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It all began with a strange email

blogs.valvesoftware.com

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Re: It all began with a strange email

#101

Post by cynest »

kragniz wrote: post #86
cynest wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though I had no clue about actual economics at the time, this is what I saw as so screwy in runescape. A lot of the ingame money came from alchemy. A few clever people had figured out that the two of the highest tier bows were easy to produce en masse and so created a market for their components. Since runescape does not have a shard system like WoW or other MMOs, this particular market was huge. RMT (real money…

Jagex eventually reversed it's decision on the fixing of prices and returned free trade. This had the effect of bringing back a large number of bots, causing huge inflation of certain items and a large devaluation of item which bots can produce easily. The economy is now hugely imbalanced, so performing common actions such as crafting a sword from metal will cause you to lose a fair amount of money. There is also no…

That's disappointing.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#102

Post by saraid216 »

xb95 wrote: post #90
primitur wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask what platform/language your ERP is coded in? Is there a sufficiently well-evolved in-game development environment for such things, or is it just your corporation membership have hacked something together in ruby or .. ?

EVE Online has always had what we call the "in-game browser". It used to be this rather terrible system that was a custom built environment that had maybe 15 HTML tags supported. It was not a very good system. Eventually, CCP made a deal with someone (I forget which framework they went with, I want to say it's webkit based?) and they embedded a modern browser with JavaScript support. They've also done some modificati…

WebKit is open-source and yes, that's what the IGB is run off now.

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/IGB_Development

Re: It all began with a strange email

#103

Post by saraid216 »

jamska wrote: post #84
snowwrestler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only for the Federal Reserve, who has a mandate to manage for a stable economy--so they are careful with their currency creation. If every U.S. citizen could create dollars, we would indeed have hyperinflation.

>If every U.S. citizen could create dollars, we would indeed have hyperinflation. For that same reason we don't give the power to create dollars to Congress.

From a legal standpoint, "every U.S. citizen" is, in fact, "Congress". That's what the whole "Representative" thing is supposed to mean.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#104

Post by saraid216 »

ricree wrote: post #99
goombastic wrote: post #5

I 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.

A Tale in the Desert is probably the closest I know of. Its player base is limited compared to most MMOs (around 1000-2000ish, last I looked), but it's a combat free game centered around economic production. It's also a bit unusual in that it has no in game currency. The last time I played (a bit more than 5 years ago), it was largely a barter economy. However, there was a player run item exchange whose credit functi…

That's a good description of the current state of the game.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#105

Post by saraid216 »

nemo1618 wrote: post #92
swombat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe we shouldn't? Assume an economy can be sized... so it's a $100m economy, or a trillion-$ economy, etc. Connecting economies together obviously causes them to impact each other. So long as games are connected just to the US economy, and it is much, much larger than any game economy, the impact on the "real" economy is nil. What about a much smaller real economy? Connect an economy the size of Eve or WoW…

That's a good point. I hadn't really thought about virtual economies like WoW or Eve as similar to the Fed in that they can essentially print money.

Only for their given domain. Blizzard and CCP are free to make as much gold and ISK as they want (and they do; it's a faucet-drain economy, and the faucet does not get shut off). But the quantity and buying power of said currencies change its value in relation to real world money.

So saying they can print money is not really true; they can control the value of a particular good that isn't intended to be a good.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#106

Post by Havoc »

dkarl wrote: post #22

an economy where we do not need statistics since we have all the data! I simultaneously feel his elation and am mystified. If you have such a quantity of data that you must relate to it via statistics, how is that better than only having the statistics? Is it because you can define and calculate your own creative statistics, or...?

>how is that better than only having the statistics?

Its the quality of the stats that is the difference. e.g. When economists work out the GDP its a case of thumb-sucking a number based on a few factors which in turn are also educated guesses. With a digital economy you can just throw it in an Excel sheet and get a perfectly accurate answer. Thats what he means with "having the data".

Re: It all began with a strange email

#107

Post by wtracy »

creamyhorror wrote: post #59
creamyhorror wrote: post #24

Among virtual economies, EVE Online's economy is the real deal. The EVE game economy is I dare say more developed and complex than nearly any 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 i…

[Market PvP and Cartelization] An interesting quote from the EVE Economic News report jumped out at me: ---- >>> The most interesting high-end mineral this quarter was Nocxium. It was the only mineral that rose in price in June, despite the insurance changes, and continued to rise in July and August. The most drastic increase came in September, though, when Nocxium prices jumped by 52%. The changes made to drone comp…

It would be fun to see someone do a blog on "Lessons from Eve that can be applied to entrepreneurship."

Re: It all began with a strange email

#108

Post by juan_juarez »

sams99 wrote: post #38

If anyone from valve is listening, would really appreciate it if you added commenting support to your blog, I am looking forward to this series of articles, it is a very interesting and unique space.

Have you ever read the WoW forums (or any other official game forum)? The signal to noise ratio is absolute crap. The first few pages would be people saying "first!" and it goes downhill & off-topic from there. We're talking about a site with 10M subscribers, all of them focused on a single piece of official correspondence, wanting their chance to get attention.

It would be absolutely useless & provide zero opportunity for intelligent dialog. If anyone from Valve is listening and wants to open discussion, they would do better to interact with 'higher quality' communities directly.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#109

Post by stretchwithme »

An economist finally admits it why they fail so much.

"let’s face it: Econometrics is a travesty! While its heavy reliance on statistics often confuses us into believing that it is a form of applied statistics, in reality it resembles computerized astrology"

"the reason for this unavoidable failure? None other than our inability to run experiments on a macroeconomy"

The theories are never tested. They just get implemented. A thousand other things are happening at the same time and its impossible to get anything approaching the clarity of a double blind experiment. But the adherents act as if they've got exactly that.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#110

Post by creamyhorror »

wtracy wrote: post #107
creamyhorror wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Market PvP and Cartelization] An interesting quote from the EVE Economic News report jumped out at me: ---- >>> The most interesting high-end mineral this quarter was Nocxium. It was the only mineral that rose in price in June, despite the insurance changes, and continued to rise in July and August. The most drastic increase came in September, though, when Nocxium prices jumped by 52%. The changes made to drone comp…

It would be fun to see someone do a blog on "Lessons from Eve that can be applied to entrepreneurship."

I think EVE is the ultimate lesson in sandbox gamification. Many MMOs have successfully plunged their players into alternate worlds and kept them addicted, but almost every one offers a pre-defined carnival-type experience rather than a sandbox. The chief reason why EVE and Minecraft are so popular is the freedom they offer to create entirely new things.

EVE, however, goes a step further in allowing players to organise themselves and engage in projects of even greater scale. The sandbox becomes a sort of construction workshop, where players are given tools to deploy their real-life knowledge and skills to build ever more complicated structures. Furthermore, EVE's rules encourage trade and competition - key aspects that keep players engaged and spur them to build, plan, organise, act.

The more EVE comes to resemble Real Life, the more it turns into a reasonable alternative to the latter (and you can even earn real-world money from EVE). This is the ultimate immersion, and if it became possible one day to support yourself from playing EVE, I have no doubt people would start doing it.

Maybe one conclusion for entrepreneurs to draw is that the combination of freedom + tools + competition on web services helps evolve them into true platforms, in which people 1) invest their egos, 2) build social networks that keep them coming back, and 3) organise and engineer to far greater extents. APIs and open interfaces amplify the impact of platforms - a principle wisely perceived by Facebook and many other platforms. EVE is just another example of the same.

There are also lessons to be drawn directly from experiences running corporations in EVE. I've read posts by people who started and ran small corporations and also those who ran megacorps/alliances, and they describe experiences rich in management and strategic principles. Strategy underpins the success of all but the least amibitious corps. Everyone has to plan how to deal with their ever-shifting, aggressive neighbours and protect their own holdings and profits (or expand their turf). Further, corp leaders have to learn to work with their growing membership and build HR/resource-planning systems to support them.

Playing EVE as a corporation manager/founder is definitely an educational experience for young people who eventually intend to manage teams in the future.

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