MMO Economics 101: Killing, Harvesting, and Looting

In the mediocre MMORPG (mMMO), a player kills a mob of some kind (forget for a moment that the term mob comes from the word "mobile" and denotes a major problem with MMO gameplay--monsters' names and descriptions are completely unimportant, and all that matters is their con to the player.  That's a topic for another post entirely). The player then clicks on the carcass, which opens a window, allowing the player to loot one or more items from the body of the defeated mob.  Wash. rinse. repeat. Until you level!  Woot.  Bored.

The Ideal MMORPG is completely different.  It incorporates real-world concepts in a way that is interesting and fun without incorporating the bad things about the real world that are not fun.  One of the problems with MMOs is that their creators have a perspective that biases them against understanding the world they have created.  Most of them are city-dwellers, with little understanding of the tribalism, hunting, and gathering that personify the fantasy worlds we imagine.  Many devs have a very statist view of reality, such that they believe in the ability of police powers (Kings, lords, CEOs, whatever) to provide for the needs of the people.  They ignore the sources of those power.  What makes a knight great is not the absolute number of kills he has made, but how he has made use of his victories.  This is part of the reason why the narratives created by these devs are so mealymouthed or milktoasty.  They lack the conviction that can only be granted by experience of actual reality, unfiltered by the helping hand of a nanny police force.  Let us take a look at the roots of humanity and see how the economic principles of scarcity, profit, and transportation can be turned into a truly enjoyable game experience.

Put yourself in the world before megacities.  If you want something, you must be prepared to make it yourself.  You survive only upon your intellect, and the imagination of any others who may be wandering with you.  You subsist on what the earth can provide, or if you are really smart, you manage to create crops and domesticate animals to keep you from moving around so much.  When you kill a deer, you don't get gold pieces, or daggers, or helmets.  You get antlers (if it's a male in-season), and skin, and gut, and fat, and organs, and bones, and flesh.  You use all of those things to create the necessities of your life. The mediocre MMO tends to idealize a wasteful and economically unsound idea of hunting.  One of the main criticisms that American Indians had of early European pioneers was their ability to kill huge numbers of animals, only to take a single part of the animal for use.  This kind of waste not only devastates the environment, but it also leads to greater poverty, since someone could use the parts you leave behind, and you could sell those parts for profit, but instead, you decided to leave money to rot in the field.

Are you starting to see how the mediocre MMO goes wrong?  By granting you items or gold with your kills, instead of the parts of the beast you have killed, the mMMO robs you of a great experience of the real world that could become the foundation for a really great game!  Let me describe the ideal MMORPG's take on hunting, killing, and harvesting, and I'm sure you will agree that this game is off to a great start.

Your character lives in the wilds.  You subsist on hunting, gathering, and some farming.  You and your friends go out in the wilds surrounding your village to hunt deer fairly regularly.  They're pretty hard to catch, so it's a big deal when you manage to bring one back.  When you kill a deer, you are given options to harvest various things.  Taking the skin or antlers is easy, and would simply be a matter of a single click.  Harvesting liver, or heart, or gut would require a mini-game, since it takes some finesse to manage this in the real world.  You are limited by the amount of weight you can carry or drag, and the number of containers you have, but you are encouraged to take as much as you can carry away from the kill.  Anything you leave behind can be harvested or looted by someone happening upon the carcass within a certain amount of time.  When you arrive back at your village, you share, sell, or trade the spoils of your kill.

The antlers are good for making arrowheads and spear tips, or simply for decoration.  Trade them for goblin teeth, which you can grind up for making some types of poisons.
The skin is good for making armor or clothing. Sell it to another player for gold or trade it for other items.
The flesh is good for making foods that restore energy. $$ Cha-ching!
The tail or hooves of a deer may be an important component in a speed potion. $$ Cha-ching!
The organs may be important as food or as components for other spells.  $$ Cha-ching!
(all of these are potential player-driven quests)


You create clothing, weapons, and other necessities from the remains of the deer, all of which you can craft or have crafted in-game to your specifications.  At some point, perhaps a player notices that the armor made from pig skin is sturdier than that made with deer skin.  All of a sudden, you have an incentive to hunt for pigs instead of deer.  Perhaps the amount of food you can get from a single pig is double that from a single deer.  Perhaps it's a longer walk/ride to get to where the pigs are, which is another reason you may choose or not choose to hunt them.  In this way, you and your friends diversify your hunting skills, based upon desire, need, and scarcity.  Now, let's say that at some point, your village learns to domesticate pigs or deer, and to grow crops.  Now you have a reason to build weapons apart from arrows or spears, because you'll have to defend your stores against raids from the neighbors.  All of a sudden, we have created an organic set of quests that adds value, narrative, and LIFE to the MMO.

Instead of this:
Welcome to the world of mMMOvia!  You are a fighter.  You have a sword skill of 5.  Here is your first quest: Raise your sword skill to 10.  Now please kill 150 rats.

The Ideal MMORPG gives you:
We are the people of the village of Uden.  Our lives depend upon your ability to hunt, and your wealth will grow as you become more skilled at hunting and harvesting.  Your family has provided you with a spear and a satchel, but you'll have to make anything else you need.  Today is your rite of passage.  Survive in the wilds for a season, and be successful in the hunt.  Return here when you have something to trade with the village, and you will become a full-fledged member of our tribe.

Let's fast forward to a society that has advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage:
Good morning, youngling.  Today is your rite of passage day!  Today you will be initiated into the defense of our town, Uden.  We survive by our ability to maintain a stored harvest, and by our protection of the livestock.  If you wish to be counted among those who decide the future of our town, you must be willing to shed blood in her defense.  Spend a season standing guard on the fence line, protecting the herds, and marching with scouting parties, and bring the Town Council evidence that you have been successful in defending the town, and you shall be granted full citizenship.

Even further along in development looks thus:
Welcome to the forum on citizenship!  Each of you has deigned to become a living contributor to the greatness of the City of Uden!  Our armies are great, but you could make them greater!  If you wish to become a soldier, please visit with the recruiter, who will be best able to assign you to a watch under an experienced mentor.  Demonstrate your skill and you will be rewarded!

Kind of rambling again, but you get the point.  Story happens when story is allowed to happen.  Hampering the MMO with meaningless numbers and unrealistic quests hinders story!  In each of the examples above, players can create the story, by sharing the events of their rites of passage, and sharing them with other players.  Quests become organic, PLAYER-DRIVEN moments of fun instead of static, NPC-granted moments of farming and harvest of unrealistic prey.

In the Ideal MMORPG, there will be some value to each part of any creature killed.  There will be no unrealistic items found on creatures.  If the goblin is wearing a helmet, you will be able to loot that helmet from him!  If you want goblin guts, you can harvest them.  If you want goblin ears, go for it, be the first in your group of friends to make a goblin ear necklace!  Even rats can be roasted and sold to someone who has no other food!

Skills as natural extensions of the character

Upon the player character's entry into the liminal world of the MMO, skills should not be obvious data sets to which the player attempts to add integers.

Life doesn't work that way. No one writes a resume that states, "I have a problem-solving skill of 132." People say, "I am adept at problem solving," even if they aren't.

In the MMO world, as in real life, skills should be something one possesses and can improve through effort. In real life, There are factors that limit how far one can take any particular skill, but in a game world, we assume everyone has an equal chance to rise as high as he wishes.

That being said, we don't want a scenario where the player character is effectively "in school" learning skills for the better part of his life. This would be too much like the real world. The trick is to create a world where each person can follow his or her individualistic interests and entrepreneurial incentives.

Arriving on the MMO plane of existence, the ideal game would allow each character to notice things in the world with which to interact, be they trees, buildings, rocks, or whatever. Continued interaction with said items should grant the player more information about them, and allow further analysis to become available.

For example,
A character, call him Bob, arrives in our ideal MMO, and is fascinated with the lovely tree near his spawn point. He approaches it, picks a leaf, and uses the game's interface to examine it closer. He is granted information about the leaf itself, but this examination also allows bob to notice the flowers, the fruits, the bark, and the roots of the tree. Examining each of these will allow bob to notice various creatures living in and around the tree, such that he gets an idea of its value as a food source. Bob may also have noticed cloth, and his examination of the tree will tell him that its fibers might be good for making cloth. If he has examined a building, his interface might tell him that the tree's wood might be good for construction. Through all of this, and through his use of the function of examination, Bob's ability to glean information from the world around him increases steadily, and soon, he finds that he has the ability to recognize multiple things about objects he has only just encountered.

Let's take a look at crafting or fighting skills in this context. Instead of deciding to look for monsters that are close enough to his level to grant, and grinding on them for the purpose of adding numbers to the value for swordsmanship, perhaps Bob simply kills a bug, or chases down a rabbit to eat. Each time he does this, his ability to understand the creatures of the world increases, as does his speed, stamina, and skill at killing. Eventually, Bob advances to higher order creatures, and the memories he has of killing lower organisms allow him to understand things like weak points. Doing this organically increases his ability in combat to the point that people around Bob can recognize his fighting skill by looking at him (it appears in their information panel, when they try to examine him. "Bob, an athletic man of medium height, who has the appearance of someone who can handle himself well in a fight."

As for weapon training, the same can be done. Bob finds a piece of wood that can be used as a club, and begins whacking the first nuisance creature with it, we'll call them ugs. After a while, Bob begins to notice that he can kill ugs rather easily, and his skill with that particular type of combat leads him to understand other creatures and weapons as well. When he eventually finds or makes a sword, Bob has a general idea of how to wield it, but will require practice. Eventually, Bob may handle a sword so well that others will notice this ability when they look at him.

At no point should the ideal MMO allow the player character to say, "I have a sword skill of X, therefore I can defeat characters of level Y with great ease."

In fact, the whole point is to have that be a mystery. Knowing that you could get your ass handed to you by almost anything affects your willingness to start swinging a weapon at it. This is an important real-world attribute that should be a part of the game experience. Too many MMOs have hunting parties that are not looking for elephants, or crocodiles, or dragons. They are looking for creatures that are yellow, or orange, or red to them. In this way, the mediocre MMO participates in making the creative process that went into creating the elephant or crocodile meaningless, and thus not worthy of the player's time or appreciation.

The same model can be applied to crafting. Now that Bob has figured out that the wood of the tree he saw is good for crafting, he might make a piece of lumber, and either he or his companion may be able to turn that lumber into a plank for building, or a shield, or a table, or a club with spikes, etc. Making one thing, and repeating that process, will open up other items based upon the expertise earned from the first item. Also, examination of other items (Bob sees a large wooden shield being carried by a friend or a monster, and examines it) will allow Bob the fledgling woodworker to attempt to recreate that item. Ideally, Bob will have one in his possession to imitate, but the one he examined as it passed by in the hand of a goblin will suffice for beginning the crafting. Eventually, Bob's skill at making shields will get to a point where others are able to see that the item is of great quality. The goal of the developer should be to avoid allowing players to say, "I have a woodworking skill of 205, so I can make shields of Double Plus Exquisite Quality, but I can get to triple plus if I twink up with Joe's buff spell.

What about magic, you say? Yes, this model applies! Perhaps Bob, upon examining the tree, notices its connectedness to nature, and begins to become sensitive to the spirit of nature. Soon, he may find that he has the ability to manipulate that spirit in various ways, from making his own or another's skin like tree bark, or causing thorns to grow from a creature's club weapon. Greater use of this ability yields greater proficiency, and also opens up other abilities previously undiscovered. At no point should the developer allow the player to "Get a nature magic skill of 55, allowing him to cast nature spells of level 3." In this, I take a cue from the MMO, "Asheron's Call". Magic, and all skills, really, should have some economy associated with them. If you have learned how to make a great shield or sword, or cast a really killer spell, there should be some risk associated with sharing that information. IF everyone has your shield, there will be no advantage to fighting with that shield. If everyone knows your spell, it should become easy to counter or defend against. As in Asheron's Call, if many people use the spell in question, it should wane in strength as well.

Now that we are talking about powers, it's a good time to point out how the ideal MMO will deal with the strength of combat skills and magic. It should never be allowed for the player to say, "I am level 50, therefore I am basically immune to anyone lower than level 5." You may be level 50 (though ideally this MMO will hide that information as well), and an expert swordsman, but if you have never met a mage who knows how to handle ice, you are in for trouble, even if said mage is only "level 3." Similarly, if you are a proficient swordsman, but have never fought an enemy who uses a spear, you will suffer penalties that should make you think twice before taunting that player or monster. In the same way, some monsters will have the ability to learn from their enemies, such that it is a really bad idea to give a newb the best shield/armor/spell buffs available, and send him against a high level monster. The monster, upon dispatching the newb, may "steal" an item, learn its capabilities, and be that much more difficult to kill thereafter.


In this way, the ideal MMO encourages players to gather, form relationships, and share information with each other in a meaningful way, and prevents the tendency for players to share information with everyone without any filters. Also, it encourages players to gather and fight or work together. David Wilson had a brilliant idea about that last point. Skills regularly used in unison should eventually become cooperative. If you fight at Bob's side regularly, you and Bob should become more adept at fighting together, and you will experience a bonus to your chances of victory in combat with that player. The same should hold for crafting. If you build shields made with Bob's lumber, and more so if you work in the same area together, your items should be a little better quality than if you picked up a random piece of wood and made a shield from it.

Crafting

This interchange defines everything that is wrong with the idea of crafting in current MMORPGs:
(from http://www.massively.com/2008/10/24/swtor-classes-part-2/)

You can't talk about classes in particular, but are you going to include anything in the game that isn't combat oriented? Smugglers, tradesmen, that sort of thing.

Gordon: We will definitely have crafting.
Rich: The core classes we'll start off with will be based off or heroic, combat oriented experiences ... Star Wars, right? We are going to have crafting, because that's a big part of MMOs. We're going to implement crafting in a way that 'feels' right for Star Wars. For the longest time we struggled with that. You know, crafting at its heart is not really what the universe is about. But one of the designers came up with a great idea, which I can't talk about because it's not implemented yet, of how to incorporate crafting into Star Wars without forcing a hero to do something that's very non-heroic.

This highlighted text captures the abject idiocy of game developers everywhere. what they really mean is:

We haven't found a way to incorporate crafting in any meaningful way into our very limited understanding of what a heroic story/game is, and so we leave it as an afterthought, and it never gets fully developed, and no one is motivated to solve this problem.

Many games have tried, and every one I have tried has fallen miserably short in terms of making crafting meaningful and fun. Here is a list of mistakes that keep recurring in every MMO to date:

1. Focusing too heavily on loot items does not encourage players to get involved in crafting. Often, the items crafted by players in no way compare in power or versatility to readily available loot items. This further limits the will of the player to sit down and craft. Who wants to spend valuable game time making items that no one wants?

2. Crafting is treated like combat (another broken system), such that in order to achieve a high level of skill, one must grind out thousands of useless items. Without getting off track talking about how boring combat is in MMOs, it is important that the IDEAL MMORPG contain minigames that require both player skill and character skill to accomplish the task. This is true of both combat and crafting.

3. Crafting does absolutely nothing to involve the player--all too often, crafting items forces the player to sit and watch a loader bar over. and. over. and. over. ad infinitum, ad nauseam. No one wants to sit and click the same button over and over all night. This automatically places the players who specialize in crafting in the "I am more capable of withstanding horrendous boredom" camp. See above, mini-games are the answer. A set of keystrokes, or typed commands, or some other way to involve the player in creating items. This necessitates keeping the player from having to repeat the game 100s of times to achieve a decent skill. One way to do this is to have a sliding scale for the number of items created on each successful passage of the minigame.

4. Crafted items are listed in readily available databases, such that one is further bored to tears, because you know that in order to make UBER-Widgets, you have to craft 10000 widgets, 1000 intermediate widgets, 1000 advanced widgets, etc. In order to make crafting interesting, there has to be an element of mystery to the process. What happens if I make this out of wood instead of copper? Copper instead of steel? Additionally, the types of items one can create are cookie-cutter, and offer no distinction from items crafted by another player. The Ideal MMORPG will allow players to customize their items, either through ready-made templates, or through open source 3D drafting software, such as that inherent in "Second Life." Of course, this necessitates tightening the EULA so that created items can be kept in theme with the MMO (i.e., no hot pink phalluses of whomping).

5. Current MMOs focus WAY to heavily on the "everyone must be able to become a hero" philosophy, and not enough on the "everyone must be having fun all the time" philosophy. Statements like the one above capture that. Part of the fun in an MMO is attempting to flesh out a character, and find his niche. Of course, no one wants to be a peon data entry clerk, and the Ideal MMORPG should not force someone to be so, but most current MMOs respond to this by giving every player a "hero in a box" formula, such that no achievement has any real meaning. All you have is an avatar with shiny clothes, and you have no meaningful connection with the character you created.

6. (Probably the most important) Economies in MMOs are not equipped to add incentive to crafting in any way. There is no way to create a hero-quest style MMORPG without some kind of economy. How can one rise "against all odds" when there are no real odds? I found this to be true when I played Asheron's call and Star Wars Galaxies. No matter how skilled I became at making something, I could never sell it, because someone was always willing to run through town dropping them on the ground for free. The ideal MMORPG will make players cautious about how they spend their hard-earned gold and loot. As a result of having a stable economy, the works of player-crafters will be central to the daily workings of all members of the server community. NPCs in towns should be selling only player-made items. Scarcity and difficulty should be factors inherent in the player's daily struggle in game. Choosing to do one thing over another should have real consequences. In this way, heroism can result from simply surviving a day in game, and craftsmen can join the ranks of heroes by creating items that helped people survive. (if you craft arrows and bows, and a town manages to survive a zombie onslaught because you were able to create enough in time, you are a hero!).

Crafting, it turns out, is central and essential to making the Ideal MMORPG work. It is the basis for the game's community, and automatically encourages players to form relationship. Unfortunately, too many MMORPGs leave it on the editing room floor, or add it as an afterthought, because they really don't understand how economies work, and thus, can not create them in an MMO.

Classes, Schmasses!

In the ideal MMO, classes are things earned by achievement, not tracks on which one starts out. Allowing the player to choose a class at the outset of character creation seems like a great way to enable free will in game play, but such choices almost always manifest not as liberating actions, but as limiting ones. Automatically, when you click that button and choose a class, you remove entire sets of opportunities from that character, and you deny one very fundamental aspect of humanity that becomes even more amazing in game-play--the ability to create and recreate oneself.

It is much more desirable to explore what one's character *might* become instead of choosing from day one what he is and shall always be. The ideal MMORPG allows one to play a character according to his own wishes and goals, and does not hinder that development by saying, "No. You chose to be a 'fighter' therefore you can never wear robes."

While it is utterly important to make sure that classes not be restricted in silly things like what clothing they can wear, this issue goes much, much deeper than the aesthetic.

Arriving in the ideal, MMO, a player should have every opportunity available to him, and be limited only by what choices he refuses to make.

In the real world, we have only one life, and so, changing our minds about what we are to be bears a heavy cost. The ideal MMO can make trying on new identities, careers, and roles very fun and enjoyable, but only if they are actually available for exploration.

Never should a player be put in the position of saying, "I am a level 40 mage." This is the kind of statement one makes when asked by the GM what character he would like to use in the game. Statistics like level, classification, skill level, etc., are all resources used by the GM to make a challenging and enjoyable adventure for the player. They are supposed to be forgotten by the player, who is engrossed in enjoying that adventure.

It's one thing to say, "You aren't strong enough to lift that axe," or "You don't know enough about nature magic in order to use this staff as anything but a walking stick," but it is completely another to say, "You will never be able to wear this armor because you chose to be a mage."

This is one thing that Asheron's call mixed up and confused. On the one hand, one could acquire any of the skills in the game, regardless of his starting class. On the other, the classes so stunted certain skills that it became pointless to choose some of them. This brings me to my next point. Discrete character classes both hinder player's choices, and reveal bias in the developers.

Everyone has played an RPG where it was obvious that the developers would like you to choose a particular class to complete the game. We all have felt the disappointment inherent in getting midway through the adventure, only to realize that we lack a skill that is crucial to the movement of the plot, because we decided to think outside the box and play, "WARRIORS OF STEEL" as a magic only wizard class, more than likely added at the end of production at the request of marketing folks who realized that a warrior-only game will alienate a large group of consumers.

The answer to this is not to do what many MMOs have, i.e., retooling classes, adding to the list of classes, renaming classes, nerfing/boosting classes, or allowing multi-class characters. The answer is to do the hard work inherent in allowing characters to develop themselves.

Perhaps in-game there is a training school where one can earn a title: Royal Guardsman, or "Wizard of the Second Degree" but apart from plot-driven or character assigned titles, there should never be anything resembling a hardwired class into which players must fall. This is one thing that "Elder Scrolls" did right. They had classes, but it was a much more interesting experience if you created your own "adventurer" class. All skills and abilities should be made available to all characters, and only their choices should dictate what they choose to use or to be.

Paul's RPG Background

After writing three posts to the blog, DW Reminded me that I had not properly introduced myself to the reader, so I have decided to come back and redo the first post so that you have some idea where I came from, and why I have authority to make sweeping generalizations about games :).

I grew up in the days before the Internet. From 1985-1989, I dabbled in table-top RPGs and card games like Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma Wars, Top Secret, Cyberpunk, Star Wars, Up Front, and a few others whose names I can't recall. Most of my actual experiences with these games were negative, but in my imagination, they remained the most awesome idea ever: a game that allows you to use your imagination to create and play in any story you choose! Unfortunately, I never met anyone who was into those games that didn't have some kind of major baggage or social ineptitude. (Perhaps I'll dedicate a future entry to these characters...) At any rate, when I wasn't feebly attempting to play RPGs or talking about how awesome they were with the few normal friends I had, I was reading Choose Your Own Adventure books (mostly fantasy stuff, with a little sci-fi every now and then). I was also reading a bunch of straight-up fantasy, sci-fi, and horror novels. I read Tolkein and Lewis twice, and most of Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality, along with almost all of Gibson's cyberpunk stuff, and many, many titles by Stephen King. I also became an avid collector of Marvel X-Men comics in high school.

When personal electronics began to come on the scene, I spent a lot of time playing on the Atari 2600 at friends' houses, but my own consoles were an Odyssey 2 and an Intellivision with Intellivoice. I did get razzed by my Atari friends for having those two consoles. I was one of the first kids in my group of friends to have a Tandy 1000, which turned out to be a pretty kick-ass game machine in the day. I learned to type by playing Sierra's Quest games (mostly King's Quest, but also Space Quest, Hero's Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry):
siwm/
swin/
sim/
CRAP!!!!
SWIM/
whew!
Look in teh chest/
-you can't do that here.
WHAT!? I'm right in front of it, oh,
Look in the chets/
-You can't do that here.
OMG WHY NOT!!! Oh..
Look in the chest/

To this day, I have never been formally trained in IT or in electronics of any kind, and yet my whole family considers me the go-to guy for tech issues. Everything I learned about technology in some way relates to my obsession with games. Almost every new title I brought home required some kind of edited Autoexec.bat or Config.sys file, so my buddies and I would get together and force the Tandy to play the game we wanted to play. I was pretty good at working with MS-DOS, and when windows came out, that knowledge helped me to understand and make it function better.  I played many different games constantly throughout my teens and twenties, but my favorites were always the fantasy/RPG types.

Other Fantasy/RPG titles I played on the PC were:

• Zork
• Wishbringer
• The Bard's Tale (I can still hear my PC's internal speaker squawking out the theme song for this one!)
• Castle Wolfenstein
• Defenders of the Crown
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Lands of Lore
• Loom
• Myth I, II, & III
• Oregon Trail
• Pool of Radiance
• Sid Meier's Covert Action
• Some of the Ultima titles
• Prince of Persia
• Thief: The Dark Project (and the two sequels--LOVE THIS SERIES)
• Vampire: The Masquerade

In the early 90s, when one of my tech buddies showed me electronic mail, and later, X-windows, I was HOOKED on the potential for internet gaming.  I skipped the BBS culture completely, and dived into the realm of IRC RPG.  I dabbled a bit in MUDs, but the lack of graphics made it a hard sell.  When Diablo came out in 1997, it became my world.  To this day, I sometimes wake up with the haunting theme from Tristram stuck in my head (Shtay a wh-ile and lishten!)

Imagine my thrill when Asheron's Call was released in 1999 (somehow, I never played Ultima Online--to this day, I have no idea how I missed this!)!  Finally, my two loves had merged: the ability to create a character and play as that character in a graphical world with lots of other players online!  Everquest came out that same year, but I only had enough money for a subscription to one game, so I only played AC, but many of my friends online were Eversmack addicts as well.  In addition to AC, I have also played:

• Anarchy Online (played an engineer, but only for a couple weeks)
• Dark Age of Camelot (played as Artfull Dodger, an Albion assassin)
• Earth & Beyond (Played Mereor, a merchant)
• EVE Online (played a free trial, but quit when I saw how time consuming it was going to become)
• Neverwinter Nights (not technically an MMO, but I did play it online a few times)
• Shadowbane (I played a Shadowclan Firekei--one of my best MMO experiences ever!)
• Silkroad Online (plug and chug, non stop, no real RP)
• Star Wars Galaxies (my first real attempt at being a crafter)

These days, I am mostly a console gamer, but I continue to wait for the release of a truly great MMORPG; one that merges all that is great about table-top gaming and computer grpahic adventures; the Ideal MMORPG!