Innovation I

Frequent commenter Barry Kearns posts a commodification-resistant MMOG economy a la Randy Farmer's KidTrade. Discuss.

Comments

[Scott]

1.

This could work.

[Thabor]

2.

I know I've seen portions of this discussed before. It seems like it has developed to a workable system. Offhand I don't see any way to commodify it.

The real challenge will be player acceptance. I'd definately be interested in seeing this system put into practice.

[Raph]

3.

It works, but you lose

- reputation factors on crafters and sellers (and buyers)
- services rendered for payment
- all forms of gifting and altruistic behavior in the economy

Those are huge and (largely) unacceptable losses to my mind, at least for most any game I would want to build. They certainly are key elements that have been identified as important glue in real world societies.

[Hellinar]

4.

Raph> It works, but you lose

- reputation factors on crafters and sellers (and buyers)
- services rendered for payment
- all forms of gifting and altruistic behavior in the economy

Those are huge and (largely) unacceptable losses to my mind, at least for most any game I would want to build. They certainly are key elements that have been identified as important glue in real world societies. <

The crafting model sounds rather like Enchanting in WoW. Someone puts an item in the No Trade window, and the Enchanter casts an Enchantment, a permanent buff on it. Not much room for crafter reputation there. But suppose crafting required real player skill, like metalworking in A Tale in the Desert? There, smiths actually hammer a lump of virtual metal into shape, and it takes real player skill to know where and how hard to hit it to get the desired effect. Suppose your avatars have variable body shape, so when you go to get a new breastplate, the smith has to measure you up, then make his best efforts at a fit. Like in ATITD, good fit would give good stats to the breastplate. With such a system, people would flock to the smith with the best reputation (even if he was a grumpy Dwarf!).

I’d agree though that the loss of gifting and altruistic behaviour would be a drawback as far as social glue is concerned. Some of that would shift to personal aid of other people. And to the extent that is possible, we may see the rise of “RMM”, real money mercenaries. I don’t think that is a major threat though.

[Raph Koster]

5.

Suppose your avatars have variable body shape, so when you go to get a new breastplate, the smith has to measure you up, then make his best efforts at a fit. Like in ATITD, good fit would give good stats to the breastplate. With such a system, people would flock to the smith with the best reputation (even if he was a grumpy Dwarf!).

But you can't pay the smith, nor can the smith hand you the breastplate, if I am reading it correctly--you can only sell it on the anonymous auction system. So even that wouldn't work.

[Tobold]

6.

The trade of virtual items for real world cash is a two-step process. Both steps involve the trade of something for nothing. In the virtual world the seller trades some virtual item for nothing, in the real world the buyer trades some real cash for nothing. Together the two operations form a virtual for real trade, assuming no scam happens. (And this is pre-StationExchange).

It is technically impossible to prevent the real world step of this transaction. Most of the time that step is even completely invisible to the game developers. So the only thing they can do is prevent the virtual world step of the transaction.

But as Raph said, this prevents all other forms of asymmetric virtual trades as well. Players can't twink their alts any more, they can't give anything to their spouses, friends, or guild mates.

It is completely fair, every character only has what he earned. But I don't think players *want* a completely fair system. They want a system in which their particular preferred unfairness is allowed, and the unfairness which helps somebody else is forbidden. And that is simply impossible.

[Unggi Yoon]

7.

I agree with Raph and Tobold's pont of view.

Then, how about introducing 'degree of in-game intimacy' concept to Barry Kearn's Economy. That is, only after having a certain time in virtual world together(ie. party play, raid, or chatting log), one avatar could get the credit to give the other party his/hers items respectively.

(It's somewhat similiar to the idea of Koei's turn based RTS PC-game 'History of Three States'(especially its tribute system as a diplomatic relation, for giving a tribute to your neighbor nation successfully, you sholud made a friendship to a certain degree...).

It is because substantial difference between the ebayer and Spouse(or friends, guild members) may be the imtimacy formed soley in virtual wolrds(Not that of real world). The former one is provisional, fitful, superficial relations, while the latter is contiuous, deep relations.

Therefore, if the degree of intimacy between avatars getting lower to that of stranger, then item giving between them would be blocked again.

[Hellinar]

8.

Raph>But you can't pay the smith, nor can the smith hand you the breastplate, if I am reading it correctly--you can only sell it on the anonymous auction system. So even that wouldn't work.<

I was looking at the system proposed in Section B:

Barry> B. Player crafting as a two-player participatory activity
...
We can easily adapt this concept to permit player crafting without having to use a trade interface. For crafting to succeed, the person wanting the crafted item (here designated “target”) must have all of the needed ingredients in their inventory. The crafter and the target player meet up, and together they engage in a crafting session. When complete, the needed ingredients disappear from the inventory of the target player, and the target player receives the crafted item directly into their inventory. <

As I am seeing it, to defeat RMT you need to de-individualize the transactions. That is, the buyers pay into a large black box, and the sellers take out of a large black box. The black box needs to be big enough to that a seller can’t reliably give a specific benefit to a particular buyer. For example, in the Smith’s case, the buyer could pay The Glorious Guild of Master Smiths according to the quality of the item he receives. The Guild in turn could pay Master Smiths a stipend based on their guild rank, which in turn is determined by the average quality of the items they are producing. That example is off the top of my head, and may have flaws, but I think the basic principle holds.

Of course, since this is a personalized service, the Smith's Player could still announce that he would only make stuff for people who sent his Paypal account US$10. Just as leaders of powerful guilds have anounced you can join their raid for a payment of real dollars. But I think that is quite a different problem, with different effects, from generalized real money trade.

Tobold> They want a system in which their particular preferred unfairness is allowed, and the unfairness which helps somebody else is forbidden. <

Hehe. So true. I guess we will have to wait for patch 1.1 on human nature.

Unggi>That is, only after having a certain time in virtual world together(ie. party play, raid, or chatting log), one avatar could get the credit to give the other party his/hers items respectively. <

I like it.

[Barry Kearns]

9.

Raph wrote:

But you can't pay the smith, nor can the smith hand you the breastplate, if I am reading it correctly--you can only sell it on the anonymous auction system. So even that wouldn't work.

Please re-read the proposal, Raph. At least two out of the three concepts expressed here don't match the proposal.

Not only can the smith hand you the breastplate at the end of the session, he must do so... it is automatic. The crafting system is the exact opposite of anonymous. The customer and the crafter must have their characters meet up in order to craft... it is a completely personalized process.

Nothing that is produced by crafting is ever sold on an anonymous marketplace. Only the raw ingredients are bought and sold that way, because they are entirely fungible. They are a commodity.

Crafted items, on the other hand, are highly specialized and custom-made. Sure, there's a base template for the item being made, but the skill and experience of the crafter should play a significant role in determining the exact final quality and stats on the item in question.

In SWG, weapon crafting (and subsequent slicing) allowed for a really nice variety among pistols, even among the same model. We can certainly apply that concept here, but rather than making quality a major function of the raw ingredients, we make it a major function of the skill and experience of the crafter.

Earlier, Raph wrote:

It works, but you lose

- reputation factors on crafters and sellers (and buyers)
- services rendered for payment
- all forms of gifting and altruistic behavior in the economy

Well, at least we have the good news that we have a starting point of a system that looks a lot like today's MMO games, yet still resists commodification.

Hopefully, we can now put to rest the canard that such a beast is impossible. Now let's work on improving the structure to add as much fun back in as possible without jeopardizing the core requirements.

First off: (loss of) reputation factors on crafters and sellers (and buyers).

Hopefully, this is based on a simple misunderstanding of the mechanisms proposed. I can see you leaping to that conclusion if all crafted equipment was bought and sold in a purely anonymous fashion... in that case, I'd agree that we would have a big problem with establishing reputations.

But that's simply not what I described. Instead, I offered an intimate crafting system, where knowing and working with the crafter to make something new is mandatory, the exact opposite of anonymity.

If we want additional recognition and reputation factors for crafters, we can always add them in. Make sure to tag all crafted items with a "Made by playername" field, and make equipment inspectable by other players. Award points in crafting guilds based on how many of your crafted items are used by other players, which can be spent for crafting-guild perks or increase the chances of having a rare recipe awarded to you.

Create "hall of fame" or "showcase" displays, where crafters can show off their best creations. If you build a crafter availability feature (something like a bulletin board or catalog that players can look at), in addition to giving users a consolidated list of what can be made, you can also allow crafters to submit their top results from a particular recipe to the catalog.

That allows players to compare the skill of different crafters who can make the same item. Think people are going to assign a better reputation to the better crafter in that case?

When guilds are looking for a good crafter to join them, who do you think is going to be courted to join?

What do you think is going to happen when the first crafter uncovers an extremely rare recipe via a combination of experimentation and crafting-guild quests... one that gives a great bloody glowing sword?

I predict fame, popularity, and yes... reputation.

In this model, there's no real point to "seller" or "buyer" reputation, since these crafted items aren't being directly bought or sold for currency.

Next: (loss of) services rendered for payment. Payment in game currency... the same currency that you use to pay maintenance, upkeep, and buy consumables and ingredients with? No, that's not there. Quite deliberately.

However, that doesn't mean that there's no way to repay a favor or express gratitude to other players when they do something good for you. It's just a different currency.

Instead of "what can you give me", the emphasis shifts towards "what can you do for me". Being able to trade game currency instills the concept that highly divisible and extremely fungible game power is something that should be traded or gifted between players.

I contend that this attitude leads to major problems. Allowing players to buy arbitrary game power with game currency, and at the same time making game currency something that can just be given away leads directly and naturally to one of the more disgusting sub-classes in MMOs: the beggar.

If we want a landscape of achievement, we can't allow people to just hand out fungible achievement tokens to others willy-nilly... we need achievement to be a function of what a player does.

Allowing gifting of currency breaks the ability to use currency as a way to track and reward the accomplishments of a player. It would be little different than having a score-based game where players could just arbitrarily give high-score points to each other. High scores no longer track accomplishments in that case.

Now, with that being said, we can certainly add in ways for players to reward each other that don't tie directly to the game currency.

Let's examine that in the context of the third point: (loss of) all forms of gifting and altruistic behavior in the economy.

I find this just mind-boggling. First you say that you can't be paid for a service, and then you say that you can't do it in an altruistic fashion either? Aren't you contradicting yourself here?

If you do something for someone else for free, how are you not being altruistic? If you do something for someone else, and they don't pay for it, how is that not a gift?

We see hundreds of examples of altruistic behavior in MMOs today that don't involve gifting items or currencies.

Have you ever seen people giving high-level buffs to low-level players? Ever noticed the newbie reactions when they get a big boost to their HP or other stats? When they get a big jump to their combat effectiveness?

There's nothing stopping you from doing things like that under "No-Cash". What's the difference between that, and just giving newbies cash to buy better equipment and potions?

Fungibility and permanence. When you give someone a buff, you end up helping them play the game in an easier fashion. But the developers can carefully balance that benefit and ensure that it is appropriate and non-permanent. You also can't trade in that buff that you received for cash, to spend on something else later.

(Technically, you can take advantage of the temporary benefit to perform better, and receive more rewards per unit time... but you're actually ACCOMPLISHING something in the process. You can't just sit around collecting buffs, cashing them in and saving up the proceeds for something else.)

IMO, the ultimate gifts that you can bestow on lower-level players are your time, effort and knowledge. You can help them learn the best quests and high-yield mobs, how to use their skills effectively, how to work together as a group... how to safely pull a mob, how to determine aggro radius. How to employ crowd control. When to use area-of-effect. How to build their characters for better performance. Show them where the good harvesting spots are.

You know... actually help them become better players. Spending your time doing that is a gift, and shows big-time altruism on your part.

I think there are plenty of people who want the admiration that comes from handing out long-term benefits, without any meaningful personal cost to them.

They want to be a sugar daddy. They want to be Santa Claus. Because hey, people really dig Santa.

Yes... but people also really dig it when someone teaches them how to fish instead of just handing them a gift certificate for 500 pounds of fish at the local supermarket.

Your time and knowledge is often far more precious than 0.001% of your net worth. But hey, spending time to teach someone... that requires actual sacrifice. Wouldn't want to encourage that, eh?

Which gift is truly more altruistic, do you think?
There's little meaningful altruism in a billionaire giving $500 to a homeless person. The billionaire doesn't feel any impact.

I'm stunned at the attitude that the only real answer to the question "How can you help me as a player?" is "Give me cash and loot". Frankly, I think that's pretty sad... and if that fosters a "community", I think it's a pretty dysfunctional one.

Isn't encouraging the meaningful helping of others a prime factor for building strong and positive socialization?

Don't think people will do it on their own, without receiving a direct and immediate reward in return? Fine, then give incentives for the behavior.

Why not add in a method for players to express their gratitude to others for helping? Consider a buff-like feature that every player can use. Call it "Token of Esteem", or "Blessing of Thanksgiving", or "Oath of Fealty". Whatever, you can even have several of them with different values/durations.

Instead of a new player just saying "thanks" and saluting the high-level guy handing out buffs and advice, the new players can "buff" him with an expression of gratitude. The high-level player has a counter for "karma points", let's say. Receiving gratitude buffs increases the karma meter, and the high-level guy can trade in these points for various (well-balanced) rewards and benefits, or even faction points.

Add a cool-down timer and/or recharging player pool of total gratitude, and maybe a diminishing-returns formula for multiple buffs from the same player, and you can mitigate the impact of people farming gratitude from alts.

I'm sure there are plenty of incentive programs that don't reduce to translating every player-to-player interaction down to a cash equivalent to be hoarded.

[Flatfingers]

10.

After reading the first draft of Barry's paper over on his site, here are my initial reactions (modified somewhat on reflection and from reading the comments here). (Note: I'm posting this here rather than on Barry's site since I'm interested in the reactions of TN folks to it, but I'd be happy to cross-post it to Barry's site if he requested that.)

B. Player crafting as a two-player participatory activity

1. Can crafters craft items for themselves? I think you implied they could, but it would be helpful to have that stated clearly.

(Silly note: This reminds me of Russell's Paradox... "The Barber of Seville shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself. Question: Who shaves the Barber of Seville?")

2. "We can easily adapt this concept to permit player crafting without having to use a trade interface."

Question: Why wouldn't you *want* to use a trade interface? Wouldn't a "crafting interface" (through which both players negotiate what is to be created) simply be a trade interface under a different name?

3. "NPC crafting quests/missions"

This is a very nice concept, and would be a valuable part of a "no-cash" economic system.

C. A large variety and high availability of ingredients for player crafting

1. If recipes are semi-randomly determined at object creation time, I don't see any workable alternative to requiring that every player always locate and carry around many units of every type of ingredient. Won't that irritate non-crafter players (who, as noted elsewhere, aren't the most patient of people)?

2. Having unlimited inventory for ingredients will be crucial if you go this route. Even so, I expect there will be some players who will never look on ingredient-hunting as a fun minigame no matter how it's dressed up. They're going to resent not being able to buy ingredients to speed up the process of getting the items they want.

3. "A variety of experimentation and discovery mechanisms are possible, leading crafters to uncover new recipes or enhancements to existing recipes while consuming ingredients in the process."

Love this! Make it so.

4. "By ensuring that items don’t always require a particular ingredient to make, we also ensure that attempts to 'corner the market' or otherwise distort the pricing of the ingredient marketplace won’t serve as a gating mechanism for crafting of that item."

While I think this is an interesting concept, it doesn't seem to be *required* if there are no "prices" because you don't allow money transactions between players. If anyone can obtain any number of resources no matter what another player does (i.e., there's no "ingredient camping"), then no "gating" is possible. So while it might be interesting in its own right, why is it necessary to have variable ingredients to make a no-cash economy work?

D. Player trade via a central anonymized commodity market

1. This is a clever concept. It does imply that customization of objects that can be traded will not be permitted, since if I can offer a uniquely identifiable item, that dispels anonymity and allows external price agreements.

But isn't customization where some of the fun is for crafters? Sure, commodities trading is fun... but so is creating "Flatfingers' Flaming Kris of +5 Leetness". Like commodities trading, customization is also an important part of real-world trading because it gives crafters the power to distinguish their goods from someone else's on a basis other than price. That's part of the fun of crafting!

Is product customization another feature crafters would have to give up for a cashless economy to work? Or are you allowing customization (and thus dispelling anonymity) by making crafted items no-drop/no-trade?

2. What else can in-game currency tokens be used for besides buying on the common market? If you can't buy other goods or services, then the only point of "making money" on the market is... to make more money that you can't spend. How is money worth anything if it's not fungible?

E. System-run market traders able to intercept unusual transactions

Detecting unusually-sized or -priced transactions is one thing. Automating a response is something else -- there's a reason why programmed trading can be suspended by "live" trading managers!

Attempts to prevent cornering a market with programmed buy orders above the "cornering" buy order price, or to prevent flooding a market by offering programmed sell orders below the "flood" sell order price, strike me as very hard to get right. How do you tell the difference between someone who's trying to flood the market with inexpensive goods and someone who's just very efficient? Shouldn't a market system reward efficiency, rather than penalizing it?

F. Preservation and expansion of "loot" systems for player rewards

If all loot drops are "no trade", what do you do with loot you simply don't want to use (perhaps because you've already got one)?

Is your only option to destroy it? In conjunction with "crafted stuff is better," doesn't that significantly reduce the value of loot to the point where you might as well not have loot drops?

G. Retention of NPC traders for basic items and loot sales

But this seems to run afoul of the "no trading in uniquely identifiable items" rule you must have to prevent commodification. Or do you see loot drops as indistinguishable commodities... in which case, where's the fun of loot drops? Isn't part of their allure the "look at this cool thing I got!" reaction?

CONCLUSIONS (SO FAR)

Commercial success is not the only measure of "fun" in a MMOG... but it's one good measure.

So here's the question: Would a game whose rules encouraged (if not demanded) altruism between players be commercially successful? In other words, if you make a game world where giving stuff away for "free" is the norm, are there enough people who'd want to play such a game to make it economically viable?

I think the idea of a game whose rules require altruistic behavior is interesting, and I wouldn't mind seeing such a world attempted to see what happens.

But perhaps such a game could only work if it followed its own prescription, and gave itself away for free....

--Flatfingers

[Jim Self]

11.

I'm almost certain this qualifies as a soapbox.

Anyway, Barry, would you be interested ideas about keeping interplayer trades? A bit late, since I've already posted one over on VekTor... But, ideas like Unggi Yoon's affinity idea above? After this last post you seem more focused on seeing how a game would work without that kind of trade allowed regardless of the absence of RMT and whatnot.

[Barry Kearns]

12.

Oh definitely... In fact, I'm working on methods for incorporating at least some forms of direct player-to-player gifting back into the mix (helping to more directly satify the urge to help others with gifts without opening the floodgates fully).

The more the merrier, please bring any ideas to the table!

(I have a response to the excellent questions posted by Flatfingers under construction, but it's not done yet...)

[Barry Kearns]

13.

Excellent feedback. Thanks, Flatfingers!

Responses to your questions:

Can crafters craft items for themselves? I think you implied they could, but it would be helpful to have that stated clearly.

Good catch. I had the "degenerate case" of self-crafting in my notes, but failed to incorporate it into the draft document. Yes, it's permitted. You use up your own ingredients and get the result for yourself.

Why wouldn't you *want* to use a trade interface? Wouldn't a "crafting interface" (through which both players negotiate what is to be created) simply be a trade interface under a different name?

Well, the fundamental premise that "No-Cash" starts from (detailed in Section I, but not fully detailed in the post for brevity's sake) is eliminating the basic concept of "I have object A, and I can give object A to you. Afterwards, you now have object A".

The whole purpose of a secure trade interface is to transfer possession of something from one player to another. Take away the trading mechanism, and you take away that function. Under this system, in a technical sense no objects or currency change possession before, during or after the crafting session. Nothing is actually traded. Instead, the crafting interface is more of a menu to select which possible crafting outcome we want to see happen (and to alert the target player to any missing ingredients, allowing them to easily make up shortfalls through the market). The target's ingredients are combined and crafted to make something that only the target ever has ownership of.

If recipes are semi-randomly determined at object creation time, I don't see any workable alternative to requiring that every player always locate and carry around many units of every type of ingredient. Won't that irritate non-crafter players (who, as noted elsewhere, aren't the most patient of people)?

Having unlimited inventory for ingredients will be crucial if you go this route. Even so, I expect there will be some players who will never look on ingredient-hunting as a fun minigame no matter how it's dressed up. They're going to resent not being able to buy ingredients to speed up the process of getting the items they want.

I think I've managed to poorly detail the functionality and utility of the tradable ingredient marketplace and the player's ingredient bank. I'll be sure to put a more detailed description and a variety of play examples to demonstrate how it works. It would probably help to include some basic mockup screenshots or diagrams.

In our current design, raw ingredients don't consume any regular inventory space, or even display in the main inventory window. They have their own separate "bank" system. Collected ingredients are automatically added to that bank. The ingredient bank interface acts something like a collector's scorecard. On the left, we have a grid of 16 rows, one for each "tier", and 12 columns for the 12 different varieties present within each tier. Each square in the grid represents the "bucket" that stores a player's current quantity of any given ingredient, and has an icon with a small numeric counter for quantity on hand.

On the right, we have a display panel for the market interface. Setting the focus on any given ingredient (by clicking on that square in the grid) sets the right side to the graphs and controls for market trading in that ingredient.
There's also a separate tab for listing all outstanding buy and sell market orders that the player has right now.

For the player who is uninterested in collecting and gathering activities, I expect the REALLY popular button to be "Sell All at Market Price". Clicking on that will give an estimate on roughly how much gold the player could expect to get if they proceed to sell all of the ingredients (that they have automatically collected and looted while adventuring). When the player confirms, all of that player's ingredient bank gets dumped onto the market for immediate sale, and they get the proceeds (minus any transaction fees). This gives downward market price pressure on each of the ingredients that were dumped.

When someone goes to craft something, and selects an available recipe, a "needed ingredients" list is shown with indicators for which quantities are satisfied, and which are missing.

The popular button here for people who don't gather and collect will be "Buy All at Market Price". That gives an estimate of the cost of immediately (and automatically) buying all of the missing ingredients from the marketplace. Confirm the selection, and you're ready to craft! "Buy All at Market Price" gives upward pressure on the prices of each ingredient bought.

Play-the-market junkies will benefit from the price volatility caused by these fluctuations, and will entertain themselves by trading in different ingredients, trying to buy low and sell high.

People who couldn't give a rip about market speculations will tend to just hit the magic buttons and either get their ingredients (just like from a vendor), or get cash from dumping off this different kind of loot (just like selling off vendor trash).

Cost-conscious (and patient) players will probably strike a balance, slowing filling in the squares of their grid by collecting and looting, dumping off excess quantities to the market when the price seems high, and filling in gaps in their grid when bargains show up.

I expect it to be pretty painless for the non-collector folks, an opportunity to optimize up to your own degree of patience for the middle-of-the-road folks, and economic PvP for the day traders. =)

So while it might be interesting in its own right, why is it necessary to have variable ingredients to make a no-cash economy work?

It's not technically necessary, but it does help shelter against people trying to manipulate the market for a particular ingredient, especially for highly popular crafted items, and even more so for crafted consumables. With one critical ingredient known to the general public, a hostile player couldn't technically "gate" the creation of the item, but could make it inordinately expensive for every crafter out there to keep manufacturing (and for consumables, since they are typically self-crafted, that means a LOT of players).

By implementing variable ingredients, we have multiple different markets with distributed volatility in each, as opposed to a smaller number of markets with very high activity, low volatility (because they tend to be perpetually pegged near the virtual trader threshold) and others that barely move. Anyone trying to make crafting of something significantly more expensive would have to drive up every ingredient in the tier. Much harder to do.

This also serves to prevent crafting from being trivialized and power-leveled via something like ThottBot.

Is product customization another feature crafters would have to give up for a cashless economy to work? Or are you allowing customization (and thus dispelling anonymity) by making crafted items no-drop/no-trade?

Definitely the latter. In World of Warcraft terms, every crafted item is automatically "soulbound".

What else can in-game currency tokens be used for besides buying on the common market? If you can't buy other goods or services, then the only point of "making money" on the market is... to make more money that you can't spend. How is money worth anything if it's not fungible?

You can spend it on lots of stuff. Item repairs, vendor-sold consumables, basic vendor-sold items, transportation costs (gryphons in WoW), higher-level rewards and perks (mounts and elite mounts in WoW), purchasing class benefits and skills (like WoW)... I imagine that people will dump a chunk of it back into the market for ingredients to make self-crafted consumables (making bandages in WoW). Furniture. Houses. Art work. Collectibles. Non-functional pets. I'm sure there are plenty of others, those were the ones that spring immediately to mind.

Anything that you can think of that the game could sell to a player. Take a look at most major MMOs and ask where the "gold drains" are that remove currency from circulation... most of those will still apply.

Attempts to prevent cornering a market with programmed buy orders above the "cornering" buy order price, or to prevent flooding a market by offering programmed sell orders below the "flood" sell order price, strike me as very hard to get right. How do you tell the difference between someone who's trying to flood the market with inexpensive goods and someone who's just very efficient? Shouldn't a market system reward efficiency, rather than penalizing it?

Well, I think the best way to describe the market (as we implement it) is a continuous double auction with a closed order book, where multi-unit orders are treated as multiple single-unit orders with the same pricing strategy. (The closed book means that every order is an "iceberg" order). In our implementation of the full system, there's a cap on the maximum amount of one ingredient that any player can hold at one time (combining current inventory with all units on the market, plus all outstanding buy orders).

Any order entering the system is compared to the best entry on the order queue of the opposite type, and if they overlap, the order is filled at the on-queue price. Rinse and repeat for multiple units. If there's no overlap, the new order enters the queue at the start price, and the players either manually tweak the price (with price changes being resolved like new orders), or they let the system slowly tweak their price automatically on their behalf as time progresses, and orders will fill whenever they overlap.

The "virtual traders" can be implemented with something as simple as a set of really massive buy and sell orders with a (generally) stable set of prices, set a good distance away from the normal/expected/typical trading range. You can make it interesting by letting the price points on those orders drift around a bit (I'd recommend fairly slow/small adjustments), but they are really nothing more than developer-set "min and max" reasonable prices for those commodities. Splitting these into a ramped set of quantities that get higher as you approach the limit gives some squishiness to the price point, too, and makes it a little harder to "game the barrier" and always know where it is.

If anything, I'd say that's pretty hard to get WRONG, rather than pretty hard to get right. When someone "floods" the market with 100% of their holdings in a particular ingredient, they'll just fill the standing orders of whoever has cheap buys listed, from highest to lowest. If there's more than a couple of smart market-gamers on your server, that "flood" will just shift your ingredients over to satisfy their outstanding low-price-buy orders, and the virtual traders won't even come into play.

The only time you'll see orders bumping up against the "soft minimum" provided by the virtual traders is when player sell demand exceeds the amount of every outstanding buy offer for that ingredient that's inside the bounded trading range. When you watch the market price, you're likely to see downward price movement get slower and slower as you approach whatever the soft limit is right now... but that's the same behavior that you'd expect to see if there were 30 or 40 humans that all had similar large long-term low-price offers on the market.

Virtual traders shouldn't be trying to increase market volatility, or even optimize their own profit-per-unit-time... instead, they are just shock absorbers to keep market prices from going insane too fast or too extremely. I should probably work up some graphics to walk through the market mechanics.

Really, it's not that different from popular commodities in today's MMOs with regular NPC vendors offering to sell some popular object at really inflated prices, and to buy back the same thing at really low prices. The players will "game" the trading price amongst themselves between those two price points. What's rough about that from a disaster-prevention standpoint?

Consider containers in WoW (bags/pouches/packs). You can buy an unlimited number from vendors at really high prices, and if you have a metric buttload of extras, you can always sell them back for a small fraction of what you paid. Yet there's still a market with variability in price for containers, since they can be crafted too. Only an idiot would buy one from the auction house at higher than the vendor-sold price, you'd be foolish to sell them at below the vendor buy price... that's the natural price floor.

From a price elasticity standpoint, demand can be treated as infinite at the vendor buy price, and supply is infinite at the vendor sell price. For rational agents, these are the "hard boundaries" within which trading will take place. Where's the problem?

The commodity market as outlined just makes sure that every successful trade stays within the "rational" range, whether the player constructs it that way or not. =P

If all loot drops are "no trade", what do you do with loot you simply don't want to use (perhaps because you've already got one)?

Is your only option to destroy it? In conjunction with "crafted stuff is better," doesn't that significantly reduce the value of loot to the point where you might as well not have loot drops?

You treat it the same way that you do soulbound items in WoW when you're done with them... you either sell them to an NPC vendor, or recycle them if you're an enchanter into reagents. In both cases, the item is destroyed, but you get some kind of compensation back.

I definitely want to see loot drops for items left in, because it helps to keep a "solo" play style viable.
One of my favorite ways to play Diablo II was in hardcore mode with a "live off the land" strategy. Don't buy anything or sell anything, just use what you find. It was a lot of fun.

Under this system, some people might still think dealing with crafters is a total pain. Where do they get their cool toys? They buy basic equipment from the NPC vendors and supplement with what they find as loot drops. If anything, you might want to increase the frequency and variety of equipment loot drops from typical implementations, and correspondingly lower the resale value to net out to the same gold faucet rate as before.

That gives players a wide variety of fairly good equipment to choose from even without crafting, based on nothing but simple adventuring. Finding your own cool stuff and wearing it is certainly a valid play style that can fit well under this system.

re: Retention of NPC traders for basic items and loot sales

But this seems to run afoul of the "no trading in uniquely identifiable items" rule you must have to prevent commodification. Or do you see loot drops as indistinguishable commodities... in which case, where's the fun of loot drops? Isn't part of their allure the "look at this cool thing I got!" reaction?

I phrased that poorly... sorry. That should read "Retention of NPC vendors for basic items and loot sales".

Stuff you sell back to an NPC vendor (as with most MMOs today) gets trashed. NPC vendors are just recycling machines... you feed in trash and money pops out. Loot drops should still have plenty of variety and usability, just like typical MMOs. Lots of cool toys to find and equip. Vendor off what you don't want for gold.

[Flatfingers]

14.

Hi, Barry -- thanks for taking the time to address my questions.

As a reward, here are... more questions! (I think this will be the last batch; feel free to go after or ignore any of the following as you like.)

> Nothing is actually traded. ... The target's ingredients are combined and crafted to make something that only the target ever has ownership of.

Ah -- I get it now. You're conceptually thinking of "crafting" as a process by which Player B converts a set of items in Player A's possession into another item that's also in Player A's possession. As you said (and I didn't quite grasp), it's a bit like how buffs work: it's an asset-modifying service, not a provisioning service.

The questions this then raises are:

1. How complex can crafting be? There's a playstyle aspect to this, I think. If the act of crafting is one-sided -- if one player does most or all of the "work" -- then in complex crafting sessions the ingredient-supplying player may be forced to wait for some time. That might not go over too well with less patient players.

Alternately, if the crafting process is defined to have a lot of back-and-forth interaction between the two players, you could wind up annoying the non-crafters again... after all, if they wanted to engage in that kind of creative decision-making, they'd be crafters!

But perhaps there's a satisfactory middle ground between these two approaches.

2. What rewards will crafters receive for the exercise of their skills? You mentioned XP as one possibility, and there are certainly others we could think of (reputation, cost reductions in commodities trading, etc.). But I wonder whether not being able to reward a crafter with money and/or goods won't be perceived as too restrictive.

A good set of skill-based rewards for crafting services might address this. I suspect the key thing will be to ask: If I were a crafter, what would I consider a desirable reward? What a "crafter" personality likes might be different from rewards that motivate other player types.

> tradable ingredient marketplace and the player's ingredient bank

You've obviously put a lot of thought into this, and designed it to provide interesting features while addressing the obvious questions. Nicely done!

Your explanation answers most of my concerns. All I have left are a couple of implementation questions:

1. Are you thinking of the market interface as being always accessible to all players no matter what their current "physical" location in the game may be? Assuming one can find a crafter with the necessary skills, this would make getting a crafted item pretty easy, but how do you explain this ease of access to a trading system (and ingredients) in gameplay/story terms?

The alternative of having "trading stations" (or NPCs that serve the same purpose) is easier to explain, and fits with our understanding of physical reality (you have to physically carry items from one place to another). But it would force players to have to travel from a crafter to such a station to get any resources they don't have (unless you allow crafters to set up shop near trading posts).

2. I'm guessing you don't see any impediment (in a crafting system that uses your no-trade model) to optional ingredients, or to allowing multiple ingredients to be accepted in one slot of a crafting recipe. I mention this because not allowing optional ingredients (or multiple ingredients that will work but which generate different effects) makes it a lot easier to calculate the kind of "10 more units of X are needed to make this item" results you describe when selecting a desired recipe. Conversely, allowing optional/replaceable ingredients would make for a more creatively satisfying crafting experience, but would potentially make the crafting interface a lot more complex.

> With one critical ingredient known to the general public, a hostile player couldn't technically "gate" the creation of the item, but could make it inordinately expensive for every crafter out there to keep manufacturing

OK, I think I see that... but it raises another question that had been bothering me (but which I couldn't quite articulate until now): How would manufacturing work in the kind of "crafting-as-a-service" system you've proposed?

If manufacturing is about cranking out many units of a high-demand or high-consumable item in order to have sufficient stock on hand to meet expected demand, how does that square with the "just-in-time" item creation system you've described?

>> are you allowing customization ... by making crafted items no-drop/no-trade?
> Definitely the latter.

OK, understood. It might be worthwhile to clearly highlight this point, as it would seem to be a critical feature of your proposed system, and will have significant second-order effects in any game that implements it.

>> What else can in-game currency tokens be used for besides buying on the common market?
> Anything that you can think of that the game could sell to a player.

Er... then I'm thinking that maybe "no-cash economy" might not be the best way to describe such a system. ;-)

If I understand correctly, the key thing that makes your proposed system resistant to commodification isn't that there's no cash -- it's that players can't trade between each other in cash-for-goods or cash-for-services swaps. You can buy things from NPC vendors and automated systems (such as an ingredient trading market); you just can't buy things from other players.

Is that correct? Or have I misunderstood?

> Any order entering the system is compared to the best entry on the order queue of the opposite type, and if they overlap, the order is filled at the on-queue price.

How do you define "best"?

> When someone "floods" the market with 100% of their holdings in a particular ingredient, they'll just fill the standing orders of whoever has cheap buys listed, from highest to lowest.

What if there are no "cheap" buys listed? (That is, how do you define "cheap," and when and how does that determination come into play?)

You describe letting player orders "move" toward each other until there's overlap and a sale is made (if they have that feature activated). So when does the programmed buying/selling kick in? What's the trigger? In other words, how does your system "know" when to leave a player order alone (allowing it to adjust itself on price) and when to satisfy the order with an NPC transaction?

> The "virtual traders" can be implemented with something as simple as a set of really massive buy and sell orders with a (generally) stable set of prices, set a good distance away from the normal/expected/typical trading range ... they are really nothing more than developer-set "min and max" reasonable prices for those commodities.
> The commodity market as outlined just makes sure that every successful trade stays within the "rational" range, whether the player constructs it that way or not. =P

Speaking as a confirmed capitalist, I find this troubling. It's those words "reasonable" and "rational" that are the problem.

The idea of a free market system is that it allows buyers and sellers to freely negotiate prices that satisfy both of them (otherwise there's no deal), and that determining prices in this way is the most efficient means for shifting production from goods that people don't want to the things they do want.

You and I might not agree with someone else's decision on a particular price for a specific good, but if it's not our money or goods at risk, how is it our business to dictate what the "right" price should be? When well-intentioned persons decide to try to enforce their idea of "fairness" on transactions (price caps being the classic example), the results have usually proven to be unhappy for everyone because it distorts the information about what goods are wanted and what goods aren't wanted.

But doesn't the system you're proposing include just that kind of well-meaning interference? If programmed buying and selling kicks in beyond "reasonable" minima and maxima, how is that anything but an artificial tampering with a market trying to find a price that satisfies both buyer and seller? In other words, do you believe that the advantages you perceive in imposing high/low caps are worth losing the high efficiency of the free market approach to regulating supply and demand?

Players of MMOGs need to be motivated to produce, just like players of economic games in the physical world. A system that artificially caps profits -- for no reason other than because someone has decided that people don't "deserve" any profit on a transaction beyond some arbitrary "fair" amount -- won't motivate players to produce except as a vanity action.

The result is a game (or real) ecomomy in which NPCs (or governments) have to crank out items, because you haven't motivated players through the profit motive to do that production for you. And that's just not as much fun.

Again, this is definitely an analysis from a strongly capitalistic point of view. I could be persuaded that I'm wrong on this... but it's going to have to be a *really* good argument to the contrary. :D

...

Overall, I have the feeling that you've thought carefully about the secondary effects of not allowing player trades, and redesigned the other usual game systems (crafting, looting, item acquisition etc.) to compensate for those effects. At this point, I'd be interested in seeing what such a game might look like as actually implemented. It might answer some or all of my questions and concerns.

Even if doesn't turn out to be The Perfect Alternative to the more commodified MMOGs, or winds up being a direction in which players aren't yet ready to go, it could be an instructive experiment.

--Flatfingers

[Barry Kearns]

15.

If only to keep from flooding Terra Nova, I've put responses to Flatfingers' follow-ups as a comment at my blog.

60-second summary:

...Yup, crafting is just a transforming service...
...complexity and rewards from a crafting system are designer's choice, just balance it...
...working on adding in some limited forms of player-to-player gifting...
...hand-wave your own explanation as you see fit...
...we split optional ingredients into a follow-on function...
...Crafters are more like Motie Engineers / Watchmakers than factory workers...
...open to suggestions for a better name: No-Outside-Cash, perhaps?...
...I really, really need to draw pictures and examples for this market...
...[Cynic]It's not really a capitalism sim, it's just lots of linked mini-games[/Cynic]...
...We do get useful functions and metrics out of the "virtual traders".

[Raph]

16.

Ah, we're nowhere near flooding TerraNova. :) Look at the number of comments on some of the other threads!

You're right, I did misunderstand the way crafting would work. I can see that there might be some interesting effects on how reputation works though, since there are a very limited number of types of transaction that can be performed. And you would absolutely need to have forms of marketing in there, since there is no marketplace where people can see goods.

I think you are defining services rather too narrowly. Giving someone directions is a service, and one which we currently handle poorly in MMOs--save for the use of fungible currency as a means of rewarding the behavior. There's countless forms of service transactions that we simply cannot easily detect. We've been slowly trying to create game-detectable ways to have services performed by one player for another, so it rubs me the wrong way to assume that only the game-detectable ones are worthwhile. What is the payoff for the roleplayer who is very good at running the tavern?

(Actually, how does a roleplayer run a tavern in this system?)

By resorting to karma points, you're just introducing a brand-new complex problem into the mix; there's enough said on why that's a massive tar pit of its own that I won't reiterate it. I did find it amusing that you ended by saying that surely there's an incentive that won't be hoarded and farmed. :)

I was struck by your insistence on "an achievement-based landscape." I could give a fig about an achievement-based landscape, relative to things like a community-based landscape. Achievement matters within a given mini-game, such as combat (yes, combat is a mini-game). But it doesn't apply to the world as a whole.

You can "fix" RMT for any given mini-game by simply not having transfer of items relevant to that mini-game. You could even have two complete combat systems that co-existed within one game, one with purchasable stuff and one without, and with two types of XP. Easy-peasy, actually. In the no-RMT version, every item is soulbound and there's nothing you can buy that will help you in the fight. In the other parallel system, you can buy equipment and so on.

[Barry Kearns]

17.

Raph wrote:

Ah, we're nowhere near flooding TerraNova. :) Look at the number of comments on some of the other threads!

Someone mentioned "soapbox" above... didn't want people to think this was just an opportunity to excessively pimp out an idea/proposal.

You're right, I did misunderstand the way crafting would work. I can see that there might be some interesting effects on how reputation works though, since there are a very limited number of types of transaction that can be performed. And you would absolutely need to have forms of marketing in there, since there is no marketplace where people can see goods.

Yep, that's why I suggested things like a directory/catalog with example results, "hall of fame" displays, NPC guildmaster quests to service individuals (basically a letter-of-recommendation from an NPC), things like that.

I think you are defining services rather too narrowly. Giving someone directions is a service, and one which we currently handle poorly in MMOs--save for the use of fungible currency as a means of rewarding the behavior. There's countless forms of service transactions that we simply cannot easily detect. We've been slowly trying to create game-detectable ways to have services performed by one player for another, so it rubs me the wrong way to assume that only the game-detectable ones are worthwhile.

I sure hope you don't think that's what I believe... I believe exactly the opposite. I think there are lots of good, friendly, community-building services that people do for each other all the time in MMOs. That's why I was stunned at the suggestion that taking away a trade interface means that none of that will ever happen... as if the only reason people did good things was to get PAID for it.

That's exactly the opposite of my experience. I see loads of people doing nice things for each other without ever exchanging so much as a copper.
If people do those things today for free, why would you expect them to stop if they couldn't directly get paid for them tomorrow? Some people don't do nice things with the expectation of getting paid... they do it because they like being nice.

Have you considered that if a player can't just drop a pile of cash on someone else, and they want to express their gratitude, they might actually come up with a way to do it that didn't involve money or items? Do you think that those sorts of non-monetary thanks might actually improve the social fabric in pleasant ways?

What is the payoff for the roleplayer who is very good at running the tavern?

(Actually, how does a roleplayer run a tavern in this system?)

Admiration. Popularity. Camraderie. Oh wait... are you asking how a roleplayer who runs a tavern earns phat lewt because he does so?

Easy enough to implement. You have a local chamber of commerce that rewards businesses who attract tourists and other visitors to the area. Good for the local economy and all that. The mayor's trying to rally support for the local area, and wants to pull people away from the neighboring kingdom. Players get paid a nominal sum from the chamber of commerce based on popularity and attendance at your establishment. Doesn't "The Sims Online" have something similar, where you have rewards based on "dwell time" or something like that? How many people spend time in your place, and for how long?

As to running it, that would seem to tie in really well with some of the gifting ideas I've been rolling around. You buy a tavern, and as the owner, you have a special action that you can perform... something like a buff. Casting that lets you put a beverage into the inventory of a local patron (with their consent, of course). You can add the usual effects (whatever you like) from the beverage. It's the tavern's mug, though, so players can't take it with 'em. Can't resell it either.

When you're not around, players can buy drinks from an NPC barmaid. Of course, when you're around, you're a pretty popular guy: Drinks are on the house!

Add in a dwell feature as mentioned above, and you can actually earn a nominal income. As a successful local businessman, perhaps that opens up a whole series of other quests that only you have the opportunity to participate in. Improved faction with the local government, those sorts of things.

By resorting to karma points, you're just introducing a brand-new complex problem into the mix; there's enough said on why that's a massive tar pit of its own that I won't reiterate it. I did find it amusing that you ended by saying that surely there's an incentive that won't be hoarded and farmed. :)

I think you're mis-reading what I meant there. I was trying to initially say that, assuming you think no one will participate in helpful behavior, you can add incentives that don't involve something you can convert to cash... because players can hoard the cash and that gives an inroad for a commodifier to sell currency, if only via multiple iterations of the smaller unit.

I was struck by your insistence on "an achievement-based landscape." I could give a fig about an achievement-based landscape, relative to things like a community-based landscape. Achievement matters within a given mini-game, such as combat (yes, combat is a mini-game). But it doesn't apply to the world as a whole.

I'm trying to listen to potential customers, who keep insisting that their game is being wrecked by people who are getting fake achievements. Is it possible that they are all delusional, and have no idea what they are talking about?

Sure, I suppose so. But I also think it's possible that maybe they just don't think like you do.

How can we know if they really want what they claim to want, unless we build an environment that gives it to them and see if they stay? And how do we give them that environment if a spoilsport has the mechanics to counterfeit achievements via purchased currency?

Richard seems to "get it" with respect to the mindset of players who want that kind of protected environment. It's one of the areas where we agree... if you're going to have an achievement-based landscape, you need to stop people from cheating their way to accomplishments. That cheapens the "display value" of the accomplishment that was earned fairly. It's why we punish exploiters.

He and I just have different ideas on how to get there. I think EULAs, rules and policies have clearly failed, and it's time for code enforcement.

You could even have two complete combat systems that co-existed within one game, one with purchasable stuff and one without, and with two types of XP. Easy-peasy, actually. In the no-RMT version, every item is soulbound and there's nothing you can buy that will help you in the fight. In the other parallel system, you can buy equipment and so on.

Is that so different from having one character on a no-outside-cash server, and another on a server with regular trading?

[Raph Koster]

18.

I think there are lots of good, friendly, community-building services that people do for each other all the time in MMOs. That's why I was stunned at the suggestion that taking away a trade interface means that none of that will ever happen... as if the only reason people did good things was to get PAID for it.

That's not at all what I meant to imply. I will state outright, however, that a sizable number of people will not behave altruistically if there is no expectation of future interaction, if there's no possibility of reward, and so on. I'll go further and say that the more achievement-based a game is, the less altruistically people will tend to behave unless there are strong forces pushing them to behave otherwise.

For better or worse, particularly the more of an "achievement-based landscape" you make the game, the more selfish behavior I believe you will see.

I agree that a game where people expressed thanks in social ways would be preferable. I suppose I am just to cynical to expect it to actually happen. I think we'd just not see thanks being expressed other than verbally.

But my underlying point was more about rewarding players for engaging in a variety of activities, particularly activities where one player offers services to another. You're essentially proposing that instead, every possible activity award the equivalent of XP in an automated fashion, and that we find metrics to determine whether or not the person is deserving of said XP. I kinda went down that road to a degree with SWG... I'm not saying it's a bad road. I'm saying that it's going to miss a heck of a lot of activities.

Hence each example is countered with "well, we can create a system to account for that case."

I was trying to initially say that, assuming you think no one will participate in helpful behavior, you can add incentives that don't involve something you can convert to cash... because players can hoard the cash and that gives an inroad for a commodifier to sell currency, if only via multiple iterations of the smaller unit.

I wasn't suggesting that people could trade the karma points--I'm just pointing out that the described system, like most systems with player-granted karma points, are vulnerable to hoarding and to farming and to favoritism in exactly the same ways that currency is, minus the transferral capability. You get most of the same negative behaviors, in other words. You'd get people putting their karma points up on eBay offering to sell them to players who want a quick reputation boost.

I'm trying to listen to potential customers, who keep insisting that their game is being wrecked by people who are getting fake achievements. Is it possible that they are all delusional, and have no idea what they are talking about?

Sure, I suppose so. But I also think it's possible that maybe they just don't think like you do.

Whoa, no need to be so adversarial!

I am not going to argue that the people who want a fair playing field are delusional. But the situation is a bit more complex than that. We need to ask why the game is being "wrecked" by "someone else's fake achievement."

The commonest complaint is that someone else buying their way to the top of a given achievement ladder is "cheating." The question to ask is whether the player complaining is in any way impacted by this. Barring PvP, they are impacted mostly by a feeling that their own achievement is cheapened. But their achievement is their own. Nothing can take it away. They know what they accomplished, and so does anyone else who knows them well at all.

It's more about status to strangers, really. That's what people are really saying is cheapened. When everyone can wear the royal purple, how can you tell who is royal?

There are other incidental effects, such as grouping with a high-level player who doesn't know how to play, but those are really fairly minor over time, plus data suggests that the majority of those who purchase items or characters are actually players who have already gotten to the top on their own once before.

But at bottom, the issue is not about achievement at all. Players are not in direct competition for levels. Rather, it's a social issue.

There are precisely two reasons to purchase goods (because there are ony two uses for goods):

A. as an enabler to access game content
B. as a symbol of status

The culture war over RMT can be summarized as "people in favor want the goods for reason A, and people opposed resent it because of reason B."

The number of people who want to purchase goods for reason B is pretty small, and the typical anti-RMT person who favors reason A tends to say "...and that's why making the grind less will make eBaying go away."

It's worth asking why there's few people who purchase goods for status, and the answer is that status in these games is not actually derived primarily from achievement. Frankly, the RPG mechanics employed already cheapen achievement as a metric of status based on skill. We see this commonly acknowledged in the everyday slang surrounding the games--"catass" being the prototypical term nowadays.

Scratch below the surface, and status in an MMO is derived from factors a lot subtler than level or phat lewt.

Similarly, making the grind easier will not eliminate eBaying, not unless goods and characters and so on are not used as gates to advancement. But that would effectively remove a lot of elements from the achievement-based landscape. Stuff like levels, loot, and so on. It's endemic to the game systems. Soulbound and otherwise non-transferable items are the same thing as levels. So long as levels exist, gates exist. So long as gates to content exist, particularly ones that separate players, there will be motive and means for jumping past the gates.

My personal opinion is that we DO need to get rid of levels. We mostly need to get rid of loot too. But this is something that the achievement-based culture doesn't want. :) So you're right, they just don't think like me.

Can we see what they really want? Well, the no-eBay worlds exist already. They're the single-player games. The social artifact that causes people to wish to buy their way past gameplay gates has been so institutionalized in single-player gaming that you can buy magazines that are full of cheat codes to let you see more of a given game. I submit that RMTs are nothing more than people giving each other cheat codes in the only way they can.

Is that so different from having one character on a no-outside-cash server, and another on a server with regular trading?

That's my point. It's not. And it's also effectively two games, one multiplayer and one single-player, embedded in the same space. And that's why this issue just isn't going to go away.

The reason why people would be reluctant to have RMT and non-RMT systems in the same world is because of the fallacious notion than a given MMO is one game. It's not. It's a space within which games are embedded. This is a social issue; the real reasons to dislike RMT are mostly to do with public ego satisfaction, with status games. RMT isn't even damaging to "immersion"--it exists outside the sphere of suspension of disbelief.

The real concern would be whether RMT distorts the design of the games. That's Ted's concern, for example. That commodification will cause designers to badly distort their intents.

I suggest that removing money, removing item gifting and trades, removing all the economic elements that can come with these two, is a massive distortion of the typical designer intent for these spaces. Which is causing greater distortion to the way these games are designed, the presence of RMT, or the desire to make RMT go away?

[Mike Rozak]

19.

I haven't look at this topic for a few days; this topic has gotten interesting; keep flooding Terranove with the comments.

Raph Koster wrote: I submit that RMTs are nothing more than people giving each other cheat codes in the only way they can.

If I buy a single-player game and can't complete it, I get annoyed at the designers for making it too difficult and go find a cheat web page. If the game company makes me pay $10 for cheat book (which they used to), I get annoyed at the company for selling a "defective" product that needs an extra cheat book to complete. I assume other people think the same way about cheats and buying hint books, but I could be wrong.

I don't know if Morrowind or NwN have official $10 cheat books, but you certainly don't see them selling in-game items to players so players can complete the games. I suspect players of such single-player games would get the same sense of annoyance if they got half way through and had to shell out $10 to advance through the rest of the game at more than a snail's pace.

Paying cash for in-game items/levels does happen in MMORPGs, though. On top of that, the content in MMORPGs is more homogonous; If I get to the end of Morrowind or NwN, I actually get the satisfaction of defeating the ultimate bad guy, saving the world, and being able to close the book. If I get to the end of a MMORPG... well, I don't get to the end because there isn't one. It's just the same old monster bashing but with different 3d models, texture maps, and audio files.

This leads me to suspect that even people buying items because they consciously want to bypass the grind are buying for social reasons, even if it is to keep up with their friends.

My latest attempt to boil VW's down to their essense has come up with the following thoughts:

1) People play virtual worlds because they want "something" from the experience, often social in nature. Of course they want to be entertained, but they want to hang out with friends, be the most revered hero in the land, own an inn with real customers, be king, or just be the only one in the world who can wear a pink fuzzy hat... What people want varies from person to person.

2) Many/most of these social desires are also sought after by other people. If I want to hang out with my friends, this sometimes means my friends can't hang out with other people, who also desire their company. There can only be one or two most-revered heros in a world. There are only so many inns. There is only one kingship. And the world has a limited supply of pink fuzzy sheep to make pink fuzzy hats.

3) Therefore, players must compete for the "resources" they want in order to fulfill their desires.

VW designers produce different ways players can compete and win control of the "resources", such as:

a) Luck... one person will be randomly selected to be king for the day (or for life). Permadeath is a form of luck.

b) Player skill (not character skill)... the best socializer/politician, or the one who is best as the jousting sub-game, gets the kingdom.

c) Hard work (the grind)... the one that spends the most hours killing orcs gets the kingdom.

d) Altruism... the nicest person gets to be king.

e) Fairness... Five people want to be king, so each one can be king once every five days.

f) Real-world money... the player that pays the developers the most money gets to be king; or, the player that pays the best player from a, b, c, d, or e gets to be king.

g) All of the above, or at least some of the above with different weighting factors.

RMT are a way for players to get control of the "resource" they desire. Because the resource is ultimately limited by social constraints, RMT is (usually or always?) a power grab. (Even a buying sword+5 is social when it affects whether your character can be the top-ranked hero, or hang out with friends.)

Every player uses a few of the above approaches to meet their desires and control whatever "resource" they wish to control. Players chose the approaches based on the players' individual strengths. People with lots of time use the grind. Those with intelligence/skill use that. Etc.

Players who don't like RMT don't like it because it necessarily reduces the effectiveness of their own approaches, unless they plan to use RMT. Furthermore, they're woried that game companies, being corporations looking for money, will side with RMTs to the exclusion of all other approaches to acquiring in-game resources, thereby preventing them from gaining power in the game (to meet their goals) unless they have lots of RL money.

In fact, if you ask players whether luck should be more of a factor in determining who gets power, the majority will say no... If you ask if player skill should be an important factor, the majority will say no. Do they want more grind? No. Etc. The answer is always no, because 5/6 of the population stands to lose out from the emphasis of any particular method.

My intuition says that the more mechanisms (a .. f) that a world supports, the more robust the world. (Despite the fact that I'm not a fan of RMT, my intuition tells me that the world may need some, although of limited effect, just as luck and hard work are limited.) Part of the problem with contemporary MMORPGs is that they currently rely heavily on "hard work" (the grind), and ignore/minimize the rest (luck, player skill, etc.)

Removing money, item gifting, etc. hinders the trading of power. Some sub-games may deliver for player skill (chess) while others deliver for hard work (MMORPG combat). Some sub-games reward with gold, others with XP, others with items, etc. If I happen to be good at chess, which rewards with gold, but I need XP to meet my desire of being the most famous knight in the land, and I can't somehow trade gold for XP, I won't play the game because there's know way I can use my strengths to reach my goal.

Does this make sense, or has my thought experiment completely gone off the deep end?

[Hellinar]

20.

Barry>I'm trying to listen to potential customers, who keep insisting that their game is being wrecked by people who are getting fake achievements. Is it possible that they are all delusional, and have no idea what they are talking about?<

Could “achievement” here really be being used as a code word for “History”? The ability to create fake history cheapens any real history a character may have. RMT distorts the history you can read from a character by looking at his stuff. Without it, you at least know he is either powerful in the world, or has rich friends if he has good equipment. Both in-world parts of his story. With RMT, he might just have a good day job. My fix for that would be to create player accessible official histories of most significant objects. Then the fact that you are an avid user of RMT just becomes another type of story, another achievement of your character.

Raph>Scratch below the surface, and status in an MMO is derived from factors a lot subtler than level or phat lewt.<

I agree wholeheartedly. The snag is, the subtlety is often overwhelmed by a simple linear scoring system, such as levels. In a social sense, someone’s reputation may be enhanced as much by their losses as their gains, by the power they give away as by the power they acquire. This subtlety is lost if you only ever present someone’s final score, rather than the history of how they got there.

I think Barry has got something very interesting there. I hope to play it. But I would like to see any “karma points” replaced by real history. Its compressing history down to a single score that makes “faking” so easy. In the old days, that was justified by expensive disk space. These days it isn’t. Plus you may get a drop in CS requests, some of which I understand revolve around the disputed history of significant items.

[Barry Kearns]

21.

(Raph) will state outright, however, that a sizable number of people will not behave altruistically if there is no expectation of future interaction, if there's no possibility of reward, and so on. I'll go further and say that the more achievement-based a game is, the less altruistically people will tend to behave unless there are strong forces pushing them to behave otherwise.

For better or worse, particularly the more of an "achievement-based landscape" you make the game, the more selfish behavior I believe you will see.

I agree that a game where people expressed thanks in social ways would be preferable. I suppose I am just to cynical to expect it to actually happen. I think we'd just not see thanks being expressed other than verbally.

I am vastly more optimistic with respect to the type of audience that will self-segregate to servers with this kind of ruleset.

I suspect that in creating an environment where player interactions are vastly less in-game-commercialized, we may actually attract a slice of audience that otherwise would have foregone the game entirely.

It's an environment that (I think) emphasizes social interaction and voluntary cooperative behavior, where players can benefit from solo play and even more so from cooperative group play.

Not everyone wants to play in an environment where all the players are driven by how many gold pieces they can extract from each other... where selling your "skills" to other players for gold is the huge motivator.

Why not target a wider audience by offering a server with a different ruleset like this? I suspect (but obviously cannot prove) that an environment like this might also attract a higher fraction of female gamers than many traditional MMO offerings.

It's more about status to strangers, really. That's what people are really saying is cheapened. When everyone can wear the royal purple, how can you tell who is royal?

I'm sure that's a big factor. Put in callous terms, you're not going to attract much admiration and envy from having completed a huge quest (which gives a reward of a mighty glowing sword) if dozens of other players just slapped down a credit card and bought the sword outright.

You've lost the power/utility that arises from showing off the trophies of your difficult deeds.

(Raph) Soulbound and otherwise non-transferable items are the same thing as levels. So long as levels exist, gates exist. So long as gates to content exist, particularly ones that separate players, there will be motive and means for jumping past the gates.

See, this is what I don't get. In most circumstances, I'd expect a developer to look at someone who had jumped past the clearly-designed gates and accurately think "Exploit!". Because that's what it is.

Of course people are going to want to jump the gates... but if you give them the means, they are gonna exploit them, and other players are not going to like that. I see RMT as no different. It's an exploit. Now, when an exploit is initially discovered, I think it's appropriate to warn players not to do that... but only as a stopgap while you code a solution that enforces the rule.

If someone found a button that gives them unbalancing XP (something like bugged turn-in quests that were not supposed to be repeatable, but players found a way to rapidly repeat it), and their levels are shooting up because of it, are you just going to make a policy telling them not to press it, or are you going to fix the code so that no one else can bypass the gates?

Well, the no-eBay worlds exist already. They're the single-player games. The social artifact that causes people to wish to buy their way past gameplay gates has been so institutionalized in single-player gaming that you can buy magazines that are full of cheat codes to let you see more of a given game. I submit that RMTs are nothing more than people giving each other cheat codes in the only way they can.

Single-player games typically don't have the benefit of showing off to others in-game, particularly strangers. Why do you think high-score displays in arcade games were popular, and drove some people to play (and pay) a lot more?

Because they gave a (typically) non-counterfeitable way to show off your accomplishments to strangers, that you might later interact with. Bragging rights do no good if you can't actually interact with the person who sees your accomplishment and envies it.

If today's single-player games embody non-RMT, and your players are telling you they want those aspects... why not listen to them?

Compare the revenue figures from single-player games to online games. That's a lot of money talking. Shouldn't you be trying to attract as much of the single-player market to the online world as you can?

A split-server enviroment lets you keep the players who like RMT and gate-jumping, and also keep the people who hate it. Seems like a no-brainer to me...

I suggest that removing money, removing item gifting and trades, removing all the economic elements that can come with these two, is a massive distortion of the typical designer intent for these spaces. Which is causing greater distortion to the way these games are designed, the presence of RMT, or the desire to make RMT go away?

Doesn't the public hue and cry for eliminating RMT by a fraction of your customers just scream to you that there is a real desire in part of your customer base for a different design of this game?

Would you rather lose those customers who want a different design, or give them a separate playground (that they keep paying you for)?

Maybe the "distorted" design is actually something they really do want, and will happily pay for... why not design an option that satisfies those desires, and capture that revenue stream?

[Barry Kearns]

22.

Mike Rozak wrote:

Removing money, item gifting, etc. hinders the trading of power. Some sub-games may deliver for player skill (chess) while others deliver for hard work (MMORPG combat). Some sub-games reward with gold, others with XP, others with items, etc. If I happen to be good at chess, which rewards with gold, but I need XP to meet my desire of being the most famous knight in the land, and I can't somehow trade gold for XP, I won't play the game because there's know way I can use my strengths to reach my goal.

And I think that's at the root of many people's complaints about RMT. You're trying to substitute one achievement for an entirely different one, when they are not equivalent. If your ambition is to be the most famous knight in the land, and we have an enforced landscape of achievement, you don't get to be a knight without actually doing all of the knightly things that are necessary to achieve that goal. You have to pass all of the gates, just like every other knight before you did.

If you don't, I'm sad to say that you're a fake knight. And if there's no way for other players to tell your fake knight apart from a real knight (you have all the same benefits and trophies), then the real knights are gonna (rightfully) resent it.

Instead, we should focus on acknowledging your actual accomplishment: that you really are the greatest chess player in the kingdom. And that's nothing to sneeze at. But playing chess and slaying dragons aren't fungible achievements. Each carry different meanings for different players. Each is clearly an accomplishment, but you can't just substitute one for the other and preserve the meanings, any more than you could substitute a world-record score at Donkey Kong for an Olympic speed record for swimming.

Hellinar wrote:

Could “achievement” here really be being used as a code word for “History”? The ability to create fake history cheapens any real history a character may have. RMT distorts the history you can read from a character by looking at his stuff. Without it, you at least know he is either powerful in the world, or has rich friends if he has good equipment. Both in-world parts of his story. With RMT, he might just have a good day job. My fix for that would be to create player accessible official histories of most significant objects. Then the fact that you are an avid user of RMT just becomes another type of story, another achievement of your character.

I think you're on to something here. "Fake history" is a good way of expressing what's happening. I'm intrigued by the concept of annotated objects as a means to establish a richer and more self-documenting history for trophies (recalling the previous discussion here on TN).

In that sense, RMT players today are trying to scratch out one achievement and write in another one, as if they were equivalent... reminiscent of that episode of M*A*S*H where they were trying to get an incubator:

Hawkeye: "We're not asking for a jukebox or...or a pizza oven."
Sloan: "Oh, those I can let you have."
Henry: "No kidding! Hey, those would be great on movie nights. Uh, you got any pizza requisition forms?"
Sloan: "Oh just use the standard S-1798 and write in 'pizza' where it says 'machine gun'."

It's a funny bit, because deep down, we all know just how non-equivalent pizzas and machine guns really are.

(Of course, with SOE giving players a /pizza command, who knows these days?)

I've been thinking about ways to add player-to-player gifting back into a system like this, without opening the door to excessive commodification. My current thoughts are along these lines:

1. Add a gift-giving function for items that are lower to mid-level in power... roughly analogous to "greens" in WoW. Vendor-purchased or looted items which had not yet been equipped would be eligible, but probably not crafted items (perhaps with the exception of crafted consumables). More powerful dropped items would remain bind-on-pickup.

2. Players could select these objects, use the "give as a gift" function, and select their target (the player they want to give the object to).

3. The receiving player is shown a dialog with a representation of the object that they can examine, and a notation of "Steve would like to give this to you as a gift. Do you accept?". The receiving player can accept or reject the gift.

4. If the receiver accepts, the object is removed from the giver's inventory and placed in the receiver's inventory.

5. The object is modified, however: It now also carries a displayable "gift" text description, and the object now has a vendor resale value of zero (to prevent gifts from being a currency-delivery mechanism). Other players can see if you found that yourself, or someone else gave it to you. Gifts cannot be re-gifted to someone else.

6. Objects with player requirements more than two levels above the receiver's current level can't be gifted. This prevents someone from loading up in one stop with all the gear they will ever need. If you want to keep gifting gear to someone, you'll need to keep interacting with them over time.

7. Optionally, create a counter which adds up the vendor-equivalent-sale value of all gifted objects received. This can (potentially) be a display field, or a sliding limit can be set on the maximum amount of gifting that one player can receive at their current level.

8. Other ideas: Gift shops that sell various types of "soul armor" packages, which contain a full set of all armor pieces for a given type (cloth, leather, etc.). Better stats than typical vendor-sold gear, but a bit less than decent loot drops. Maybe even have "soul armor" automatically improve itself as a player levels. Non-repairable, but decays slower than typical armor. Resale value of zero. Same delivery mechanics.

9. Same idea, but for consumables. Various "care packages" with potions, bandages, food, etc. that can be gifted to others. Different packages that are appropriate for different character levels.

Currency gifting remains blocked in all of the above. The basic idea is to be able to give some marginally improved capabilities to friends that are no more unbalancing than a typical high-level buff being bestowed on another character... and most importantly, to ensure that if you want to keep providing benefits to another player, you need to keep interacting with them (just like with buffs), instead of just dropping a lifetime-supply of gold on their head when they are born.

It's player-to-player assistance over time driven by interaction, not a bottomless trust fund.

Comments and other proposals that allow assistance without overblown one-shot twinking that lasts for a character's lifetime?

[Barry Kearns]

23.

Whoops, forgot to add into the gifting ideas section that this could even open up the possibility of player-to-player secure gift swaps, which gives a form of more typical "trade" back to the population.

[Mike Rozak]

24.

Barry Kearns wrote: If you don't, I'm sad to say that you're a fake knight. And if there's no way for other players to tell your fake knight apart from a real knight (you have all the same benefits and trophies), then the real knights are gonna (rightfully) resent it.

Instead, we should focus on acknowledging your actual accomplishment: that you really are the greatest chess player in the kingdom.

I understand where you're coming from, but a few points from the chess-player's POV:

1) If winning at chess games earns in-game money, and the chess player uses the in-game money to buy better-than-normal equipment, that makes his quest to become a renouned knight easier. Is that cheating?

2) Maybe the chess player wants to become a famous knight in the VW because while he's great at chess in RL, and known for it, he wants to experience a different sort of fame.

3) "Chess" could be substituted for any other sub-game that doesn't necessarily result in the same rewards as the combat sub game. For example: "Chess" could be replaced by crafting, card playing, ability to explore the world, drawing sketches of other PCs for their web pages, etc.

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that player's desires run into conflict with one another. Some players wish to be able to identify another player for what they have done with their definition of legitimate, while other players want the definition of legitimate changed because they can't reach their goals without a change in the definition.

[Barry Kearns]

25.

Mike Rozak wrote:

1) If winning at chess games earns in-game money, and the chess player uses the in-game money to buy better-than-normal equipment, that makes his quest to become a renouned knight easier. Is that cheating?

I would say in general, no, since we've defined that particular advantage as something that is purchasable with fungible achievement, as represented by in-game gold. In doing so, we're implicitly saying that all of the different in-game ways of earning gold are acceptable substitutes for ways to get that particular advantage.

Part of the big difference is that all this does is give you a minor edge... you still have to accomplish all of the tasks and pass all the gates.

Now, when we try to balance this, I would think many people would expect to have players do something to "earn" that gold, and set the gold production rates from those activities so that they are reasonably balanced... that's why people get upset when someone comes up with a gold dupe, or purchases a billion gold using a credit card. It throws the balancing aspect all out of kilter.

That's why I'm proposing a system where game currency isn't tied to what people can GIVE YOU, only on what you do within the game itself... and the amount of advantage you can buy with that currency is limited as well.

By doing so, no character gets the "walk on Easy Street" that comes from someone gifting a million gold to them, either for twinking purposes or from a purchase in RMT.

We can then offer higher symbols of status and other advantages (like mounts, extra inventory/storage space, mansions etc.) for purchase using in-game currency, and know that the characters did something to earn it at least. They didn't get a "free pass" giving them advantages that others had to work for.

2) Maybe the chess player wants to become a famous knight in the VW because while he's great at chess in RL, and known for it, he wants to experience a different sort of fame.

Great! Sounds like a perfect application for a virtual world. And he'll certainly earn and deserve that sort of fame... provided he actually does the things necessary to become a famous knight. When he does so, and gets the trophies and designators that come from being a famous knight, people will recognize that achievement... because he actually did it.

If he slaps down a credit card and just buys the trophies and designators, he's trying to publicly claim that he did something when he didn't. It's a fradulent status. It's like a civilian buying a uniform and ribbons at the Army-Navy surplus store, and wearing them in a veteran's parade... or buying Olympic medals off of eBay and then claiming that he actually won them. (He can even technically "not lie" with that claim. After all, he had the winning bid... the point is, the "wins" aren't equivalent.)

It's a misappropriation of the markers of status.

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that player's desires run into conflict with one another. Some players wish to be able to identify another player for what they have done with their definition of legitimate, while other players want the definition of legitimate changed because they can't reach their goals without a change in the definition.

Yes. The rude/blunt way to say that, is to say that some people want to lie about what they've done, and have the game environment legitimize their lie.

I'm sure some people would like to change their play histories to be able to proclaim to the game world that they singlehandedly defeated four enemies who were armed with machine guns when all they had was a knife. That's a really cool achievement.

But it's a bit of a problem if the four enemies were actually armed with pizzas instead, and the player wrote in "machine gun" where it said "pizza". That's not nearly so cool.

If a player wants to be Rambo, make him do Rambo-like things. Don't let him buy a made-up history where he can just claim to be Rambo and the game will back him up on his false claims. Saying that he doesn't have the ability to be Rambo unless he's allowed to change machine guns into pizzas and vice versa, indicates that he shouldn't be Rambo... if he does, being Rambo means a lot less.

From an in-game perspective, we can prevent people from buying an advantage in a few ways. We can utterly break the relationship between game currency and everything that helps the player advance. If someone buys a million gold, it does no good when they can't spend it on anything. But then why bother having a currency at all?

Or, we can leave a game currency in as a method for allowing a player to partially substitute different activities for one another, but still stop people from buying an advantage with RMT by making sure that no character can gift wealth to another character.

I think the second option has higher utility than the first (no currency at all). Both are significantly different landscapes from what most people play today, because many players have gotten used to arbitrarily reassigning the privileges earned on one character to another character who hasn't earned them yet... by giving them wealth. They've gotten used to "faking it".

I'm sure many players would rather have that option... they want the second and third characters they play to have it much, much easier than their first one. And that's fine, so long as everyone's in agreement that people just get to decide to make the path easier that way whenever they want.

Some don't agree, though. Some people want a separate environment from the one where people are allowed to jump over gates... one where everyone overcomes similar obstacles, and no one has the option to just decide to fast-forward through the "dues" that the other players are paying.

I think it would be neat to give them that environment, and having a ruleset that makes sure you walk the road instead of taking shortcuts means that players who get extremely far will know how other players earned it. Not everyone would want to play there, and that's a good thing. You should only have players there who value what the ruleset brings. People who don't like it should have other servers to play on.

It's ultimately a "live and let live" policy that can be enforced by code, designed to reduce the friction between different playstyles and mindsets... people who disagree with skipping the difficult bits get to play somewhere where you can't skip them.

I'm all in favor of a game that offers a no-RMT version, a standard version with twinking allowed, an RMT-enabled version like Station Exchange, and even a version where you can directly purchase in-game power from the developer with cash if you like... all for the same basic game.

My game will likely have something like all of the above, separated into distinct servers. But server separation does no good if your code can't enforce your goals of separation of player practices.

That's why I think we need designs that can enforce a no-RMT regime. Without code enforcement, the history of today's games makes it clear that at least some pro-RMT folks are going to use RMT on non-RMT servers... precisely because they can and it gives them an advantage.

[Aryoch]

26.

> Barry Kearns wrote:
>
> And if there's no way for other players to
> tell your fake knight apart from a real
> knight (you have all the same benefits and
> trophies), then the real knights are gonna
> (rightfully) resent it.

First of all, they are all fake nights. This is fake, fantasy entertainment. Don't forget that.

Second of all, if they are that obsessed with what other people are doing, they need counselling. They need to get over themselves and stop thinking they "acheived" something.

Third, as for your very complex system of preventing people from being able to share/trade/sell/gift items: I hope no company I own stock in ever invests in that game. :p That sounds horrendously not fun. A huge part of the joy of playing MMOs is helping out friends or just random people with gear, money, and other such things.

> By doing so, no character gets the "walk on
> Easy Street" that comes from someone gifting
> a million gold to them, either for twinking
> purposes or from a purchase in RMT.

Why does this matter?

You do realize, don't you, that the portion of people who actually CARE where someone else got their Sword of Leetness is incredibly small, right? You also realize anyone who cares so deeply about something so irrelevant is not the kind of person you should be catering to. That is an unstable individual.

> If he slaps down a credit card and just buys
> the trophies and designators, he's trying to
> publicly claim that he did something when he didn't.

Wow. You mean sortof like how people having been slapping down credit cards to pay for escapist entertainment for a long, long time in a galaxy not far away?

The whole point of PAYING for entertainment is to get what you want. Duh.

> The rude/blunt way to say that, is to say that
> some people want to lie about what they've done,
> and have the game environment legitimize their lie.

Only people who have a grossly exaggerated sense of what it means to "accomplish" something in a game really means. Here's a hint: accomplishments in the game mean jack squat.

Obviously, games don't just drop the player in at the end and say "YOU WON!"

But when we are talking about MMOs where the time required to accomplish even small things is often absurdly exaggerated. In that kind of situation, it is not hard to see why someone who pay their way forward.

[Barry Kearns]

27.

"Aryoch" wrote:

First of all, they are all fake nights. This is fake, fantasy entertainment. Don't forget that.

Second of all, if they are that obsessed with what other people are doing, they need counselling. They need to get over themselves and stop thinking they "acheived" something.

I'd say instead that the primary category would be "virtual knights", and the second "fake virtual knights". I think that you'll find the average intellectual capacity here to be more than sufficient to see through weak attempts at confusion through amphiboly. Extracting the concept of "fake" to the meta-level doesn't eliminate the initial context. We were talking about the virtual world context of "knight".

As developers, we establish a variety of virtual obstacle courses that our players run, and we award to them various virtual tokens as virtual trophies. Now, the player-as-human actually did accomplish something in the process of having his character run the virtual obstacle course in question. The physical tasks probably devolved down to little more than pushing buttons on a keyboard and clicking a mouse... but many of the most intriguing virtual obstacle courses from a game-player's perspective require a substantial amount of time, skill, and possibly luck to complete.

Those who "cheat" at the virtual obstacle courses become the virtual analogs to the real-world Rosie Ruiz. They end up seeking (and stealing) a sort of fame that they don't deserve.

As to your considered diagnoses regarding people who are "obsessed", "need counseling", or need to "get over themselves", I'd be slightly more interested if this came from someone who isn't lurking behind an anonymous tag in order to spew bile onto an academic blog without accountability, in a fashion utterly indistinguishable from any other internet troll. I always hope for better on Terra Nova. I'm rarely disappointed. With a few obvious exceptions, of course.

Third, as for your very complex system of preventing people from being able to share/trade/sell/gift items: I hope no company I own stock in ever invests in that game. :p That sounds horrendously not fun. A huge part of the joy of playing MMOs is helping out friends or just random people with gear, money, and other such things.

As I've listed before, there are a great many ways to help out friends under the system I outlined... almost every way that's present in today's MMO games. I've even proposed extensions which return giving gifts to each other, thus re-enabling trade. About the only thing left blocked is the ability to gift currency.

As to "very complex", I'd disagree wholeheartedly. It's simply a different landscape which doesn't have the arbitrary trade function. Everything else is a variety of built-in mini-games.

Regardless, it's clearly not an environment that's designed to appeal to you... it's designed to appeal to an entirely different type of gamer: one that wants the system to ensure that people actually (virtually) ran the obstacle courses if they have the trophies that say they did.

You do realize, don't you, that the portion of people who actually CARE where someone else got their Sword of Leetness is incredibly small, right?

I realize nothing of the kind. I do realize that there seems to be no shortage of people willing to float this assertion, yet without fail they seem completely unable to back this up with concrete facts... primarily because there is no realistic way to ever know this, lacking a mind-reading device that can scan everyone who ever plays games.

Doesn't stop people from asserting it, though. In the meantime, there doesn't appear to be any shortage of people stating that they, in fact, do care. But hey, so long as you imagine that they are the tiny majority because everyone else must agree with you, I guess that makes it so, eh?

You also realize anyone who cares so deeply about something so irrelevant is not the kind of person you should be catering to. That is an unstable individual.

I'm vastly more interested in the input of paying customers (who insist it matters to them) than I am in the character assassination attempts of an anonymous troll.

The whole point of PAYING for entertainment is to get what you want. Duh.

And if you have a customer who only "gets what he wants" by engaging in behavior that upsets ten other paying customers... what will you do? Tell the ten other PAYING customers they are unbalanced and need counseling? Or seek a design that can potentially keep all of them happy?

Only people who have a grossly exaggerated sense of what it means to "accomplish" something in a game really means. Here's a hint: accomplishments in the game mean jack squat.

Yes, and grandmaster chess players just push little pieces of wood/plastic/stone around. Their "accomplishments" mean jack squat too, I suppose? Who cares if someone fakes a grandmaster rating... It's just a game, get over yourselves, right?

Weak, dude. Terribly, utterly weak.

[Barry Kearns]

28.

On a less troll-related front, I've posted a more detailed treatment for the anonymous commodity market at my blog. It includes a transaction-by-transaction walkthrough, showing how auto-moving prices and the virtual traders interact with various player orders, and how the system responds to commodification attempts.

I'm interested in reasoned critiques or suggestions for improvements to the presentation.

[chansons]

29.

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[Barry Kearns]

30.

I've reposted an archive of the draft position paper, comments and other explanations ported over from my old blog.