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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

#71

Post by keypusher »

newman314 wrote: post #56
tseabrooks wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I think it was well thought out, I just think it's hard to know what will happen until afterward. As for some of the values of items in Diablo III currently... I think there will be a settling period before prices reflect their true value. Supply will increase until some equilibrium is reached. When we hit some equilibrium we'll know if Blizz needs to tweak things. The gold AH, for instance, has had the o…

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.

Blizzard is well familiar with bots and virtual economies, they do still run multi-million subscriber behemoth World Of Warcraft after all.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#72

Post by primitur »

xb95 wrote: post #44
taliesinb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone here played EVE online? I keep hearing about how intricate and rich it is, but I've never met anyone who played it. Is the complexity interesting? Or is it 'time-sink' complexity in the vein of Diablo 3 -- as in rather mindless optima-seeking?

I've played off and on since 2003. The corporation I'm part of now has built an ERP and manages a trillion ISK (which at the legal rate is $35,000 USD in assets). We have production facilities -- several of them. We have distribution facilities. Transportation units (local and long-haul). We have combat pilots to protect the transportation. And we have the final delivery points where we actually sell goods -- both re…

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 .. ?

Re: It all began with a strange email

#75

Post by primitur »

creamyhorror wrote: post #53
xb95 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've played off and on since 2003. The corporation I'm part of now has built an ERP and manages a trillion ISK (which at the legal rate is $35,000 USD in assets). We have production facilities -- several of them. We have distribution facilities. Transportation units (local and long-haul). We have combat pilots to protect the transportation. And we have the final delivery points where we actually sell goods -- both re…

Awesome, you guys have taken it to the next level. I played a bit over 2006-2008, but was only ever a grunt. I do know the logistics guys in big corps/alliances have to do a ton of work. It sounds like you put IT properly to work for yourselves, as proper hackers would. For those observing: There's an in-game internet of sorts, but the real-life Internet plays the same role in EVE as it does in Real Life: it lets pla…

I believe it would be interesting to use EVE as the front-end for real management. If we get robotic space-probes off in the near asteroid fields in the next few decades, and little doubt EVE will still be around by then, well .. maybe a robotic-space explorer plugin to EVE will result in something even more awesome.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#77

Post by CosmicShadow »

frinxor wrote: post #3

Looking forward to these posts. I've remember being completely fascinated by Diablo 2's virtual economy, and saddened that I could find so little articles about it.

I went to GDC this year and saw a talk by a PHD Economist who does work on video game economies and releases reports about them. It was one of the coolest talks I attended, and I spoke with him afterwards. In his talk he mentioned Habbo Hotel a lot and spoke about a few other economies and how they came to settle on some sort of currency. I just had to bring up how I first noticed a form of virtual currency in Diablo 2 as he didn't seem to mention it. I do recall that SOJ's were like the defacto unit of pricing other items. Apparently he had actually never heard about that, which surprised me greatly (perhaps because Diablo 2 was so huge, and because it was one of the only examples I personally had). Here's hoping he looks into it and writes a report about it!

Re: It all began with a strange email

#78

Post by lclarkmichalek »

JonnieCache wrote: post #66
xb95 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've played off and on since 2003. The corporation I'm part of now has built an ERP and manages a trillion ISK (which at the legal rate is $35,000 USD in assets). We have production facilities -- several of them. We have distribution facilities. Transportation units (local and long-haul). We have combat pilots to protect the transportation. And we have the final delivery points where we actually sell goods -- both re…

I see that reddit no longer dominates to anywhere near the same extent. (Reddit is "test alliance please ignore." Also, "goonswarm federation" is the Something Awful forums. They used to absolutely run the show as well IIRC.)

One fun note on Test is that they initially tried to find space as far away from goonswarm as possible, but had the map upside down, so ended up very close by. However, they ended up as close allies, so all's well that ends well.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#79

Post by intended »

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…

Adding to gold sinks -

WoW I think had some of the most visible impacts in terms of gold sinks (some I am sure were pioneered by other games and MMOs)

They brought about the concepts of vanity items, which were absurdly expensive and went from there.

Whats even more interesting is seeing the progression and evolution of these economies.

Wow 1.0 auction houses and others barely had the concepts of gold sinks, nor any of the finer tuned economic catches that blizzard introduced by the time it reached its 3rd expansion - Wrath of the Lich King.

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