What I'm saying is that MMOs get to design the economic game, and they are afforded the opportunity to make it so that the optimal solution is also the fun one. It's just that it doesn't happen by accident.
The way they do this is not by altering the optimal solution, it is by encouraging people to pick the path they enjoy the most.
If you pick the path you enjoy the most, regardless of whether it is the most optimal for you at that time or not, it will end up eventually being the optimal path for you, as well as the most enjoyable path.
If you pick a path based purely on how optimal it is for you today, then tomorrow when that changes, you are stuck with it as you have started specializing.
It's a matter of player choices not game design, imo.
I think there's a really solid chance that we're talking about different stuff here. Maybe a super simple example will help.
Say that your goal as a player is to get to 2000 points, and there 100 different activities that you can do in the game. All of those activities except activity-42 average out to earning you 20 points / day. Activity-42, on the other hand, earns you 21 points / day.
A lot of players would play whatever interests them. Maybe they try a whole bunch of different activities. Maybe they find 15 or so different activities that they really enjoy, and sort of cycle between those based on how they're feeling that day. Maybe they play slightly more of Activity-42 than the other ones, but not especially so.
Those aren't the players I'm talking about. I'm talking about the players that, when they find out that this is the case, feel like Activity-42 is now the only viable option. If you play strictly Activity-42, you will be done with your grind in 95 days. If you play the other activities, it will take 100 days.
This is, notably, how Diablo 3 worked at release (activity 42 was called the bridge). This is how earning currency has worked in a lot of MMOs (activity 42 in WoW classic was called a tribute run).
You could say "that's those player's problem then". And sure. It's also a widespread and developer-recognized problem. The game doesn't have to be designed in such a way that there is a single dominant activity that can be repeated ad-nauseam for maximum efficiency.
An easy fix for the above 100-activity game is to make it so that the reward for each activity decreases for each time you repeat it within a particular period. Activity-42 is better for than the rest, but only the first time, so optimizers have to go play Activity-28 and everything else. It releases them from the hell that is repeating activity-42 over and over.
Hopefully the above is enough proof that this can be solved on a game design level. Let me know if you agree there before we go into the econ
Basically 'can you say you are willing to pay more than you actually have?' and all the issues that come from either doing that, or the countermeasures.
There's the simple way, where setting up the order freezes the asset (either the currency for a buy order or the item for a sell order. Canceling the order returns the funds, with an optional fee for both the order-placer and the fulfiller.
There's a more complicated way where you're over-collateralizing your position somehow, and if the collateralization ratio crosses particular thresholds, you get liquidated. The second one is fun for finance folks, but I think it's overkill in a video game!
And yeah, what I more-or-less what I expect to happen is that the economic nodes will have so much more convenient markets, and there will be enough people who have fun playing traveling merchant, and enough third-party websites that just index all of the low-liquidity, low-population nodes, that the effective merchants will just create arbitrage scripts. They'll get an email alert whenever the price of some item in node 53 is low enough that you can buy it, transport it to the highly liquid metropolis, and be economically efficient for your time.
This means that node 53 becomes even more of a wasteland. Any time there's a reasonably priced item, some big-city folk comes in to scoop it up to move it to an economic node. It creates the perception that If you want to actually buy anything as a regular consumer, you should just travel to the economic node since your local market is barren or overpriced. I don't think it'll take a particularly long amount of time to get to the nearest market anyway.
The liquidity pools and gathers more liquidity
My general design solution to these sorts of things is to 'twist' them, not 'fight' them, since obviously fighting raw economics is a losing battle in so many ways. "Twisting" allows for creativity on the part of the designer, and all sorts of things come up, so I think I just wanna watch and see what they do.
"Dragon attacks the bank because there's too much gold and they want to take it to sleep on."
This is such a cool idea.
I want a squirrel infestation for nodes that hoard walnuts or acorns.
Basically 'can you say you are willing to pay more than you actually have?' and all the issues that come from either doing that, or the countermeasures.
There's the simple way, where setting up the order freezes the asset (either the currency for a buy order or the item for a sell order. Canceling the order returns the funds, with an optional fee for both the order-placer and the fulfiller.
There's a more complicated way where you're over-collateralizing your position somehow, and if the collateralization ratio crosses particular thresholds, you get liquidated. The second one is fun for finance folks, but I think it's overkill in a video game!
And yeah, what I more-or-less what I expect to happen is that the economic nodes will have so much more convenient markets, and there will be enough people who have fun playing traveling merchant, and enough third-party websites that just index all of the low-liquidity, low-population nodes, that the effective merchants will just create arbitrage scripts. They'll get an email alert whenever the price of some item in node 53 is low enough that you can buy it, transport it to the highly liquid metropolis, and be economically efficient for your time.
This means that node 53 becomes even more of a wasteland. Any time there's a reasonably priced item, some big-city folk comes in to scoop it up to move it to an economic node. It creates the perception that If you want to actually buy anything as a regular consumer, you should just travel to the economic node since your local market is barren or overpriced. I don't think it'll take a particularly long amount of time to get to the nearest market anyway.
The liquidity pools and gathers more liquidity
My general design solution to these sorts of things is to 'twist' them, not 'fight' them, since obviously fighting raw economics is a losing battle in so many ways. "Twisting" allows for creativity on the part of the designer, and all sorts of things come up, so I think I just wanna watch and see what they do.
"Dragon attacks the bank because there's too much gold and they want to take it to sleep on."
This is such a cool idea.
I want a squirrel infestation for nodes that hoard walnuts or acorns.
Then there needs to be an "poisoned squirrel bait" alchemist recipe
This is, notably, how Diablo 3 worked at release (activity 42 was called the bridge). This is how earning currency has worked in a lot of MMOs (activity 42 in WoW classic was called a tribute run).
I think I have found the issue here.
My decade long distaste for Blizzard aside, both of these games are more concerned with itemization than they are with economy. If these are your points of reference, then yea, I can see where you would see a problem with what myself and Azherae have been saying. EQ2 was itemization driven as well, so I understand your perspective well enough.
What tends to happen in a game that is more economy focused (EVE, Archeage, likely Ashes) is that activity 42 may be slightly better today, but tomorrow that activity may only give you 19 points instead of 20, and activity 37 may give you 21 instead.
With an economy that is player driven (rather than a game that is itemization driven), the return on an activity fluctuates not just on how many people do the activity you are doing, but on how many people do the activity below and above you.
Lets say you are someone that processes iron ore in to iron plate. The return on this may well be exactly 20 points for a good long while. However, if all of a sudden a few more players opt to spend their time mining, the price of the iron ore you are buying to process will go down, and you'll now many 21 points. if more people decide to level up a craft that uses iron, your demand is now higher and suddenly you are making 22.
With a player driven economy, this things are not set by the developer, the demand is set by players. As such, the demand not only fluctuates, but is different on each server, and in Ashes it will probably be different in each major node.
This is why the best thing to do in a player driven economy is to find a task that you enjoy, and specialize in it. If you opt to just run at that activity 42 because it makes 21 as opposed to 20, tomorrow when everyone else does the same thing and activity 42 suddenly drops to only making 18, or 15 because the demand for the products that activity 42 makes has dropped right off, you will really wish you had specialized in something you enjoy.
So here's the trick. Make it so that whenever you mine Iron Ore, you mine some Iron Ore that you can sell (fungible) and some Iron Ore shards that you can't sell, but serve as Iron Ore for the purposes of crafting.
I have an alternative, but i'm not sure this extra layer of complexity is a good thing. (sometime, keep it simple is better)
You can make it so item you get first hand are soulbind, not soulbind in a way that you can't trade them, you just get something like 10% better stats.
If you trade/sell the item, it lost his soulbind attribute and became regular. That way there is incentive to get it yourself and not just throw away gold to get it.
You can use this attribute for some crafting ressources too and soulbind material will give you better crafting chances. So it will be essentially the same as "you get two ore, and one is BoP".
@Noaani before I get into any of the Econ, can you directly confirm that we’re on the same page that you think that the activity-42 thing, in the abstract, is a real problem and that it’s a problem you think is solvable at the game design level?
I think connecting that to the Econ is pretty complicated, so I don’t want to get into that only to find out that we disagree about the fundamentals
@maouw I think that in the process of typing up that example for Noaani, I figured out how to solve the problem while also preserving full economic freedom and fungibility.
Make it so that all activities start with "bonus yield", say... 1.5x. After doing the activity enough times (say, spending ~2 hours during a 1 week period), the bonus drops down to 1.25x. After another 2 hours, it drops down to 1.1x, and then finally 1.0x. Then, adjust the crafting patterns / sinks to account for the new expected yeild.
The numbers are fully tweakable, but the idea is that now you hit these breakpoints where after spending two hours looping dreamfoil, you lose your 1.5x bonus. Hopefully 1.25x dreamfoil is less effective than 1.5x of your next best thing (or they can adjust the numbers). This gets the optimizers to go around the world doing different stuff and releases them from optimization hell.
At the same time, if what you love to do is fish all day, you're certainly allowed to! You'll start with your 1.5x bonus, and then after a few hours you'll go down to a 1.25x bonus, and then you'll just keep fishing at a normal rate.
It doesn't fix the problem forever and eventually you do get to a point where you've exhausted enough options that you're back to your default dreamfoil loop, but hopefully by then it's almost reset day.
Noaani before I get into any of the Econ, can you directly confirm that we’re on the same page that you think that the activity-42 thing, in the abstract, is a real problem and that it’s a problem you think is solvable at the game design level?
I think connecting that to the Econ is pretty complicated, so I don’t want to get into that only to find out that we disagree about the fundamentals
I have a question for you about Diablos bridge and WoW's tribute run before I answer this.
Explain the process for how players turn that activity in to gold.
With the tribute run, they do the zone, avoid killing the bosses until the end, kill him, get loot - then what?
I don't know enough about Diablo 3 (it was a shit game in comparison to PoE, I don't understand why anyone would play D3 over PoE).
With this question answered, either we have a foundation for a discussion, or we have the solution to your problem.
Sure - I'd like to just talk about the abstract activity-42 thing before we talk about how well the diablo bridge thing fits as an example of the problem, or how well the diablo bridge thing works as a metaphor for ashes, but I'm down to answer that separately.
So abstractly, say that you have a game where some players have a goal to get to 2000 points as fast as possible, and there are 100 different activities, and 99 of those activities give ~20 points/hour, and activity-42 gives ~21 pionts/hour.
Some players will feel the need to strictly play activity-42 because that's optimal, even though playing the other activities would be more fun. Do you agree that this is both a problem that's worth solving, and one that can be solved on a game design level?
Re - Diablo:
The bridge had a high desity of mobs. Mobs dropped both items and raw gold. Items can sold on the auction house for gold to other players. Gold can be used to purchase items on the auction house from other players. Some items that dropped from mobs on the bridge are also just upgrades themselves.
Re Tribute - Kill Mobs, they either drop trash loot, currency, or items valuable to other players. If you get currency, this gives you more buying power. If you get items, you sell those for currency.
Sure - I'd like to just talk about the abstract activity-42 thing before we talk about how well the diablo bridge thing fits as an example of the problem, or how well the diablo bridge thing works as a metaphor for ashes, but I'm down to answer that separately.
So abstractly, say that you have a game where some players have a goal to get to 2000 points as fast as possible, and there are 100 different activities, and 99 of those activities give ~20 points/hour, and activity-42 gives ~21 pionts/hour.
Some players will feel the need to strictly play activity-42 because that's optimal, even though playing the other activities would be more fun. Do you agree that this is both a problem that's worth solving, and one that can be solved on a game design level?
Re - Diablo:
The bridge had a high desity of mobs. Mobs dropped both items and raw gold. Items can sold on the auction house for gold to other players. Gold can be used to purchase items on the auction house from other players. Some items that dropped from mobs on the bridge are also just upgrades themselves.
Re Tribute - Kill Mobs, they either drop trash loot, currency, or items valuable to other players. If you get currency, this gives you more buying power. If you get items, you sell those for currency.
In both cases, what would happen if enough players started doing these activities to oversupply the items that each content type provides, to the point where there are more people selling these items than there are people wanting to buy them?
As I said earlier, that is only an issue in games that are itemization focused, rather than economy focused.
If you have a game that is economic focused, all of the points that each activity generate change on a daily basis. As such, there is no point in discussing that UNTIL those variables are sorted - which is what I am trying to do, sort out those variables so that we can then actually and properly discuss your activity 42 situation.
Literally any discussion on it now is a waste of time, until we understand those variables. So, talk about the variables first, then the activity.
We can discuss my activity-42 scenario just fine as written. I think you have that in you
You might not think it applies, or think that that any other game isn't an example of the activity-42 thing or whatever. But I'd really like to hear what you think, specifically, about the exactly activity-42 example I outlined.
No economics, no other players, just that simple game
Then every day optimizers choose whichever activity generates the most points.
Except they need to specialize.
Edit - you cant just go from being an ore miner one day, to being a tailor the next just because that is the activity that generates more points that day.
Would you like to come up with your own hypothetical to ask me about? I'm down to answer questions about some thing you're imagining in your brain. Designing complex economic systems is my salaried day job, after all.
As for my hypothetical I was asking you about, there is no specialization and the numbers don't shift and all of the activities are worth 20 points per day except activity-42, which is worth 21 points per day.
Optimizers have to jam activity-42 until they have 2000 points, even though they would have more fun doing other stuff. Do you agree that this is a problem worth solving? Do you agree that this can be solved on a game-design level?
As for my hypothetical I was asking you about, there is no specialization and the numbers don't shift and all of the activities are worth 20 points per day except activity-42, which is worth 21 points per day.
More than a hypothetical, you are talking about a situation you have seen in Diablo 3 and WoW that you don't want to see in Ashes.
I am saying that the way the economy is built in Ashes, that situation won't happen.
In other words, I am saying your issue with activity 42 has been solved in dozens of games already, and Ashes is going to take that same resolution and run with it.
Is it a problem worth solving? yes, in the same way the wheel was worth inventing. No point in redoing either of them now though, as they have both been done.
In both cases, what would happen if enough players started doing these activities to oversupply the items that each content type provides, to the point where there are more people selling these items than there are people wanting to buy them?
In Diablo's case, all of the drops dropped from anywhere, so it was just the most efficient place to farm period.
In WoW's case, you could eventually oversupply the market and the prices would eventually drop, but the specialization required was high enough (high skill, particular class, high gear requirement, tedious), and the rest of the market was liquid enough that it didn't end up happening and so it just kept getting milked.
In general, when you specialize, this makes it so the number of things that might-be-the-most-efficient-thing that you could do at any point in time decreases. If you spend a bunch of time/money investing in a diamond mining pick and being able to mine the highest tier mining veins, the probability that "mine the highest tier veins" is your highest g/h activity is relatively high.
You may have 3-4 different things your character is specialized to do, and you rotate through them based on market conditions and what's in demand and the meta and all that. This makes the current "activity-42" vary from day to day.
For more reading about how players fill different economic niches in steady-state, I would look into congestion games, though again, this is my day job.
Part of the reason the first two pages of this thread focus so much on liquidity is that the more liquidity there is, the less you have to do anything but the thing you're the absolute best at. If there's next to no liquidity, you might have to actually go out and gather panther hides or collect ore, and weave fibers, even though your character isn't specialized for it, which is novelty. If there's tons of liquidity and throughput, you just mine all the time, don't worry about oversupplying because your own marginal contribution to the mining ore liquidity is tiny, and exchange your ore for currency and currency for pather hides and fibers, both of which are also highly liquid.
Everyone is specialized in their own thing, so they stay in their own lane, and they're all more-or-less stuck in their own activity-42, just like how when we want to make money in real life, we work the same job every day instead of trying out tons of different novel, fun activities.
In general, when you specialize, this makes it so the number of things that might-be-the-most-efficient-thing that you could do at any point in time decreases. If you spend a bunch of time/money investing in a diamond mining pick and being able to mine the highest tier mining veins, the probability that "mine the highest tier veins" is your highest g/h activity is relatively high.
Yes, exactly.
However, you made the decision to get good at mining, you could have picked any task, become a specialist in it, and then that task would be your activity 42.
The trick is, when you are picking that task, pick one that you enjoy. Every task will have it's day as activity 42, so don't use that as a guide to what you specialize in.
Everyone is specialized in their own thing, so they stay in their own lane, and they're all more-or-less stuck in their own activity-42, just like how when we want to make money in real life, we work the same job every day instead of trying out tons of different novel, fun activities.
This is where other aspects of the game come in.
If you are sick of doing what ever your specialization is, go out and join a group, or a raid, or a siege, or a - what ever. There is tons of other things to do in an MMO other than what ever your activity 42 happens to be for the day.
Sure, you may not progress that day, or may progress less, but so what?
If you are the kind of person that optimizes the fun out of the game, then you should not be surprised if you progress quickly, but have no fun in doing that. This isn't a game design thing, it is a player choice thing.
However, you made the decision to get good at mining, you could have picked any task, become a specialist in it, and then that task would be your activity 42.
The trick is, when you are picking that task, pick one that you enjoy. Every task will have it's day as activity 42, so don't use that as a guide to what you specialize in.
You are right in that if you happen to like activity-42, it will hurt less that you have to do it forever as an optimizer. maouw also suggested making activity-42 more engaging, which is also tackling the problem from another direction.
Unfortunately, as an optimizer (that's who we are talking about), you don't get to pick the task you specialize in for fun, you have to specialize in whatever you think will be optimal. If you specialize in activity-18, then you do activity-18, because doing activity-18 as an activity-18 specialist is better than activity-42 as a non-specialist. But you should have specialized in activity-42 because doing activity-42 as a specialist is better than doing activity-18 as a specialist, even though you think that activity-18 is more fun.
If you are sick of doing what ever your specialization is, go out and join a group, or a raid, or a siege, or a - what ever. There is tons of other things to do in an MMO other than what ever your activity 42 happens to be for the day.
Sure, you may not progress that day, or may progress less, but so what?
If you are the kind of person that optimizes the fun out of the game, then you should not be surprised if you progress quickly, but have no fun in doing that. This isn't a game design thing, it is a player choice thing.
This is why I was very careful to ask you about activity-42, and whether or not you agreed that it was a problem, and whether or not you agreed that it can be solved from a game-design level. Here, your solution is to "stop doing activity-42".
Yes, at any point, the players are allowed to simply stop doing activity-42, do any other activity that they might think is more fun, and go slower. They can trade efficiency for fun. Players playing diablo don't have to run the bridge over and over. They did. Over and over. The intended way to play the game, and the efficient way to play the game were unaligned. Then, blizzard realized this, tweaked the rewards, and re-aligned them.
I'm saying that the game does not have to be designed in such a way that the optimal solution is unfun. One of the main ideas of mechanism design is designing games that produce player behavior where optimal play aligns with intended play.
I won't be "surprised" if the devs don't account for this, or if the optimal solution ends up degenerate for a while. It's happened plenty enough times. Mech design is hard.
This is why I was very careful to ask you about activity-42, and whether or not you agreed that it was a problem, and whether or not you agreed that it can be solved from a game-design level. Here, your solution is to "stop doing activity-42".
If a game were designed like D3 or WoW, where activity 42 is set by the developers, then I would agree that it needs to be changed (don't expect anything from Blizzard, they are the Apple of game development - if they were making cars, they would use square wheels just because, and then claim you were using the car wrong if you complained about the uneven ride).
In a game where players can select what activity is their 42 though, this isn't an issue. This is the difference to me.
I don't personally see this as any different to picking a combat class in an MMO. Both restrict what you can do, but allow you to specialize in to the thing you do decide to go for. In both cases, if you get board of the thing you selected, you just roll an alt - that is what alts are for, experiencing parts of the game you are locked out of on other characters.
Again, I get the issue in games lie D3 and WoW, and agree that such design is not good enough. However, in games with a play economy (assuming it is properly managed), the issue just isn't there any more.
This is why I was very careful to ask you about activity-42, and whether or not you agreed that it was a problem, and whether or not you agreed that it can be solved from a game-design level. Here, your solution is to "stop doing activity-42".
If a game were designed like D3 or WoW, where activity 42 is set by the developers, then I would agree that it needs to be changed (don't expect anything from Blizzard, they are the Apple of game development - if they were making cars, they would use square wheels just because, and then claim you were using the car wrong if you complained about the uneven ride).
In a game where players can select what activity is their 42 though, this isn't an issue. This is the difference to me.
I don't personally see this as any different to picking a combat class in an MMO. Both restrict what you can do, but allow you to specialize in to the thing you do decide to go for. In both cases, if you get board of the thing you selected, you just roll an alt - that is what alts are for, experiencing parts of the game you are locked out of on other characters.
Again, I get the issue in games lie D3 and WoW, and agree that such design is not good enough. However, in games with a play economy (assuming it is properly managed), the issue just isn't there any more.
But also, it straight up doesn't have to be a problem in the first place. As in, right now optimizers have to consciously choose between playing activity-42 which the market has deemed efficient, or activity-18, which they would really love to do, which the market has deemed less efficient.
The developers can add mechanics to the game that directly influence how long a single activity is the most efficient activity.
For example, you talked about specialization. Say that in my 2000-point, 100 activity example, we ratchet the point requirement up to 4000 and make it so that you're allowed to choose a single activity to boost by +20 points permanently, but only 1 activity.
It's optimal to boost activity-42 to be worth 41 points per day, but now even the non-optimizers would feel some of the optimizer's pain when they went to do their non-specialty. This is a mechanic that makes the problem worse. If the developers want each player playing in a single lane, then this is good mechanism design. If they want each person picking 3-4 things, then they could let them pick 3-4 specialties. If they want players to feel like they can play whatever they want, here's what they can do:
Give the player a quest to do a random activity. They can ignore the quest and do whatever they want, but if they do the quest, they get rewarded. Optimizers do nothing but random activities (and thus get to experience the whole game). Destiny 2 does this with random bounties.
Make each activity start the day with 2 bonus points. Once you've completed the activity once, you won't get the bonus points again. Optimizers will complete activity-42 first (for 23 points), and then the other 99 activities in any order (for 22 points), and then repeat activity-42 until they run out of time.
etc.
Applied to open markets or a game like ashes, you can make it so that the first 100 times you mine nodes (or craft helms or pick flowers or w/e), you get bonus yield. The next 75 times, you get less bonus yield, then the next 50 times after that, you get even less bonus yield. Eventually, you get to normal yield.
What this does is it makes it so that even if you specialize in mining, once you've exhausted all of your bonus yields, it might make economic sense for you to skin pelts, or pick flowers, or craft helms or w/e, to reap more bonus yield. Even in fluctuating market conditions, optimizers might be released from doing-their-specialty-over-and-over.
It is possible to design the game such that the optimal way to play is also the fun way to play. It just takes some doing.
The thing you're talking about has a problem for people like me who really do just like doing the exact same thing over and over ad infinitum.
Now you're 'hurting me for doing that' relative to someone else.
Without that, you get a different outcome. When my favorite thing is less profitable due to it being done by everyone for a while, I'll still do it, and then hold the materials until things die down. Or, because I like doing it, I'll undercut other people just to bring down the profit to make them go away.
Comments
I think there's a really solid chance that we're talking about different stuff here. Maybe a super simple example will help.
Say that your goal as a player is to get to 2000 points, and there 100 different activities that you can do in the game. All of those activities except activity-42 average out to earning you 20 points / day. Activity-42, on the other hand, earns you 21 points / day.
A lot of players would play whatever interests them. Maybe they try a whole bunch of different activities. Maybe they find 15 or so different activities that they really enjoy, and sort of cycle between those based on how they're feeling that day. Maybe they play slightly more of Activity-42 than the other ones, but not especially so.
Those aren't the players I'm talking about. I'm talking about the players that, when they find out that this is the case, feel like Activity-42 is now the only viable option. If you play strictly Activity-42, you will be done with your grind in 95 days. If you play the other activities, it will take 100 days.
This is, notably, how Diablo 3 worked at release (activity 42 was called the bridge). This is how earning currency has worked in a lot of MMOs (activity 42 in WoW classic was called a tribute run).
You could say "that's those player's problem then". And sure. It's also a widespread and developer-recognized problem. The game doesn't have to be designed in such a way that there is a single dominant activity that can be repeated ad-nauseam for maximum efficiency.
An easy fix for the above 100-activity game is to make it so that the reward for each activity decreases for each time you repeat it within a particular period. Activity-42 is better for than the rest, but only the first time, so optimizers have to go play Activity-28 and everything else. It releases them from the hell that is repeating activity-42 over and over.
Hopefully the above is enough proof that this can be solved on a game design level. Let me know if you agree there before we go into the econ
This is such a cool idea.
I want a squirrel infestation for nodes that hoard walnuts or acorns.
Then there needs to be an "poisoned squirrel bait" alchemist recipe
My decade long distaste for Blizzard aside, both of these games are more concerned with itemization than they are with economy. If these are your points of reference, then yea, I can see where you would see a problem with what myself and Azherae have been saying. EQ2 was itemization driven as well, so I understand your perspective well enough.
What tends to happen in a game that is more economy focused (EVE, Archeage, likely Ashes) is that activity 42 may be slightly better today, but tomorrow that activity may only give you 19 points instead of 20, and activity 37 may give you 21 instead.
With an economy that is player driven (rather than a game that is itemization driven), the return on an activity fluctuates not just on how many people do the activity you are doing, but on how many people do the activity below and above you.
Lets say you are someone that processes iron ore in to iron plate. The return on this may well be exactly 20 points for a good long while. However, if all of a sudden a few more players opt to spend their time mining, the price of the iron ore you are buying to process will go down, and you'll now many 21 points. if more people decide to level up a craft that uses iron, your demand is now higher and suddenly you are making 22.
With a player driven economy, this things are not set by the developer, the demand is set by players. As such, the demand not only fluctuates, but is different on each server, and in Ashes it will probably be different in each major node.
This is why the best thing to do in a player driven economy is to find a task that you enjoy, and specialize in it. If you opt to just run at that activity 42 because it makes 21 as opposed to 20, tomorrow when everyone else does the same thing and activity 42 suddenly drops to only making 18, or 15 because the demand for the products that activity 42 makes has dropped right off, you will really wish you had specialized in something you enjoy.
I have an alternative, but i'm not sure this extra layer of complexity is a good thing. (sometime, keep it simple is better)
You can make it so item you get first hand are soulbind, not soulbind in a way that you can't trade them, you just get something like 10% better stats.
If you trade/sell the item, it lost his soulbind attribute and became regular. That way there is incentive to get it yourself and not just throw away gold to get it.
You can use this attribute for some crafting ressources too and soulbind material will give you better crafting chances. So it will be essentially the same as "you get two ore, and one is BoP".
I think connecting that to the Econ is pretty complicated, so I don’t want to get into that only to find out that we disagree about the fundamentals
Make it so that all activities start with "bonus yield", say... 1.5x. After doing the activity enough times (say, spending ~2 hours during a 1 week period), the bonus drops down to 1.25x. After another 2 hours, it drops down to 1.1x, and then finally 1.0x. Then, adjust the crafting patterns / sinks to account for the new expected yeild.
The numbers are fully tweakable, but the idea is that now you hit these breakpoints where after spending two hours looping dreamfoil, you lose your 1.5x bonus. Hopefully 1.25x dreamfoil is less effective than 1.5x of your next best thing (or they can adjust the numbers). This gets the optimizers to go around the world doing different stuff and releases them from optimization hell.
At the same time, if what you love to do is fish all day, you're certainly allowed to! You'll start with your 1.5x bonus, and then after a few hours you'll go down to a 1.25x bonus, and then you'll just keep fishing at a normal rate.
It doesn't fix the problem forever and eventually you do get to a point where you've exhausted enough options that you're back to your default dreamfoil loop, but hopefully by then it's almost reset day.
Explain the process for how players turn that activity in to gold.
With the tribute run, they do the zone, avoid killing the bosses until the end, kill him, get loot - then what?
I don't know enough about Diablo 3 (it was a shit game in comparison to PoE, I don't understand why anyone would play D3 over PoE).
With this question answered, either we have a foundation for a discussion, or we have the solution to your problem.
So abstractly, say that you have a game where some players have a goal to get to 2000 points as fast as possible, and there are 100 different activities, and 99 of those activities give ~20 points/hour, and activity-42 gives ~21 pionts/hour.
Some players will feel the need to strictly play activity-42 because that's optimal, even though playing the other activities would be more fun. Do you agree that this is both a problem that's worth solving, and one that can be solved on a game design level?
Re - Diablo:
The bridge had a high desity of mobs. Mobs dropped both items and raw gold. Items can sold on the auction house for gold to other players. Gold can be used to purchase items on the auction house from other players. Some items that dropped from mobs on the bridge are also just upgrades themselves.
Re Tribute - Kill Mobs, they either drop trash loot, currency, or items valuable to other players. If you get currency, this gives you more buying power. If you get items, you sell those for currency.
In both cases, what would happen if enough players started doing these activities to oversupply the items that each content type provides, to the point where there are more people selling these items than there are people wanting to buy them?
Nope.
If you have a game that is economic focused, all of the points that each activity generate change on a daily basis. As such, there is no point in discussing that UNTIL those variables are sorted - which is what I am trying to do, sort out those variables so that we can then actually and properly discuss your activity 42 situation.
Literally any discussion on it now is a waste of time, until we understand those variables. So, talk about the variables first, then the activity.
You might not think it applies, or think that that any other game isn't an example of the activity-42 thing or whatever. But I'd really like to hear what you think, specifically, about the exactly activity-42 example I outlined.
No economics, no other players, just that simple game
We can, but it would be a waste of time.
In your scenario, what happens with activity 42 started generating 5 points per day instead of 21?
And what happens when every day is different in terms of how many points each activity generates?
Except they need to specialize.
Edit - you cant just go from being an ore miner one day, to being a tailor the next just because that is the activity that generates more points that day.
As for my hypothetical I was asking you about, there is no specialization and the numbers don't shift and all of the activities are worth 20 points per day except activity-42, which is worth 21 points per day.
Optimizers have to jam activity-42 until they have 2000 points, even though they would have more fun doing other stuff. Do you agree that this is a problem worth solving? Do you agree that this can be solved on a game-design level?
I am saying that the way the economy is built in Ashes, that situation won't happen.
In other words, I am saying your issue with activity 42 has been solved in dozens of games already, and Ashes is going to take that same resolution and run with it.
Is it a problem worth solving? yes, in the same way the wheel was worth inventing. No point in redoing either of them now though, as they have both been done.
I edited in the answer.
Okay so circling back to the beginning -
In Diablo's case, all of the drops dropped from anywhere, so it was just the most efficient place to farm period.
In WoW's case, you could eventually oversupply the market and the prices would eventually drop, but the specialization required was high enough (high skill, particular class, high gear requirement, tedious), and the rest of the market was liquid enough that it didn't end up happening and so it just kept getting milked.
In general, when you specialize, this makes it so the number of things that might-be-the-most-efficient-thing that you could do at any point in time decreases. If you spend a bunch of time/money investing in a diamond mining pick and being able to mine the highest tier mining veins, the probability that "mine the highest tier veins" is your highest g/h activity is relatively high.
You may have 3-4 different things your character is specialized to do, and you rotate through them based on market conditions and what's in demand and the meta and all that. This makes the current "activity-42" vary from day to day.
For more reading about how players fill different economic niches in steady-state, I would look into congestion games, though again, this is my day job.
Part of the reason the first two pages of this thread focus so much on liquidity is that the more liquidity there is, the less you have to do anything but the thing you're the absolute best at. If there's next to no liquidity, you might have to actually go out and gather panther hides or collect ore, and weave fibers, even though your character isn't specialized for it, which is novelty. If there's tons of liquidity and throughput, you just mine all the time, don't worry about oversupplying because your own marginal contribution to the mining ore liquidity is tiny, and exchange your ore for currency and currency for pather hides and fibers, both of which are also highly liquid.
Everyone is specialized in their own thing, so they stay in their own lane, and they're all more-or-less stuck in their own activity-42, just like how when we want to make money in real life, we work the same job every day instead of trying out tons of different novel, fun activities.
However, you made the decision to get good at mining, you could have picked any task, become a specialist in it, and then that task would be your activity 42.
The trick is, when you are picking that task, pick one that you enjoy. Every task will have it's day as activity 42, so don't use that as a guide to what you specialize in.
This is where other aspects of the game come in.
If you are sick of doing what ever your specialization is, go out and join a group, or a raid, or a siege, or a - what ever. There is tons of other things to do in an MMO other than what ever your activity 42 happens to be for the day.
Sure, you may not progress that day, or may progress less, but so what?
If you are the kind of person that optimizes the fun out of the game, then you should not be surprised if you progress quickly, but have no fun in doing that. This isn't a game design thing, it is a player choice thing.
Unfortunately, as an optimizer (that's who we are talking about), you don't get to pick the task you specialize in for fun, you have to specialize in whatever you think will be optimal. If you specialize in activity-18, then you do activity-18, because doing activity-18 as an activity-18 specialist is better than activity-42 as a non-specialist. But you should have specialized in activity-42 because doing activity-42 as a specialist is better than doing activity-18 as a specialist, even though you think that activity-18 is more fun.
This is why I was very careful to ask you about activity-42, and whether or not you agreed that it was a problem, and whether or not you agreed that it can be solved from a game-design level. Here, your solution is to "stop doing activity-42".
Yes, at any point, the players are allowed to simply stop doing activity-42, do any other activity that they might think is more fun, and go slower. They can trade efficiency for fun. Players playing diablo don't have to run the bridge over and over. They did. Over and over. The intended way to play the game, and the efficient way to play the game were unaligned. Then, blizzard realized this, tweaked the rewards, and re-aligned them.
I'm saying that the game does not have to be designed in such a way that the optimal solution is unfun. One of the main ideas of mechanism design is designing games that produce player behavior where optimal play aligns with intended play.
I won't be "surprised" if the devs don't account for this, or if the optimal solution ends up degenerate for a while. It's happened plenty enough times. Mech design is hard.
If a game were designed like D3 or WoW, where activity 42 is set by the developers, then I would agree that it needs to be changed (don't expect anything from Blizzard, they are the Apple of game development - if they were making cars, they would use square wheels just because, and then claim you were using the car wrong if you complained about the uneven ride).
In a game where players can select what activity is their 42 though, this isn't an issue. This is the difference to me.
I don't personally see this as any different to picking a combat class in an MMO. Both restrict what you can do, but allow you to specialize in to the thing you do decide to go for. In both cases, if you get board of the thing you selected, you just roll an alt - that is what alts are for, experiencing parts of the game you are locked out of on other characters.
Again, I get the issue in games lie D3 and WoW, and agree that such design is not good enough. However, in games with a play economy (assuming it is properly managed), the issue just isn't there any more.
But also, it straight up doesn't have to be a problem in the first place. As in, right now optimizers have to consciously choose between playing activity-42 which the market has deemed efficient, or activity-18, which they would really love to do, which the market has deemed less efficient.
The developers can add mechanics to the game that directly influence how long a single activity is the most efficient activity.
For example, you talked about specialization. Say that in my 2000-point, 100 activity example, we ratchet the point requirement up to 4000 and make it so that you're allowed to choose a single activity to boost by +20 points permanently, but only 1 activity.
It's optimal to boost activity-42 to be worth 41 points per day, but now even the non-optimizers would feel some of the optimizer's pain when they went to do their non-specialty. This is a mechanic that makes the problem worse. If the developers want each player playing in a single lane, then this is good mechanism design. If they want each person picking 3-4 things, then they could let them pick 3-4 specialties. If they want players to feel like they can play whatever they want, here's what they can do:
- Give the player a quest to do a random activity. They can ignore the quest and do whatever they want, but if they do the quest, they get rewarded. Optimizers do nothing but random activities (and thus get to experience the whole game). Destiny 2 does this with random bounties.
- Make each activity start the day with 2 bonus points. Once you've completed the activity once, you won't get the bonus points again. Optimizers will complete activity-42 first (for 23 points), and then the other 99 activities in any order (for 22 points), and then repeat activity-42 until they run out of time.
etc.Applied to open markets or a game like ashes, you can make it so that the first 100 times you mine nodes (or craft helms or pick flowers or w/e), you get bonus yield. The next 75 times, you get less bonus yield, then the next 50 times after that, you get even less bonus yield. Eventually, you get to normal yield.
What this does is it makes it so that even if you specialize in mining, once you've exhausted all of your bonus yields, it might make economic sense for you to skin pelts, or pick flowers, or craft helms or w/e, to reap more bonus yield. Even in fluctuating market conditions, optimizers might be released from doing-their-specialty-over-and-over.
It is possible to design the game such that the optimal way to play is also the fun way to play. It just takes some doing.
Now you're 'hurting me for doing that' relative to someone else.
Without that, you get a different outcome. When my favorite thing is less profitable due to it being done by everyone for a while, I'll still do it, and then hold the materials until things die down. Or, because I like doing it, I'll undercut other people just to bring down the profit to make them go away.