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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

#81

Post by intended »

newman314 wrote: post #8
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…

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.

Thats a job I would love to have. Datamining and seeing the patterns, figuring out the tweaks, and seeing it affect the economy as it propogates out.

That would be one fun thing to test - and better yet, contrast with real world examples.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#82

Post by msfd »

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 ?

Re: It all began with a strange email

#84

Post by jamska »

snowwrestler wrote: post #29
jwallaceparker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#85

Post by Simucal »

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…

I think it would be interesting to build a game like EVE which maps the management of spaceships and cargo to the management of real world businesses like a toilet seat manufacturer in Iowa.

While users of the game are creating distribution networks and building custom ERP solutions they would really be managing businesses (without their direct knowledge). If you were really successful in the game then you would find yourself managing the logistics of a much larger real world company.

I guess the challenge would be to create game mechanics that mapped in a way to real world business constraints that made sense.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#86

Post by kragniz »

cynest wrote: post #39
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.

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 real item sink because the consequence of death from npcs has been reduced (keeping most of the item you where holding when you died) and PvP (player versus player) has been neglected to the point where few players engage in the activity.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#87

Post by aggronn »

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...?

A statistic estimates a parameter of a population. If you have the population, you don't need statistics because you already know the parameters.

Having 'all the data' sidesteps any possible need to use statistics outside of forecasting, which he doesn't seem too fond of anyways.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#88

Post by aggronn »

yk wrote: post #42
creamyhorror wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head: you no longer need to sample to obtain your statistics, and you can obtain good statistics on virtually everything and every sub-component of the economy, sliced every which way, as many times as you like -- which is much harder in the real world. You can't just go out and gather information on sales of all red, oblong widgets in shops owned by couples aged 50-60 with one dog and one cat -- bu…

Even the real data should contain noise, compared to a true hypothesis. For example, you could predict that a certain (for the purpose of the example, small) percentage of all players will buy a certain ship. But many of them just stop playing by chance, then your prediction fails even if the underlying theory is correct. [1] I believe the main advantage is, that you can get rid of sampling bias. So you can look at t…

This type of 'noise' is easy to weed out. Its not really even noise--its just a question of how he wants to define his population.

With a good team of people who know SQL, he can pull data from any population he chooses, and can make any statement about that population he has data on, and if his arithmetic is valid, those facts are without any sort of 'noise'.

On the other hand, this is economics, and if he ever wants to make a valid prediction, he's going to have to use forecasting. Forecasting intentionally adds noise, so in that sense, have the population doesn't eliminate the existence of noise in his work.

But I really don't see what you mean by 'noise' in this case. He literally has all of the facts. There is nothing fuzzy about the data, as long as he has the data.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#89

Post by starpilot »

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 found this snippet from 24 May on BusinessWeek:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-24/greeces-brai...

> By the end of 2011, Yanis Varoufakis was a celebrity. The director of the Ph.D. program in economics at the University of Athens, Varoufakis had been arguing for two years that Greece was insolvent and the country should default while staying in the euro region ... In 2006, Varoufakis gave a talk in Athens predicting a financial crisis that would start in U.S. real estate, move through Wall Street, and on to Greece.

Re: It all began with a strange email

#90

Post by xb95 »

primitur wrote: post #72
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…

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 modifications of the system -- when you are in-game, you can instruct your browser to "trust" the remote web site. If you do that, the browser starts sending along headers that include information like your location in-game, your character name/ID, what corporation you're in, etc. It's a rather abysmal system of authentication, but it works OK for basic things.

They also added some JavaScript APIS so you can do some things in-game from the browser. I.e., display "show info" windows, do some UI stuff, etc. This makes you able to build web sites that are slightly more interactive and useful and actually connect with the game you're playing.

The ERP we've built is, unfortunately for me, in .NET. It's an ASP.NET system (maybe C#?) and so I can't really work on it. (I'm a Perl/Python/Go guy mostly.) I have built some other systems that my corporation and alliance uses, though, that are not part of our ERP or EMC (corporation management application).

A screenshot of the production view of our ERP:

http://xb95.com/pics/eve-erp.png

Note that it has order priority, build location, item, quantity. The icons on the right allow the producer to handle the order -- "resources ordered" (turns out we didn't have it, so I had to order stuff), "build started" (it's in build, wait for it to finish), "buy instead" (turns out it's better to buy it, resubmit this to procurement), and cancel, comments, info, etc.

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