This is awesome.
It all began with a strange email
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Re: It all began with a strange email
#12This is truly fascinating. I remember hearing about virtual economies where money can be injected at any time through gold mining, etc, and that they were inherently unstable. Once you got the gold farming schemes that sold gold on e-bay, it created massive hyperinflation. And it totally made sense that hyperinflation would occur since the creation of virtual gold was limitless and effortless, so the gold farmers did…
> And it totally made sense that hyperinflation would occur since the creation of virtual gold was limitless and effortless
The creation of the US dollar is also limitless and effortless.
Re: It all began with a strange email
#13Which two economies were being merged?
Re: It all began with a strange email
#14I guess I would be interested in a truly economics oriented game that modeled nations without it being about wars, raids, guilds, spells etc. Not sure if something like that exists though.
I've heard EVE online described as such.
Well, not so much spells, since it's space oriented rather than fantasy, but it does have a complicated, realistic economy with corporations, wars, and economic exploitation.
Re: It all began with a strange email
#15Fascinating read, just like many of the other Valve blogs.
Though, I do wish this guy could explain why real-world money Steam games in the US are often half the price of those in Australia/Europe.
Re: It all began with a strange email
#16This is truly fascinating. I remember hearing about virtual economies where money can be injected at any time through gold mining, etc, and that they were inherently unstable. Once you got the gold farming schemes that sold gold on e-bay, it created massive hyperinflation. And it totally made sense that hyperinflation would occur since the creation of virtual gold was limitless and effortless, so the gold farmers did…
Blizzard sure could use someone like him right about now. Diablo 3 has crazy gold hyperinflation due to bots and the real money auction is causing further havoc. It is pretty obvious that this was not well thought out prior to release.
I can't dig up a source, but Blizzard representatives have confirmed in the past that they hired economists to work on Diablo III -- this isn't something unique to Valve.
Re: It all began with a strange email
#17Complete tangent, but I noticed that on Yanis Varoufakis' blog, the current entry is his interview with Max Keiser.
http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2012/06/15/ponzi-austerity-intervi...
What's the connection? Max Keiser sounds exactly like the defective turrets from Portal 2. Coincidence?!
Re: It all began with a strange email
#18Fascinating read, just like many of the other Valve blogs. Though, I do wish this guy could explain why real-world money Steam games in the US are often half the price of those in Australia/Europe.
Advertised prices in $ exclude sales tax, because for most states it isn't levied on digital downloads.
However, VAT in EU countries (don't know about Australia) is included in the price. This causes a fairly substantial discrepancy, as VAT can be rather high (in the UK, 20%). Other discrepancies can usually be put down to exchange rate fluctuations, which with the recent financial issues in Europe have been somewhat unstable.
Re: It all began with a strange email
#19I worked at CCP when they hired Eyjólfur. He came in without really knowing a lot about the game world and made it his first job to learn as much as he could about how the world actually worked. Given that I was a foreigner who was working and living in Iceland, I didn't have much of an evening social life. I was also one of the relatively few employees (sadly) that were really active in the game in the advanced leve…
[edit: reposted as top-level comment; I apologize for the repetition]
CCP's economist's reports are the real deal. The EVE game economy is I dare say more developed and complex than most other games' - it has many kinds of input factors and stages of production, and many of the production facilities/resources are player-controlled and their fate determines on political maneuvering, war and sabotage between player corporations (guilds). The price of most items in EVE (ships, weapons, components, structures) is determined by the state of production and speculation in the economy, so CCP has to consider the economic impact of nearly every single change they make to the game world.
If any of you folks are interested in reading about a truly fascinating, active digital economy, you have to read the EVE economic reports and other investigations of EVE. It's like reading about mining, manufacturing and stock markets - against a background of eternal war between corporations - in far-future space.
edit: links to additional content ----- http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/eve-online/855380p1.html
>>> EVE Online was developed to have a very dynamic economy from the very beginning. It was decided that "time" would be treated as a valuable player resource: for that reason, raw materials were spread all over the galaxy map, which takes hours to traverse. This created regional pricing. Interestingly, there were no trade hubs built into the core game design -- players gradually settled into certain areas and made their own pockets of population where trade thrived.
>>> Gudmundsson had some fun examples of how intelligent virtual economies can be. He showed a graph displaying the prices of a mineral in the game known as Zydrine. Zydrine is hard to find in the EVE universe, but players had discovered that killing a certain class of drone often leaves behind Zydrine in the wreckage. This hole in the market led to lots of drone-farming, and subsequently the price started to drop. Drastically.
The developers decided to tweak the drop rate and this change rolled out onto the test server, unannounced, and mixed in with all sorts of other tweaks. Still, clever players noticed the change. Word got out. And suddenly, even though nothing had yet been done on the live server, prices for Zydrine spiked dramatically. Markets make for great predictors of future events!
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http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/06/21/real-economist-tak...
>>> One of his team’s first big findings is somewhat sensitive. Confirming decades of gender research by economists, sociologists and anthropologists, Mr. Turpeinen’s group found that the same biases that have historically favored men in the real world exist in a virtual economy. Their research demonstrates that both women subscribers and female avatar characters operated by male subscribers in EVE are biased toward a slightly lower chance of success in competition with their male counterparts.
Re: It all began with a strange email
#20A bit of a background: Varoufakis is something of a celebrity in Greece for being one of the first and the most vocal economists to speak out against the European strategy for resolving the Greek sovereign debt crisis. His predictions have proven to be tragically spot on so far, although it remains to be seen whether his proposal for renegotiating the European bailouts, a proposal that the left-wing SYRIZA political party (which has about 50% chance of winning in the Sunday elections and has allegedly asked Varoufakis to be its economic advisor) has stood behind, is actually a realistic one. He fled to the US and Valve after the doctoral program in Economics he had built in the University of Athens was dismantled during the crisis and after he started receiving death threats by people who weren't particularly thrilled with his opinions.