As many are no doubt aware, AO has suffered from its fair share of exploits over the years, be it profiting from tradeskilled items whose constituant parts could be purchased from shop terminals or acquiring free Funcom points to use in the store. This has resulted in an economy that has been flooded with credits (literally trillions were made from the tradeskill exploit over a period of 5 years). It has also left the wealth dsitribution skewed to a few veteran players.
I feel this is a giant elephant in the room that is not being tackled. It has resulted in the following situation:
• An economy that is punishing to new players (and this game really needs new players).
• Credit rewards provided from quests/content feel unrewarding. They contribute so little towards actually being able to buy stuff.
• Established players tend to just buy whatever it is they need without engaging in content making teams for PvE less prevelant.
For those of you that follow Greg Street (the former lead developer of WoW), having meaningful rewards and real choices makes a game interesting and appearling to players. There's a lot of pseudo-science to game design and I'm not expecting the AO team to suddenly acquire the insight of Sid Meier, but I do think they are missing a trick by not taking steps to rebalance/correct the economy.
Highly subjective bit... I personally feel taking measures to correct the economy prior to, or on release of, the gfx engine update will lead to a greater intake of new players.
Some ideas that I would personally like to see in game to help achieve this:
• More NODROP tags. Likely to be highly unpopular but it would incentivise PvE content a great deal and encourage more groups. An empty LFT is good for noone.
• Introduce more credit sinks. The option to buy funcom store points with credits (much like Guild Wars 2 and a bunch of other games allow), Repair costs for armour, new social items for sale for creds etc.
• Introduce credit rewards to daily missions to provide a consistent on-demand source of a small amount of credits. Important for a new player as they may not wish to spend hours camping inferno dynas / solo AI raids (or even have the gear / means to do so for that matter).
• Reward the winners of a BS with a small amount of credits.
• Introduce an entire new set of endgame gear superior to Combined armour to help reset the playfield a little. Make it NODROP. It's almost impossible for a new player to catch up on 8bil+ worth of gear to be able to compete in PvP content.