This seems to jump to a gun. I will agree that free markets are always the best from an economics stand point. Any barriers to trade are always worse for the net market, one of the few things all economists agree on this applies to anything from tariffs in the real world to clans providing barriers for transactions and then creating their own fiat currencies.I agree fully. The number one issue revolving the economies imo is that gold has no power anymore... people are running out of things to buy so they no longer value gold as much they used to. Trying to buy rares is extremely hard on my world because the rich don’t need gold anymore... that is a problem (when the games currency has no power)
100% open market is by far the best way to correct all these economic problems, but people are sadly too deep inside their closed off walls within their clans for something like that to happen.
That being said, there is a certain allure to clans that is especially prevalent in the small scale that is the varying servers. Clans make it easier for individuals to add in criteria that works best for them as a group and then to engage the surrounding server environment as a group. The issue is that whereas in the past (falgren era) the game supported multiple clans from having higher proportional drop rates as well as end game difficulty matching a level that supported multiple clans, now a days the game is built to require extensive numbers to kill EG bosses and the drop rates are more so that if a faucet in a desert trickling put a drop of water at a time in hopes of filling an ocean... The more clans that exist, the better everything flows as players have more choices and as such the demand for players in clans outweighs the supply of players looking to join clans.
This creates a situation that I would call the best of both worlds. You keep the clan centered atmosphere that some players really enjoy, while at the same time you increase the power of individual players to the point where clans as an entity carry less weight to the point where both the economies increase (whether it be some clans using open econ systems or just general trade of goods as players leave one clan for another) while at the same time clans work as both a social group and as a raiding group to help make it easier to get gear.
I agree that from a numbers standpoint it would be great if every server had an open economy in terms of gold value, but I would disagree that gold value is the only variable that should be considered, and as such I would argue for other alternatives. Furthermore, VR can not enforce an open market approach, however there are some overlapping alternatives that they could push for. These overlapping approaches I feel are increase drop rates, decreasing boss difficulty in terms of numbers required (I love a difficult boss like necro or lich, but dislike needing almost a whole server there to kill it :/ ), and adding horizontal content to further diminish the weight the repetitive “camp and grind” playstyle which further diminished pull for singular dominant clans. This isn’t anti-dominant clan. If a server really lovers it’s clan structure, this would perpetuate it, but it also makes it easier if some players want to splinter for them to be able to do so without switching servers or without negatively affecting the other clan established. It enables non hostile competition I would argue.
Overall this is just my opinion. I’m a more casual player now so I more so argue for more lax game approaches, and maybe this is stance is just a victim of that playstyle I have now come to after 6 years of serious playing.