Using Math To Tune a Video Game's Economy 96
An anonymous reader writes: When the shipping deadline was approaching for The Witcher 3, designer Matthew Steinke knew there was a big part of the game still missing: its economy. A game's economy is one of the things that can make or break immersion — you want collection and rewards to feel progressive and meaningful. Making items too expensive gives the game a grindy feel, while making them too cheap makes progression trivial. At the Game Developers Conference underway in Germany, Steinke explained his solution.
"Steinke created a formula that calculated attributes like how much damage, defense, or healing that each item provided, and he placed them into an overall combat rating could be used to rank other items in the system. ... Steinke set about blending the sub-categories into nine generalized categories, allowing him to determine the final weighting for damage and the range of prices for each item. To test if it all worked, he used polynomial least squares (a form of mathematical statistics) to chart each category's price progression. The resultant curve (pictured below) showed the rate at which spending was increasing as the quality of each item approached the category's ceiling value."
"Steinke created a formula that calculated attributes like how much damage, defense, or healing that each item provided, and he placed them into an overall combat rating could be used to rank other items in the system. ... Steinke set about blending the sub-categories into nine generalized categories, allowing him to determine the final weighting for damage and the range of prices for each item. To test if it all worked, he used polynomial least squares (a form of mathematical statistics) to chart each category's price progression. The resultant curve (pictured below) showed the rate at which spending was increasing as the quality of each item approached the category's ceiling value."
It's the big problem with space games (Score:5, Interesting)
As you say, you want to feel like your economic choices have consequence, and not just for your pocketbook. If I buy all the fish in town, then not only should the price of fish go up, but the fishing industry should spend its money in predictable locations and boost other industries.
As my subject line alludes, the real place this crops up again and again is in space games. If I'm buying and selling the complete available product of a planet in some particular industry, that should have significant effects. Or, if I blow up a bunch of cargo ships carrying spaceship parts, then that should have significant and immediately noticeable effects. Instead, none of this is true at all in basically any game but EVE.
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The common audience for these games wouldn't appreciate such nuance/sophistication. EVE is very much a "geek's" game. EVE's complex economics and politics tends to drive away the casual/braindead players.
What you meant to say was "drives away the people with actual lives"
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EVE is overrated - it's just a libertarian fantasy-land without any of the truly damaging human consequences.
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EVE is overrated - it's just a libertarian fantasy-land without any of the truly damaging human consequences.
Congrats, you just described every computer game ever.
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Warcraft III had "upkeep", where the more units you created, the more progressive the "tax" on your mines, to slow you down until the bloat of government ground progress to a halt.
A stunningly realistic simulation.
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EVE is overrated - it's just a libertarian fantasy-land without any of the truly damaging human consequences.
Yes, EVE's problem is that it allows player 1 to be a complete dick about things, screw you over, and totally get away with it.
There is no real justice, it is like the wild west, but without the ability to hunt that player down and kill them.
If you behave in the real world the way players behave in EVE, you wouldn't live very long. Sooner or later, someone would simply shoot you and be done with it.
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In the Wild West most people wouldn't hunt down an individual that wronged them. They'd report it to the sheriff who would post a wanted poster which would attract bounty hunters to go hunt down the criminal.
EVE lets you place bounties on other players.
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The character is not jailed or perma-killed (barring stupidly not saving off a clone copy with your skills, which would almost never happen for an experienced player) and all their stuff not seized and sold off.
There is no real downside to griefing, which is part of the problem with more open PvP games. Indeed, the companies rely on casuals to provide fodder for hardcore griefers, going back to Ultima Online.
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Those bounties would mean something if they were permanent.
If you faced permanent death from your stupid behavior, you may be more inclined to be nicer.
Not everyone of course, after all, you did still have to deal with it in the real world, but you always did have that as a solution.
EVE just supports people who like to be trolls from the safety of their homes and computers, which is fine I suppose. It is the same type of people who troll forums behind fake names.
If you really want to show your stuff, domin
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In the Wild West most people wouldn't hunt down an individual that wronged them. They'd report it to the sheriff who would post a wanted poster which would attract bounty hunters to go hunt down the criminal.
In the Wild West, if you made enough problems, they would send out the fucking Cavalry to hunt your ass down, shoot you a whole bunch, and drag your sorry leaking corpse back to town for a quick exhibit and cheap burial to remind others what lies down that road.
In the really real world, shipping is protected by threat of military action.
EVE is a cheesefest because there is insufficient motivation to provide stability.
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In ancient EverQuest, an evil elf was soloing the Gnome guard at the first juncture outside the Gnome city. This irritated me, so I went and "told" the two main guards at the entrance about it. (I attacked one and trained them past the elf and let them kill me.) Then they wandered back past the elf, who they faction-hated, and, being 2 rather than 1, took care of business.
After doing this a few times, a GM "warned" me.
It's at that exact moment I realized I wanted more from these games, something absolute
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I mean, if I was Captain Kirk, I'd have gotten a fucking medal.
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Of course they do, but their ability to troll is more limited.
I play SWTOR, on a non-PvP server. Outside of very limited areas, you can't do anything to me. You can't damage my stuff, there are no repair bills for PvP, you can't enter my stronghold without permission, I can put you on ignore and we won't play together.
EVE doesn't have that ability, it only takes a few jerks to spoil the game. You're defending it, perhaps you're one of them? Such a game is naturally going to attract such players of cours
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Got it, so you're one of the trolls who likes to gank other players and be a total dillweed in a game because you can't suffer any real conquenses for it.
Good to know...
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Comparing scrabble to quake is stupid. And that is what your doing. Also its a FUCKING video game. It is not real ya know.
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Defend away... you've shown your true colors as one of THOSE players... :)
In any case, there is clearly a market for people like you, EVE Online exists and that is fine. You should have a game to keep you happy, I actually don't have a problem with it.
This is why I don't play EVE, I don't want to take part in that nonsense. If you enjoy it, then carry on.
Re:It's the big problem with space games (Score:4, Insightful)
X3 came close-ish to achieving it. The price of a good was relative to the available stock. Some stations consumed certain items to make others so over time their stock levels would drop and they would offer more and more money to restock. Energy cells were the base resource used by most stations so they were a good place to start in the economy.
The real problem though was there was no real top end consumers creating enough demand so the game dumped resources at various points to keep everything moving. And it was too easy to dominate the whole economy with a super station. Your personal business empire kept expanding but nothing else did. If you picked one of the unknown sectors to build your base you became an economic god with nothing that could stand in your way.
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Some stations consumed certain items to make others so over time their stock levels would drop and they would offer more and more money to restock.
Yet the price of what those stations produced didnt reflect the prices of the raw materials needed, and stations making what should be large profits just swallow the money into oblivion, and when stations should be out of money they magically have an endless supply anyways.
The elephant in the room is that its not an economy. In an economy the actors are each trying to benefit from their transactions, most transactions are wins for both parties, consequences when they aren't, motivation to eliminate losse
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Yet the price of what those stations produced didnt reflect the prices of the raw materials needed, and stations making what should be large profits just swallow the money into oblivion, and when stations should be out of money they magically have an endless supply anyways.
Yes, but I suspect that if you could actually do all that and make it real, then it wouldn't be any fun.
The whole idea of a game is to win, to come out on top. There has to be a way to do that.
In reality, most people can't do that. :)
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The whole idea of a game is to win, to come out on top. There has to be a way to do that.
One of the things you have to do to make a game "good" is manage difficulty. It should be possible for the player to win; depending on the difficult level, perhaps even "easy". But a challenge should be available to the player who is looking for it.
You should have to do realistic sorts of things to succeed in a game, it just shouldn't be as difficult for your character to do it as it would be for you in the really real world. But then, one's character is usually an exceptional person, so it's reasonable tha
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One of the things you have to do to make a game "good" is manage difficulty. It should be possible for the player to win; depending on the difficult level, perhaps even "easy". But a challenge should be available to the player who is looking for it.
I agree... however, I would toss out that the average gamer in 2015 is not the same as the average gamer of 1985...
There is a reason it was called Nintendo Hard... I remember those days and don't miss them one bit...
A lot of gamers today are really looking for a fun interactive story experience without too much trouble. They want it to "feel" hard without actually "being" hard.
Not all of course, some people do want a real challenge, I totally support difficulty settings so people can have the insane mode
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I think the big issues is that to do a true economy is really really really hard. X3 was single threaded and if you had a lot of ships you could bring the whole system to its knees. It was one of the reasons so many were hanging out for X-Rebirth. All people really wanted was a rewrite of the original engine to handle multiple threads so that they could actually run a full economy. Lets not even talk about what we got instead....
The other challenge is you need other active actors and these are also incr
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Agreed. One point though is that the price of an input is no determiner as the the price/value of a final product. Price of a final product is a function of supply vs demand. Of course if your final product is worth less than the inputs you will go broke, but that too is reality.
X3 came close to making it work. Particularly if you played albion prelude and ran a few of the balancing mods. It was far from perfect, but it is the best space one I played.
The real issue was that you were the only active pla
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EVE (and many MMOs) get around this problem by having the players drive the economy, which means that you don't need to code much AI to handle this as the players will tend to make intelligent decisions and create a functional economy. The only remaining issue is for deve
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having the players drive the economy, which means that you don't need to code much AI to handle this as the players will tend to make intelligent decisions and create a functional economy
oh, there's that invisible hand again. no, it doesn't work in games either.
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Let's use a simple example of crafting healing potions that are consumed by other players. If no one needs those potions, no one will buy them, so it's probably not as valuable to bother making them. But if they are used, the price will naturally increase
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I'm not really sure what you mean
sort of a pun. free markets don't actually exist, it's a fallacy. all
markets are controlled in subtle (and not so subtle) ways.
because of that there's no real balance, inequality inevitably grows
and they need a periodical correction or even 'reset' which is usualy
a rather violent event. in that sense i say "they don't work", and the
"invisible hand" idea is just delusion.
I'm not sure how you can claim that the notion of the invisible hand
doesn't work in games when there's a particularly good example of it
working well. I can't think of any game I've played that as an
entirely AI-driven economy that's come anywhere close to creating the
same kind of experience you can get from EVE.
eve's economy is not completely player driven. basic resources are
always available and affordable regardless of player actions, thus
specula
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While there are certain things that are supplied by NPCs in EVE, in practice the economy is completely player driven. NPCs will sell you skillbooks and the like, so speculating on those is usually pointless (NPCs don't sell them *everywhere*, so you can still have player-driven changes in the effective supply - and therefore the cost - in localities where they need to be shipped in and the transports can be attacked). NPC "rats" (pirates) can be killed (usually costing some money for ammo, always costing so
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sort of a pun. free markets don't actually exist, it's a fallacy. all markets are controlled in subtle (and not so subtle) ways.
No, it's an ideal. And one doesn't have to fully achieve the ideal market in order to reap most of the benefits.
because of that there's no real balance, inequality inevitably grows and they need a periodical correction or even 'reset' which is usualy a rather violent event. in that sense i say "they don't work", and the "invisible hand" idea is just delusion.
The thing is, markets both have inherent mechanisms against indefinitely growing wealth inequality and their own periodic corrections. First, there are diminishing returns to higher levels of wealth due to the difficulty of managing it and declining profit margins with higher wealth. Large businesses and mutual funds have run into this before.
Second, there's the business cycle which routinely d
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oh, there's that invisible hand again. no, it doesn't work in games either.
Depends what you're trying to do. It works for the developer of Eve, CCP Games. It works for the players who have fun and get goods when and where they need them.
In fact, I wager you don't have any actual experience with a market since otherwise you wouldn't make such a dumb claim.
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In other words, it only works on a very limited scale for a very limited range of problems.
So what? You just described almost all human tools. At least, we're backpeddling in this thread from the absurd claim that markets don't work at all.
Hey, I'm happy for Eve's success, but its (checking wiki) 500k subscribers is a small number in the grand scheme of things.
And why would that be relevant? We do have plenty of examples of bigger markets that work.
As above, markets only work in limited scale, so I wager he hasn't experienced markets, as most people deal with the larger global economy than whatever local market they have, if any. It's one of the pains of growing up. You realize all the fairy tales and fantasy you see in games don't actually work out in reality.
I sure hope not. I really don't want to get suicide-ganked in front of the post office. Or anywhere else, now that I think of it.
And the "limited scale" of markets covers the entirety of humanity.
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Depends what you're trying to do. It works for the developer of Eve, CCP Games. It works for the players who have fun and get goods when and where they need them.
please feel free to see my other reply: http://games.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
In fact, I wager you don't have any actual experience with a market since otherwise you wouldn't make such a dumb claim.
dunno what you mean with "actual experience with a market". if you mean i lack a degree in some pseudoscience then yes.
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dunno what you mean with "actual experience with a market". if you mean i lack a degree in some pseudoscience then yes.
No, I mean extensive trading experience. When you assert, as you did in your linked reply that "inequality inevitably grows", then you haven't actually experienced the behaviors of markets that correct for high levels of wealth inequality.
When you say " they need a periodical correction or even 'reset'", you haven't traded through actual market corrections like recessions.
When you say "and the "invisible hand" idea is just delusion", then you haven't actually experienced the huge variety
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EVE tends to do better here because the game allows for practically all player assets to be destroyed and leave the economy
Yes, but what is broken about EVE is that while you can smash a player's stuff, that player can't actually get revenge.
Oh sure, they can build back up and smash your stuff, but lets be honest, that isn't likely to happen.
What is more likely to happen is the person who lost everything has nothing to live for and decides to kill the player who hurt them.
In the real world, if you actual treat people the way people do in EVE, sooner or later, someone will do something about it, and it won't be to smash your stu
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Oh sure, they can build back up and smash your stuff, but lets be honest, that isn't likely to happen.
What eve do you play. That happens all the time. Also most of your stuff is safe in a station. You don't have to "build back up", you just get another ship.
In the real world, if you actual treat people the way people do in EVE, sooner or later, someone will do something about it, and it won't be to smash your stuff, but rather you.
Oh FFS enough with the everyone is bad on eve bullshit. It is in fact better than any other game i have played. I have been escorted 20 nullsec jumps to highsec when i i got stranded. For nothing. I have had people give ISK and i give ISK to new players that derped and lost a ship. The list goes on..
and stop with the real life bullshit. IT is interent
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Not sure everyone in EVE is bad, but they are there and they can troll the crap out of you if you want and there isn't anything you can really do about it.
As you say, you can't kill people, as such, they are free to be jerks and trolls. If they could die and death meant the loss of their account, they might change their behavior.
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http://www.penny-arcade.com/co... [penny-arcade.com]
Note that the game in question is not eve. The eve mantra on that is simply not backed up by any data what so ever. It is like complaining people kill you in Quake. Oh what a troll he killed me....
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I don't mind dying in PvP warzones in SWTOR, that is what is supposed to happen, but there is no cost to such death.
Likewise in Quake, there is no cost to death, you just respawn and get back to it.
In EVE, trolls can cost you time and money, they can chase you around and smash your stuff. There is really no safe place, even hi-sec isn't totally safe, people do sucide gank there.
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The advantage of games like EVE (where there are consequences for screwing up besides just wasting some time) is that there's a much stronger drive to succeed, which leads to much more intense competition and a much more satisfactory success / victory. In a typical single-player game, dying (or otherwise failing) costs you nothing but the time to load a save (though permadeath games do exist). In a team game, failure on your part may make your teammates mad at you for wasting everybody's time and not meetin
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Fair enough, that is a point of view that I don't personally share, but can respect.
When I play games, I personally prefer them to be easy. I work hard in real life and I do want my games to be "its just a game".
But that's me. So to each their own.
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I don't think the code is anywhere near the hardest part of the endeavor; I'm a pretty mediocre programmer but I can envision that part. The hard part is designing an economy that both works and makes sense, with no cheating. All the money has to go somewhere and do something that makes sense, that's non-trivial. Economists argue over how economics works in the real world as it is.
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There are other space games except EVE?
My net connection is lame and I don't like time dilation so EVE is right out for me. If a game doesn't have single-player, I won't spend any significant amount of money on it.
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Actually, there should be some lag, until merchants find out what's happened, and the effect should expand gradually as the news spreads. And, that means you have a window of opportunity to buy up as much of those parts as you can before prices go up, assuming that you can get your instructions to your agents fast enough.
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Fast enough?
"Guys, I'm blowing up five hundred transport ships with ship parts on Thursday. Get ready."
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Friday's board meeting: Umm, chaps, I don't really know how to put this. Plasmo-blasters, well, you know they aren't 100% reliable ...
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In this example, what happens when a level 60 character goes to newbie town and buys all the swords and spikes the price to 1000 gold?
It only works if the game is sufficiently realistic, and they cannot hide the goods from the player base by simply logging out. If those swords have to be carried, transported, and stored somewhere, then that player has now made himself a game objective. Newbie swords are fast and easy to make out of readily available materials, so there's a lot of them in the world and it's difficult to remove them all from the game. If he wants to buy them all, he's got to have a way to transport them. A magical means of
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Many big games hire actual economists to design and maintain a workable economy. They tweak things much like the Fed tweaks interest rates, in an attempt to keep the game interesting, and to deal with the occasional bugs that cause rampant inflation.
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Many big games hire actual economists to design and maintain a workable economy.
Which perhaps explains why game economies are crap?
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Many big games hire actual economists to design and maintain a workable economy.
Which perhaps explains why game economies are crap?
Actually, I thought engineers naively applying math formulas to tune a game's economy explained that pretty well. :-)
Economies are driven by humans making both rational and irrational decisions about the prices of items; with each decision filtered through a unique lens of that buyer's perception of value at that instant. Economists study these activities at a high level, and produce equations that describe 98% of the behavior they see. But they also know that when those remaining 2% of people do somethin
Well it's a step in the right direction (Score:2)
Most games seem to view currency as little more than a control mechanism. Which is why you get games that have 10s of currencies new ones being introduced just for the purpose of obsoleting the old ones.
Re:Well it's a step in the right direction (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, it annoys me a bit when at the beginning of a game, it costs a gold coin to stay a night at the inn at the beginning of the game, but it costs 100 gold coins at the end of the game in the "end game" areas. Granted, these are not games that are attempting any sort of "serious" world-building like Witcher 3. It still seems lazy, though - they should use other means for removing money from the player.
I've also thought it somewhat lazy for developers to have a single coin type (typically "gold coins"). I've always thought that designers who resorted to that sort of currency never really understood how incredibly valuable a single gold coin actually is. Common goods are typically highly over-valued, and weapons and armor actually tend to be undervalued. It's ridiculous for a fish to cost 5 gold coins while a sword, even a basic starter sword, might only cost 100. Granted, I think most gamers don't really care about such things, but just once I'd like to see a videogame at least attempt to make a realistic stab at this.
MMOs (particularly "theme park" types) have a particular problem with their economies, in that goods are essentially created from nothing in limitless supplies, and the final products from crafting last an infinitely long time. As such, they need to figure out how to create viable viable "gold sinks", or ways of removing money from the economy in ways that doesn't irritate the players too much. I've always thought that, no matter the solution they came up with, it always ended up feeling rather artificial (or simply inadequate), and it often ended in a massively inflationary economy.
I'm still working my way through the first two Witcher games. As soon as I'm ready to play the third, I'll have to take some note of the general economy and see if it ended up as satisfying to play as one hopes.
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Most modern MMOs don't have a real economy. EVE Online is a rare exception (and very much a niche proposition). Of the "normal" MMOs, then depending on who you talk to, Final Fantasy XI (released 2002 in Japan, 2003 in the West) or Star Wars Galaxies (2004) was the last to allow any significant degree of player freedom to shape the economy. Everything since World of Warcraft has locked in-game financial transactions down so hard that actual trading between players is knocked right out to the margins.
What do
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What do I mean? Basically, that the items of highest value in most MMOs cannot be obtained through player-production and in-game trading. In a subscription MMO (eg. WoW, Final Fantasy XIV), the most powerful gear will normally be obtained by players through skill-based team challenges (high-end raiding or PvP). Once obtained by a player, it is almost always locked so as to be untradeable to other players. A second tier of good-but-not-best gear is usually available via a pseudo-currency (tokens, honour, whatever) that is rewarded in fixed proportions from performing repetitive activities (daily quests, dungeons etc), often with a cap on how much can be earned in a week, and which can't be traded to other players. Consumable items are still crafted and traded, but the trend in MMOs has been to downplay these over the last few years.
Crafted gear in FF14 is frequently the best or second best option assuming you have the patience/money to acquire the item and meld it. Crafted accessories are flat out the best option for tanks. The fact that the best gear can't be obtained on a market board shouldn't be particularly distressing in an MMO. That gear is the way to let people know that you are able to clear the toughest content in the game.
Bad Example (Score:4, Informative)
The economy is one of the very few real weak points of Witcher 3. The article doesn't explain in detail what he did, but whatever it was: Don't do that, unless you have an otherwise master-class game to outweigh your mistake.
Re:Bad Example (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, I felt the the economy is witcher 3 one of the few bad points of the game
Witcher 3's "economy" basically consisted of kill shit, get extreme amount of loot, sell loot, have thousands of needed coins at end of game....
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Garbage (Score:2)
Like dictionaries?
Glad you cleared that up. I'm sure many people were labouring under the illusion that it was the underwater basket weaving type.
Seriously, who lets this shite in?
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Gret grammer. Awsum spelling. 11/10 - wood reed agen.
Economics 101 (Score:2)
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err... because its not multiplayer?
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Huh? (Score:2)
I don't get what an "economy" has to do with this. It's a single player game and just how they calculated item costs. And that's it... nothing new and sure as heck not an economy. You'll note tons of games, multiplayer or not have static prices for items and this sounds like just another way of calculating those prices. It's not an economy.
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A single-player game just needs to *simulate* an economy, meaning that you need to ensure there isn't some loophole that allows the player to gain an infinite amount of loot through some simple, expedient task. In a real economy, prices are adjusted according to supply and demand, of course. It's a natural feedback mechanism that ensures such "loopholes" are very short-lived.
So, the question becomes "how do you set prices so that it *appears* a real economy is at work, rather than just a designer arbitrar
The resultant curve (pictured below) (Score:2)
The resultant curve (pictured below)
Where is it?
Meth (Score:2)
Oh noes, not MATH?! (Score:2)
Wait a minute here. Is there an editor so clueless that they thought the notion of a game developer "using math" is headline-worthy? What's next, a story about how "programmers" are "using math"?
I'll bet they used "physics" and even "engineering" too!
What the hell?
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As a professional videogame programmer, I can assure you that it's fairly newsworthy when a game designer uses math to solve problems like these.
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There's more math in the corniest Free2Play game than there is in Witcher 3.
As a professional videogame programmer, I'm guessing you've heard of Eve Online. I'm just guessing here, because I'm not a professional videogame programmer, but I'll just bet they used a little math in the same way. Over a decade ago.
Anyway, my point was that I would have thought Slashdo
Re:Oh noes, not MATH?! (Score:4, Informative)
I'm exaggerating a bit, as I was going for a humorous remark. So, killing the joke dead and answering your question seriously, yes, I've heard of Eve Online, and know quite a bit about it, but haven't played it. In terms of economies and designer math skills, MMOs are a slight exception. They take their in-game economies very seriously, and some are known to hire actual economists to help guide their virtual trade and monetary policies.
Designers don't necessarily avoid math, but they often use it in ways that drives programmers insane. For instance, they'll use formulas in spreadsheets to calculate tables of figures for loot, armor, damage, etc, and then painstakingly enter all those figures by hand. Why? This allows them the freedom to individually tweak components as desired. Programmers look at this and shake their heads, because we're hardwired to avoid that sort of redundancy whenever possible. For whatever reasons, some designers seem to revel in it.
Many designers tend to be control freaks. They're deathly afraid of automatic, feedback driven, or chaotic systems (all of which could apply to an economy), and often for good reason, as some outlier condition could tend to cause autonomous systems to spiral out of control. This is why most MMO in-world "economies" are tightly controlled affairs, with lots of limiters to prevent things from going too far in any particular direction too quickly. Programmers are always suggesting ways to create automatic and chaotic environments driven by algorithms, but designers want carefully scripted and planned systems, because they want to control and tweak it.
From the description, it appears this designer only turned to math as a last resort, because there was simply no time to do the sort of hand-tweaking that designers typically do. They were impressed enough with the results (gosh, math actually works!) that they wrote about how they did it. And the programmers on the team are probably thinking "I told you so. In fact, I told you so years ago, and you only listened to me when your back was up against a wall."
Economy mismanagement is a huge risk for MMOs (Score:4, Interesting)
Magic Online, the digital version of the famous trading card game, is currently undergoing a kind of "economic recession". Basically, trading for cards is facilitated by event tickets (roughly $1 in value) and booster packs (containing 15 cards, roughly $4 in nominal value) that act as a digital currency. Events are entered using event tickets as payment and they pay out as booster packs to the most winning players. This is done to avoid gambling laws.
What has happened is that number of players entering events has gone down while the amount of booster packs floating around has increased, so that the going price for booster packs has fallen to around 2 tickets (so $2 equivalent). This has made entering events unattractive for all but the top players, since the expected value of the prizes to win are now half of what they should be, while the entry fees remain the same. This further drove the number of players down, with many people selling their collections and leaving Magic Online.
Several months ago Wizards of the Coast set up an "economy strike force" that supposedly consisted of several people with "advanced math degrees" to solve this conundrum of a depressed economy. They finally announced their "solution" some weeks ago. It was to double the entry fees and basically cut the prizes to 75% of the old one.
The economy predictable tanked even harder, leading to more players selling out.
Re: (Score:2)
Magic Online, the digital version of the famous trading card game, is currently undergoing a kind of "economic recession".
I find this ironic as NPR recently praised the MTG team for their economic skills. [npr.org]