It feels fun to be rewarded for something you accomplish in-game.
In many singleplayer games, you can slide difficulty up or down to change the effort:reward ratio.
In an MMORPG, though, you have different groups of players with different amounts of time. You want to make it fun for both the kid on summer vacation who is happy to spend 80 hours a week on a game (not a choice I want for my kid, but I was a kid once too) and an adult who has a 60-hour work week and exchanges 2 hours of sleep after the kids go to bed to play.
That means the person with more money than time will want to buy things from someone with more time than money. But this causes all kinds of distortion in the game balance and economy.
I don't know that this is solvable, whether you're trying to balance against cheap labor or AI bots.
It feels fun to be rewarded for something you accomplish in-game.
In many singleplayer games, you can slide difficulty up or down to change the effort:reward ratio.
In an MMORPG, though, you have different groups of players with different amounts of time. You want to make it fun for both the kid on summer vacation who is happy to spend 80 hours a week on a game (not a choice I want for my kid, but I was a kid once too) and an adult who has a 60-hour work week and exchanges 2 hours of sleep after the kids go to bed to play.
That means the person with more money than time will want to buy things from someone with more time than money. But this causes all kinds of distortion in the game balance and economy.
I don't know that this is solvable, whether you're trying to balance against cheap labor or AI bots.