This week Google launched Monopoly City Streets. The concept is simple. You buy real streets, develop them virtually, and earn a corresponding virtual income. Like Jerry Paffendorf's million-inches-in-Detroit, MCS combines alternate reality, games, virtual worlds, and social networking.
Is it good? I have no idea. Can't get in, because massive user inflow has already crashed the product. I'm reminded of the way that Quake broke some parts of the network when it launched, and EverQuest clogged all the bandwidth of San Diego on its opening day. When somebody comes up with a good idea on the net, the user storm becomes awe-inspiring.
There's a lesson here in the contrast with Google's Lively, a virtual world of avatars and rooms where you could hang out. /yawn. The crash there was caused not by massive user inflow but massive user apathy. Merely virtualizing something is dumb. VR a necessary tool, not a sufficient one. To create new energy, you have to reinvent the game people are playing.
Thanks to Daniel Polonsky for pointing this out.
If you ever want to see how to do MMO Economics very poorly, this is the place.
Just a few days into the first restart, and they have a currency that is going crazy.
The solution? The first one was a restart, the second a re-write of the rules, and the third is a second re-write the rules. All in about 10 days.
In round 2, they had an exponential currency. The larger the street and the more investment the larger the payout. The formula being (street value/1,000,000)*(investment) = payout.
The larger the payout, the larger the street you could buy and the more investment you could make the very next day.
Example:
Day 1: 3M
Day 2: 4.5M
Day 3: 20M
Day 4: 100M
Day 5: 2.5B
That was until they changed the rules. Now seems to be linear. They are still dumping huge amounts of currency into the market, and haven't figured out how to take it back out.
The other problem, is that unlike the board game where dice add a factor of luck, because you can buy the streets you want as soon as you have the money, the top players, will always have the top streets, which make the most money, which means they stay on top, until all the good streets are gone, at which point they have very little to do with all the cash they are making except start trouble.
Cheating was also given a huge advantage, imagine being able to play the board game with an unlimited number of tokens, each with start-up cash, cash that can be 'traded' for nothing to a single user that uses it to buy everything up. And reinvest at exponential rates. Had they stuck with this system, I calculated it would be about 2 weeks before the numbers wouldn't fit on the screen anymore. That's when you now you've got an economic design problem.
The only limit in the game is server load, which they have all but run out of.
The team has made just about every mistake in the book, in the shortest period of time. No one that I know of has ever crashed an 1-3 million person MMO economy 3 times in 10 days.
Still, the game play is fun, and a giant game of Monopoly has too much economics to resist. So, I play on.
-bruce
Posted by: bruce boston | Sep 21, 2009 at 21:56