The thing I miss the most about Eve Online is the immersive free market economy. I long for a true, in-depth economic MMO more than the space veneer around the order book. Buy low, sell high. Specialize in industry, trading, transportation. Add a little bit of light PvP to inject chaos and it's more fun than playing the stock market.
(I am actually designing such a game, but I'm open to suggestions)
My main activity in the game was stealing loot from under carebears' noses to sell for profit. A true rat scouring the battlefields for scraps. That must say a lot about me.
Dune: Awakening tried this. Was kind of fun while it lasted (and before the bug stole all of my resources I was trying to sell. The support was zero help on getting that resolved. That killed it for me immediately).
Usually I don't care about the economy in MMOs, but in New World it was fun and different when it launched. I played almost exclusively for the economy. Buy and sell orders and separate auction houses between cities. There was many unexpected ways to make money with trading and crafting. The only major source of gold was a single main story quest early in the game, so if you weren't careful you would go broke and struggle. The economy wasn't that advanced, but it was fun watching the players ping pong back and forth with supply and demand.
The crafting systems were so trivial that didn't make the economy game of New World particularly engaging. One core mechanic I seek is the division of labor; if everyone can and is expected to become a master in every skill, there is no niche to corner, and trivialises the experience.
There are very few games (actually, only EVE comes to mind with its skill system) that require you to specialize if you want to compete over everybody else.
I don't like how EVE is run, and the pay-to-win mechanics added over the years to entice the whales.
I'm looking at the problem with the eyes of a prospective game dev, and saying that there should be more games focused on free market economy, which is often just a half-arsed mechanic on the side, not the core game.
Problem with EVE is that they did not have a solution for the problem of resource accumulation from the start. It was mitigated to some degree by great wars of old, and then wormhole space, but then they a) sold out to koreans with their interesting approach to MMOs, and b) merged the chinese shard. This did not help at all.
Now.. Py3 is nice, and I guess that move signals that at last they pay attention to engine instead of bolting on useless p2w crap, but to really revive eve this is not it.
In my opinion (joined EVE in 2006, still own a JF and few carriers there), what is needed is a massive sink for all the accumulated assets. Idk, expand the universe like tenfold. Then it would be fun again.
edit: also ditch all the nullsec sov mechanics and revert to something resembling the pre-TCU state. I can't for the life of me think of a reason why they chose to die on the hill of not adding more systems.
While I broadly disagree with much of this, I have been advocating for years that expanding the universe would indeed dispel much of the issues with the power disparity between groups, as well as encourage more involved logistics and stuff like that.
I played EVE for many years, and I really hated the addition of skill injectors. When I first started playing, the only way to get your skills up was to spend the time training them. Now it just takes real money cash.
There's a legitimate argument for some P2W mechanics, though. To keep a game going you need new players, and if you're looking at losing every PvP encounter for years as you skill up your character you probably won't stay.
The thing with EVE is that, even with all the ISK and SP in the game, you can't just buy your way to a win - you can't buy skill. You can have perfect skills and buy the best ship and modules and all that, but if you don't know how to fly, you're going to lose your ship immediately and it won't even be a fight.
That, coupled with your second paragraph (the new player experience being so rough) and I've never really been too upset about the stuff CCP sells.
I enjoyed off world trading company but it’s a very different kind of economic simulator- much shorter and gamified loops - which isn’t a criticism, just not exactly the same itch.
(I am actually designing such a game, but I'm open to suggestions)
My main activity in the game was stealing loot from under carebears' noses to sell for profit. A true rat scouring the battlefields for scraps. That must say a lot about me.