Problem: Items are Worthless

[Nomiro]

In another game which focuses on a player driven economy, they fix this problem by making it so "gear" just leaves the system.

Fusing together big items to make bigger items is just extending the same broken run for gear and does nothing for low level gear which is just as effected by the "unbreakability" of gear. Why not just remove the repair option and simply let gear fall apart?

This would stop the deflation of prices.
This would make NQ gear viable in the markets.
This would put more emphasis on wearing job/rank appropriate gear.

*edit*

Solipse, if someone in this thread is calling you dumb and lazy and not addressing your idea, you should probably just ignore them +^_^+

[Solipse]

Solipse, if someone in this thread is calling you dumb and lazy and not addressing your idea, you should probably just ignore them +^_^+

Hah, yeah, I just found out about the ignore feature.

Well, the problem with having gear unrepairable is that you somewhat penalize people for spending great amounts of time creating a very powerful item. If you spent 10 days worth of farming to gather up all +3 mats for a champion's lance, and it broke after using it for a week, I'd say that that would be pretty unfair. Not only that, but as I said, a system that allows for items to leave the economy should be a reward for sacrificing those items. Causing items to be unrepairable and having them break into uselessness only further penalizes people for playing the game - something that many, many sites and people complain about (ie, the fatigue system penalizes people for playing the game).

In the above case, I'd make the point that lower ranked weapons being cheap and unsellable isn't _really_ a problem - at low ranks gear should be cheap. You shouldn't have to spend 250k on a willow wand +1. If nobody bothered combining lower rank stuff and prices bottomed out, and you have some r50 crafter undercutting an r25 conjurer who's trying to resell his outranked gear, well, that crafter's a jerk... but that's something that is endemic to the free market economy; just think of Walmart as the r50 crafter.

The other thing to consider is that this sort of system doesn't have to be the sole way to have gear leaving the economy. You can have ten different (and creatively rewarding) ways to have gear leave the economy.

Example: Add another elaborate system where combining different kinds of items from the craft allows the crafter to create some special higher tiered material. IE, a culinarian combining a bowl of soup, a sandwich and a salad can get some new meal, or a goldsmith combining a silver ring, an electrum ring and a gold ring can get some gold alloy ingot or a couple nuggets. This one is far more complex and would take much longer development wise, but implementing the original suggestion in this post would not preclude them from working on some kind of system like this longer term.