Splinter Topic: Motivation - Opportunity vs Necessity

Ok Intrepid I'll keep this short since it is broader reaching and either something that Steven doesn't 'get' or doesn't care about. At this point I'm seriously hoping it's the latter actually, because fixing the damage being done by him not 'getting' it is way worse than being able to double down.

An MMORPG is at best a simulation of a world not a world. Fantasy worlds do not have player serfs for a reason.

A human living their miserable life takes up arms and plans a revolt when there is a critical mass of people who will manage to revolt without dying or when their life is no longer worth it to them. An MMO player living their miserable ingame life leaves the game.

Necessity and suffering/constant frustration are not motivating factors for the majority of players. If you only desire the truly 'hardcore' for whom these are endless motivations, great, ignore the rest.

MMORPGs therefore tend to simulate a reality in which the player, at least, has agency and opportunity and is happy. This is a scale. PvP games automatically are toward the 'Necessity' part of that scale. Some balance this by adding more opportunity and reducing necessity through matchmaking. You don't have the second option.

You need to factor this for every aspect of your game. Either reduce Necessity or increase Opportunity. Not everyone needs to get everything, but they all need to feel like they get something. Here is where your Open PvP Oceans and 'Hard to Get Freeholds' fall short in the eyes of players, and where your Corruption system was always tenuous.

People look at those systems and see you creating Necessity but where their Opportunity is controlled by someone else. Reality had a whole war about this somewhere around 250 years ago. Opportunity won, I think.

I have no reason to go into this more because I don't have any reason to think it will matter, this is a 'just in case' post. For all I know it's already completely factored and this is definitely the way Steven wants it or believes it will work because of something we don't know about or just 'believes it will work'.

But every single point of Econ in MMOs is colored by this specific thing, it is the point where the parallels to reality break down the fastest and in my personal experience it is the place you have to know/learn what to do the fastest. It's so complex that I've considered writing a book on it more than once.

But since I haven't released a successful fantasy MMORPG, I don't feel I'm qualified yet.

For all of you who do the thing, that line above. Quote that one. It's there for you.

And then argue about the next line.

Steven hasn't either.

We have not received permission from Caww to share the quoted post.

Yeah, it's why I gave up on this sort of thing.

If I'm not insulting, people ignore it.

If I'm insulting, people ignore it.

I think it's a problem with my personality combined with the way expertise is treated especially on the Internet.

Unprovable expertise or 'not really expertise but lots of experience' seems to be the same. Hopefully it works out for Steven though.

btw a serious request, can you point out the somewhat insulting parts? I am truly not good at determining which parts are being taken as insults or not as insults, especially when trying to interact with strong-willed communities, so I'd appreciate it.

Azherae wrote: »

btw a serious request, can you point out the somewhat insulting parts? I am truly not good at determining which parts are being taken as insults or not as insults, especially when trying to interact with strong-willed communities, so I'd appreciate it.

I'm curious too, cause I didn't see any insults there.

We have not received permission from Caww to share the quoted post.

Ok, thank you.

I have no defense for that, given the perspective presented, but I do appreciate it.

Azherae wrote: »

Ok Intrepid I'll keep this short since it is broader reaching and either something that Steven doesn't 'get' or doesn't care about. At this point I'm seriously hoping it's the latter actually, because fixing the damage being done by him not 'getting' it is way worse than being able to double down.

An MMORPG is at best a simulation of a world not a world. Fantasy worlds do not have player serfs for a reason.

A human living their miserable life takes up arms and plans a revolt when there is a critical mass of people who will manage to revolt without dying or when their life is no longer worth it to them. An MMO player living their miserable ingame life leaves the game.

Necessity and suffering/constant frustration are not motivating factors for the majority of players. If you only desire the truly 'hardcore' for whom these are endless motivations, great, ignore the rest.

MMORPGs therefore tend to simulate a reality in which the player, at least, has agency and opportunity and is happy. This is a scale. PvP games automatically are toward the 'Necessity' part of that scale. Some balance this by adding more opportunity and reducing necessity through matchmaking. You don't have the second option.

You need to factor this for every aspect of your game. Either reduce Necessity or increase Opportunity. Not everyone needs to get everything, but they all need to feel like they get something. Here is where your Open PvP Oceans and 'Hard to Get Freeholds' fall short in the eyes of players, and where your Corruption system was always tenuous.

People look at those systems and see you creating Necessity but where their Opportunity is controlled by someone else. Reality had a whole war about this somewhere around 250 years ago. Opportunity won, I think.

I have no reason to go into this more because I don't have any reason to think it will matter, this is a 'just in case' post. For all I know it's already completely factored and this is definitely the way Steven wants it or believes it will work because of something we don't know about or just 'believes it will work'.

But every single point of Econ in MMOs is colored by this specific thing, it is the point where the parallels to reality break down the fastest and in my personal experience it is the place you have to know/learn what to do the fastest. It's so complex that I've considered writing a book on it more than once.

But since I haven't released a successful fantasy MMORPG, I don't feel I'm qualified yet.

For all of you who do the thing, that line above. Quote that one. It's there for you.

And then argue about the next line.

Steven hasn't either.

I think the biggest problem with this whole 'debacle' is the way Steven talked about this. Steven went to great lengths to explain the necessity of freeholds. You need them to master craft. You need them to run businesses. You need them to do large volumes. You need permits to create certain structures. You need blueprints to have certain structures and benefits on them. He spent a lot of time talking about the benefits of Freeholds and then dropped big negatives and then put the caveats after or barely mentioned them at all.

This is a flawed approach because people will react emotionally and rightfully to what is presented FIRST. Saying all your caveats and OPPORTUNITIES afterwards will fall on largely deaf ears because we as a community are 'conversing with what we were told.'

What a player needs to know more than the fact that you need a freehold to become a master artisan, is if we can rent out work stations at freeholds to ALSO obtain mastery even if we are not landed gentry. We need to know this more than that it is locked behind a giant play wall. We need to know how the selling system works and WHY people are likely to sell freeholds instead of reaping the economic benefit from them and how often he wants to see that happening economically speaking far more than the fact that it is locked behind an approval process and bidding war.

JustVine wrote: »

What a player needs to know more than the fact that you need a freehold to become a master artisan, is if we can rent out work stations at freeholds to ALSO obtain mastery even if we are not landed gentry. We need to know this more than that it is locked behind a giant play wall. We need to know how the selling system works and WHY people are likely to sell freeholds instead of reaping the economic benefit from them and how often he wants to see that happening economically speaking far more than the fact that it is locked behind an approval process and bidding war.

Steven's response to that "you can sell processing services by selling invites to your family and then letting that newcomer use your freehold".

I sure hope Bill gonna do some amazing work at Intrepid, cause oooh boi

NiKr wrote: »

JustVine wrote: »

What a player needs to know more than the fact that you need a freehold to become a master artisan, is if we can rent out work stations at freeholds to ALSO obtain mastery even if we are not landed gentry. We need to know this more than that it is locked behind a giant play wall. We need to know how the selling system works and WHY people are likely to sell freeholds instead of reaping the economic benefit from them and how often he wants to see that happening economically speaking far more than the fact that it is locked behind an approval process and bidding war.

Steven's response to that "you can sell processing services by selling invites to your family and then letting that newcomer use your freehold".

I sure hope Bill gonna do some amazing work at Intrepid, cause oooh boi

Wat.... Was that a serious quote from Steven from somewhere? He wants people to RMT for family invites? I'm confused.

JustVine wrote: »

Wat.... Was that a serious quote from Steven from somewhere? He wants people to RMT for family invites? I'm confused.

We have not received permission from Songcaller to share the quoted post.

Yeah, it's a whole pretty mess rn.

edit: a follow up on that btw

NiKr wrote: »

JustVine wrote: »

Wat.... Was that a serious quote from Steven from somewhere? He wants people to RMT for family invites? I'm confused.

We have not received permission from Songcaller to share the quoted post.

Yeah, it's a whole pretty mess rn.

edit: a follow up on that btw

Oh ok. thank you. If they don't plan on having a system to facilitate using in game currency I expect RMT will be the preffered way for this transaction to happen then. Thanks for the paste

We have not received permission from Songcaller to share the quoted post.

And all of that only outside of top lvl guilds, while top lvl guilds SOAR THROUGH THE SKIES

We have not received permission from Depraved to share the quoted post.

This is only true if the freehold owner is a kid or dumb. Any smart person would just build a good rmt rep by providing their services in an honest manner. Why scam one dude out of $20, when you could earn hundreds and have future rep stored up to do whatever you want.

Especially when you consider that freeholds will probably be a guild thing, so providing its usage will also be a guild thing, so rmting it will ALSO be a guild thing. At which point you have a whole proper system and keep making big money w/ pretty much 0 traces.

NiKr wrote: »

We have not received permission from Depraved to share the quoted post.

This is only true if the freehold owner is a kid or dumb. Any smart person would just build a good rmt rep by providing their services in an honest manner. Why scam one dude out of $20, when you could earn hundreds and have future rep stored up to do whatever you want.

Especially when you consider that freeholds will probably be a guild thing, so providing its usage will also be a guild thing, so rmting it will ALSO be a guild thing. At which point you have a whole proper system and keep making big money w/ pretty much 0 traces.

Hey, I work for an infosec company and I can tell you that it works exactly like this for hackers too. Underground forums and communication channels exist, and anyone dumb enough to try to pull a scam (e.g. by selling an exploit/database that is useless or not delivering) will be publicly shamed all over; it's flatly not sustainable for anyone to scam.

What does proliferate is that once someone proves they're capable of the "hack" is their reputation increases and they become able to throw more money at the problem. Those with the most rep dominate and become richer over time, in every underground scene. With how easy it is to spin up "stealth" credit cards these days, a RMT trader just has to succeed once per every few accounts and they'll get plenty of profit.

I'm very concerned at the hole the bidding system leaves in the economy for this kind of profiteering.

We have not received permission from Depraved to share the quoted post.

Intrepid could just setup default (unchangeable) prices on those services and make that the only way you can provide processing services to others (well, outside of family).

This way Intrepid could then put trackers on frequent family changes and then look into those accounts more. Right now, w/o a proper system, tracing all family changes would most likely dilute any potential rmt tracking with just proper in-game services. It's just a silly approach to an already shaky unstable and risky system of trying to catch all the rmt in the game.

In other words, this would just move the "dev" time from making a good system to GMs sifting through different accounts. Now, obviously, GMS will be paid way less than Intrepid devs, but I feel like in the long run the impact of this decision would be quite big.

We have not received permission from Depraved to share the quoted post.

It will make it easier for Intrepid to track suspicious interactions. If the approach rn is "players should just change families willy-nilly (btw, it takes days to change back lol)" just to be able to use processing on someone's freehold - you can't really track the difference between rmters and normal players trying to process some shit.

But if there's a proper system in place, majority will just use it because it's the easiest way to do so. And then you can track families that have super frequent changes as something suspicious, because there'd be no in-game reason to change your family that frequently, unless you were trying to go around some system.

We have not received permission from CROW3 to share the quoted post.

Obviously even with my imperfect experience it would take a long time to explain this, so bear with me, if it was easy to explain one wouldn't need an Economy Designer far less a 'Lead' one.

I say this to note that there will be all sorts of holes in any explanation I give.

The key here is that the 'Free economy buying power' is the flaw.

All the other things are good to have, they are choices, and they have adaptations that result in lower Opportunity for those who choose to try to monopolize the situation.

The fact that Freeholds are bought is the pain-point.

The optimal flow is much more about people striking out on their own and MAKING a situation better through effort and working on the land from their Freehold (one could do this without a Freehold, but at this point we are questioning why it does NOT work this way given that Freeholds are a Necessity for some number of things).

There's a lot of tiny interconnected errors in this approach that appear as soon as you move from 'Freeholds are average/plentiful but getting the benefit from them is effort' to 'Freeholds are something that can be controlled as a gated system'.

It's the introduction of the incentive for a person who will not use a Freehold, to OWN one, that's the problem here. The same way that IRL, Rent would theoretically 'always go higher' as long as 'living near X' was beneficial.

Economic agency in MMOs is related to 'I can do this but I don't want to, the benefit is small' but anytime that you benefit by preventing your competition from being able to do something then the benefit scales by how much market control you have.

Tying that directly to ingame earnable profit just makes it terrifying. You're empowered by having money, to prevent people from getting money without interacting with you. The game system enforces this. There aren't 'squatters'. If you buy a Freehold Plot, put stuff on it, and just don't do anything with that stuff, the land is removed from other people's options until Node Destruction.

What I would expect the design is intended to do is 'cause people to destroy a Node' but this won't quite work either.

If 10 small guilds exist and 5 of them have people who have Freeholds connected to a Node and the 'Big Guild' controls all other Freeholds in the ZOI (exaggeration but roll with it a bit here)... if the other 5 don't, and want Freeholds, now in order for the Have Nots to have a chance of getting anything they have to bring down the Node, but the five who have things, even if friendly to the other 5, will lose theirs too.

One person's Necessity then creates another person's Necessity but with no obvious opportunity available unless the Big Guild was broken up. Furthermore, if I do own a Freehold plot, I did the quest or paid the money or whatever and then the Node falls, do I still have a Freehold plot to just place somewhere else? What's the gap work?

Big Guild doesn't care as much. They could quite literally 'expect their Node to fall', 'sell off Freeholds', and then when the Node falls, other people can't use them. Anyways that's all speculation.

Land speculation!

In the end I feel like I didn't even end up answering your question instead of just complaining more @CROW3 because it felt so unnecessary 'to answer' but I'm not sure how to quickly do so.

"The method I was assuming before was better because that method can easily fit into a generally well designed economy".

I hate giving this answer type. It's no better than 'The combat will be good because the combat will be designed good'.

But I haven't written Fiat Magarin yet, and without it, I can't quickly say 'how to make a generally well designed economy'. Not to mention that each game has a different set of starting factors.