All Posts by Gooney

To answer the OP.

What type of game do you envision with the type of currency model you discuss?  How big a part of game play do you imagine that the economy will play?

Frankly there is no need for multiple currencies, in fact, I think it would cause far more headaches than play oppertunities, would depend on the game though.  Most games today use resources as a secondary form of currency.

If the currencies were valued the same in you hypothetical multi-currency world, what would be the point?  Presumeably currency value would be tied to some sort of local economy, which in turn would be compared to the others to determine a trade rate.

I think you could create a whole economy centric game play without multiple currencies.  If it was me, I'd have one unit of currency but let the local markets themselves determine relative value.  In this way you could create a situation where trade would be profitable and thereby create a whole game from just that.

Player issued currency would only work if you had a banking system, the banks loan out money to players who then can use it for circulation. (How it works in real life).  Sooner or later all of the money will end up back at the banks, it would also allow speculation and markets.

-Gooney

Originally posted by Pyrostasis

 

How many other MMO's have you played?

 

What MMO did you start with?

UO(shortly)

EQ (1.5yrs)

DAoC (2 yrs)

AO (3 months)

Eve-Online (6 months)

SWG (2 years)

EQ2(3 months)

Lineage 2 (2 months)

LOTRO (1 Month)

CoH (1 Month)

Vanguard (2 Months)

I'm not religious about MMOs, I play what I enjoy. 

-Gooney

We're coming up on the 3 year anniversary of World of Warcraft in November, say what you will WoW still is at the top of the heap.

Success for this game is no accident, Blizzard has an almost zenlike understanding of what makes an MMO fun.  Fun for all?  Probably not, but fun for most, theres plenty to do and reaching max level in many respects is only the begining.

-Playable on just about any modern PC with a 3d graphics card.

-More content than you can shake a stick at.

-HUGE player population

-Tons of servers.

-Just plain fun.

I've enjoyed my time in Azeroth, and look forward to the coming expansion.
















No, Im not getting paid to write this, I'm making a point to some friends.  Everything I wrote there I happen to believe though.


-Gooney

I've taken several multi-month breaks from Wow, I come back from time to time for a game-card or twos worth of play.

Why do I come back?

 Say what you will about Wow, Wow players, MMOs, complexity levels or lack thereof,  WoW, is bar none the highest quality MMO available. 

The game works on just about any  machine with a graphics card, the graphics are lush, colorful, and pleasing to the eye.  The animations are "complete", I mean no hitching, no awkward joint movements, fluid.  "Driving" my character is enjoyable in a way, the animations are so natural that I never get kicked out of the "immersion" of the game world.

Game play is layered, meaning that easy to just get going but to truely get into it requires a greater understanding.  There are many  ways to advance a character, quest, grind, dungeons, quests are most often of the common "fed-ex", "kill-ten" or "assinate" type but there are real gems in these too, multi-quest chains that culminate in really useful items.

One of the most important aspects that keeps me coming back is population, not talking about asshatery or lacktherof here.  What I mean isnt necessarily the social aspect, I am unguilded and mostly solo, except for PUGing instances, and sure sometimes that works sometimes it doesnt, but there is never a time when my play time is hindered by a lack of players.  This is something that many of the older MMOs suffer from (DAoC, EQ1, AO, SoR, SWG), WoWs population is still growing.

Don't get me wrong, some things irratate me about the game, and sure I'd love more "realism" and "depth" in an MMO, but not in this MMO.  WoW is what it is, a fun game, with levels of complexity that is both easy to leave and easy to get back into, with lots and lots of people playing and plenty of things to do, even at max level.

I play a level 70 Orc Shaman (10,0,48) Resto.

-Gooney

In the Matrix when Neo goes to meet the Oracle he enters the apartment living room and sees several "hopefuls", children who can change the world by manipulating the Matrix. 

One boy bending spoons says to Neo, "Do not try to bend the spoon, that is impossible", "instead realize the truth". 

Neo asks,  "What truth?"

The boy replies, "There is no spoon."

The oblique meaning of this in relation to the OPs post is that there is no answer that Graypawn could give that would assuage the doomcrow  "sky is falling" tone of the post. 

-Gooney

Here, hope these help.

Understanding Keymapping.

 Understanding Combat Targeting.

-Gooney

Originally posted by PSKmustang

Last question, how important are the resources?  I could have sworn I read somewhere that the values of the resources are not as important as they once were and the items no longer vary as much as they used to based on the resource stats. 

I can only speak about Domestics (Tailor / Chef) as my alt is a domestics trader.

Good resources are just as important as ever, you still need high grade to make decent tissues/additives.   Tailor never really depended on quality so that hasnt changed. 

The thing is that crafting in general has changed, the degree of it has changed, each trader has far more options as to what to focus on than they did before.  Some things havent changed, people expect to buy top quality items, which is somewhat easier with buffs and expertise to attain these days than it was pre-nge.

Focus has changed, the tailor for example is used mostly for creating SEAs and reverse engineering clothing for parts for SEAs.  Chefs still make bio-enhanced foods but they can make all the bio stuff themselves now, which is nice.

Traders are now combined, two professions per trader (3 if you count merchant, 4 if you go into bio-engineering/beastmaster).  Expertise dictates which of those professions you specialize in, you can do both, but something else will suffer for it. 

The biggest thing Ive noticed is that there are very few real crafters around these days.  Most crafters are around only to supply thier guilds or themselves, there are very few well maintained shops/malls.  Those that are around do very well indeed, from what Ive seen.

I just came back to the game too, so Ive been running around gathering resources, just put my first batch of Flameout on my vendors a couple days ago.

-Gooney

TR is weak. 

Don't get me wrong its a short term blast, but there is nothing there that will hold the player base for longer than a couple months.

This is not to say that some people won't be completely enamoured, they will, a very tiny group of Garriotians will bask in the shallow glory of TR for years to come, of that I have absolutly no doubts.  Look no further than Vanguards McQuadians for proof.

TR is just lacking too many of the things that actually make an MMO world worth spending time in.  While at the same time relying on too many of the crutch norms of current MMOs.

There is little character customization, armors and weapons look more or less the same. 

The quests, such as they are are absolutly nothing anyone who has played an MMO before hasnt seen. 

There is practically no opportunity at all for players to "make thier mark" on the world.

I do fear that the cloning system will do the exact opposite of what is intended.  Much like DAoC it will create a situation where longer time players will not interact with new players until those player are up to the same level as the older ones.  This means that after the initial rush of new customers, the truly new will be playing solo for a relativly long time, this is never a good thing for a social MMO.

The biggest reason that TR will ultimately fail will be because it is a game in which action action action is the only viable play style, my friends I ask you, what is the point of playing an MMO in that case?  Failure here will be measured in direct relation to pre-launch hype.  Looks to be a year of fallen design Giants.

Short term fun, absolutly.

Long term enjoyment, its just not there.

-Gooney

OP have you even been following what Koster is up to now?  Read his book?  Listen to any of the speeches hes given over the years?

If anything he left SWG because it was too nichy, the man is all about getting as many subscribers as humanly possible.   It is very clear that Raph Koster is all about bringing games and game playing to the masses, he views modern mmos as being too limiting in thier mass appeal for several reasons.

-Unintuitive UI's

-Overly complex gameplay

-Heavy system requirements

-Requirement of a seperate client application.

Metaplaces is the next stage in his efforts to bring online gaming to everyone.

Raph is not, absolutly not the man you want to go to to create a niche game, everything he has written for the past 5 years has had to do with expanding market share, he is one hundred percent focused on the market and the cash.  Thats not to say that his ideas are bad, they are not, he has a very analytical view of fun and how to increase peoples gaming value.

Do not  belief that if it wasnt for LA and SOE that Koster would have injected far more depth and complexity in to the game, it is completely the opposite, Raph is about simplification, I think it was the development of SWG that brought him to that conclusion, that and the realization that content creation costs far more than its enjoyment would warrent.  Will Wright has made the same observation, which explains Spores key design elements.  Everything Koster has worked towards in print, code and design has been moving towards simplification.

I'm not in any way suggesting that that is a bad thing, its just not what many of us want for SWG.  Koster left a huge imprint upon SWG, but I do believe that it was an epiphany for him, and changed his ideas as to how to approach the market, I don't think Raph personally ever really cared that it was a Star Wars specific IP, he would have made the same game with any IP at that time in his game design career. 

We do know he didnt agree with the NGE, NOT because he didnt like the design but because in his words "Ya dance with the ones that brung ya".  It was the principle of completely changing game direction that bothered him, not that the game actually needed change or that he disagreed with the changes themselves, which he may or may not have, we dont know because as far as I know he's never said anything about it.

I think Raph left because he has an idea that he wants to make into reality, so being where he was in his career and financial reality he decided that there was no time like the present. 

Simple as that.

-Gooney

Dont listen to the haters, I mean isnt almost 2 years a long enough time to let all the NGE angst drop, I mean, seriously grow up, we pretty much all of us liked the game better pre-nge, but this new game is what it is?

Ive been back off and on since the NGE, about every 6 months or so, I just restared my account this week.  I am glad I did, there really are new people playing, met one last night who didnt know what a teras kasi was (I was sportin my elder title).  The housing demolitions seems to have freed up a bit of space and over all the game is moderatly healthy (at least on my server).  It is the highest population I've seen since the NGE landed, thats not to say that its high, but I see people pretty much everywhere Ive gone.

About best classes and what not, you can pretty much min/max anything, there is enough variety for you  to make yourself unique.  In fact, I was with my old guild base busting this last weekend and of all the people there, there were only 2 Jedi, all the rest were fairly distributed among the combat classes.

I'm getting a real kick out of the new Beastmaster stuff, it is an intriguing and unique system.

That said, I'm not sure if I'll be sticking around this time, depends on if they announce a new expansion or not I suppose, its been nearly 2 years since the last and that came at such an inoppertune time that it quite frankly left a bit of a bad taste, I still haven't explored most of that.

Go to Ahazi if your looking for a good server.

-Gooney

The reason that game economies are often compared and contrasted to modern capitalism is simply because its what most people have had experiance with (or at least they believe they have).

Capitalism is simply an economic system under which the means of production are privately held and run for profit, by capitalists.  Nothing more sexy than that.

Supply and Demand are not specific to capitalism, rather they are the foundations of trade.

Trade is NOT assumed to occur between equals, in fact more often than not a good trade is defined by the partner who either got the highest price for the least goods or the most good for the least price.  Ultimately benificial to both usually, but not always, consider the Diamond trade or Kenyan Oil or Haliburton in Iraq.  Trade is simply the voluntary exchange of goods, services or both.
  

In most games today at the very roughest level they are capitalistic, means of production is private (mostly individual) and run for profit (personal).  What game economy lack that exists in the real world (as far as products) can most easily be summed up as innovation, the ability to create new products.  This is because up until now any item that is added to the game world has to be modeled and "created" by the devs first. Will Wrights Spore game is going to be an eye opener for the game making world I think, the implications of procedurally created content are amazing.

SWG allowed "experimentation" which allowed a person to influence the quality of an item by using high grade resources and running experimentation on it.  This was at best a simulated nod to innovation but it wasnt really, the items themselves were slightly customizable but essentially identical (although a vast range of quality from low to high could be attained).  To my knowledge SWG was the only game to allow this level of personal influence into products, everyone knew who the good crafters were and thier products drew top dollar.

What the above system lacked that the real world is based upon is labor delegation.  In the real world no one person can create anything, not one modern implement can be created by a single person, not a roll of tape, a rubber eraser, or even a plastic jug.  We, all of us are absolutly dependent upon the products of other people, and those products in and of themselves are complicated enough that they employ whole industries of people.  Just to make chewing gum for instance you need, suger, chicle, food coloring, mixing machines, etc.  Even the most simple product is the result of dozens if not thousands of peoples labor. 

You touch on something interesting at the end of your post, the discussion about creating a class of what essentially boils down to being investment capitalists, speculators, and financeers.  The one element you need to create that is Banking.

If you have Banking you can create everything else.  Without banking you can only simulate, much like the gambling your talking about in the OP.

A complex economy does not necessarily mean that everyone has to be a banker, ditch digger, miner, builder, etc.  They all just require that most of the people are in debt, and that those people want to get out of debt.  Thats how it works in the real world, whole populations are defacto controlled by the ruling elites because the vast majority of the people are in debt, which means that they must work to pay off the debt, which means that they have to obey the rules, so they can keep thier jobs.

By extension keeping everyone employed negates thier natural tendancy towards individualism and chaos, i.e. revolution against those in power.  Then if you have everyone in debt you can keep em busy by work, then keep em happy by making sure they have enough disposable income to buy crap, and spend thier "liesure" time resting or zombified infront of the TV watching Survivor, Paris Hilton, or Mondy Night Football.

Get it?

Too realistic economies should probably never exist in a game.

-Gooney

Originally posted by xcatlkd

This statement pretty much disproves your entire economic argument.  The idea that work and production are interchangeable in an economic sense is a little off.  Both are closely related but work is an input whereas production is the output, and a more acurate measure or value or money in a system.  Time does not equal money or everyone would be paid the same.  I understand you are from Sweden so your experience may be somewhat different than mine, being from the US.  Still, your point above makes it fairly clear that given the same inputs of levels, equipment, skill, etc. does not equal the same output.  The key difference, and the counterpoint to socialism, is that work is not equal to production.  The key is in the intangible.  It is the organization of the pre made group from which they derive advantage over a disorganized opponent.  All inputs being equal, an organized and focused group will prevail every time.

I live in Sweden, I am from  the US, so whats your point? Are you alluding somehow that a Swede is less able to grasp the realities of free market capitalism than an American because they live in a country that practices social democracy?  If so your a buffoon.  Sweden is more democratic than the US of A  (according to The Economist, google Democracy Index) as well as possesing and developing some of the most advanced market transaction technologies in the world (google OMX).  In fact Swedish technology drives a significant portion of the worlds economies, if that is you consider exchanges as being instrumental to modern economy.

That aside,

Im not saying that in the REAL WORLD time equals money (although for many of us it does), but for the sake of simplicity it is defined so in the OP.  Were talking about a GAME economy not the real economy with all its permutations.  This is because in standard MMOs time spent generally directly equates to wealth growth and level gain generally means larger money gains.   The last is true if you assume that the players are on a treadmill advancement model, which most are.

Now, as to the rest of it, yes you may have a point if and only if the economy consists solely of a small group, but when you have a large group (ie an MMO population) then you can get results by tweaking subtle factors.  Just as the Fed controls US money supply by either increasing or decreasing interest rate.

Remember that the example above was to illustrate the problem of designing an aspect of the game that requires players to voluntarily act in the greatest interest of their own and their groups good and has not much to do with the real Money Problem.  Which is in my opinion what is holding up the development of more sophisticated in-game economic systems that would lend themselves to the game as avenues of active interest.

-Gooney

The problem is this, particularily in Vanguards place.  McQuaid et al, are gamers, they make games for people like themselvs, because of that; they assume that people will put up with a lot of iggyness because that is what we have always done (because they would too if they liked the game enoug).  Gamers my age still remember the incredible feats of technological prowess that were required to get old dos games to run, we remember constant LDs, client crashes, etc.  We took all of that with a grain of salt, it was simply what we expected, "save your progress and save often", everything back then crashed more or less regularily.

EQ did grand job for a lot of reasons, chief among them being that it was a 3d world that people could run around in, EQ became the game to play for online gamers.  Because of the apparent success of EQ, McQuaid got to thinking that he has a pretty good idea about what a great game would be, again from a gamers point of view, but not just any gamer, a gamer of his type.  What would happen if you launched EQ now, as it was then at its launch...well youd have a VG like failure.

Perspective gets bound by the target audiance, remember early on there was a lot of hullaballo about VG being a "hardcore" game.  It became very apparent that in the current environment that a "hardcore" game isnt going to recoup 30million in investments, not when non-hardcore but nonethe less hardcore games like WoW are around giving people all the pleasure pellets they can take.  So they toned down the hardcore in the hype engine but failed to do so in the actual game.  Results of this miscalculation will be discussed for years to come.

Indies and small studios can probably get away with having a more esoteric experiance but not a big budget game.

So once they woke up and realized all this what choice did they have?  They couldnt very well say, "sorry folks this game sucks but come and pay for it anyway".  No, McQuaid and everyone else knew exactly what was going to happen when VG went live, thats why Sony decided to front them, they will never admit it publically but they picked up VG for a song and minor investment and some positive press at the "re-launch" will surely net them a decent profit.  Sony has a strategy thats been building for some time now, they are building what is in effect an MMO gateway, like one of those popsicle packets with all the different flavors.

So, ultimately I wouldnt say that its "Denial" per se, it more of a dance with the devil, "they are damned if the do damned if they dont".  If they dont pump up hype they launch quietly and build over time alá Eve-online, or they take a chance and hype and hope they get a hit like LoTro.  The truth is that there are many MMOs all competing for players time, you can only play one at a time, so they know that not only do they need a hot product but they need to build up hype long before the launch.   Means, necessarily that they are hyping something that is not feature complete, trimmed or balanced... vaporware.  Its a catch 22.  Then add to that how bloody hungry the player population is (fans), theres a ton of pressure to give out info.

-Gooney

Pink Elephant?

Well, sure if your intent is to build a  game that has combat, or action as a focus, then yes, a complex economy is unnecessary and probably detrimental to your game.  However, a game that had the kind of complex economy we talk about here would have economy AS a significant focus of the game.

Economies are not based on resources, they were, once, a long time ago, but as soon as debt became the primary method of money generation that whole "resource is king" thing went out the window.  Money runs the economy, money is what is exchanged for services and goods, and money is based on debt, not gold, not silver, not any resource.  Implications?  Money is not finite, but has a total theoretical limit, which grows based upon belief, or more proper upon peoples willingness to bear debt.  This is why credit cards are soooooo easy to obtain, and why economy portions of news reports are focused on consumer retail numbers.  Credit card debt for a lot of people is greater than their housing debt, silly and ultimately it cant end well for them but they do it just the same.  

This is why depressions and recessions are so dangerous to peoples individual incomes and employment.  When folks stop borrowing money then new money doesnt enter the economy, which means that you cant buy, sell or get paid.  This is why for instance that the US Fed controls money supply by either selling or buying bonds (control money supply) , but the Fed itself, is not an organ of the state, it is completely private, owned and operated by private banking interests.  Since the 70s focus has been on controlling inflation so that the money that people borrowed could be paid back with interest without wiping out the economies main source of new cash, (people who borrow).  Of course, times change and focus shifts, its not really clear how the current Feds strategy is but Greenspans was definately beating back inflation. 

A game could be made on these principles and it would necessarily mean that at least a portion of the playing population would have to be interested in playing a primarily economic sort of game, cops, robbers, capitolists, etc.  In leu of having people actually have to toil in factories you could do it by having players have representitive "factors" that did the active work for them and contributed to the over all wealth of the world while the player themselves did what they wanted to do:  be a corporate mercenary, hacker, researcher, banker, bar owner, pimp, merchant, tycoon, whatever, it would be like the 1800s with rail road baron type individuals.  In order to create that type of envirionment you need a context, it would be fun, I think.  The devil is in the details though.

-Gooney

Originally posted by evilbob13

If a developer were to add non-renewable resources to a game this is what it should be like. Their should be a limit that would allow the game to go on for quite some time, but eventually the players use these resources up and find new ones. These new ones would be better leading to the world changing from an age of swords and bows, to one with guns. when the resources used in this age are depleted they would move on to something maybe in the EVE time period and move on from there.

I dont see h