce, but can only consume what is taken from others.
But even without wolves, in a world without PvP let alone PKing, sheep would necessarily find something to sell. If certain properties good for PvP were not so highly prized, people would necessarily turn to something else. What do people do in Farmville and other similar games? Well, they're no different than people who play UO purely to hunt monsters, roleplay, decorate houses, and/or be cookie-baking merchants.
look at the trade forum. with the loot changes, most the stuff goes unsold. stuff thats awesome for pvm. to drive an economy you need things to sell. the "sheep" stuff just isnt moving. maybe 1 out of 20 posted pieces is a desirable pvp piece and thats whats actually selling.
As I said, sheep would find their own things to sell, if not for consensual PvP but for anything else. Say's law: supply creates its own demand. It's been around for a couple of centuries, so you may want to look it up.
You're also misled by an item's high price due to an arms race. Would you like to tell me that an F-35 is equivalent to a few hundred million pounds of apples, or to feeding about 41,000 people for a year at a very generous $20 per day?
So you keep talking about this and that being necessary, but it is hardly necessary to "drive an economy."
you do bods, its well known that pvpers buy the majority of the barbed / horned kits. i dont know of a single person whos spent over a billion gold using it to purely pvm. on average its taken me about 250 mil in barbed kits to get each perfect pvp piece lately. take those billions out of the equation the demand for kits for plummet.
Again, people's preference would shift from something like casting focus to luck, with other things like resists, mana/hp regen and hit/defense chance still being desirable. Yet this is talking about a PvP-free world, when, again, I'm not talking about a lack of PvP but a lack of
wolves. You're incorrectly assuming that because I point out people don't like getting attacked non-consensually, therefore I oppose all PvP.
And let's not forget that a lot of the gold duping is done by those with PvP in mind, just like the old pre-Trammel exploits (like Uzi bows and mana vampire) were the exclusive realm of PKs.
they wouldnt turn to luck, because no one would be buying the stuff that you use luck for.
Oh yes, they would. They'd necessarily
Gold drives the UO economy. theres lots of gold in game. 20mil here and there on a decent pvm piece isnt going to move enough gold to support an economy.
Actually, no. Money is never what drives an economy, in UO or the real world. Who in UO collects gold piles or checks just to have them? Hardly any. Do people in the real world save because they like seeing numbers on an account statement? Hardly any. But what drives all but a very few people is what they can do
with the money. Once upon a time, a senior manager and I had to decide a new policy about employees holding company stock in a certain type of account that would soon have trading restrictions. The decision was to have them move it to a flexible account. Even if the people weren't looking to sell shares in the near future, or 20 years, they'd still want to sell the stock eventually. The same applies to money. Very few stick money in the bank, buys stock or even sticks it under a mattress just for the sake of having the money.
You're also falling for the fallacy that velocity of money is important to economic growth, which it is not. What matters is
production. There's no velocity of money unless someone is selling goods and services in the first place. What you're seeing is the effect, not the prime action.
if your saying people will hunt / kill monsters purely for the extremely rare chance at deco / artie drop then your right. but a very large portion of players abandoned pvm anywhere else but shame because the loot just wasnt worth it. and the majority of that loot value is from pvpers.
Look at the new items from Doom and Halloween. Aren't those "driving" the economy? But consider that the money has to come from somewhere first, and other than duping, it's going to come from monster hunters. When my friends and I do another Harrower and I have another +25 to sell, where are the millions going to come from? Someone had to hunt a bunch of monsters first, or dupe gold.
But again, you're taking my position that "wolves aren't necessary" to say that I oppose all PvP, which is completely untrue. To get back to the original point, Freja's point that "We need (more) wolves"