Farmer & Virtual Economies
Randy Farmer has just released a position paper called "KidTrade: A Design for an eBay-resistant Virtual Economy" which he'll be presenting and defending at State of Play 2. In it, he argues that MMOG designers have the choice to build virtual economies that are compatible or not with external markets (eg eBay).
He suggests that there are virtual economy models that are resistant to eBaying, and which (talking to game devs) "may be suited better to your property, especially if externalizing virtual object markets will be harmful to the health and/or profitability of your product." He outlines one instantiation of such a model for an "eBay-resistant economy, designed for children to trade scarce virtual objects without fear of being cheated by smarter, craftier (adult) traders who are generating a lifestyle-supporting income from eBay-ing the kids’ poor trades."
Lots to parse out here...
Posted by Dan Hunter on October 13, 2004 | Permalink
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Comments
May there be many innovations in this direction. WTG Randy!
Posted Oct 13, 2004 8:38:49 AM | link
Randy,
Great paper. A few questions/comments, though:
What's to stop n colluding players from surpassing your liquidity threshold? If those n players can control when an offer appears, anonymity is broken, which means that they can callude to centralize items.
Once that happens, isn't their a market for Blockbuster? Go on eBay to bid for 20 minutes with the best item (or pay me via PayPal). If I have (via previous technique) managed to powergame ahead of the pack, I now have lots of the best items, so it seems like a rental model would work. Plus, if I organize so that mutliple people are playing my account, then Blockbuster is always open and you can effectively borrow items for more than 1 session.
This system doesn't block account sales, so if anyone can get the "best" stuff then there is a market for their account, right?
Posted Oct 13, 2004 11:03:27 AM | link
Very interesting!
Personally, I think the easiest way, and most likely the eventual solution for many properties, to keep items/etc off of eBay will be to simply integrate RL$ into the VW. Even for MMORPGs like EverQuest I think this could easily be done by 'a Sony' simply selling 'Rubies' for US$1, and buying them back for US$0.80, and allowing the Rubies to be traded on the market just like everything else. For an even simpler version, 'a Sony' could simply go to charging 15 Rubies a month for player upkeep, and even price all their other services in Rubies, for example, instead of charging $50 to transfer a character they could have an in-world portal that cost 65 Rubies for your character to travel from the realm(shard) of Bristlebane to the realm(shard) of Xev (etc). My guess is that in many ways this sort of model increases the RPing level of the game.
That said, I think that Randy's proposal is trying to do many more things than simply keep trades off of eBay. Its clear that this proposal has some clear educational value in that it is trying to better highlight many of the core economic principles that often get lost in the context of virtual game economies.
Personally, I see no reason why this model wouldn't be successful in the goals stated in the paper. I'll also preface this with saying that there are many economic goals that other games have that would not be accomplished by this proposal. Without direct trade possible there is little social value gained by being the best crafter, and there is little value with socializing with thousands of players before you find the best crafter for your character. I'm not saying that economics is the best way to encourage socializing, but what I am saying is that I think it's very important that when designing an economy that you figure out what you want to accomplish with it. Clearly this is a great model for encouraging kids to learn about economics, and an awful model if a company wanted to encourage 3rd party content or players the ability to 'brand' themselves as Master Crafters.
While I agree with Cory that if players really want to eBay they will no doubt find a way, there is much to be said for economies like this that seek to greatly decrease the external trading levels. At the end of the day, economies are about scale and even a small decrease can have exponential effects on external trade. There is also something to be said for perceived effects on Game-Play. I think a good example of this is CoH. While I am sure there are tons of players 'twinking' their Alts, if you lined-up 5 twinkers next to 5 role players at the same level, and I'm not sure how anyone could tell them apart *visually*. In many ways CoH has hidden all tell-tale signs of economic valuation and in turn I hear very few complaints of eBay influencing the game-play.
Hide the economic value like CoH and add 'Rubies' and I think Developers are going to have a mix that takes a great step in a nice direction for my game style. Do as Randy is proposing, and I think you are taking a huge step in the right direction for how kids play today. Again, I don't think there is a 'right' answer in economics, I do think there are better answers and that they are highly subjective depending on the market you are going after.
-bruce
Posted Oct 13, 2004 1:43:23 PM | link
One thought: Markets tend to move to least-cost operations. If NYSE and NASDAQ offer the same kinds of trading but NASDAQ is easier to deal with in some way, NASDAQ is where trading will go. (That's why the EQ Tunnel bazaar moved to the Bazaar zone - trading was easier there.)
Having no currency in the system is a cost/obstacle factor. It may create some odd pressures. Something may become currency - some small Thing, low weight, valuable, stackable, divisible. Not sure how that would play out, though. Maybe there's no way that the markets could invent a replacement currency, but they will try very hard.
Anyway, the idea of all in-world trade being anonymous, except for lending: good stuff.
OTOH: in ToonTown I guess people are coming up with ingenious ways to talk when they are not supposed to. Laying down bricks that spell out their Friend-me codes, for example. Can we be sure that the traders' identities will always be anonymous?
The one-for-one trading feature: It means, the prices of all objects are the same. You can make the system produce them at the same rate, but demands will not be equal, so prices will not be equal. I think some things will end up being junk, others untraded because they are too valuable to trade for any other object 1 for 1.
But I like the no-gifting idea. Some riffs on it: impose a price floor and price ceiling, don't allow trades outside the normal price range. Charity is then giving someone a price break, or lending, or, performing a service for them. It's noble! Much more noble than dropping 50P on a level 1.
All in all, much food for thought here.
Posted Oct 13, 2004 1:59:04 PM | link
Hmm, I would expect adult players in the KidTrade system to start using something--most likely consumables--as an alternate currency, just like heads on Habitat, strings on muds, and feathers in Asheron's Call.
Because they are consumable, they will likely be in sufficient supply; will be backed by the common need for them--particularly if they are something there is an ongoing need for; and will be accumulated.
To me, this raises the following questions:
- Is there any reasonable way to prevent creation of a currency?
- We're essentially talking about intentionally retarding economic development in order to solve the eBay problem. Many game design problems with MMOs can be interpreted as intentional retardation of human progress. What underlies this general approach?
Posted Oct 13, 2004 2:18:00 PM | link
There are great comments on terranova.blogs.com and Habitat Chronicles in response to this paper. I'm going to try to address the key points in one post in both locations. :-)
Edward Castronova at first says:
>May there be many innovations in this direction. WTG Randy!
Thanks, I'm just trying to stir the pot a bit before we all settle on the one-true-model-with-all-its-warts.
Cory Ondrejka asks:
>What's to stop n colluding players from surpassing your liquidity threshold?
Nothing, but to what end? (See my next answer.)
>If those n players can control when an offer appears, anonymity is broken, which means that they can collude to centralize items.
Not perfectly. The entire market participates in those trades, so they don't completely control that offer. You never know which conspirator will fulfill the terms of the trade. The conspirators are just as likely to give their subjectively good thing away for some other kid's less good thing as to a fellow conspirator. I suggest that this scenario reduces to a varient prisoner's dilemma (or some variant with random unknown agents?) This is why I added the footnote:
[9] The system could also detect odd trading patterns and inject its own offers into the market to correct any imbalances.
In other words, the market maker (service provider) could happily interfere with this pattern with no harm to the economy, as each trade stands on its own merits.
>This system doesn't block account sales, so if anyone can get the "best" stuff then there is a market for their account, right?
Absolutely. See this footnote:
[4] Note: This model does nothing to address the sale of characters on eBay. …
In fact, a paid service account as described should be worth approximately:
monthly-membership-$ x (current-number-of-simple-things + number-of-sets * average-number-of-simple-things-in-a-set) / monthly-thing-faucet-rate
Consumables and wear-and-tear mean that the account will usually sell for less than it cost to generate. Since any thing can be traded for another, there is no particular reason to assume a premium on individual thing value.
Bruce Boston is next:
>Personally, I think the easiest way, and most likely the eventual solution for many properties, to keep items/etc off of eBay will be to simply integrate RL$ into the VW.
This is not an option for KidTrade, and ignores the primary requirement of the service. I'll let others comment on this idea.
>there are many economic goals that other games have that would not be accomplished by this proposal. Without direct trade possible there is little social value gained by being the best crafter, and there is little value with socializing with thousands of players before you find the best crafter for your character.
Cory, are you going to let this comment go without comment? :-) Some might say that Second Life's social lifeblood is crafting, even for those who don't sell/trade/allow copies of their works.
>I think it's very important that when designing an economy that you figure out what you want to accomplish with it.
Amen, brother. This is one of the primary points of this paper. I just want us to think about our economic models and ask what we want them to do for us.
Edward Castronova then follows up with an observation that Raph Coster echos:
Ted> Having no currency in the system is a cost/obstacle factor. …Something may become currency - some small Thing, low weight, valuable, stackable, divisible. Not sure how that would play out, though. Maybe there's no way that the markets could invent a replacement currency, but they will try very hard.
Raph> I would expect adult players in the KidTrade system to start using something--most likely consumables--as an alternate currency, just like heads on Habitat, strings on muds, and feathers in Asheron's Call.
Congratulations! You both win the prize for being the first to post the answer to one of the 'exercise for the reader' footnotes.
If you read carefully, there is a line in the market design that addresses this issue:
Offers are constructed graphically and always one for one.[8]
This sets the price of every individual thing at exactly one other thing.
The footnote says:
[8] Another exercise for the audience: How does the market change if you allow many-for-one offers? How about many-for-many?
The answer to challenge in the footnote is: One or more defacto currencies appear in the market.
Ted's comments continue:
>Can we be sure that the traders' identities will always be anonymous?
That isn't a requirement of the model. If the users can chat with each other, they still can't do a personal, private trade. The only identity hiding is that no one knows who's offers are who's and who fulfilled them.
>The one-for-one trading feature: It means, the prices of all objects are the same. You can make the system produce them at the same rate, but demands will not be equal, so prices will not be equal. I think some things will end up being junk, others untraded because they are too valuable to trade for any other object 1 for 1.
This is something to test. I'm not sure that it's true, but I'll bet it's driving your economist-nature crazy. :-)
>But I like the no-gifting idea. Some riffs on it: impose a price floor and price ceiling, don't allow trades outside the normal price range…
This is the kind of riffing I was hoping for. Yeah!
Besides the comment on defacto currency above, Raph said:
>To me, this raises the following questions:
>- Is there any reasonable way to prevent creation of a currency?
I think my model accomplishes this, but acknowledge it is currently only a theoretical model. On the other hand, even assuming it does prevent a currency, I don't know how far we could generalize it.
I'd rephrase the question: Do we need to prevent the creation of a currency? Or, perhaps better: Does the creation of a currency lead us on the slippery-slope to eBay?
>- We're essentially talking about intentionally retarding economic development in order to solve the eBay problem. Many game design problems with MMOs can be interpreted as intentional retardation of human progress. What underlies this general approach?
Whoa! Is that completely true? Sure, KidTrade is very non-Hayekian, but does the anonymous trade nature of a stock market really a retarded economic development? I think there are many things we can tease out of various market dynamics to create different models to meet different goals in our virtual worlds.
Finally, only on Habitat Chronicles, Duane Roelands says:
>The model you propose does seem very well-suited to a children's game, but I do see difficulty in adapting it to adult play. Specifically, the common desire to own more and/or better "stuff" than the other players in the game.
This, more than anything, is the weakness of using KidTrade in this discussion. It may be an outlier, fit for only, if anything, a small portion of the greater virtual world audience. But then again, who says there needs to be one grand-unified model of virtual economics. Honestly, if every virtual world must (in the nature-of-the-universe-sense) always contend with an eBay aftermarket, I'll be sorely disappointed in my fellow designers. But, rather than just complain, I figured I'd put-up-or-shut up. :-)
Randy
Posted Oct 13, 2004 11:32:10 PM | link
Randy,
The focus on the target audience seems excellent!
I only have one comment. You mention on the paper: "They all wear out with use, so the kids learn not to abuse their things. This discourages antisocial hoarding behavior."
Intuitively the opposite feels true - 'Anything that wears out is warehoused'.
Posted Oct 14, 2004 12:24:05 AM | link
Randy> Not perfectly. The entire market participates in those trades, so they don't completely control that offer.
Doesn't have to be perfect, just needs to provide an advantage, right? You have a system that allows a single power gamer (or group) to gain an advantage. I agree with Andres that things wearing out actually makes eBay more useful and encourages KidBlockbuster.
Also, since you don't allow other currencies (1:1 trading) the only viable currency is US$. Even if you assume that IGE doesn't enter KidTrade, I think that the difficulty of acquiring the "cool" items encourages general payment for loan behavior. Since the payments will be out of band, you'll have no real way of tracking this. Plus, since they're kids, most of the payments will be from "borrowed" parent/adult credit cards, resulting in lots of angry parents :-).
Randy> An eBay compatible virtual economy is (now) a design choice.
Folks get unhappy with me when I make blanket statements like "you can't escape eBay in MMOs" but I think the fact that a really well thought out design by one of the smartest folks in this space *still* has plenty of exploits is informative.
Randy> Cory, are you going to let this comment go without comment? :-) Some might say that Second Life's social lifeblood is crafting, even for those who don't sell/trade/allow copies of their works.
SL is getting large enough that attempting to categorize any single behavior as the "social lifeblood" is probably a mistake. That being said, I thought Bruce was saying that for emphasis, not as a serious assertion.
Bruce> Personally, I think the easiest way, and most likely the eventual solution for many properties, to keep items/etc off of eBay will be to simply integrate RL$ into the VW.
This depends. What are you charging per transaction? What chargeback policies do you support? Is there a big enough market to demand barter in addition/instead of US$? Does the third party make dispute resolution and fraud resolution easier? Plus, if you think that US$ for time is OK, then why would you want to keep eBay out (unless you think that taxing the exchanges is the best long-term strategy)?
Posted Oct 14, 2004 12:47:24 AM | link
Cory says:
>Folks get unhappy with me when I make blanket statements like "you can't escape eBay in MMOs" but I think the fact that a really well thought out design by one of the smartest folks in this space *still* has plenty of exploits is informative.
Wow! Such praise and criticism is one sentence!
Dude, "plenty" of exploits? Name two. You think you have one credible challenge, but I can't tell because still don't understand the threat (and why the mitigation means I've already mentioned don't address it.) Perhaps we can address this in person at SOP II, and I'll post the summary for everyone after the event.
There's no way I'll accept a blanket "you can't escape eBay in MMOs" - there's always a the question of scope. Exactly what do you want to avoid being on eBay? Clearly there are already products mentioned (CoH and ToonTown) that have drastically different 'eBay' compatibility profiles than EQ2/SL/ACx/etc.
BTW, this is the first peer-review of this design. I never claimed it was perfect. To do that I'd have to build it... Then we would all know exactly how imperfect it really is. :-)
Posted Oct 14, 2004 2:36:25 AM | link
Very interesting paper and some neat ideas. I think the most important point is right at the beginning, which is that the acquisition of items is not driven by labor time invested. That goes to one part of the problem in a fundamental way.
The eBay economy for MMOGs depends centrally on an exchange between players who have surplus real-world labor time to invest in the game and players who have surplus real-world money but no labor time. If surplus labor time no longer has any kind of relation to acquisitive capacity, no other structural change to a MMOG economy is needed to interrupt the usual underpinnings of an eBay circulation.
But.
The problem I see is that the KidTrade design still centers on aquisitiveness, that it is thing-centered and avatar-centered, meaning that the player has a persistent avatar who represents him/her in the virtual world who acquires persistent goods, and the more items that are acquired, the more advantages of various sorts (even if only aesthetic) accrue to the player's persistent avatar. Decay helps deal with this problem a bit--you don't acquire objects forever, and therefore don't permanently stockpile more and more and more. But that also helps to aggravate an issue: as long as there is a reason to acquire more and more to differentiate or empower an avatar in a virtual world, there is a powerful incentive to evade or elude structured restrictions.
This raises the question of why players hoard or want to have more items in an item-centered or acquisitive MMOG. In many MMOGs, that's because players have come to expect that even common consumables may have unexpected value because developers may at a later date alter the relative power of the consumable within the gameworld while leaving all previous iterations of it intact. So for one, acquisitiveness is an artifact of the temporality of a persistent world: you hoard against the possibility of unanticipated changes to the environment.
But players also hoard and acquire because items provide not just a "real" kind of differentation between players but also a social differentiation. The "real" is that in most MMOs, items alter your ability to extract value from the gameworld--if value comes from monsters, items that make you more powerful or efficient at killing monsters allow you to gain more value more quickly, etc.
KidTrade eliminates that, but it doesn't eliminate the use of objects as a form of social differentiation: the signifier of one's unique identity within the gameworld. In fact, as I read it, you're depending on that. This also motivates players to exert control over the items available to them. What you're sort of doing is randomizing the resources that players can use to craft their avatar's social identity within the gameworld and then hoping that players will use the marketplace offered to them to exchange what they acquire for the items that they really want to use to craft their own identities.
This is what I think needs the most thought, because this actually provides a very, very powerful incentive to control or manipulate markets. You might assume that the player's real-world aesthetics are what will drive their trading in this regard: say I like the color orange and I get a blue item. I offer it on the market looking for orange. Ideally I anonymously exchange with someone who prefers the color blue. Now we both have avatars that suit our sense of virtual identity, and we have perfect equity between us. I got one item, he got one item, and we both satisfied our preferences through a marketplace (and hopefully had "fun" trying to do so).
That's one part of it--it's why black, let's say, is a commonly desired coloring option in most MMOs, because players perceive it to make avatars look very bad-ass. Even when black is being used heavily, players will use it.
But the other part of it is that players will use objects to socially differentiate their avatars in relationship to their (perceived or real) rarity, and therefore have an incentive to produce rarity even when the gameworld itself does not, either by acquiring a particular item and hoarding it or acquiring it and destroying it. Call it the De Beers strategy--all you need is a cartel, by whatever means, and you can accomplish this. Even if players cannot hoard by any means, even when the supply of items is not governed by labor time or player action in the world, some players will try to find a way to use items to create a visual langugage of social differentiation between avatars in which the differences expressed are unequal or hierarchical. Not orange = blue, but "the few, the proud, the pink".
Even if you could succeed in suppressing this completely, in producing complete equality between all avatars, I think you have to question whether that would be destroying what you came to save--because if the game is based on individual projection of the player into the gameworld through an individuated avatar, then having all avatars be absolutely equal risks having players (even kids) feel de-individuated and therefore not particularly invested in the gameworld. You come smack up against an entire ideology of identity and individuality at that point: if the difference between my avatar and another avatar is not that I have more, or I have better, only that I like orange and he likes blue, then the number of items that permit individuation needs to be EXTREMELY large and the supply needs to be EXTREMELY constant and fast-paced. The best example I can think of would be character customization in City of Heroes and Star Wars: Galaxies. You'd have to have an item-based economy that allowed players to achieve that sense of precise individual control and strong differentation from others through their avatar's look and surroundings. That means a huge number of combinatorial choices, and a timeframe for sampling them which is reasonably short. Otherwise you get a gameworld where there are a bunch of players in orange shirts and a bunch in blue shirts and they're all desperate to differentiate themselves from everyone else.
Posted Oct 14, 2004 8:33:09 AM | link
Randy> Wow! Such praise and criticism is one sentence!
Sorry, the attempt was to err on the side of praise because it is a great initial design.
Randy> Dude, "plenty" of exploits? Name two.
Your design is for an eBay resistent economy, so I'm defining "exploit" to be aspects that continue to encourage eBay-ing.
Exploit 1: You can sell accounts. I realize that your doc specifies that you aren't addressing this concern, but it is still an exploit.
Exploit 2: Anyone who manages to acquire the best stuff can then run a rental business (or alternately, rich people can run around saying "I'll pay you $20 for a loan") so you still have money trumping time and skill.
Possible Exploit 3: Much like aim bot detection, automated detection of market makers will be an arms race. We can disagree on who has the burden of proof but I think that we agree that people will try to do this.
Exploit 4: The decay of items actually increases the demand for cool stuff by increasing their scarcity. This will increase Exploit 2 and increase the incentive to cause Possible Exploit 3. In addition, it creates a great market for replacement insurance.
Possible Exploit 5: If Possible Exploit 3 exists, then there is also a market for working on commision. A player saying "I want to Slug of Mystical Undoing" provides an incentive for the manipulators to go out and find a copy and to then manipulate the market until they get it. This would also support replacement insurance.
Exploit 6: As several people have pointed out, 1:1 trades mean that items can't become defacto currency. This means that there is an incentive to use US$. This reinforces Exploit 2.
Randy> BTW, this is the first peer-review of this design.
Of course, so I'm trying to poke holes in it :-)
Posted Oct 14, 2004 12:06:29 PM | link
Randy,
The design sounds like a lot of fun for kids while providing a relative safe environment.
I think, however, making accounts non-transferable would be a stronger stance. Else, parents will be tempted to buy that account with the complete collection of a particular set as a Christmas present for their kids, thus changing the dynamic of kid’s world into a parental metagame world.
On another topic:
Cory makes a point about “signaling” asking “What's to stop n colluding players from surpassing your liquidity threshold?”
Randy responds by stating that the service provider is a perfect market maker referring to footnote 9 “the system could also detect odd trading patterns and inject its own offers into the market to correct any imbalances” and stating “in other words, the market maker (service provider) could happily interfere with this pattern with no harm to the economy, as each trade stands on its own merits.”
Randy what’s your system for being a perfect market maker in providing liquidity? Would you have a warehouse of existing items, create the exact trade items on the spot, or a more complex method. I’m just trying to understand the method of maintaining perfect faucet-drain, item-distribution, one-to-one trading economy.
As for Tim's point on individuality, giving out unique non-drop items could be used to reward the desired behaviors or accomplishments (like collecting scout badges). If the account is non-transferable, then the accomplishments and rewards are individualized.
In this system, kids would collect badges yearly throughout their developmental years and get to the end-game with a "graduation."
Thus, the virtual world becomes a new space for child development.
Ok, I'm going off track now...
Frank
Posted Oct 14, 2004 1:01:39 PM | link
"Focus is placed on subjective value over objective (quantifiable) value." Is that really true? Aren't you really just severely constraining the available quanta?
Can I trade a LONG CAR BODY for a LONG CAR WITH A HUGE ENGINE (or substitute any single 'thing,' say A BIRTHDAY CAKE, for LONG CAR BODY)?
Doesn't that violate the 1:1 requirement, even if you cannot disassemble the LONG CAR WITH A HUGE ENGINE? You're still trading something of 'one-gameday value' for something that's a minimum 'six-gameday value' (4 days CAR TIREs, 1 day LONG CAR BODY, and 1 day HUGE CAR ENGINE).
Can I reduce my approved set of things to a single thing in order to guarantee I receive the item the next time I receive an item? If not, what's the lower limit on my approved set?
If there really are "so many kinds of things, with so many combinations of attributes," and you do indeed enforce n-gameday-for-n-gameday trades (in order to maintain 1:1) what are my realistic chances of finding such a trade?
Isn't the currency, then, just 'gamedays'? I will either be able to find a trading path from n_gameday_item_I_have to n_gameday_item_I_want, or I won't.
Don't you think that a de facto n_gameday_item00 currency will emerge? Not unlike the Broken Cryptrobber Stones that became the de facto AP currency on Firiona Vie server--everyone knows that they were wroth 100 AP (now 75?).
How do you determine that someone is 'hoarding' collectibles?
My inital thoughts, anyway,
Jeff Cole
Posted Oct 14, 2004 1:24:40 PM | link
Bruce Boston>I think the easiest way, and most likely the eventual solution for many properties, to keep items/etc off of eBay will be to simply integrate RL$ into the VW.
Well actually the easiest way is just for the developers to give people whatever objects they want for free.
Richard
Posted Oct 14, 2004 2:44:53 PM | link
Richard> Well actually the easiest way is just for the developers to give people whatever objects they want for free.
Right, digital world as large, real-time, lending library. If the CPU and memory resources are vast related to the set of objects, this works well. If they aren't, then you have restrictions on what you can "borrow" at any given time, which still isn't a problem.
Of course, this would have game play implications ;-)
Posted Oct 14, 2004 2:55:40 PM | link
Edward > The one-for-one trading feature: It means, the prices of all objects are the same. You can make the system produce them at the same rate, but demands will not be equal, so prices will not be equal. <
But if you produce “sufficient” of each object, the price will be equal. In a computer rendered world “scarcity” is a design choice. Given the amount of demand information the Traders Market is generating, I’d think it would be possible to adjust the faucet appropriately. Trading doesn’t require goods to be scare. It just requires goods to be misallocated. Which the random distribution model ensures.
Cory> Also, since you don't allow other currencies (1:1 trading) the only viable currency is US$. Even if you assume that IGE doesn't enter KidTrade, I think that the difficulty of acquiring the "cool" items encourages general payment for loan behavior. <
That assumes that the things I want are more difficult to get than the things I don’t want. That is, that the desired object is scarce. If the Faucet is working properly, that shouldn’t be true.
Timothy> The problem I see is that the KidTrade design still centers on aquisitiveness, that it is thing-centered and avatar-centered, meaning that the player has a persistent avatar who represents him/her in the virtual world who acquires persistent goods, and the more items that are acquired, the more advantages of various sorts (even if only aesthetic) accrue to the player's persistent avatar.<
My understanding of the design is that each Player gets random items per month, and can only trade 1 for 1. So two players of the same age will have an identical number of items. Unless I am missing something. It is which n items you choose to hold that uniquely identifies your avatar. And situates them the in the “red pants”, “blue pants” or “black pants” social group. Again, if the Faucet is doing its job, this social distinction should come from player choice. Not because some players want pink pants but can’t afford them.
Cory> Exploit 2: Anyone who manages to acquire the best stuff can then run a rental business (or alternately, rich people can run around saying "I'll pay you $20 for a loan") so you still have money trumping time and skill<
“The best stuff” implies a relative scarcity of a particular object, which the Faucet should be able to correct. It also implies a universal ranking of “stuff” which everyone agrees on. But Randall explicitly states the focus on is “subjective” value. The idea as I understand it is for the kids to explore there own subjective value system. Tuning the Faucet properly should eliminate hoarding because something is “rare”.
I don’t see how you avoid character trading though. If a ten month old avatar is has ten times as many objects as a one month old one, buying one is a shortcut to “being rich”.
Posted Oct 14, 2004 5:07:24 PM | link
Richard> Well actually the easiest way is just for the developers to give people whatever objects they want for free.
Which seems to me to be the core game Randall is proposing. Pick x objects that express your subjective value system. What makes in more interesting is that you accumulate the objects over time. The objects are randomly misallocated, so you have to trade to recover “your” objects. And you can reorder your value system, and trade now worthless object for newly desired ones. Sounds like a fun game to me…
Posted Oct 14, 2004 5:14:00 PM | link
Richard> Well actually the easiest way is just for the developers to give people whatever objects they want for free.
Absolutely, but then the very best way is to give people whatever *information* they want for free as well.
For instance, I've never known exactly why mmorpg games don't allow brand new players to walk through all that restricted high-level content in some sort of look-but-don't-touch ghosty mode. Isn't that pretty much what happens when watching tv/movies/sports?
In any case, I doubt hoarding and eBaying are going to be much affected by either more or cleverer restrictions on items and item use. A zillion players closely examining those restrictions always tend to reign cleverest of all. More likely, hoarding and eBaying may be affected by fewer restrictions on items and item use, or, as Richard says, by none at all.
Posted Oct 14, 2004 7:39:21 PM | link
For instance, I've never known exactly why mmorpg games don't allow brand new players to walk through all that restricted high-level content in some sort of look-but-don't-touch ghosty mode.
Perhaps this would require that world content be less "static" (predictable). In other words, the balkanization (among level groups) and secrecy of content allows it to be meted out to grinding players. But should worlds be places where new content was constantly bubbling to the surface... this might make it more palatable to designers to share. Which would be a win on both sides: players and devs.
Posted Oct 14, 2004 8:43:37 PM | link
Comments from TerraNova are annotated TN:, those on Habitat Chronicles are marked HC:
Before I respond, let me say how happy I am with the level of feedback this design is getting. This time around we're finding a few things that I either missed in the first draft, or didn't explain very well.
TN: Andres Ferraro>You mention on the paper: "They all wear out with use, so the kids learn not to abuse their things. This discourages antisocial hoarding behavior."
Intuitively the opposite feels true - 'Anything that wears out is warehoused'
I definitely need to expand these statements. First let me say that, in evaluating this design, wear-and-tear should be considered an optional feature, as I tried to hint at in footnote 7:
[7] Decay complicates the trader's market by adding wear status as a dimension, but seems like an important feature for a kid's educational game. Stuff that lasts forever, even when you use it heavily, doesn't match their real-world experience.
In the next draft, I will clarify that things that are banked (in a standing offer for trade) are not subject to wear-and-tear. All things in play (unbanked) are subject to wear-and-tear. Simply put, there is no warehousing, except in the market, where the banked item will (eventually) trade.
TN:Timothy Burke raises some issues about how the economy might interact with avatar customization:
TN:Timothy Burke>… as long as there is a reason to acquire more and more to differentiate or empower an avatar in a virtual world, there is a powerful incentive to evade or elude structured restrictions.
I'm not trying address incentives. I'm trying to preclude a certain type of behavior by design.
TN:Timothy Burke>… [players] hoard against the possibility of unanticipated changes to the environment … [and they] hoard and acquire because items provide not just a "real" kind of differentiation between players but also a social differentiation…[an important one being]…the signifier of one's unique identity within the game-world [ their Avatar.]…which provides a very, very powerful incentive to control or manipulate markets.
He goes on do describe how some avatar customizers will be subjectively more valuable (bad-ass) than others, such as the black colored clothing, increasing the trade demand for black things/customizers.
TN:Timothy Burke>… Even when black is being used heavily, players will use it. But … players will use objects to socially differentiate their avatars in relationship to their (perceived or real) rarity, and therefore have an incentive to produce rarity even when the game-world itself does not, either by acquiring a particular item and hoarding it or acquiring it and destroying it.
There's a bit of a self contradiction in there: Black will be the most popular, but people will gravitate toward rare things (presumably Not-Black), but it isn't important to my response. KidTrade has no scarcity of tradable objects, by design. For every Black thing destroyed, a new one is created. If Black is all the rage, good luck trying to hoard it, everyone is trying to trade for it and you have no advantage in the market.
TN:Timothy Burke>… the difference between my avatar and another avatar is not that I have more, or I have better, only that I like orange and he likes blue.
Yup. That's the design.
TN:Timothy Burke>… EXTREMELY large and the supply needs to be EXTREMELY constant and fast-paced … to have an item-based economy that allowed players to achieve that sense of precise individual control and strong differentiation from others through their avatar's look and surroundings.
Yup. Been there. Done that. Many times. We're all in the content consumption business.
TN:Cory Ondrejka had a detailed response to my challenge to stand-and-deliver an exploit list:
TN:Cory Ondrejka>…Exploit 1: You can sell accounts…
Again? :-P This is a red herring, and not a virtual economy exploitation design issue. It is "the typist" issue that every computer/web application has: You never know what human is at the keyboard [or, our case, has the password to an account], so it is possible for people to share/transfer/steal/sell accounts outside the scope of the game. If people want to go after this problem for a service, they will have to perform some sort of operator-level identity verification scheme, such as requiring a user to type in their (un-editable) credit-card-number, or an eyeball scanner, etc. every time they log in. This exploit does not count against the challenge, because it is out of scope.
TN:Cory Ondrejka>…Exploit 2: Anyone who manages to acquire the best stuff can then run a rental business (or alternately, rich people can run around saying "I'll pay you $20 for a loan") so you still have money trumping time and skill.
Per the design, loaned object behavior is limited, so I'd love to see if this is actually an exploit. Keep in mind that objects are not scarce, and the user can get a 1:1 trade for the exact same object from the market, and may well receive one over time from the faucet (much more likely if the item is consumable and popular.) I'll bet we can calculate the maximum cash value of such a loan as being a tiny fraction of the service fee, given the production rate and the thing consumption rate. I'm definitely going to chew on this one for awhile. I really like loaning, but if it breaks the economy, it is out! If loaning is out (or I can prove that it is safe from this attack), Cory's #4 and #6 are eliminated as exploits.
TN:Cory Ondrejka>…Possible Exploit 3: Much like aim bot detection, automated detection of market makers will be an arms race. We can disagree on who has the burden of proof but I think that we agree that people will try to do this.
This is related to the attack Cory outlined before, and now I think I have a handle on it: Is there any way that the market can be manipulated? Specifically, can liquidity be gamed by collusion? I will except the burden of proof challenge provide evidence that answer is no. I will demonstrate it (by this weekend, I hope) with an appendix to the proposal outlining the market dynamics that preclude this class of attack. As a happy side-effect, I'm hopeful that I'll be able to dispense with the market-maker bots entirely. Exploit #5 depends on this one, so if I kill #3, I'm golden. :-)
By my count, Cory met my challenge to name at least two possible (core) exploits (not including #1.) Thanks, man! I'll prove they are both dead soon. :-)
TN: magicback>…making accounts non-transferable would be a stronger stance.
The service operator could make this a EULA/TOS violation and attempt to enforce it in ways similar to the Sony and the like. As I said earlier, this is technically impossible to detect.
TN: magicback>…what's your system for being a perfect market maker in providing liquidity?
This will be a part of the planned appendix, mentioned above.
TN: magicback>…giving out unique non-drop items could be used to reward the desired behaviors or accomplishments (like collecting scout badges). If the account is non-transferable, then the accomplishments and rewards are individualized.
The unique things were designed with merit-awards in mind. You sparked an interesting thought though: If merit-earned unique things were customized with personalized information, like "Tom's Wonderful Award", could that serve as a disincentive to account sales? Again, this is beyond the scope of the design.
TN: Jeff Cole>"Focus is placed on subjective value over objective (quantifiable) value." Is that really true? Aren't you really just severely constraining the available quanta?
If the objective value is fixed at 1 thing, all that is left is subjective value, right? What am I missing?
[At this point Jeff finds an oversight in the design, which I'll fix.]
TN: Jeff Cole>Can I trade a LONG CAR BODY for a LONG CAR WITH A HUGE ENGINE)? Doesn't that violate the 1:1 requirement, even if you cannot disassemble the LONG CAR WITH A HUGE ENGINE?"
Good catch! Assembled sets may not be dissembled (this is also not clearly communicated in the design). You're right, this confuses the market's 1:1 value equivalence. Oops.
Here's the fix: when an set is assembled into a single thing, it takes on the properties of a unique: it can not be traded.
TN: Jeff Cole>Isn't the currency, then, just 'gamedays'? I will either be able to find a trading path from n_gameday_item_I_have to n_gameday_item_I_want, or I won't.
If there is a currency, it is non-unique things (which are granted at a fixed daily rate.) All things in the market have a price of one thing. I guess you could map that to days, but why?
TN: Jeff Cole>Don't you think that a de facto n_gameday_item00 currency will emerge?
I don't see how this would be expressed in a transaction. Could you give me an example?
TN: Jeff Cole>How do you determine that someone is 'hoarding' collectibles?
Why would I need to? If they aren't on the market, they decay. If they are on the market they will be traded away soon.
Hellinar seems to have internalized the gestalt of the design and joins the fray I won't copy it here, but I didn't see anything in his spirited defense of the design that I wanted to correct. (Be sure to read his full post on TerraNova.)
TN:dmyers voices this opinion >I doubt hoarding and eBaying are going to be much affected by either more or cleverer restrictions on items and item use. A zillion players closely examining those restrictions always tend to reign cleverest of all. More likely, hoarding and eBaying may be affected by fewer restrictions on items and item use, or, as Richard says, by none at all.
Now, I co-wrote the first paper that pointed out how MMOG users are always more clever than the designers, but I can't let this comment go without challenging the author to provide support for these claims. I've provided a design to support mine, what do you have? Also, do you have any comment on the initial 6+ months of ToonTown (before they implemented housing and furniture), which completely prevented both currency and object hording, did not support gift giving (and by extension trading) and had no virtual-object or currency eBay market?
Controls most certainly affect the shape of the eBay market, especially strict ones. Cleverness can find design flaws in systems, but it is possible to design systems without specific flaws.
Now for some of the comments at Habitat Chronicles:
HC:Nick Caldwell uses the model of a collectable miniatures game where the market price isn't solely based on scarcity in an attempt to support Ted's comment that "some things will end up being junk, others untraded because they are too valuable to trade for any other object 1 for 1."
As I said before, I'd love to see this tested, especially with kids. Can it be said that there is any one (non-[pseudo]-currency) thing that every one wants? I've never been in a MMOG that this is true, but I haven't played them all. I would consider that a design failure for the service implementing KidTrade. Even if it were true, a growing economy will eventually deliver one of this purported amazingly valuable thing to every one who wants it.
If there are things that no one wants, those will all be listed on the market creating a lot of liquidity for that item and all the items that are desired in exchange, so that's not an issue.
HC Chandler Howell speaks observes about Cory's Blockbuster threat that >…the "friction" involved in trying to E-Bay a 20 minute item rental is simply going to be too great. Also, I don't see people being willing to pay enough to make it a worthwhile endeavor, especially given that the economic system seems designed to ensure that there are probably faster paths to gratification in-game, although they will more likely involve a suitable in-game trade-off.
Personally, I would expect that the ability to "loan" items will encourage positive social behavior--people who are willing to loan out highly-prized items will gain in-game social prestige and influence, which I infer would be in-line with the game's design goals.
I hope to prove his insights are right.
I'm going to take a 48 hour break from this debate, as I have some work to get done (I'm not currently working in the MMOG industry, and all your challenges are way too good and distracting.) Please keep posting and expect a reply sometime Sunday.
Randy
Posted Oct 15, 2004 1:48:03 AM | link
Cory Ondrejka>Of course, this would have game play implications ;-)
You know that and I know that, but the people who actually buy the objects don't know it (or at least they choose not to think about it).
Any object sold on eBay can be given away for free by the developers. If buying and selling objects didn't affect gameplay, developers would have no problem just giving people what they wanted. However, buying and selling objects does affect gameplay, so developers have either to stop it from happening or (as in SL's case) change their gameplay to accommodate it.
Technically, it's not much of an issue to give stuff away for free. Objects could have a fixed lifespan of, oh, let's say 6 hours, to stop the database from flooding (because players can always create the object again once it's purged). Some absolute limit per character would serve to prevent spambots from creating vast quantities of objects in an attempt to bring down the database server.
People who really want to stop object sales can do so with a policy of zero tolerance. Anyone who buys a virtual object loses their account. If you want to be really draconian, you can put into the EULA a clause that allows you to charge $100 to their credit card for every object they're found to have bought with real money, too. Of course, this approach comes with its own problems of player acquisition, but at least the gameplay is protected...
Richard
Posted Oct 15, 2004 3:04:57 AM | link
If KidTrade immediately generates a replacement for each item destroyed (something I missed in the first run-through), and the supply of all items is always exactly equal (e.g., there is no scarcity), then I would say that you've covered my concern to a major extent.
To clarify one thing: I was observing that players use items to socially differentiate with two different ideas of utility. One, they seek to acquire items based on their real-world aesthetic preferences (hence, black is popular even if common) and two, they seek to acquire items that no one else has (even if these contradict their real-world aesthetic preferences).
If you prevent any scarcity of any kind existing in the gameworld, even scarcity that players try to produce collusively, you pretty much short-circuit any market besides the equal trading market you've designed, *except* if there turns out to be a real-world aesthetic preference that produces inordinate demand for a particular item and disproportionate disinterest in another.
Though then I do think you have a different problem, which is this: the players might ask, "Why shouldn't I just be able to have all the things that I want when I want them?" In a game with inequity and scarcity in its economy, that question (sort of) answers itself. In this game, the time-delay to item acquisition starts to seem more like a Rube Goldberg machine. The player has to trade in the market to get the items he likes; all items exist in the same proportion; all players are exactly equal. The trading is anonymized, so it's not a part of the social interaction in the game. The player may wonder what the point of deferred gratification is exactly in the game, where the "game" in it might be.
Posted Oct 15, 2004 7:12:49 AM | link
Timothy > The player may wonder what the point of deferred gratification is exactly in the game, where the "game" in it might be. <
My experience is that deferred gratification adds “value” to acquiring the item. Instant gratification can get boring pretty quickly, like playing a game in “godmode”. A delay in acquisition, even if pretty arbitrary, gives me the pleasure of anticipating the acquisition, and the chance to reconsider if my choice was too hasty. I may be out of the mainstream on this though.
Also, my impression from the design document is that the main gameplay value in the world comes from using the objects to do fun things. The exchange mechanism is not the central gameplay feature, but more of a background feature. It provides a mildly interesting trading game. And encourages acquisition based on what you find fun, rather than scarcity.
I find the whole idea very appealing. Its what I think VWs should be. Places that act in some ways like the familiar world. But in some respects make available an experience that isn’t possible in the familiar world. “All objects have equal trade value” isn’t something you could reliably implement in the physical world. But its pretty trivial to implement in a VW. I hope we get to see how it works in practice some day.
Posted Oct 15, 2004 9:33:57 AM | link
Gee, I have to work on my own paper, but, as always when work is present, something else is always more fun. So…
The argument:
Players are not able to buy and sell the experience of play, only the outcome of play. Outcomes of play vary in the degree to which those outcomes are and are perceived to be the result of skill or chance. Regardless, those outcomes are valued (surely outside the context of the game, and, for non-trivial games, inside the context of the game) differently. Thus, in order to establish a 1:1 ratio among items gained through the outcome of play, you must establish a 1:1 ratio among items as perceived and experienced by players. Game rules don’t and can’t do that -- or anything else “technically impossible to detect.”
This is why I think you get into trouble with “Focus is placed on subjective value over objective (quantifiable) value.” Yeah, but then all your rules and market manipulations and whatnot are focused on the objective (quantifiable) value of game items, such as how often they appear and their trading mechanics. You can’t control the apple market by buying up all the oranges.
Examples:
Since I have this HUGE time investment in CoH, and only about 5 minutes worth of throwing pies in Toontown, let’s use CoH. Any game should suffice.
1. “[Things] wear out with use, so the kids learn to not abuse their things. This discourages antisocial hoarding behavior.” Don’t follow this. It would seem more directly to discourage use.
In CoH, inspirations drop endlessly from villains. Once you use an inspiration, it’s gone, yet it makes little sense not to use inspirations pretty much as soon as you get them, because you can pretty much always get more. Very open faucet. You can buy inspirations (trivial cost), trade inspirations, sell them, gift them, whatever. Nobody does any of that very often (buying/gifting happens in some circumstances), but you can. Extremely open faucet. Nevertheless, many players “hoard” inspirations, stack them tightly into full trays, arrange them in pretty patterns, save them for that hypothetical rainy day. They don’t USE them as often as they should or could simply because once they use them, they are immediately used up.
In your terms, inspirations are consumables. And, also in your terms, CoH players are turning these consumables into something resembling collectibles. If you would like to consider collectibles and consumables distinct in terms of subjective value, how do you make this distinction?
2. “Since the only way for items to enter the world is via the daily award faucet, it is very unlikely that a user would get exactly the item they wanted just by waiting for it.”
I note “unlikely” is unquantified. Is this as “unlikely” as drawing the card I need for an inside staight, or as “unlikely” as finding a bubble defender to help me take out some AV in CoH, or as “unlikely” as running multiple accounts in order to get a better chance of getting the item I want – regardless of my ability to “mule” across acounts?
In CoH, it is unlikely that players – particularly advanced players -- will get a power enhancement they want/need in a mob drop, i. e., by waiting for it. It is much quicker and very easy – particularly for advanced players – to buy wanted enhancements at the good ole enhancement store. Yet there is some small effort involved. You have to go to the store, click on this, click on that, lose some (trivial) amount of influence in the process, etc. etc. It’s not really costly, but it is after a while sort of like minimally tedious, not as much fun as something else. So, despite the fact the advanced players could optimize EVERY LITTLE THING and keep all their enhancements in double green form, they usually don’t. They commonly just cover the main bases and wait for usuable, small-upgradish enhancements to drop, regardless of the probability involved. In fact, it’s actually sort of cooler when the enhancements drop rather than when you buy them at the store. Sort of like having a natural flush in poker or something.
In your game, you don’t control for scarcity of the *experience* of getting “natural” items vs. “traded-for” items. You assume players are going to want to get items as soon as they can by whatever means available. This assumption ultimately places the objective goals of the game (relatively limited) over the subjective goals of the players (relatively unlimited). An indication of this, by the way, is that this game seems to be entirely playable by a relatively easily programmed bot – or, related, that all trading in the game could be automated in such a way that individual playesr would not know whether they were trading with other players or with the game itself.
3. “This exploit does not count aginst the challenge, because it is beyond the scope.”
This, I think, makes the exercise of designing a non-eBayable game a bit trivial. Yahoo tic-tac-to has no eBay problem, etc. etc. I could even make the argument that all eBaying is functionally equivalent to character/account selling, and so choosing to ignore character/account selling as “beyond the scope” is a red herring.
But examples, examples. Let’s see.
In CoH, you don’t need to buy influence. It’s stupid to buy influence. You get influence out the wazoo.
Check out the influence for sale on eBay.
Are players doing stupid things “outside the scope” of game design? Related: Is charging a subcription fee for a game outside the scope of its design? Why, for instance, would a kid prefer to play KidTrade rather than, say, Kingdom of Loathing or, even more virtual-economish, Hattrick? Because they can trade – or because they are motivated to trade FOR something?
The main interest I would have in your game would be in what all those various things DO, not really in how I could or couldn’t’t economize them. Do they do neat things? Clever things? Boring things? I know you can balance one item with another item; can you balance one doing with another doing?
I do feel like I’m just not getting it here. I definitely think it’s the scope thing.
4. “Parents want their kids to learn good citizenship and sharing skills, not caveat emptor.”
Yeah, maybe. But those dudes. They just want to DANCE.
Posted Oct 15, 2004 11:14:21 AM | link
On CoH, I agree that the eBay market for influence is a really good demonstration of the general point that eliminating scarcity, inequity and so on still doesn't eliminate an eBay market or the desire to "play" the economy. I'm not so sure about the other points: do players really *commonly* hoard inspirations rather than use them? In groups I play in, people use them constantly, and will stop at contacts to replenish if necessary--especially players who play or in very small groups. People also drive very hard for levels where they can completely and systematically upgrade their enhancements from the store *after* they get access to single-origin enhancements. I agree that before that point, many players just use naturally dropped enhancements, but after SOs, players buy most of their enhancements because SO enhancements have such a major effect on the character's relative power in the gameworld.
Posted Oct 15, 2004 1:22:08 PM | link
Hey Tim,
I don't want to hijack with CoH picadilloes (maybe you could post something on it sometime -- I'd be interest in reading), but...
No, all players don't hoard inspirations in the conventional sense, but the inclination is there -- despite the lack of rules/mechanics making it profitable -- and this can be observed/measured, I believe, in how the insp are (or are not) used. How many times do players die with insp trays more than half full vs. more than half empty? How many players see just how long they can hold on to those two insp they get from the tutorial? Either of those strike any chords?
You buy SO enhancements at 22, 27, 32, 37. 42, etc. When you ding 40, do you really go back and update *every single* 40 SO you bought at 37 in order to get that enhancement to go from grey to green? And then you do that AGAIN when you ding 41? If you do, you may be more the powergamer than you think! :)
Posted Oct 15, 2004 2:36:26 PM | link
(CoH minutae follows): Ya, you're right, you don't (or at least I don't) update SOs constantly, just at the key intervals. But the point is that people will outlay influence-cash in a min-max way at those moments rather than just wait for enhancements to drop.
The more relevant thing for this discussion, though, is that mostly a player-to-player market for enhancements has failed to develop even though for the first three months, some players regularly tried to make it happen by spamming broadcast channels. By and large they were ignored because the faucets for both "cash" and the items themselves are so wide open that it's not worth the fractional savings of dealing with another player. The interesting thing we can draw from that for KidTrade is that there were people who were trying, sometimes desperately, to make an economic game even when the advantages they gained were equally fractional (e.g., they'd have only just a bit more influence after peddling enhancements than they would have otherwise).
I think we could almost postulate a new "Bartle-type": the trader. Maybe that's a subspecies of achiever, maybe not--but it's clear there are players, maybe even kids, who will seek an economic game of advantages and acquisition even where none really exists. In structural terms, I don't think there's an MMOG where the player economy is more irrelevant than CoH unless it's Toontown, and still there are players who try to make it happen.
Posted Oct 15, 2004 4:17:31 PM | link
It seems there could be a risk of gaming an automated market balancing mechanism, by triggering it intentionally in order to trick it into completing trades that would not otherwise have been fulfilled. Depending on how the balancer interacts with the item faucet, this could either allow flooding the market with an item, or (probably worse) allow people to control the market, increasing the odds of being able to ebay the account (or rent the item, or be able to have good odds of fulfilling an ebay item sale despite the balancer).
I'm a bit unclear about the item decay mechanics... what qualifies as 'in use' for the purpose of decay?
Is an item always decaying as soon as it is created (aside from the trade system)? If so I don't see the 'teaches not to overuse things' part. If items don't decay while not logged in, then there is enough banking available for the people playing for external trading as opposed to playing for the rest of the game.
Posted Oct 15, 2004 6:20:02 PM | link
(re: CoH and 'traders') It always seemed to me that the best way to handle inspirations was to always have exactly 1 slot open, aside from fights that 'go bad' in some way. That way you have the most emergency powerups available, while not wasting any inspirations that would have been lost to a full tray.
I don't know that I would count 'trader' as inherently a subset of achiever, since it quite frequently (as in the CoH example) isn't a very effective style of play compared to just using the NPC sinks and using the time saved to go fight some more...though I suppose some of them could just be very bad achievers, wouldn't be surprised based on the way some people handle other game mechanics :)
Possibly split traders into trader-achievers who only trade in games where it is effective, and trader-socializers who trade just for an excuse to sit in a populated zone and chat?
Posted Oct 15, 2004 6:34:57 PM | link
Nice one Randy!
The focus on the target audience seems excellent!
This is the most important point for me. “What do I want the economy to do?” is probably something that should be asked more often.
Many game design problems with MMOs can be interpreted as intentional retardation of human progress. What underlies this general approach?
Need. Human progress is generally made due to real world need. We need efficient distribution of our scarce real world resources and so economic progress has been made. If we lived in a world without scarcity our economic progress would be different.
Where we need to reduce the efficient distribution of scarce virtual world resources, retarding human economic progress makes a lot of sense.
The flip side of retarding the real world model is to only build as much as you need. This starts to sound a lot like the argument for naïve physics in Richard’s book.
As an added bonus, hopefully Naïve economies are easier to reason about. I’m sure that one reason we haven’t seen more experimentation in this area is because generally economies are very hard to reason about.
I like the no-gifting idea. Some riffs on it: impose a price floor and price ceiling, don't allow trades outside the normal price range.
In a virtual world in which the economy is not a major focus, why not take this further and just have complete price fixing across the board? Items can only be traded between players at their fixed price. All items can be converted to cash at their fixed price at any shop. Players get items randomly, so they trade to get the things they need. The removal of gifting (hopefully) reduces a lot of economic headaches.
I’m sure this has been done before, but I wonder why similar things aren’t done more often. How much fun is a real world economy anyway?
Posted Oct 16, 2004 9:30:47 PM | link
MSNBC has just posted up another news article on this:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6199780/site/newsweek/
Gaming the Online Games
A new breed of entrepreneur is collecting virtual booty and selling it for hard cash. Is that fair play?
Oct. 18 issue - K. sits in front of his computers for 12 to 15 hours a day, playing games for a living. He is a scavenger in the kind of online games that involve as many as 200,000 players building or battling in elaborate virtual worlds. His specialty is Lineage, a medieval fantasy game, and he plays seven characters simultaneously on four computers, seeking the spoils—magical swords and the like—that allow victors to move up to higher levels. At 27, he says he couldn't find a normal career out of university, so he turned to this gray-market profession, earning some $4,000 a month winning and selling virtual booty to other players. (etc.)
Posted Oct 17, 2004 2:05:05 AM | link
Bruce> Personally, I think the easiest way, and most likely the eventual solution for many properties, to keep items/etc off of eBay will be to simply integrate RL$ into the VW
Sorry to jump back in time, but I meant to ask this since Bruce has unique insight on this. Isn't using a real world currency the same as locking your in-world currency to a fixed exchange rate? It seems like it is, which brings me to the second question. If you lock your currency to a "foreign" currency, aren't you immediately limiting your fiscal and monetary policy options? If you have the option to create a small, open economy (in the macro economic sense), why give up those policy levers by locking to another currency?
Posted Oct 17, 2004 9:29:39 PM | link
Why do you fight consequences, not the source of ebaying ? Maybe just stop making highly addictive, monthly fee based games and start making games where making fun != ages spent online ? People are NOT buying items in fact, they are buying time to gather them.
My time costs more than china boy's, so its simply cheaper to buy that Bow of Peril than to spend 50-100 hours farming it myself...
Posted Oct 18, 2004 1:25:31 AM | link
Dmitry Nozhnin>Why do you fight consequences, not the source of ebaying ?
Because the source of eBaying (or at least the one you cite) is fun for some people. It ceases to be fun for them if the achievement hierarchy is screwed up by people who don't want to play but want to appear as if they have played.
Your time may cost more than "china boy's", but his costs more than free. Virtual worlds can have free objects if they want. There's nothing to stop a virtual world from giving away a Bow of Peril to anyone who wants one by embedding a command, /CreateBowOfPeril. Now you want a Bow of Peril, sure, have one. The same applies to every single other object in the virtual world.
Now do you want to play? If so, go to Second Life, which allows you to create you own objects arbitrarily. If not, perhaps you understand why people who don't like commodification are pissed off by self-important arguments that suggest your time spoiling their fun is worth more than their time having fun.
Richard
Posted Oct 18, 2004 1:52:50 AM | link
On an almost completely different subject...
I'm currently reading the book, The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III by William C. Dear. In it, it mentions some students from Michigan State University who play D&D, one of whom is called Randall Farmer.
Is that you, Randy, or some other Randall Farmer?
Richard
Posted Oct 18, 2004 2:17:27 AM | link
>It ceases to be fun for them if the achievement hierarchy is screwed up
Thats the point. Achievement hierarchy, where achievement = time (= money). It doesnt matter how smart, agile or social I am in my quest for Bow of Peril. Only time spent online matters. As long as its true there will be ebaying, because time costs money, and only time spent determines your "coolness".
Imagine cheat codes unique for every copy of the singleplayer game are sold for real money. Game is boring/unbalanced/buggy => players need cheats => players pay and get fun or whine and troll on developers. Game is perfect => there is no need for cheats => players are happy.
Real game is somewhere between, and EQ+clones like Lineage2 are near the left limit while SecondLife tends to the right one.
I am not an expert in psychology, but i belive that behaviorism theories are right, there is no sence in forbidding any kinds on human activities. Human mind is very creative in abusing and exploiting any restrictions. Its much more effective to create (or teach patients) new desired behaviors, that are good to himself/society, or multiplayer game community in our case.
Those ones yielding achievemnet/socializing/exploration fun and not involving 40 hours per week playing.
Posted Oct 18, 2004 4:09:23 AM | link
Me> Personally, I think the easiest way, and most likely the eventual solution for many properties, to keep items/etc off of eBay will be to simply integrate RL$ into the VW.
So I guess I should clarify something. First I actually wouldn't ever recommend a zero eBaying goal. I think it's a policy that could be very costly and at some point between "mostly internal trades" (90%-95%) and "only internal trades" (100%) there is a point of diminishing rate of return, and in fact (as I think Cory is inferring) costs soar the closer you try to get to 100%. If you can work it into the story, keeping 98%-99 of all non-currency trades in-world seems to a good goal to test the fluidity of an economy. That said, for companies that do have the goal of ‘zero eBaying’, I think that they will find that RL$ incorporation gives a very high level of control which I can only guess is one of the key things they are hoping to gain from this practice.
Richard> Well actually the easiest way is just for the developers to give people whatever objects they want for free.
Touché!
In which case, I guess they could just give out 5 stones a day and allow kids to trade them in for whatever they wanted. In fact, why have trades at all, they could just have vend-anything-machines. Not sure what the moral of that story would be (which I think is what you are getting at), but I don't think it would resonate very strongly with the parent side of me. But maybe, that's kinda of the point. after re-reading the proposal it seems that Randy is trading "work=reward" for "feeling lucky?". Even so, I guess my boys would play it for a bit, and much would have to do with how new the content was kept. My experience with kids would kind of suggest that (given the chance) they'll eat ice cream till they're sick, then sleep it off before trying it again with another product.
Cory> Sorry to jump back in time, but I meant to ask this since Bruce has unique insight on this. Isn't using a real world currency the same as locking your in-world currency to a fixed exchange rate?
Yes and no. If I had a magic wand, I would actually link There's currency to an international hedge fund that was weighted in a similar manner to the geographic origins of our population (based on payments). Hedge funds are somewhat unique in that they are very boring investments, and they tend to be boring investments in all currencies invested, which is what I think I'd recommend for a main currency.
Cory> It seems like it is, which brings me to the second question. If you lock your currency to a "foreign" currency, aren't you immediately limiting your fiscal and monetary policy options? If you have the option to create a small, open economy (in the macro economic sense), why give up those policy levers by locking to another currency?
While the it may seem that governments are limited in what they can do with linked currencies, this is often due to the fact that linked currencies keep governments very 'fiscally' honest and (imho) much of what they 'can't do with a linked currency' isn't that much of a loss to the citizenry.
Remember, that even governments with linked currencies practice in collecting and disbursing funds and can do almost anything that a country without a liked currency can as far as internal monetary spending and collecting goes. That said, again, I think that what may be lost in limitations around fiscal creativity is more than made up in fiscal security and stability.
Randy> Fortunately, the answer came in the form of a feature from a competitor: There.com’s lending feature.
I also wanted to note, that I was very happy to read this. ‘Lending’ is by far one of my favorite features in the There Economy, and it would be great to see this picked up in other localities. If I could recommend something, it might be worthwhile looking into extending this feature to ‘uniques’ as well, as it will certainly be one of the first requests you get from this demographic.
-bruce
Posted Oct 18, 2004 3:43:59 PM | link
There were a few topics I wanted to add in here, since they seem to apply, namely, Zero-Sum Theory, Winner’s Curse Theory and What’s the Goal part 2.
Much of what I seen evolving in this proposal actually follows very close to how ‘game theory’ (not game design theory, but the economy type) plays out.
Zero Sum Economies:
With 1:1 trades, there are a few things I think we have to assume.
1) Either supply will be manipulated by some ultra-smart computer system yet to be designed to increase the supply of all goods (note: decreases in supply will be slow as the decay rate seems to be fixed when the items are created) until they have exactly the same ‘market value’.
Or
2) All trades will be near-Zero-sum trades, in terms of ‘average market value', with both person’s receiving items given up by someone else without any value being added on either side.
While I might argue that there really isn’t anything as a Zero-Sum economy, as we have to suppose that both traders gave up the item they had because they wanted the other item more, I think that what I would expect here is a near-Zero Sum economy (with most trades not going in favor of the kids).
Why? Because kids tend to have high levels of curiosity, and professional traders have high levels of patience. (please see my kids toy box for reference). While in most cases kids ‘want’ something very much at the time just before the purchase their value estimate is often exaggerated well above ‘true market value’, and give it two days, and we can see that with 20/20 hindsight that the trade was indeed not the trade of two equals.
I think what is trying to be argued is that due to a decreased level in eBaying professional traders wont have the incentive to take make un-equal trades, but this seems a bit weak, almost like saying “people wont become griefers in *our* world, because we wont give exp for it” Again, my guess is that most trades will be in favor of the trader with the most patience.
Winner’s Curse Theory
The resultant emotions are actually predicted in a term called Winner’s Curse. Basically, because demand curves are . . . well . . . curves with higher and lower points in price on them, and when this curve is applied to a limited quantity of market goods through a mechanisms such as an auction system, or a 1:1 trading system in this case, it is the side of the curve that ‘bids’ the highest, that ends up obtaining the item. In most cases this isn’t a problem. In fact, it’s only a problem when the true market value is ‘unknown’ which is exactly what I think this system would have because of the innate complexity that a ‘no currency’ economy entails. In fact, in most cases ‘prices’ overtime are easy to understand and easy to follow, both in any point in time and over extended periods of time. In contrast, add to a no-currency system the stated design goal of ‘correcting imbalances’ and this economy is only going to be trackable by the keenest of traders. How in the world will a casual 10-year old player be able to understand that because a bunch of red cars were released over the weekend they should now have different expectations when trying to get their old black car back?
What’s the Goal?: part 2
From reading the many posts and responses, it’s odd that the goal more and more seems to be leaning towards actually making the value of all tradable items very close to 1:1. If this is true, then the first question this begs is: Why? In fact, if anything this is exactly the opposite information that economies are designed to highlight. For the most part, there is a huge value in finding out, communicating and acting accordingly to differences in prices and market value. It’s very important that car manufactures know if Black is more popular than Green so that they can change production from one color to the next and stay as close to demand as possible. And as important as it is in first generation production and consumption questions, value information becomes exponentially important when looking for historic trends both for the consumer and the producer.
Yes, I understand that the hope is that by looking at ‘quantity’ demand that this system hopes to anticipate actual market demand, but historically this has yet to work and I have yet to see a system that even looks like it might work. Why? Not just because people often ‘want’ things for their ‘market value’ and not always for their intrinsic value. But, in this model, you have an inflexible rate of decay with a highly flexible rate of production, and to resolve any imbalances, it most likely has to be done by increasing production rates. In fact, my guess is that this economy will be very muddy from the consumer point of view, if indeed the goal is to make all things equal 1:1.
It’s also interesting to note that another of the stated goals seems to be to fight MUDflation. While decay is listed at the obvious sink in this system, my guess is that it will never be high enough to sink all the goods that will need to be injected into this system to keep the relative value of even most goods 1:1, not to mention that this seems like a very hard market expectation to set for users, which I assume you will have to do to explain why things are set-up as they are. (note: I guess you could make the decay rate exponential, so that things decays faster overtime, thus encouraging quick use, but this is hard to communicate to an audience that needs to be talked to at a very low grade level)
Going back to my kid’s toy box, markets that involve kids as the main consumer are often very volatile. These are not planned purchases, these are ‘wow, looks cool, I want it Now!’ type purchases and the value often heavily depends on factors that don’t seem to be taken into account here. Again, just for simplicity sake, my guess is that as soon as the system has adjusted the value of the next coolest thing, (which it will most likely have to do by depreciating the items value until its equal to the old toys in the world) that value momentum will not stop on a dime, and will most likely carry the value much farther below the 1:1 target. And, again, decay seems to be the only mechanism that tries to balance this out, and in most cases, kids toys depreciate at very unpredictable rates. The only thing worse than not throwing out a toy to make room, is throwing out their favorite toy.
But, again, I have to ask, is the goal to some how keep all values at 1: 1 while trying to emulate a non-Zero Sum market? If so, this seems pretty tough.
-bruce
Posted Oct 18, 2004 9:08:50 PM | link
Dmitry Nozhnin>It doesnt matter how smart, agile or social I am in my quest for Bow of Peril. Only time spent online matters.
If you don't like it, don't play it. You seem to suggest that if you don't like it, you should nevertheless continue to play it, but do so in a way that makes everyone who liked it before stop liking it.
>As long as its true there will be ebaying, because time costs money, and only time spent determines your "coolness".
You can't buy cool. The more people who try to buy cool, the less cool what they buy becomes.
Besides, if people are rewarded for being smart, agile and social, then using your argument there would be an eBay market for people who aren't any of those things. It wouldn't go away, it would just change in participants.
>I am not an expert in psychology, but i belive that behaviorism theories are right, there is no sence in forbidding any kinds on human activities.
Oh great, so the guy who parked in the middle of the junction outside the train station this morning and jammed all the traffic should have been allowed to get away with it? If I'd known life was a free-for-all, I'd have gone up and smashed his windows with a wrench.
Richard
Posted Oct 19, 2004 2:46:47 AM | link
>You can't buy cool. The more people who try to buy cool, the less cool what they buy becomes.
This is so true. Most experienced players know that reputation/noteriety is the true meta-game that most of us are playing, and the n00b with the hopped-up eBay special is absolutely no threat.
We've all seen single or groups of players make an impact on a game then quit, and then have their characters show up again under new management. Sometimes the original players will come back again with different characters, maybe that they bought in turn. None of it matters after you've chatted with them and done a few runs through Emain Macha. It's no different from learning people's alts.
But then I guess that's only true if you're playing a game more involved than LevelQuest. The solution I still buy into is to make a game that's fun to play.
Posted Oct 19, 2004 10:15:36 AM | link
I've completed my update to my position paper and added the appendix.
http://www.fudco.com/habitat/archives/000023.html
It addresses all of potential 'exploits' outlined by folks here and over on Habitat Chronicles and clarifies some issues that some folks were having understanding the roll of KidTrade in it's service context.
Posted Oct 20, 2004 3:19:08 AM | link
Cool. It works for me, but we'll see what holes Cory can kick in it.
It seems that the most powerful anti-eBay weapon is anonymity, so why not use that to combat the Blockbuster threat?
Borrowers are listed anonymously along with the item they'd like to borrow. Lenders can see which of their items want to be borrowed and choose to lend the items. Once the deal is done you could even allow the borrower to personally contact the lender to say thank you. The reward for lending is sometimes new friends.
This model is different from most real life lending where you generally lend to people you know, but it depends whether you want to tell kids that friends should help each other out or that everyone should help each other out.
I think the right thing to say is that you should lend things to anyone trustworthy; the only difference between the virtual world and RL is the set of trustworthy people. In RL you don’t trust people you don’t know, but here the trust can be assured.
Highlighting the difference between the virtual world and the real world is fine. Teaching today’s kids that technology can allow you to do things that you can't do in RL seems like a very important lesson to me.
Posted Oct 20, 2004 7:08:01 AM | link
It can be "e-bayed": I'll play your account while you are on vacation.
But the main problem is obvious: if you cannot tell whether you are interacting with a real player or a fake player it nolonger fullfill the desirable properties of a multi-user game. I.e. the mechanism is not all that useful.
Posted Oct 20, 2004 10:21:55 AM | link
(I also think it is a bit naive to think that there will be no market for the lending feature. My staff of N players simply e-bay you a lending service. You pay us per month. Easy.)
Posted Oct 20, 2004 10:39:35 AM | link
Ola says:
>It can be "e-bayed": I'll play your account while you are on vacation.
This dismissive argument as already been dismissed. :-) Please read my earlier replies.
>But the main problem is obvious: if you cannot tell whether you are interacting with a real player or a fake player it no longer fulfill[s] the desirable properties of a multi-user game. I.e. the mechanism is not all that useful
There is no claim in the system that robots are precluded from participation. You have not demonstrated your so-called-obvious claim that bots weaken the model in any way. Are current MMOG's "no longer fulfilling the desirable properties of a multi-user game" because of taxibots?
>(I also think it is a bit naive to think that there will be no market for the lending feature. My staff of N players simply e-bay you a lending service. You pay us per month. Easy.)
Mitigation strategies were proposed, several of which I contend would nuke your proposal. Rather than call me naive, please provide a model of economic incentives that counter my claims and mitigation strategies.
For the record, do a search for Disney Toontown on eBay. There are no virtual items listed. There are no account sales listed. There are no service contracts (high-level-help for pay) listed. Though there could be a market for accounts and service contracts, there isn't.
Posted Oct 20, 2004 12:04:00 PM | link
F. Randall Farmer:
> This dismissive argument as already been dismissed. :-) Please read my earlier replies.
I have... Maybe there is something I have misunderstood about your game design. Ok, I tell my good friend Peter to log in once a day because I am away for a week. I tell him what kind of items I want. So when I come back my character has a configuration I am happy about, and I hand him 10 bucks for the favour. Now, if all items have a shorter lifespan than one week then it will not work, but then it won't be a fun trading game with good retention either...
> There is no claim in the system that robots are precluded from participation.
Oh, I am not speaking about bots. I am speaking about not knowing that I am cheating F. Randal Farmer by giving him this ugly pink doll for a nice red sportscar. *greedy snicker*
You would have to disclose the identity of the players after the completion of the trade for the system to be experienced as a trading system and not a lottery..? Or?
>For the record, do a search for Disney Toontown on eBay. There are no virtual items listed.
There are lots of smaller games for which the ebay activity is low. There are of course also many designs which will make e-baying less interesting, 1 hour life span of objects or NODROP for instance.
BUT I can assure you that if you make the claim (to powergamers) that your design is e-bay resistant then you have basic