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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

#111

Post by creamyhorror »

neutronicus wrote: post #95
creamyhorror wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[The linking of EVE Online and Dust 514] I wasn't intending to mention this, but I might as well since people are looking at EVE: http://ps3.ign.com/articles/122/1221463p1.html CCP has built a PS3 MMOFPS game called Dust 514. Players play mercenaries battling on planets. The utterly amazing thing is, this game is actually integrated into the EVE universe. Dust players are actually mercenaries being hired and fighting…

I'd be worried either about games of Dust being one-sided due to events in the EVE world, or to advantages in EVE becoming meaningless in order to ensure that individual games of dust are competitive.

That could definitely be an issue. Balancing dynamic systems is hard, especially when you bring an entire new section online and connect it with the existing structure.

The EVE universe is imbalanced by nature and by design, but hopefully Dust's mechanics will make the actual gaming experience for Dust mercs fun nonetheless. I'd expect an equilibrium to eventually emerge where warring parties employ mercs of matched number, armament and skill, and no one can gain an upper hand. That's what tends to happen in EVE anyway -- the starmap reaches an equilibrium of victors and losers, and borders are quiet for some time until a large disruptive event occurs, upon which alliances go to war, conquer or collapse, and the starmap changes and resettles again. So I'm hopeful that the micro-experience will still be fun during these transitions, even if the odds are clearly against one side.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#112

Post by swombat »

saraid216 wrote: post #105
nemo1618 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But if their virtual economy is stabler than a real world economy, this changes, right? I'd rather own ISK than Zimbabwean dollars. Even if it's not strictly stabler, the ISK reflect a certain amount of wealth that's retained in the virtual economy.

Taking another contrived example to make the point obvious, if Eve players basically controlled the equivalent of a trillion dollars, and they all decided to shift half of it to dollars (e.g. Because CCP has decided to print more ISKs), this would have a very real impact on the real economy.

Those are all contrived examples, so regulation shouldn't be based on them, but they show the question is worth considering.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#113

Post by lostlogin »

weego wrote: post #60
newman314 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they took into account the bot farming which causes a huge disparity between normal users farming and them getting 6mil gold/hr. There is also evidence of duping on the Asia servers already requiring a rollback so. So people are actively trying to exploit the system and there are not enough checks in place.

Just to clarify the item dupe was caught quickly and no rollback was needed, they were able to track the item that was the basis for the dupe and all the clones and remove them.

What's the equivalent of this in the real world? Forgeries? Fraud? Owning something without a license? Or is it not comparible?

Re: It all began with a strange email

#115

Post by nmutua »

i think the gaming sector with its virtual economies is a very good representive for "real" economies. in both economies it's all about feeling, very irrational. many panics and hypes. it's a bold move by valve to hire an economist-in-residence. they are going for the big shot

Re: It all began with a strange email

#116

Post by tatsuke95 »

stretchwithme wrote: post #109

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 implem…

>"An economist finally admits it why they fail so much."

What do you mean by "so much"? Because they can't accurately, regularly predict the future?

I think you'll find that, in reality, economists know their fallibility and limitations. It's the proletariat that doesn't understand the under-pinnings and assume economists should be 100% accurate when they make predictions, and are upset when they are not.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#117

Post by tatsuke95 »

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.

When Congress signs off on deficit spending, you are giving them the power to create dollars.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#118

Post by antman »

msfd wrote: post #82
katsaroles wrote: post #20

A 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…

You seem to know a little bit about this gentleman than I (and the rest of HN probably) know, could you tell us more about his (correct) predictions ?

I have attended one lecture-seminar-debate for economists. He was a spokesman and his ideas can be summarized in 2010 here [1].

His work regarding european crisis [2]

[1]:http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2010/12/17/the-modest-proposal-in-... [2]:http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/euro-crisis/

Re: It all began with a strange email

#119

Post by mik3cap »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #21

Four years ago one of my first startup ideas I pursued was setting up an arbitrage between virtual economies. I believed then (and still believe) that it is a huge chunk of the future. Everything that is tangible now will become software and intangible in the future. That means the virtual economy is set to eclipse the current one. I spoke with some somewhat famous startup-type people; several I met on HN. None of th…

I'd like to see reputation or karma or achievement based currencies that are convertible between online communities, and a currency exchange that lets me buy and sell equivalent values. I could then take Reddit karma and exchange it for Stack Exchange points and "buy in" to another community at the going exchange rate, transferring the good will or community mindedness I earned on one site into another.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#120

Post by xsmasher »

tseabrooks wrote: post #9
steve8918 wrote: post #4

This 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…

Many games add "Gold sinks" to tackle this. Just ways for players to use gold that completely removes it from the economy. I believe the trick of this is to scale it with the amount of gold in the system. Complete conjecture, but I suspect this is related to things like the increased price to craft gems in Diablo II (bigger gems are more expensive) which was a stark contract to Diablo 2's simple method of "3 small ge…

> I believe the trick of this is to scale it with the amount of gold in the system.

That would make the items too expensive for normal players - only the gold farmers and their customers would be able to afford it. Tricky business.

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