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A first look at RF Online
Heartless Gamer wrote to mention a set of beta impressions from RF Online at GamerGod. RF Online is a MMOG that's been out for a little while already in the east, but has now been published here in the U.S.. The launch date for the U.S. service was yesterday, the 21st. From the article: "If I had to point out a single aspect that keeps the pre-30 game fun, I would have to say that it's the totally eliminated down time between fights. Potion use, or "potting" as the locals put it, is a vital part of the game and the reason why healer classes are unnecessary enough for only one faction to get them. Potions are sold on NPC vendors for bargain prices, enough that it's easy to afford to keep 99-potion piles."
The lack of any type of healing ability/item that could be easily/affordibly gotten by any class has always been one of my biggest gripes with most mainstream MMORPGs. I always liked being able to stock potions in Diablo and go out and fight on my own.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
I played Ragnarok Online a while back on a private server with about a few thousand players. On this server, MP potions (a.k.a. grape juice) were sold dirt cheap, so magic such as healing spells and special attacks could be used indefinitely and levelling runs could go on for a long time. This was good because levelling went relatively quickly.
Unfortunately, this was problematic for the economy. The problem was that every enemy in Ragnarok drops at least some sort of trivial item that can be sold to NPC vendors, so when a player amasses hundreds of these items, their stash of gold gets pretty high. Since a lot of the trade in the game goes through player characters of the merchant class, and large sums of money were being collected, the merchants could continually raise prices to maximize their returns; inflation went through the roof. All the while, grape juice was held at low prices because they were easily fabricated by merchants and flooded the market unlike rare weapons, armors, and other items.
The adminstrators of the servers eventually had to institute a money wipe, where every player's fortune was cut by 90%. I stopped playing at this point.