Fungibility, Farming, and Degenerate Economic Efficiency

The thing you're talking about has a problem for people like me who really do just like doing the exact same thing over and over ad infinitum.

Now you're 'hurting me for doing that' relative to someone else.

Without that, you get a different outcome. When my favorite thing is less profitable due to it being done by everyone for a while, I'll still do it, and then hold the materials until things die down. Or, because I like doing it, I'll undercut other people just to bring down the profit to make them go away.

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What I'm saying is that the robustness of a low to medium liquidity market has the benefit of working for both, most of the time.

If I can gather 20 crab meat per hour, and I farm crabs for 4 hours, and I'm really good at it, but some others come along and because of some buff or something can match my l33t crab farming skilz for 30 minutes, I'm okay with some number of these people.

8 such people would manage to provide 'the other half of the crab meat market'. The price is set.

If another 6 hear 'Crab meat is profitable', and show up, I as the Incredible Crab Meat Enthusiast can see a trend with the market supply getting too high, undercutting starting to happen because people want their crab meat to sell 'right now', and undercut further to make them miserable enough to leave. Economic PvP.

I just need to push them out of my market (which my additional knowledge can help with) and then things go back to normal.

But that way you've got 8 people who 'happened to feel like farming crabs today' not really affecting me, the 'I farm crabs all day' person. Maybe some days, the other Incredible Crab Meat Enthusiast who plays less often, logs in, and they also farm crabs for 4 hours.

Maybe I know that person. Maybe we are crab hunting buds. Neither of us is trying to (nor likely to) push the other out of the Crab Meat business. Basically the lower liquidity allows us to have enough power to say "This is how I have fun, you people who are only here because you hear it is higher profit lately, gtfo, this is my fun spot, you can only stay if it's fun for you too".

And maybe we form like a whole Crab Hunting guild and go all around the world finding new places to hunt crabs. Maybe we have a rotation of who can hunt which crabs where and when for maximum Crab Meat Enthusiasm.

And none of us have to feel 'I have to do something else because these 24 other players worked crab hunts into their daily novelty rotation and now I'm unprofitable after my first hour'.

Because the problem with solving optimizing by 'forcing novelty' is that people optimize the novelty.

EDIT: I just realized that this example might seem farfetched if I didn't clarify that this is exactly a scenario I have experienced directly in FFXI, (it was something else, though, not crabs). No actual 'guild' formation, but we did have the whole '/t hey did you farm X today? how many you putting up?' '/r Yeah but if you're low on money you can put yours up first, I'm good'.

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Remember that I'm not a pure economic optimizer, I have fun weighted equal to or higher than economic outcomes, relative to my answers.

If I am needed to help contest the World boss, and it is fun to do, then it is now my optimal because it's part 'duty' and part fun. If it is considerably less fun to me than farming crabs, I keep farming crabs as long as I am not needed.

The important part is that I have the option to go contest the World boss, for fun, and the option to continue farming crabs. In the example where my crab-farming was less effective after one hour, I would feel more compelled to go to the World Boss even if it were as fun, because:

Fun Factor of World Boss + Economic Value of World Boss is compared against Fun Factor of Crabs + Economic Value of Crabs.

If you lower the Economic Value of Crabs, then you can also lower the Fun Factor of the World Boss, and then I'll probably go to the World Boss. But I don't necessarily want to. If you 'allowed my Crab Fun Factor' to remain constant, then I wouldn't have to calculate this. Some days I might go, some days not, assuming I'm not 'needed'. This gets even more complicated by 'how exactly is this system implemented'? FFXI actually does have this, to an extent, when a character has not left a specific zone or killed a monster in a different zone for some period of time. But if I am 20 minutes into my 'Daily Crabs' and I get an offer to fight a World Boss, now what do I do? Hope the system 'remembers my exact 20 minutes'? Or will it 'reset me' because I went to the World Boss?

Similarly, with the new guild member. DPS is a good example because they're usually in good supply, and therefore I'm less likely to be needed and go 'wait which raid? oh, I don't really like that one more than I like just killing crabs, but good luck though guys, I'll do my part and keep control of the Crab Meat market for us since you all will be busy with the raid'.

Or in the fully social situation, I'll just ask 'yo who wants to do this raid more than they wanna farm crabs?' and someone may go 'I wanna go but who will fill in my share? If I go, there may be crabs left unslain on the shores of Traitor's Rock'.

And I'll go 'I got you fam I will ride out to Traitor's Rock to kill your share of crabs, go have fun with that raid.' The important thing here is that now, I, who have been killing crabs for an hour, and 'Traitor's Rock Crabslayer Of The Fifth Order' who has just logged on, are not making a calculation based on the fact that my bonus for the day has run out and theirs hasn't. They get to go to raid, even if they care about nothing from the raid, and I'll just trade them the crab meat I gather for some Raid drop I might want, without either of us thinking 'oh wait this would have been more profitable the other way though'.

I won't kick up a fuss if yet another game 'forces me to rotate through stuff I don't want in order to be optimal', I'm just making the point that if you are correct, then we are definitionally at odds. As you said, you have to make my experience worse in order to make your experience better.

Sometimes it's like that, that's why different games exist I guess. If only there were enough good ones that we weren't all fighting for scraps of what we want from Intrepid. But I trust they will do something good, and someone will do the 'other side', even if that someone someday has to be me. By that reasoning I should hope that they implement things your way entirely (assuming that your perception is right and the two cannot coexist, which I am not explicitly accepting yet). Since I'm losing interest based on their design implications at the moment, I would hope that those who haven't, also get an economic system they like.

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But those players are doing it because of competitive optimization freedom that assigns a specific value as important and only that one. Just the timer. That has to do with the way human brains do pattern matching, and social pressure. So the key point before I proceed into a bunch of priors, based on this, is the crack in the design.

"Novelty is absolutely not a high weight for me in terms of fun, and is often negative."

I can give many examples of this, and I definitely don't think that games should be designed in ways that strip away options for novelty, but if you do anything to force it, you're having a negative effect on me. Later on in this post I'll get to what 'forcing it' means. For now, random examples!

Monster Hunter World is by most reasonings an easy game for veteran MH players or just veteran gamers. For this reason, many players and speedrunners apply additional challenges to themselves and change their value system to optimize for their fun while still being within a competitive environment. I agree that all absolute incentives to be competitive over fun should be reduced or removed as much as possible. But different 'tiers' of fun or fun styles can exist.

Some people find it more fun to challenge themselves to perfectly attack the monster and never let up and defeat it super fast doing exactly the same thing very quickly.

I find it more fun to challenge myself to fight monsters with Armor and defensive values considerably below what the game intends so that when they hit, they do a specific amount of damage on average.

I don't expect to convince anyone else to play this way in some 'competitive' sense, but maybe I should, because I have learned that, at least for a while, a lot of other players explicitly did so because it's relatively easy to agree on, and feels intuitive enough.

But when we're talking about an MMO, optimizing novelty isn't the same feeling. I can optimize 'my skill at fighting monsters with 375 Armor' in any number of ways, but the baseline experience of 'if I get hit, X damage will be done so I must play around this' remains. In your specific lens, I believe what you are talking about is 'optimizing novelty relative to economic status', which is not the same thing as 'optimizing novelty itself'.

So to round out that example, I'll give the reason why I don't like the optimal MHW playstyle. It's based around 'preventing the monster from posing a threat'. That's obviously the most efficient and effective way to play Monster Hunter. Minimize the monster's ability to do anything and you can't be harmed. That's efficient, and fun for some, because it is definitely still mechanically challenging. It's not fun for me.

There are people out there who feel the 'this is against the spirit of the game' and want other people to be made unable to play that way, but some of them want this because they don't want to compete in that sphere, and since 'kill time' is the most easily available metric, it is the one most people will see value in. People don't like to feel undervalued.

Honestly, the only reason that economic optimization is so inescapable is that in an MMO, economic power is the only solid and uncounterable power. No one messes with your bank account. Contrast this with PvP Minecraft servers, where 'secrecy' and 'territory control' are the optimization, because people absolutely can take/destroy your valuables. All of them. Would someone 'buy currency' in Minecraft if it didn't come with a Super Secret Base to protect it all?

That means we get the following:
1. Economic Optimization is the Optimal Optimization therefore Optimal Optimizers will view all Optimization through the lens of Economics in MMORPGs.
2. Introducing a system to make Optimal Optimizers more likely to experience novelty will involve introducing the Novelty into the Economic Optimization
3. If this system damages the Fun Optimization of Fun Optimizers (it's much more robust, but it can be damaged, which is my point) by reducing the Economic Optimization aspects related to their Fun, then their Economic power is reduced for no guaranteed benefit to them (because not all value Novelty).
4. Since Economic Power is linked to Fun at least some of the time, their Fun is eventually impacted and they must participate in the forced novelty offered by the Economic Optimization Novelty system or at least start calculating, which may in turn also impact their Fun.

The above is almost exactly what BDO is, and why I had to stop. BDO's regular Fun factor is gated behind timers for activities and 'dailies'. The other fun things to do in BDO are economically unviable for most people since there is no fast travel in the game. Also, the more people seek fun, the more the rewards from fun become economically unviable due to saturation, and the less economic power is available to Fun Optimizers. Quite frankly it is so bad as to get that game 'Garbage Tier' rating from me.

In fact, that's one of the most interesting outcomes of all this. The more fun something is for a majority, the less valuable the rewards will be on any market unless that fun does not rely on success and most engagements with the content are definitely intended to be failures (in which case, unrewarded, in which case, Economic power lost). And that is often why the less fun option is the optimal.

If gathering the materials for an item was really fun and achievable for everyone, then there would be no market for them, because people would all have so much fun gathering the materials themselves. And we know this works even outside of the game because there are many people out there who decide 'it is more efficient to work at my day job and spend money to have someone else level my character for me, than it is to level myself'. Why? Because to them, leveling isn't fun, but 'being high level' is either 'fun' or 'helps them resist the social pressure of conformity' or 'helps them deal with the pattern-matching impulse of humans to be at least above average in performance'.

If we were somehow free of these pressures, if we were not a species of wildly varying psychological profiles, where some people literally can't 'choose not to conform to social pressure', we'd all just 'choose our fun and go with it'. Oh, and of course those annoying requirements like 'food' and 'shelter' that you have to pay for, for some reason, which led us down this path.

Anyways this continues to be a complex topic so I look forward to your answer, I'd say the numbered points section is the only one worth directly responding to, since the rest is 'personal background priors', and this time, those are pretty 'set-in-stone' because of my psychology, just as yours are.

If we can agree on the premises of the numbered points bit, maybe we can agree that they are at odds in your worldview regardless?

And this is the number one reason why I think farming shouldn't be available on mobile. Putting it on mobile app lowers the barrier to entry so much, and reduces most of the complexity that either: its fun to do and everyone will therefore do it making the economic output relatively meaningless (or worse, a requirement) or its boring and stale relegating it to a basic economic calculation rather than a fun calculation (leaving people like me extremely salty they reduced the complexity and engagement just so they could lower the barriers to entry on the activity.)

Alright, then now I can focus on being more helpful since I'm no longer going to 'oppose suggestions based on the fact that they lower my enjoyment', and can switch to the much more productive 'this is lowering my enjoyment when that is not necessary '.

My perception is that a game with enough specialization bonuses to carefully equal or near-equal the timed novelty bonuses would be a good push here.

For example let's say I have the title 'Crab Meat Enthusiast' which explicitly goes 'your bonus yield from crab hunting does not drop below 75%', and in order to get this I had to farm a LOT OF CRABS and I can only hold some number of these 'Enthusiast' titles and must re-earn them every time.

Everyone who just 'randomly wants to farm crabs on a day where the supply is low' can still do that and it be economically viable. But I, as the 'Crab Meat Enthusiast' can't be explicitly pushed into conflict with these players over long term.

The bonus yield would mean that I can remain competitive at my chosen thing, without feeling 'my bonus has run out on this thing I find fun, I have to move to remain viable'. Since I have 'chosen this life', I can't just 'move to the next big thing' either, nor am I incentivized to, unless that thing is profit above '100% bonus Crab Yield' (an arbitrary point, basically saying that at 25% reduced efficiency I'm not likely to move from my favored activity, I don't have to start calculating 'should I move' until I'm at 40% reduced).

Now the obvious problem here would be 'Well there would just be a lot of Activity-42 Enthusiasts'. My perception is that the liquidity of the game and the intended/expected limitations on Registered Accounts Per Server will lead to this being a balanced situation. Too many of them, and the market will flop enough for them to want to do other things.

This is one of the things BDO did correctly, except not because BDO never does anything truly correctly. LifeSkill Mastery gear. You put money and time into raising it and it increases your efficiency at the lifeskill.

Except that you didn't have to choose, so whoever had the most money just got all the different types, aaand we're back where we started. Ashes intends for you to have to choose. They seem to plan to do this through Artisan classes which is what I'm used to. Is this something you disagree with? If so, I may need a clarification on why.

If I choose 'Processor' because I like Metallurgy (for me it's usually between this, Alchemy, and Cooking, I was once on the path to Chemistry Doctorate before I fell into the glorious world of programming) in Ashes, and I raise that skill high, I want it to be the optimal thing for me to do quite often. I probably invested in it. Anything to the contrary is the game telling me, at 'best', 'you didn't need to specialize but I'm glad you're happy, hope you get your investment back eventually' (BDO before Lifeskill Mastery) and at worst 'You should have become a jill-of-all-trades to keep up with the dynamic market' (BDO after Lifeskill Mastery).

So my expectation has always been 'specialization is most rewarding because it is specialization, and explicitly because other people will specialize into other things and not compete with you'. So on the 'economic ladder', specialists 'stay in their lane' while people like you (I think?) wander around doing other cool content that is generally just above it on the ladder and then selling things to people like me. Money flows to me in a concentrated form over time, then gets transferred to someone like you in a lump, whether that's 'paying you to help defend my node' or 'buying that cool boss drop you got'.

My understanding is simply that one should make it so that the rarer activities have good rewards, but my point earlier with the whole 'wand maker' example was...

"Those rewards are automatically worth as much as the person who wants it the most, has money."

So if I sit around gathering money and you get a boss drop, that boss drop is now worth 'whatever money I am willing to part with' which is 'slightly more than whatever anyone else is willing to part with' which technically means that there's always an incentive to go fight the boss.

If I have less money, your boss drops are worth less money simply because the buyer doesn't have money to give you. This is another 'wonderful' BDO parallel. Whenever a new class appears, the Kzarka and Nouver and Kutum weapons for that class skyrocket in value, to the point where it's worth making a character of that class just to open the ones you have lying around. Playing that Market is easy because you can just check the month's event. Does this event cause money to leave the economy or concentrate itself into the hands of hoarders? Wait 14 days and then buy stuff that people are likely to want during the next event, if you can guess what those are. Is the event going to pour money into the economy because it rewards a lot of silver for doing very little? Wait a little while and then start selling off mid-ticket items or enhancement materials, depending on how you want to control the server.

That's why I keep having trouble with the presupposition that one can just go 'I'll just keep doing my economically viable thing until I have enough money to buy the item' in a game where the faucet drips. Currency is, after all, just a representation, you know that better than everyone here, I'm sure. I do absolutely agree that someone would go 'I will just do the most economically viable thing until I have enough money to buy the item'. I just feel like eventually, the most economically viable thing will always become 'go get the item or some equivalent item yourself' if the faucet drips.

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Ok I'm definitely with you now. Yes, what I was describing was 'that market optimization', and I think what I'm surprised by might be 'the idea that an optimizer doesn't explicitly enjoy doing that'. I haven't, so far, met anyone who spends their time doing this sort of optimization while also feeling compelled enough to do it that it affects their fun.

That's an entire aside from 'should the game have a system to prevent obvious things from happening'. I was simply saying 'BDO is fluid and predictable'. I would personally prefer if Ashes was less fluid and therefore less predictable, but would have less fun if it were unpredictable. That's probably another difference between us as players. I prefer micro-adaptation strongly, which is what the Monster Hunter thing was a prior for. If the monster/market gets to take any action or direction that I have to respond to, but that I do understand, I have fun. If it never gets to move outside of a specific point, or on the other side, is completely unpredictable and novel, I don't have anywhere near as much fun.

So yes, we're in alignment now. We disagree on the amount of liquidity, but neither of us knows. So the next question is, would lower liquidity alone solve the problem of 'time to release for optimizers', and would the low liquidity in itself be a negative to an optimizer like yourself?

EDIT: I missed a point (did I delete my own paragraph when typing?) related to a question. You agreed that it can be easy to predict the release of new content's effect on markets. Do you personally find this interesting, not-interesting, or neutral?

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Ok. So then we have three takeaways.

1. If liquidity is too obviously high, we RIOT!
2. If farming mobs repetitively is a valid option, some limits on this over some period longer than 1 day should exist, (my numbers say 3-day reset, but that's using the numbers from my own stuff and assuming 'hardcore' players) with maybe some limited Titles as an 'out' for those of us whose idea of relaxation is just 'yeah do the same thing literally all the time.
3. As optimizers, we should complain whenever we find ourselves thinking getting pulled into optimizer hell, and hope we don't end up going to war with the people who want to lord it over everyone else (boy do I have a long story about a card game for this one if it ever comes up)

Anyways, added to my design document.

If there's anyone else out there reading this thread who feels 'no, lower liquidity is bad' while also feeling 'I don't want to be caught up in optimization', do me a favor and explain why, I may need an assumptions check. Because I absolutely understand 'optimizing the fun out of the game', the part I didn't get before now was that I honestly thought that most people who did that were enjoying the result of doing so enough that they'd just want 'their optimization itself' to be more fun, I didn't think of 'I want the optimization itself to shift toward consistent novelty'.

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Some of what you've said implies that you are one of those people who is affected by immersion, but that the immersion itself is the 'hook' to keep you playing the game or caring about it, hence 'needing the ingame reason'?

Ashes is so compelling and appealing in the worldbuild sense, to me, because they seem to be planning to put some effort into this. In fact, I'd be surprised if they didn't 'create and curate new content based on points of interest'. After all, in such a dynamic world, 'the DM gets to play too' and Steven seems to quite enjoy that.

If they build from the ground up with certain forms of malleability in mind, it should work, but the problem I see with this is simply that players often 'respond to novelty all at once' which can actually make certain things feel much less interesting to me personally. Does this affect you?

Example from Elite Dangerous:
A Pharma company 'stole' some designer drug data from a big pirate syndicate and this turned into a war situation, but while this type of event is pretty interesting lore-wise, and most people who play this game know what part they want to play in such events, the 'tendency for everyone to respond at once because it is something novel to do' turns it into a different experience than it might be otherwise, and it doesn't last long enough to really do much optimization.

Does PvP or other player behaviour affecting your optimization experience feel like a fun challenge, or a disruption of your fun?

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First off, I am a bit confused by your premise. Why exactly would you even need to switch accounts to shift profession? Half the kinds of economic activity Azherae and Beaushinkles were talking about were combat related and changing which craft is your main isn't exactly rocket science just pick within your tier of production.

None of Beaushinkles 'need for novelty' ever stemmed from 'boredom with class design' or craft activity. A need for novelty is a separate type of drive, one normally filled in mmos by rotating between the different games within the mmo itself or changing locales/niches. That's the really simplistic tl;dr of 'What Azherae was explaining to someone who hadn't experienced a low liquidity game that makes doing that economical.'

Second of all, I don't really understand your assumption that killing mobs will have no economic value. If that's not what you meant maybe your language isn't clear enough to me? If you did, has it been said somewhere this will be the case? Is Steven vegetarian? Surely the Macaws will drop poultry. To get meat, hide, blood, and bone from an activity other than fighting would be pretty un-immersive.

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Most people on the planet don't understand psychology in the first place. Being bored with economic activity is not the same as being bored with your class. You can be bored of farming crabs and go fight a world boss and have your problem solved. Fighting crabs on mage after fighting them on fighter would be 'novel' to a point but.... That's a different feeling from staying on fighter and going out to fight Betty The Fish. I would be in no way surprised if you don't understand why that's different.

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If mobs don't have DIFFERENTIATED economic value, then there are possibly several flaws in Ashes economic systems. Surely you aren't going to tell me that bird feathers and bear meat will have the same purpose in crafting recipes? And again if those are not things, was it said somewhere that it won't be?

If it is a thing then economic demand for those things will be different depending on ttk, local artisan population, crafting effect, meta, combat class population, popularity of activity, ease of imports from cheaper areas etc. Being very good at fighting bears vs fighting birds vs other specialist in those niches (in both senses ) will have a very real meaningful impact on your gold per hour depending on which of those you specialize in, in such a system.

If the mobs are dumb enough or uncomplicated enough or their mob population design lacking in proper difficulty loops and kill staggers to not warrant any specialization what so ever the game will flatly be BAD. It would be a very strong sign of missing skilled ai designers, system's devs, or a level designer (or design philosophy squishing what such people are allowed to do.) There is no way a team lacking people who can or would naturally think to design any of those facets to the point where economic differentiation in hunting niche exists will make good PvE(system's dev and ai), Worldbosses (mostly ai the rest is combat and level design), raids(all three), or sieges (level design and systems dev definitely required.) And if all of those suck, and their combat system is at all lacking and their corruption system the least bit flawed, the game will simply die from sheer lack of anything interesting to do.

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Right.... And Beau's game experiences have been lacking in a way that made their discussion with Azherae relevant, because they haven't had the experiences that would inform them of that basic thing you and I take for granted.

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Well, this statement leads me to believe you don't actually understand what Beau's problem was, or your devaluing their specific lived experience. Either way... A good game developer doesn't ignore the kinds of concerns Beau was expressing, they certainly design around them because good design protects the average player from bad psychological traps and misconceptions.

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That's not how crafting economies work.... Wealth is always a comparative. If the crafting materials are differentiated, the bonus vouchers aren't part of the real wealth comparative even if they are a real economic actor. It just boosts the numbers. Is what I was going to start trying to explain but then you said:

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Why do you predict that?

If regular mobs aren't going to drop crafting materials NOR be involved in spawning the ones that do NOR exist as part of the encounter challenge with the elite mob, they have no gameplay value. They are at best a nusance at worst a waste of time, vouchers or not. If they are somehow involved it goes back to my 'hyperbole'.

I'd go on to try and explain why my 'hyperbole' was warranted, but it only makes sense if we share the same premise of the role of mobs in Ashes, which at the moment we seem to not share.

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No not really. Even a bad mmo like BDO has level design built into it's mob encounters. The more efficient you are at completing a circuit the better you are at making money. Specializing for your niche region in that game isn't particularly purposeless. FFXI mobs fit none of those descriptions on average as Azherae has already exhaustively covered, and to my knowledge FFXIV has a similar but weaker design for this.

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The goal of a game is to have fun. Watching grass grow passes time.

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I will leave that discussion to @beaushinkle or Azherae.

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Never said that. But I will say as a crafting oriented player I would rather there be a social aspect between me and a person good at hunting bears if I am a leathersmith or cook other than 'worrying about them possibly killing me.' Coin being the sole thing involved in mobs makes you much more faceless and ignorable. I don't need to request your services. I only need my PvP guy. In a mob drops crafting materials system, I need the person best at hunting said mob AND my PvP guy.

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Por que no los dos? As an economically oriented player I feel both being involved adds economic depth and social depth.