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To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Splinter Topic: Motivation - Opportunity vs Necessity
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Ok Intrepid I'll keep this short since it is broader reaching and either something that Steven doesn't 'get' or doesn't care about. At this point I'm seriously hoping it's the latter actually, because fixing the damage being done by him not 'getting' it is way worse than being able to double down.
An MMORPG is at best a simulation of a world not a world. Fantasy worlds do not have player serfs for a reason.
A human living their miserable life takes up arms and plans a revolt when there is a critical mass of people who will manage to revolt without dying or when their life is no longer worth it to them. An MMO player living their miserable ingame life leaves the game.
Necessity and suffering/constant frustration are not motivating factors for the majority of players. If you only desire the truly 'hardcore' for whom these are endless motivations, great, ignore the rest.
MMORPGs therefore tend to simulate a reality in which the player, at least, has agency and opportunity and is happy. This is a scale. PvP games automatically are toward the 'Necessity' part of that scale. Some balance this by adding more opportunity and reducing necessity through matchmaking. You don't have the second option.
You need to factor this for every aspect of your game. Either reduce Necessity or increase Opportunity. Not everyone needs to get everything, but they all need to feel like they get something. Here is where your Open PvP Oceans and 'Hard to Get Freeholds' fall short in the eyes of players, and where your Corruption system was always tenuous.
People look at those systems and see you creating Necessity but where their Opportunity is controlled by someone else. Reality had a whole war about this somewhere around 250 years ago. Opportunity won, I think.
I have no reason to go into this more because I don't have any reason to think it will matter, this is a 'just in case' post. For all I know it's already completely factored and this is definitely the way Steven wants it or believes it will work because of something we don't know about or just 'believes it will work'.
But every single point of Econ in MMOs is colored by this specific thing, it is the point where the parallels to reality break down the fastest and in my personal experience it is the place you have to know/learn what to do the fastest. It's so complex that I've considered writing a book on it more than once.
But since I haven't released a successful fantasy MMORPG, I don't feel I'm qualified yet.
For all of you who do the thing, that line above. Quote that one. It's there for you.
And then argue about the next line.
Steven hasn't either.
An MMORPG is at best a simulation of a world not a world. Fantasy worlds do not have player serfs for a reason.
A human living their miserable life takes up arms and plans a revolt when there is a critical mass of people who will manage to revolt without dying or when their life is no longer worth it to them. An MMO player living their miserable ingame life leaves the game.
Necessity and suffering/constant frustration are not motivating factors for the majority of players. If you only desire the truly 'hardcore' for whom these are endless motivations, great, ignore the rest.
MMORPGs therefore tend to simulate a reality in which the player, at least, has agency and opportunity and is happy. This is a scale. PvP games automatically are toward the 'Necessity' part of that scale. Some balance this by adding more opportunity and reducing necessity through matchmaking. You don't have the second option.
You need to factor this for every aspect of your game. Either reduce Necessity or increase Opportunity. Not everyone needs to get everything, but they all need to feel like they get something. Here is where your Open PvP Oceans and 'Hard to Get Freeholds' fall short in the eyes of players, and where your Corruption system was always tenuous.
People look at those systems and see you creating Necessity but where their Opportunity is controlled by someone else. Reality had a whole war about this somewhere around 250 years ago. Opportunity won, I think.
I have no reason to go into this more because I don't have any reason to think it will matter, this is a 'just in case' post. For all I know it's already completely factored and this is definitely the way Steven wants it or believes it will work because of something we don't know about or just 'believes it will work'.
But every single point of Econ in MMOs is colored by this specific thing, it is the point where the parallels to reality break down the fastest and in my personal experience it is the place you have to know/learn what to do the fastest. It's so complex that I've considered writing a book on it more than once.
But since I haven't released a successful fantasy MMORPG, I don't feel I'm qualified yet.
For all of you who do the thing, that line above. Quote that one. It's there for you.
And then argue about the next line.
Steven hasn't either.
♪ One Gummy Fish, two Gummy Fish, Red Gummy Fish, Blue Gummy Fish ♪
10
Comments
By that I mean he seems to be developing the game with tools and mechanics and such that a few people in positions of power would use and would enjoy, kind of not understanding the impact it would have on the general player population.
This tracks well with how he treated his guild in Archeage. He was a dick - even he admits that. He treated people as if they were there to just do his bidding.
Yeah, it's why I gave up on this sort of thing.
If I'm not insulting, people ignore it.
If I'm insulting, people ignore it.
I think it's a problem with my personality combined with the way expertise is treated especially on the Internet.
Unprovable expertise or 'not really expertise but lots of experience' seems to be the same. Hopefully it works out for Steven though.
btw a serious request, can you point out the somewhat insulting parts? I am truly not good at determining which parts are being taken as insults or not as insults, especially when trying to interact with strong-willed communities, so I'd appreciate it.
I think that's the usual magic answer put forth by those glorifying hard to get content of this kind of situations. If that magic answer failed they'll default to "Ashes is not a game for everyone".
So, ascribing someones understanding of a circumstance or problem as "something that Steven doesn't 'get' or doesn't care about" would be the first instance followed shortly by "fixing the damage being done by him not 'getting' it is way worse than being able to double down." would be a second. Further down we have "Steven .... just 'believes it will work'".
Using just the above 3 examples, there is no other context that allows the statements to be constructive. The "Motivation - Opportunity vs Necessity" seems to me to be a reasonable observation worth discussing but characterizing his personal attitude or actions, as was done, does nothing to advance the readers knowledge of your perspective.
Ok, thank you.
I have no defense for that, given the perspective presented, but I do appreciate it.
I think the biggest problem with this whole 'debacle' is the way Steven talked about this. Steven went to great lengths to explain the necessity of freeholds. You need them to master craft. You need them to run businesses. You need them to do large volumes. You need permits to create certain structures. You need blueprints to have certain structures and benefits on them. He spent a lot of time talking about the benefits of Freeholds and then dropped big negatives and then put the caveats after or barely mentioned them at all.
This is a flawed approach because people will react emotionally and rightfully to what is presented FIRST. Saying all your caveats and OPPORTUNITIES afterwards will fall on largely deaf ears because we as a community are 'conversing with what we were told.'
What a player needs to know more than the fact that you need a freehold to become a master artisan, is if we can rent out work stations at freeholds to ALSO obtain mastery even if we are not landed gentry. We need to know this more than that it is locked behind a giant play wall. We need to know how the selling system works and WHY people are likely to sell freeholds instead of reaping the economic benefit from them and how often he wants to see that happening economically speaking far more than the fact that it is locked behind an approval process and bidding war.
post lewds, ppl wont ignore
I sure hope Bill gonna do some amazing work at Intrepid, cause oooh boi
Wat.... Was that a serious quote from Steven from somewhere? He wants people to RMT for family invites? I'm confused.
Yeah, it's a whole pretty mess rn.
edit: a follow up on that btw
Oh ok. thank you. If they don't plan on having a system to facilitate using in game currency I expect RMT will be the preffered way for this transaction to happen then. Thanks for the paste
why? theeres not a real life system to facilitate this transaction.
in game, u simply trade someone, give them the gold and they invite u. if they scam you, you only lose in game gold and they get a bad reputation and repercussions from other players.
in real life, u give them money and they scam you, you lose real life money and you cant even advertise that they scammed you, since rmt isn't allowed and you can lose your account, so no punishment for the offender.
this isn't new. it has been stated before that the wall to get items will be processing...and it will take long time, and you cant fire and forget. you have to tend to your stations as opposed to log in for 5 minutes, refine something and come back 2 days later to sell it. its in everybody's best interest that casual players do not own free holds so that everybody can have a constant supply of processed goods. and this isn't new information btw.
I see Steven planned for students to rule Verra all along.
Especially when you consider that freeholds will probably be a guild thing, so providing its usage will also be a guild thing, so rmting it will ALSO be a guild thing. At which point you have a whole proper system and keep making big money w/ pretty much 0 traces.
yeah I agree. i only mentioned the scamming thing because, to my understanding, that seemed to be the concern of not having a system implemented by IS to deal with these type of things, and people will reset to rmt for whatever reason.
if Is implements a system to let others access services on your freehold for a fee (in game money) people can still rmt, cant they? that doesn't stop anyone from rmting, it only stops scammers.
but if you have a good reputation of not being a scammer, you also don't need said system, you can just charge gold for said services and people will pay based on trust.
Hey, I work for an infosec company and I can tell you that it works exactly like this for hackers too. Underground forums and communication channels exist, and anyone dumb enough to try to pull a scam (e.g. by selling an exploit/database that is useless or not delivering) will be publicly shamed all over; it's flatly not sustainable for anyone to scam.
What does proliferate is that once someone proves they're capable of the "hack" is their reputation increases and they become able to throw more money at the problem. Those with the most rep dominate and become richer over time, in every underground scene. With how easy it is to spin up "stealth" credit cards these days, a RMT trader just has to succeed once per every few accounts and they'll get plenty of profit.
I'm very concerned at the hole the bidding system leaves in the economy for this kind of profiteering.
This way Intrepid could then put trackers on frequent family changes and then look into those accounts more. Right now, w/o a proper system, tracing all family changes would most likely dilute any potential rmt tracking with just proper in-game services. It's just a silly approach to an already shaky unstable and risky system of trying to catch all the rmt in the game.
In other words, this would just move the "dev" time from making a good system to GMs sifting through different accounts. Now, obviously, GMS will be paid way less than Intrepid devs, but I feel like in the long run the impact of this decision would be quite big.
that still wont stop rmting. they talked about how they can track rmets. that's what will most likely stop them.
I don’t have answers either, but when Freeholds are in the open world there are some considerations that may result in a more feudal outcome:
- Available land is a limited commodity
- Proximity to ‘x’ or ‘y’ is a limited commodity
- The success and population of the node a limiting constraint
- Distance from or near other players is a limited commodity (thinking about the jam-packed real estate in Archeage)
- Instanced freeholds are antithetical to the design approach
- In a free economy, the buying power of most groups, supersedes the buying power of most individuals (so a heavy tilt toward guilds)
You would either need some very clever instancing (which would balance placating the casual crowd while not undermining the sense of risk&reward connection to the node’s success) or some sort of land granting mechanism that would allow individuals with less buying power to compete equally in freehold acquisition.
But if there's a proper system in place, majority will just use it because it's the easiest way to do so. And then you can track families that have super frequent changes as something suspicious, because there'd be no in-game reason to change your family that frequently, unless you were trying to go around some system.
hmm without going into technical details, they will know when players change families. that doesn't mean its suspicious and that doesn't mean it makes it easier to track rmt.
how about I just have lots of friends and they have freehold and I change from family to family all the time to do some processing. im not rmting but im still changing families constantly. changing families constantly isn't proof of rmt. and even if there was a system in pace for selling services, you can still rmt. and I could argue its harder to track. i could charge you 10 gold, or I could charge you 10 gold and 10 $usd, or 8 gold and 1o $usd and now all intrepid will see is that I payed gold for items..
if there isn't gold involved and a player starts getting items from trades, then that could be an indication of rmt since most people wont be giving away everything for free.
also consider that while you are processing using my station, I wont be able to do so, owners will most likely turn off this service so that they can process...unless they don't care about getting the stuff for themselves.
Obviously even with my imperfect experience it would take a long time to explain this, so bear with me, if it was easy to explain one wouldn't need an Economy Designer far less a 'Lead' one.
I say this to note that there will be all sorts of holes in any explanation I give.
The key here is that the 'Free economy buying power' is the flaw.
All the other things are good to have, they are choices, and they have adaptations that result in lower Opportunity for those who choose to try to monopolize the situation.
The fact that Freeholds are bought is the pain-point.
The optimal flow is much more about people striking out on their own and MAKING a situation better through effort and working on the land from their Freehold (one could do this without a Freehold, but at this point we are questioning why it does NOT work this way given that Freeholds are a Necessity for some number of things).
There's a lot of tiny interconnected errors in this approach that appear as soon as you move from 'Freeholds are average/plentiful but getting the benefit from them is effort' to 'Freeholds are something that can be controlled as a gated system'.
It's the introduction of the incentive for a person who will not use a Freehold, to OWN one, that's the problem here. The same way that IRL, Rent would theoretically 'always go higher' as long as 'living near X' was beneficial.
Economic agency in MMOs is related to 'I can do this but I don't want to, the benefit is small' but anytime that you benefit by preventing your competition from being able to do something then the benefit scales by how much market control you have.
Tying that directly to ingame earnable profit just makes it terrifying. You're empowered by having money, to prevent people from getting money without interacting with you. The game system enforces this. There aren't 'squatters'. If you buy a Freehold Plot, put stuff on it, and just don't do anything with that stuff, the land is removed from other people's options until Node Destruction.
What I would expect the design is intended to do is 'cause people to destroy a Node' but this won't quite work either.
If 10 small guilds exist and 5 of them have people who have Freeholds connected to a Node and the 'Big Guild' controls all other Freeholds in the ZOI (exaggeration but roll with it a bit here)... if the other 5 don't, and want Freeholds, now in order for the Have Nots to have a chance of getting anything they have to bring down the Node, but the five who have things, even if friendly to the other 5, will lose theirs too.
One person's Necessity then creates another person's Necessity but with no obvious opportunity available unless the Big Guild was broken up. Furthermore, if I do own a Freehold plot, I did the quest or paid the money or whatever and then the Node falls, do I still have a Freehold plot to just place somewhere else? What's the gap work?
Big Guild doesn't care as much. They could quite literally 'expect their Node to fall', 'sell off Freeholds', and then when the Node falls, other people can't use them. Anyways that's all speculation.
Land speculation!
"The method I was assuming before was better because that method can easily fit into a generally well designed economy".
I hate giving this answer type. It's no better than 'The combat will be good because the combat will be designed good'.
But I haven't written Fiat Magarin yet, and without it, I can't quickly say 'how to make a generally well designed economy'. Not to mention that each game has a different set of starting factors.
My problem with explaining in more detail is that it's burning too much energy on an incorrect premise of design.
Achieving the Freehold should not be monumental. Profiting from it should be, and most importantly 'holding onto it just so others functionally can't have it' should be a remarkably stupid idea.
We're better off with 'abandoned repossessed homesteads' than 'Someone using their second account as a Plot Device'.