How to be a Scammer

Step one: Advertise to sell something.
Step two: Sell it.

I had some extra heavy junkboxes sitting around for a few years. Since they're a box, they can't go in the AH, so it's a matter of finding someone online that wants them. If you do find someone who wants them and can take many COD over time, it can be a nice boring few hundred gold an hour, depending on what price you get.

Again, I advertised at my usual 25g. Someone offered 20g, which I took. I traded them over and then cringed as I saw it, "so and so looted empty poison vial."

I'd been in the habit of unlocking all my boxes. I could, and did, get a Teebu's Blazing Longsword out of one, so it was a good habit. As long as I kept auto-loot off I could safely and quickly unlock and check them before mailing them off for turning in.

At first I thought he'd mistakenly opened it. Then another opened. I was off to do my pet battles, so I dropped group. Then he whispered me, saying that it is rude to scam people. I asked, "what scam?" Surely someone wouldn't be so stupid as to use a level 60 box as a way to loot gold for the achievement. Surely someone would know what they're buying. And if they don't, they can see that it is their own fault.

The last time something even remotely like this happened involved someone buying a sword for transmog, only for them to realize they couldn't actually use it. They told me this, in an "oops, I screwed up" kind of way. I offered to buy it back, since it's not as if it was damaged just by being traded. They kept it, maybe for an alt. No accusations of scamming.

I'd have even kept the same policy. If he'd said "these aren't what I thought they are", then I'd have bought back the unopened ones. Of course that's unprofitable, but I can see myself mistakenly buying something that is almost what I wanted and I'd rather play in a game, and live in a world, where people offer an undo button. And maybe a world where people don't immediately assume it's a scam when they make a mistake.

Understanding Understanding BitCoins

I have a shiny new game to write about, but until I'm horribly burnt out and hate it I can't really give a fair assessment. In the meantime, here's a brief I wrote about how comprehension of BitCoins works.

Understanding of BitCoins operates with a complex system, but here are a few concepts to know. Some people try to understand BitCoin and will spend a great deal of time and mental energy trying to work out complex mental patterns. All understanding is tracked in the BitCoin Comprehension Ledger, a list that everyone has of people who understand BitCoins. Two people can agree to talk about BitCoin, with one transferring their understanding to the other, as illustrated here, which is then witnessed and recorded by others in the Ledger. In this way the system can carefully regulate how many people understand it, thereby creating value through scarcity.

There is some risk that too many people will understand it. The inventor has assured everyone that they will work diligently to ensure a sufficiently confusing system in the long term. However, the system has been shaken by some large events such as the FBI's Silk Road action and something happening with MtGox. Spreading through media channels, these resulted in dozens of additional people understanding BitCoin and dramatically increasing the popularity of trying to do so.

Free Money works well

Earlier when I'd claimed that free money doesn't work so well. There is one factor that I'd overlooked: how much people care.

I could farm money spiders and dungeons endlessly for more and more gold. Therefore the gold sinks are ineffective; they only remove a finite amount of gold from a potentially infinite supply.

Would I farm money spiders endlessly? If I cared enough, yes. Maybe I really like having a fancy house or shiny armor. Or many houses. So I'll farm more.

However, another player, and I'm guessing most players, won't care as much about the virtual goodies. A basic house and transportation is 99% as useful as a half-dozen decorated homes and several dozen rare mounts. I think we can also assume that a player who is less interested in the extra stuff will be less interested in the game in general. The net result is that they'll buy less and farm less. The gold sinks and farming grow proportionally with their interest in the game.

We can therefore imagine that there is a balance between gold sinks and sources. If we can figure out how they grow relative to each other, then we can design them to grow proportionally. A player who is barely interested will farm little and spend little. A player who is extremely interested will farm a lot and spend a lot. For all reasonable amounts of time spent playing it is possible to achieve a balance between income and spending.

Of course there will always be some players who play a great deal more. They'll burn through gold sinks and amass mountains of gold. They'll break the system. They'll also be a minority. Perhaps a vocal one, given their level of investment, but they will inevitably break any system designed for reasonable amounts of play time, and therefore can be ignored, in a single-player game.

In my earlier post I suggested that a multi-player environment, and the resulting economy, would reduce the gold problem. Certainly the economy has some beneficial effect. However it also means that the typical players for whom the system works are exposed to the super-players who have broken it. While individual amounts of gold will usually match interest, in aggregate it can be ruined by players who have much more interest, and time, and therefore can flood the economy with gold. This ruins the balance and distorts the behavior of less interested players as well.

In summary, fixed gold sinks in a single-player game will work well for the vast majority of players. In a multi-player setting, those few players for whom it does not work will tend to break the system. Therefore multi-player games need something beside fixed sinks, perhaps even something stronger than transaction sinks.

Free money doesn't work so well

Why is karma the most useless currency ever? Syp has several reasons, some personal to him, such as the fact that he isn't doing much crafting or legendaries. Yet the real problem isn't that the currency isn't used for buying a lot of stuff, but rather, because it is free money.

Most games don't give the AI an adaptive economy. Prices aren't based on supply or demand, but are instead based on what the devs thought would be balanced, so they end up either fixed or rising with the player's level. The usual result is that players become richer and richer, yet they will have fewer and fewer items to purchase. Maybe that first Greatstaff of Greatness drains their account, but after a few more money spiders they're ready to go again, with nothing left to buy.

In part this is due to the lack of costs. You don't need to buy many potions or boxes of ammunition to shoot spiders. In fact, if you did, you wouldn't go. Players aren't going to spend more on an adventure than they'd get from it unless there is some non-monetary reward. However even that case is similar to buying the Greatstaff of Greatness, a one-time cost that doesn't affect the overall trajectory. Y=X-10 has the exact same trend as Y=X. If costs were higher, but not quite higher than rewards, then it would slow the trend, not stop it.

I generally like having more money, whether virtual or real. It's a habit of sorts, to scavenge and not let perfectly good assault rifles go to waste just laying around on the trail of corpses. Or in real life I try not to throw away food.

Games reinforce this by making money rather tight early on, and often necessary. Your armor needs upgrading, your weapons are weak, and you're homeless. So you scrape and scrounge, learning to save every last bottle cap and credit. You develop the habit of calculating the value/weight ratio of everything, shuffling items in and out of inventory to maximize your haul, regretting every extra pound you carried into the dungeon.

Next thing you know you're rich, yet still in the habit of gaining wealth, despite it being of no use any more.

Adding in other players can help or even fix the problem. They want things too and are willing to pay for them. Developers can stick a tax on the transactions to gradually destroy excess currency. This does require that players have a reason to trade currency, meaning the addition of commodities (trade materials) or services (help with content). Having players also makes it easier to add sinks, because with one player a sink either works or doesn't, whereas with many players it only needs to work for some players, who will then attempt to draw currency to themselves.

Arguably karma fits into this, since it can be used to purchase items that can eventually be traded with players. However karma only goes one way, into gold or materials; players cannot trade to increase their karma. The karma sinks then need to be effective for every player, since there won't be any ability to use other individuals as sinks/magnets.

There's my quick fix: make karma tradeable on the trading post.

Do you reward timing on the AH?

By timing I mean whoever posted most recently.  The reward is getting the sale rather than the later person.  While this is not a black and white concept, I think it can be distinguished from offering a significantly lower price.

For example, person A posts a frostweave bag for 225g.  Person B shows up sometime later and posts a frostweave bag for 224.9599g.  The one copper only has the effect of changing the sorting, without any significant savings to the buyer.

Contrast this with person A posting for 225g and later person B posts for 215g.  10g isn't exactly a game-changing savings, being maybe half a daily quest of gold, but it is not trivial either.  You'd care about 10g but not a value 1/100,000 as large.

Is 1g a significant undercut?  What about 50g, but on a 1500g item?  I acknowledge that this is subjective and relative.  Yet I would still call it real, in the sense that I notice it in both my own behavior and that of other people.  I've bought the item that is 1c more because I think it is ridiculous to reward timing rather than actual savings.  Similarly, when I've seen my items undercut by trivial amounts, they have still sold, yet the competing items remain.  I cannot attribute this to other sorting methods such as time remaining, since items of higher price often bracket my own.

The most incident that inspired this post was the frostweave bags.  I had several up for 225g.  Seeing that they had sold, I went to post more, only to find that there is a bag posted at 219.375g.  The 6g difference in price was ignored for some reason.  Both were very long auctions.  The next highest bags were at a 238g buyout, so the 13g gap there was apparently large enough to discourage moving up further in the price.

Alternatively, someone misread prices and I am reading way too much into this.

Selling for less than vendor

I sometimes run across these auctions.  They don't make much sense to me.  Are these just generous souls who trade their profits and risk lost deposits to help others get the items?  I doubt this, even if kindness was the answer to last Monday's mystery.

I don't use the mobile armory/AH often.  The UI is not as good as my in-game addons.  It does have the benefit of allowing me to post and buy when I can't play WoW.  It allows me to sell directly from my bank and mail.

I think this may be the cause.  One thing that bugs me is that it doesn't show vendor prices.  This may be the answer to the less-than-vendor selling.  If you can't see the vendor price, you probably won't know you're going under it.  The app will undercut other sellers by default, and the bid is lower than the buyout.  This allows for prices to creep down, below what is theoretically a price floor.

This leads me to a word of advice: don't use the mobile AH to sell if you don't understand the market.  Maybe that's a good rule in general.

Can I interest you in a payment plan?

Why can't players go into debt?    Obviously we can picture some reasons.

The biggest reason might be the ability to create debt, then delete the character, mailing off whatever item was bought.  This can be fixed by making the item soulbound.  In the case of trade materials, that would have to apply to the crafting results.  Or exclude trade materials since I foresee many problems, both on the technical side and on the player side.

Paying back is tricky too.  What can the game do?  One like EVE could be heartless and tear out your implants and break a clone's kneecaps.  But WoW can't do that.  It can't actively punish failure to repay, which leaves it open to abuse.

Behold: income withholding.  Make the player's gold go negative and future quest rewards, coin, and vendor sales go to the debt.  Despite having less than no gold, players could still make some purchases, such as repairs, though that would add to their debt.  Again, in a game like WoW we can't have a situation where a player cannot repair their armor.

Excessive debt is also a potential issue.  For example, if I bought a 250,000g mount, we all know I'm not paying that off with my main's coin looting and daily quest rewards.  Not for a very long time.  To deal with this, the account's income on that server would be calculated and purchases could not exceed a certain time period's income, perhaps no more than a month.

This creates some potential problems.  Can the income be faked?  The obvious way would be through direct trades of gold.  A trusting guild might trade a lot of gold to someone so they could borrow for a mount, then take it back, so that the players with an income of 100g a day is in debt for the next 2/3 of a year.  Excluding direct gold trades would fix that, but then it blocks players who do a lot of selling through direct trades.  The AH couldn't be excluded, but then the trillion gold gold coin becomes a potential issue, though the resulting gold destruction might discourage that course of action.  Looking at a longer time frame, such as several months, could give an idea of what a player typically takes in, before they thought to cheat the system.  That creates the problem that income isn't stable: in my case I know my income has gone up dramatically in the past few weeks thanks to my enchanter, so I'd appear much poorer than I am.

Ultimately the problem may be that any amount of gold that can be safely loaned is going to be too little to be worth much.  Loaning me a few thousand is a safe bet: I can pay it back in a few days, but in that case, I'd rather just wait a few days and not deal with goblins.  Loaning me the $250,000g for one of those fancy mounts, that could take a long time.  Then what if I quit?  Returning is less interesting if I know I'm going to have a couple hundred thousand debt waiting for me.

All this leads me to this suggestion: make it an RP mechanic.

Allow for small loans, only a few hundred gold.  Stick a one-week timer on them.  After that week, goblins come for you.  Pay up then or you have a difficult boss fight on your hands.  Better hope you're in a raid when it happens, or maybe not!  If you beat them, then the debt is forgiven, though the goblins will refuse to loan you money for a few weeks, since goons aren't free.  If you pay up, then they'll leave you alone and gladly lend you more gold right away, even on the spot.  If you run away, then they get the bank to withhold income until it is paid off, with periodic letters notifying you that you are being watched.

You might have noticed that the first scenario, borrow money, kill goons, is essentially free gold.  That's why it is meant to be a difficult fight, and can appear anywhere, though the timer will be pretty exact.  By that I mean, if you borrow on Monday at 7pm, the goons will show up the next Monday between 7pm and 8pm, so you could plan ahead.  This could be a guild event, or just a way to get people working together, in a capitalistic manner of course: "/2 paying 50g per person for a group to protect me from goons in 15 minutes!  PLEASE!" Borrow 500g, pay 200g to other players, pocket the 300g, and then repeat it a few weeks once the goblins have burned down their banking records.  Or maybe that should be a quest as well, to break in and destroy the evidence.  The criminal implications are endless!

Stop making useless shards

Prismatic shards are on the AH for less than 1g.  There are no blues in Lich King that vendor for less than 1g.  This means that players are taking something for which they can get multiple gold and instead getting less than one.

You might be saying, "But I need shards."  Okay, so then why are they on the AH?  If an enchanter is burning gold for shards for his own enchants, then they won't be on the AH.  Alternatively, if you need shards, buy them on the AH rather than making them.

 Similarly, low-level essences aren't particularly valuable anymore.  Incidentally, this makes them a great way to level enchanting.  Weapons tend to make a lot of essences rather than dusts, so they're also often better to vendor rather than disenchant.

Of course your server might be different.  Maybe you're on an RP server that only uses shards as currency.

Morning Mystery: Who needs a dozen ghost iron dragonlings?

You've just posted a few auctions and as you're headed to the mail to empty it out, you see that yellow text: a buyer has been found.  And again.  Next thing you're eagerly anticipating the coming hour when you get to be rich.

This morning I checked the ghost iron dragonlings.  They'd been up in price last night but I'd been undercut since yeterday.  I posted a few more.  A few seconds later it came in, a buyer had been found.  They were too close together to be separate buyers.  I'd put up four.  But there were five sales; one was of the previous day's more expensive ones.  The four or five that someone had posted in the middle were gone too.  That only adds up to ten, but a dozen sound better, so I'll stick with that.

Market manipulation is possible, and I'd hoped that was the case.  If someone had tried to push them up to 400g, I could overprice and still undercut with my supply.  Maybe they'd keep buying them to pull up the price.  I have a lot to sell.  But no; the AH was not cleared, nor did they repost them.  They bought them to keep them.

Thus the mystery, who needs a dozen unique-equipped trinkets?

A deflationary economy with a price floor

I find game economies interesting because they can be little experiments.  Imperfect experiments, but experiments nonetheless.  In the case of Guild Wars 2, we can look at how people act in an economy experiencing deflation, but with a price floor.

To start off, I tend to use deflation in the sense of price deflation, which is not necessarily linked to the money supply.  We can see this in the current economy where the money supply has grown more quickly than prices.  In the long term the two will tend to match up, but we tend to die and stop caring over the long term.  However in this post I am going to use deflation to describe both the money supply and the price level, as the two are more easily linked in a game.  Why is that?  Because in a game there are not contracts, so prices can vary much more readily with the money supply.

Rather than calling it a deflating economy, you might try to call it a heavily-taxed economy.  This seems logical: any trading post activity results in me the seller getting 15% less than what the buyer paid, much like taxes.  However taxes actually go somewhere, to someone, rather than vanishing into thin air.  This isn't to suggest that taxes do not change the economy, but merely to show that taxes are not the same as burning a pile of currency.  We could still look at how the taxes change behavior, possibly reducing activity or fueling a 'black market' of avoiding taxes by using chat and mail.

The reason I call it deflationary is that the money supply is being reduced, as well as the price level.  Normally in times of deflation we expect to see a recession.  Consumers, anticipating lower prices, will hold off on spending and instead save.  That savings can become investment and loans, and loans become very desirable since deflation essentially causes the currency to have a built-in interest rate on top of the nominal interest rate.  If I give you $10 today and you give me $10 tomorrow, even if you paid no interest, for me the $10 is worth more and if you had to work to get the $10 to repay me, you had to work more to get it.  In that way, deflation discourages borrowing even as it encourages lending.

Prices cannot drop forever because there is a price floor.  In real life we'd see this in the form of government subsidies.  For example, in the US there are price guarantees on farm products such as milk.  If market prices fall below the guarantee, then the government will refund the difference.  The reasons for this are varied, but in part it can act as an insurance policy, ensuring that farmers do not react to price drops by excessively reducing production, triggering a price spike, and so on.  It soothes the markets, though at the cost of overproduction at times and the subsidy cost.

The price floor in GW2 takes the form of vendors who will always buy items.  This means that copper ore is never worth less than 3c.  Nothing can ever become completely worthless.  Obviously if the market price is higher then the items will go there rather than to vendors.

This creates a ping-pong effect.  Market activity destroys a large amount of currency, driving down prices.  But if prices get too low, vendors will stop the decline.  For a while we will see items being vendored until the money supply is large enough to drive up prices.  And then gold is destroyed until vendors become a factor again.  Note that personal activity will deviate from the overall market, so I'm not suggesting that the market overall is going to go into constant, repeated recessions (at least not for this reason; I'm not ruling them out), but rather that individuals will tend to go through cycles.

I expect that this pong-pong will stabilize as the markets mature, and importantly, as the rush to level crafting wears off.  Eventually some items will be obvious vendor trash and others will go to the market.  Though even this will not be perfectly stable.  Imagine a simple world in which the only drops are Chest of the Trash and Copper Ore.  The chest is useless and does not salvage into anything useful, so it is permanently vendor trash. Copper ore is valuable and will go to the market.  Stable prices require a particular ratio of dropping between the chest and the ore.  If too few chests drop, then the ore trading will destroy too much gold, driving down the price, until eventually copper is vendored, until the currency is restored and prices can rise again.  Note that copper is a stand-in for a variety of trade goods and the chests cover not just vendor trash but also events and quests, since those generate gold and do so at a particular average rate relative to resource gathering.  Of course activity can change to alter these effective drop ratios, such as spending more time at events that give gold and less time farming materials.

One reason for the deflation is obvious: having little spare gold encourages gem-buying which means profits from the gem shop.  This would encourage not just heavy gold sinks, but few gold sources as well.  But not everyone would buy gems and having too little gold would ruin the economy (this is why a real-life gold standard is exceptionally stupid).  To compensate, there are gold sources beside the gem-buying.  Together, these create a deflationary economy with a price floor.  It won't be stable and it certainly won't be the most efficient set of regulations, but it sure is interesting to watch.

A million competitors and a million customers

People are expressing worry over the effects of the globalized market.  With so much competition prices end up extremely low, to the point that most crafting is unprofitable.  I could have taken the last part of that statement, "most crafting is unprofitable" and pointed it at WoW, where indeed, most crafted items are not profitable and you often are better off sending items to the vendor.  In those cases where they are profitable, it often seems to be due to the presence of enchanting, not because the leveling items are particularly useful on their own.  From this perspective it could seem that the global market isn't actually doing the supposed harm to crafters, but is instead just the easy thing to aim at.

Think back to your intro econ class with your supply and demand curves (which back then are straight lines).  Push supply out and there you go, quantity goes up and price goes down.  Now push out demand and suddenly price is back up where it was and quantity is even higher.

Competitors and undercutters are not the problem of the globalized market.  Time is.  With so many people, someone is online crafting when you are, which means that you don't get to be the one single person who is making copper wizzbangs.

On the plus side, this means customers.  Not only are there more customers, presumably in direct proportion to the increased crafters, but they will be more even than on a single-time zone server.  No longer is there the guessing game of posting and hoping that a buyer arrives before another seller.  It might happen, but with so many people from so many time zones in the market, you'll get enough buyers at more times, despite the sellers.

The constant stream of buyers means that a seller can do a constant stream of business.  Flooding the market is a much smaller problem, since the market is that much bigger and able to handle that many more goods over a given time.  Tap into a stream and you can get a lot of gold.  But if you fail to do so, if you cannot find a stream of your own, then you're going to have a hard to getting in.  You'll be competing with people who know their marker, how to efficiently get supplies and create their product with as little effort as possible, and who know exactly how low they can go on their prices while you're fumbling in the dark.  In this way, the global market may have little effect on the average seller, but will concentrate the rewards among fewer sellers.  That could cause problems.

A money-fired power plant

I found a niche in the Guild Wars 2 economy where I can get a bit of gold.  I'm not rolling in piles of gold coins (that emote hasn't been added yet), but I no longer feel poor and I think I can get fairly steady income from this.

But it involves the trading post.  That creates a strange problem, or at least what is in my mind a strange situation.  These are rough estimates, but depending on the product, I destroy the 15% on my sale, baseline, plus more on top of that for merchant materials, with the result being that I estimate that  20-30% of the gold I touch is destroyed in the process of me getting it.  That doesn't include the fact that whoever I buy from also had 15% of their sale destroyed.

This isn't part of some convoluted scheme of buying and reselling and rebuying to distort markets.  It's little different than how I got gold in WoW: buy gems off market, cut gems, sell gems.  Some gold is lost to failed sales and auction house cuts, but that's just the inevitable result of the system.  Buy-craft-sell.  Nothing fancy, and yet, it burns piles of gold.

What disturbs me about it is the inefficiency and the implications for other players.  If for every gold I get, 20 silver are destroyed, that suggests that for every gold I have someone had to farm 1.2g through events (which in the mid 40s are giving around 2 silver) and vendoring.  I shudder to imagine what happens if I'm not selling to consumers but instead my product is bought and recrafted or simply reposted, destroying even more gold.

I'm not opposed to gold sinks, but GW2 does seem to be rather excessive.  If I were looking for a single crude fix, I'd remove the trading post's cut.  Leave the posting fee, but don't take a further cut at the time of sale.  That takes the baseline burned gold from 15% to only 5%.

Buy gear at the trading post, but don't sell

I've been having trouble keeping my gear up to date, which is my current excuse for dying a lot.  I did the sensible thing and checked out the trading post.  Well, it went well.

Items are on the trading post for mere copper above the vendor price.  That means that the net cost of the items is only a few copper.  I'm sure this will change, for various reasons, but for now, it is a buyer's market.

I've even found yellow weapons, which seem to be somewhere between WoW blue and purple in quality, for mere copper above the vendor price.  The size of the upgrade is huge, going up a dozen levels and a level of quality.  Hopefully this will help me out in the field.  If it doesn't, it cost me only a few copper overall.

On the other hand, selling seems stupid to me.  The trading post takes a cut of sale (10%)s.  That means that the 1c 'profit' vanishes and turns it into a loss.  Put the deposit price (5% of ask price) on top along with the risk of not selling, and it sounds like a terrible idea to sell anything that you can't put at least a few times higher than that merchant price.

This doesn't apply to non-gear items which are already selling for many times their merchant price.

I think the sell prices will go up as more people notice the values available and as sellers realize that getting one copper above the merchant price isn't doing them any good.  That means upward pressure on demand and downward on supply.  As players spread out in level we may also see fewer low level items available.
 

Why I love buy orders... as a seller

Can we agree that in WoW, 1 copper is utterly trivial?  Good.  Note that I won't say the same for Guild Wars 2, which so far isn't throwing piles of gold at me, though that's with the condition that the game is young and so is my character.

I don't mind price competition.  I do mind time competition.

If I post first, I lose.  The next person to come along can undercut by one copper, the agreed-on utterly trivial amount, and they get the sale.  I could pre-undercut and post at a copper less than I would have otherwise, but the next person in line can take a copper off of that.  I try two less, and he does three less, and so on.  Over many, many iterations we'll see the price drop by several silver.  Wow, competition sure is... not bringing down the price by any significant amount.

The person undercutting me isn't truly competing on price.  1c is trivial.  It has only one big effect: sorting the AH puts his goods higher up and therefore likely to be seen and therefore purchased first.  The effect isn't price competition, but time competition: he is able to get his goods listed higher because he got to the market after me.

Obviously if he were undercutting by silver per item and we were dealing with large volume stacks, then it's not so trivial.  This isn't about that.

Thankfully, GW2 has a buy order system.  Buyers can put up an offer for items which are filled as items come in.  As a seller I can enter a market knowing what buyers will pay.  Even better, I know that they are and will pay that.  If I post an item at an offered price it is guaranteed to sell.

Of course this only applies in a high-demand market.  If there are many sellers and buyers aren't around then it will look much like a WoW AH market: gradually descending prices as everyone tries to get something.  I avoid those markets.  As a buyer, I've found myself facing a similar situation of gradually descending prices from which I can pick the lowest or post my own offer and hope someone comes along to supply at that price.  Conversely, if it's a high-demand market and I'm buying with few sellers, then I'm stuck putting in an offer and hoping the next buyer doesn't bump it up slightly.

Any market system has tradeoffs and offers different benefits at different times, so don't take this post as me suggesting that the GW2 trading house is superior to the WoW AH.  While I think the offer system and cross-server aspects are great (smooths out prices and activity), I think WoW has a better interface, though I'm sure some of that is merely due to learning a new system.

Down the the Dictator, but not the extensive bureaucracy that maintains civilization

"There must always be a Lich King."  Lame, right?  Or is it?

The other day I watched Equilibrium, which is basically what would happen if you wanted to make the Matrix but couldn't legally do that, and replaced machine-driven illusion with drugs to block emotion.  For various reasons it irritated me, but one in particular stood out: the downside of ending the regime was never discussed.  The film of V for Vendetta had this same problem.

It might be because I'm a Stalinist*, but I'm not a fan of the pattern of "dictator falls, everyone lives happily ever after."  That's not actually how things happen.  Ever.  I can sense the objection rising up inside you, so I have these two things to note.

*according to my critics

First off, I don't think the downside to the fall of the dictator must necessarily be shown, at least not right away, but there should be at least some notion that something went wrong.  Take Star Wars for example.  After A New Hope we're all happy that the Death Star was destroyed.  Then the Empire strikes back in the appropriately-named The Empire Strikes Back in which the Rebels are stuck on a planet made entirely out of ice and wampas.  In the extended universe we learn about how just because the Emperor eventually died doesn't mean everything is great.  Instead, people go out to celebrate and are gunned down by the millions and a whole new form of civil war breaks out, which as best as I can tell, never ends no matter how many times they kill clones of the Emperor.

Compare this with real life where we celebrate the fall of a dictator, and then all go "so... now what?"  That's when every single suppressed grievance explodes and suddenly people start missing running water and streets paved with something other than unexploded ordinance.


Despite that, there is my Second thing to note: just because there is a downside does not mean it is bad that the evil regime has fallen.  Of course it's bad when the basic infrastructure is wrecked and rule of law breaks down, but that's something to consider when taking down the dictator.  This doesn't mean "oh well, things would be worse without them", but instead "let's have a plan for what happens when the Elite Guard of the Evil Government are all out of work."




The admission of a downside is part of what can make the story complex and interesting.  It makes the enemies, the villains, a little more understandable.  Sure the dictator is bad, but perhaps his supporters are just people who see stability as worth the occasional murder and rampant corruption.  Maybe they think it will be even worse without him.  This makes them people with different philosophical leanings and social predictions, rather than evil people.  That's what the world is filled with: people with different perspectives, who we may still find ourselves in conflict with, but who are not evil faceless goons.  After the rebellion they may even join the winning side, not because they are traitors or flip-floppers, but because they see it as the best way to protect what they value and to continue to do their jobs.





They are the bureaucrats.  They are the police and the army.  The judges and administrators.  Are they on the wrong side?  Perhaps.  But that doesn't mean they cannot be on the right side.  Nor does it mean that they are necessarily evil.

I remember an argument in a Star Wars novel in which the hero is arguing with his future father-in-law about smuggling.  The father was a smuggler, running Imperial blockades and bypassing their customs.  It paid well and seemed to be righteous work, sticking it to The Man.  But the hero points out that while the Empire was evil, those import taxes were what paid for roads and schools and healthcare for children.  So even as it is a blow to the Evil Empire, it is also a blow to those who are subjects of the empire and who have no choice in the matter.

Perhaps the best book I ever read that showed the downside, the cost of victory, the burden of maintaining civilization, was called The Star Conquerors.  It's an old science fiction novel in which humans are gradually getting crushed by an alien empire.  It is approximately a gagillion times bigger, which is not helped by a human population which isn't very interested in paying for the war effort that keeps them from being crushed in a week.  The hero does the sensible thing: rounds up what ships he can and goes flying off to kick some ass, which after a mix of luck and brilliance, results in him capturing the core planets.  The aliens hand over control of the entire empire, about a third of the galaxy.  Cool, right?  USA USA USA!  Er.. TERRAN EMPIRE TERRAN EMPIRE TERRAN EMPIRE!  Except for one problem: Before they leave the aliens explain that now we're responsible for administering it all, of managing the flow of trade, of preventing starvation, of keeping everyone in line so it doesn't all collapse into a giant civil war among the various species.

Should we have just given up and lost?  No.  But knowing that there is something after victory, some burden of leadership, of survival against entropy rather than war, makes the story that much more complete and interesting.

And so, when we hear that there must always be a Lich King, maybe let's go ahead and say that in the literal sense, that sounds ridiculous.  But let's not forget that there are still the Vrykul up there, who are going to wonder what happened to their Death God, who are going to need to be either crushed, assimilated, or some mix of the two, and better hope we don't get that wrong.  There are still Scourge agents, dedicated to various agendas of evil, power, and insanity.  In fact, we run into one in the Eastern Plaguelands, a spider who thinks he's going to start his own Scourge.  A joke, for now.  We should wonder, without the leadership of the Lich King, what will the mindless ones do?  What about the sentient and free agents?  What happens to the Plague?  The diseased and corrupted land?

Perhaps we should even be glad that Deathwing showed up.  Imagine the chaos, the destruction, if the greedy, amoral adventurers with incredible magical and combat powers backed with even greater magical artifacts and armor, found themselves bored.  Perhaps that's what was meant by the Scourge going on an even greater rampage of destruction.  With the Lich King, we had a target and that target was something everyone could agree on.  Without him, then what?  Perhaps he did not actually need to convert or corrupt us, merely step aside and let us do what we do: mass slaughter of anything which might be remotely profitable.

Maybe those daily quest givers aren't so bad after all.  I shudder to think what we'd do otherwise.

An auction house without speculator buyouts

FIRST!

Annoying, isn't it?  The first person into a forum thread or comments section can completely derail it, ruining it for everyone else, for some personal gain, but a net social loss.

This can happen in the auction house too.  Whoever gets there first, particularly as a buyer, can reshape it dramatically, to the detriment of others.  As an example, I offer this story of my own.

I occasionally engage in speculation, acting somewhat like a futures broker, though without anyone asking me to.  I'll see things which are at absurdly low prices and buy them up, sometimes reposting them all higher, thereby setting the market price at what I want.  Or I may simply hold them.  At the time there may be a glut of supply or a lack of demand.  Reposting later keeps a more consistent price, which helps future sellers, though obviously all of this comes at the expense of buyers.  They do get something for that expense, a more stable supply.  So at times this speculation may be an economically productive activity.

At other times it is little better than theft.  The incident which inspired this post was when I saw moss agate at a mere 3 gold.  I bought it up and feeling unkind, reposted, not at the usual market price of around 15g, but at an outrageous 20g.  One sold a minute later.  Clearly it would be absurd to suggest that I added value here, since it's not as if I have moved them through time, bringing them to the market at a time of a shortage.  If I had arrived a minute later, the buyer would have gotten an item for about 12g under the usual price, rather than 5g over.  In effect, he was 17g worse off and I was 17g better off, not because I added value, but simply because I got there first.  While this clearly was to my benefit, it is still ridiculous.

What would fix this?

Bring the auction, by which I mean bidding, back to auction house.  Either remove the ability to buy out items or add some extra cost to it to make short-term market manipulation significantly less profitable.  If I could not have instantly bought out those moss agate, then all I could have done is placed bids.  In the event that only the one sold, then I'd walk away with cheap gems and the sellers would have had successful auction (if underpriced, but that's purely their own faults.  Reposting would have then meant I was putting them up at a time that they might not have been up otherwise, allowing other players to buy when they otherwise could not.

Removing buyouts entirely would probably be unpopular, since sometimes we're in a rush and just need that flask before the raid.  For this, remove the ability of sellers to set a buyout price and instead make buyouts automatically double the current bid.  That means that if something has been bid up a great deal, it's going to cost a lot to buyout, and if it was bid up so much, it was likely closer to the market price than if it had started off with a buyout near the starting bid.  This removes the profit of short-term speculation without removing the ability to carry out time-based arbitrage or for people to get what they need at the last second.  As a side benefit, it might encourage players to plan ahead more, a useful habit for everything except murder (in that case it's a tradeoff between better planning and an increased sentence if caught).

To clarify, the "double bid price" is not set in stone.  Merely adding 10 or 25% would be enough to entirely stop some speculation and reduce others.  Furthermore, since I know you're thinking "everyone uses buyouts, so if the speculator pays 25% more, they'll just get that back when the end user pays 25% more" the extra buyout fee does not go to the person running the auction, but is instead removed from the game, much as the auction house cut and lost deposits are.

Segregating the NPCs

The static prices of NPCs, unlimited gold of quests, and the dynamic prices of a player-driven economy do not play well together.  A player economy only needs a little bit of gold, enough to act as a medium of exchange.  The NPCs want big piles of gold.  The dailies churn out unlimited amounts.

Taken together, we're left with a problem.  Someone wants a pile of gold to give to the NPC for something cool.  They do dailies to get that pile of gold and give it to the NPC.  No problem yet.  Until someone else shows up who doesn't care about the NPC's cool wares, but can still do the dailies for the pile of gold.  Now where does that pile of gold go?  Rather than being generated and destroyed, it instead goes into the player economy, the player economy which doesn't need much gold, but now has a lot.  Prices rise.  Absent the dailies and cool wares, players would have little need to farm gold, and little ability.  Just a little bit would be enough to keep everything flowing, with gold as a medium rather than a goal.  But now gold is both medium and goal and there is a quest mechanic to fuel the engine of inflation.

My suggestion is to cut the tie between the player and NPC economies.  Make gold non-tradeable.  Now players can do their dailies or not, with no impact on the economy, except to the extent that dailies are done instead of farming materials.  Even then, that is merely a function of how much a player wants something from the NPC will cool wares rather than something from the player economy.

If players want something from NPCs, they'll interact with NPCs.  If they want something from players, they'll interact with players.

As for the auction house, allow players to create trade offers.  Initially this would be chaotic, with a billion linen being asked for a truegold bar.  But eventually, players would settle on some new medium to use.  Perhaps ore or another commonly-used crafting material.  This does allow for inflation, but there would not be any NPC giving innate value to the material.  Elementium ore would be worth only what players think it is worth, based on its ability to be traded for other materials or used itself.  Farming a lot of ore would be pointless, because increasing the supply much faster than it is used would devalue it, driving players toward a different medium of exchange.  Without the distortion of NPCs feeding and taking, the market could better set a value for the 'currency'.

Hoarding would be less useful.  Gold is useful across expansions and having a lot early in an expansion gives an advantage when the crafting rush begins.  Materials would not be, so that the barons of the last expansion are at no great advantage in the next except to the extent that they are good at what they do.  This would also have the benefit of keeping the currency in exchange, rather than stockpiled.

You might have noticed by now that merely making gold non-tradeable would not perfectly sever the economies of players and NPCs.  As I mentioned before, there is still the time cost of one or the other.  That is inevitable.  Vendors could still buy and sell materials, creating an exchange between the economies, though I predict that it would be inefficient and therefore not too common.  The exception would be when the player currency is in transition, with the old currency being vendored in large amounts.  Despite these exceptions, I think the separation could be done without too much leakage.

Commence criticism.

Gold for Quests: The Beginning of the End

Once upon a time there was not a conversion of xp to gold when a player hit the level cap.  If you were level 60, quests gave whatever the reward was, and that was it.  The xp part just didn't exist anymore.

Imagine the economy without quests, particularly daily quests, giving large amounts of gold.  Instead gold would come from a scant few coins from quest rewards, fewer still from mob kills, and then there was vendor trash.  We needed that stuff badly.  It was the source of gold in the economy.  Nowadays you might throw out those few copper of charred boar glands, but back then, those charred boar glands were good stuff.  Bag space could be an issue but thankfully, no one ever needed more than one set.  That last part was a blatant, ironic lie.

Then one day that changed.  Excess xp, which was of course all of it at 60, turned into gold.  And there was much rejoicing.  Verily, did we prance about Silithus in our clown costumes of non-set green gear of the monkey, and we quested and it was glorious.  Gold, precious gold!  Oh the feeling, as if we'd been in a desert and seen a drop of water.  I suppose I was actually in a desert, so... anyway, it was pretty neat.

Or was it?

Without quests giving gold, the notion of dailies seems a bit ridiculous.  Why would we have these strange quests that are the same, day after day?  For reputation they make no sense, since dungeons give that.  They are bosses, so we can't expect them to give loot.  Aha, gold.  But wait, why would dailies be a way to get gold?  Quests don't give gold.

When quests do give gold, without dailies, they players hit the cap and start racing about to find more quests because that's where gold comes from.  And then they use up all the quests and have run out of sources of inflation.  They could switch to farming to get materials to trade for gold or farm mobs for gold, but the first one doesn't add gold and the second is slower.  They learned to expect inflation and ended up with the strange idea that the way to play was to print money rather than generate actual resources.  In effect, they had learned inflation expectations and then wondered where they printing press had gone.  Dailies came to the rescue, giving a new way to dump more gold into the economy.  In the process, they made it necessary to get even more gold by driving up prices.

The concept of going out and farming the materials can get lost on people.  This isn't helped by the tendency of someone to pop up and say "I farmed it for free", followed by a few dozen people saying that they didn't because nothing is free and ranting about opportunity costs.  That's a useful economic lesson, except when you're dealing with "I farmed it for free", you're also not dealing with people who are applying the minds much (this isn't a judgement, merely a statement; it is a game after all).  After a round of "no you didn't farm it for free" there is a tendency to get the "farming is for idiots" idea instead, which is equally ridiculous.

I don't much like the proliferation of dailies.  A few are good.  But they've become excessive.  Yet scaling them back is difficult.  Now that the economy has adapted, as best it can, to this steady influx of gold, removing that could prove as damaging as adding them.  If no new dailies are added in Mopland, players could feel compelled to run the old dailies, causing them to have less fun.  Or if all were removed, then there would be huge imbalances of wealth which would be semi-permanent.  That's where you get violent revolutions, or worse, customers quitting.

So as is typical, my advice is to make a time machine and go back and make everything right.

RDKP: Refined

Last week I proposed adding a currency, called RDKP, to groups which would be spent when winning need rolls.  It was meant to reduce two problems: perceived unfairness and ninjaing.  Since the first one is a perception problem, it is going to be tricky to convince anyone that there is a problem and even then, that there is any solution or even a way to reduce the problem.  Ninjaing, while seemingly so easy to define: taking unneeded items from those who need it, is not so easy, in fact.  There are many grey areas: relative upgrades, sidegrades, offspecs, and so on, and it is unlikely that we'll see developers implement a feature which perfectly blocks ninjaing.  After a great number of helpful comments I think I've gotten a better grasp on how the system should work.

While it is implied, I want to clarify that if I say  "roll need" or "win a need roll" or anything like that and mention spending RDKP, what I mean is the following.  Picking "need" has no cost.  Winning an item has no cost.  Picking need and winning the need roll costs a set amount of RDKP (or none if the player has none)

All characters start with enough RDKP to roll need on two items.  The exact number isn't something I'm tied to, it's just meant to be enough to get the system moving.  Because it's zero-sum and players cannot go into debt, there needs to be some initial amount.

In the previous post I noted that if someone has insufficient RDKP they can still roll need, but will automatically lose to someone who spends RDKP.  This still stands, however,  RDKP would only be gained if people roll need and spent RDKP.

The amount of RDKP gained is based on the ratio of spending to group members.  The goal is that the income matches the spending.  For example, in a typical 5-man group, if two items drop and both are needed on, then each group member will get the following: (10 RDKP x2)/5 or 4 RDKP, so that altogether, there are 20 RDKP spent and 20 RDKP gained.  In implementation, it is likely that all RDKP values would be increased tenfold, in order to avoid decimals and to make it seem more lucrative.  If this sounds complex, it can be thought of like this: winning a need roll causes the winner to automatically split some RDKP with group members.  This equalizes spending and earning and also explains the situation when the winner has no RDKP.  You might have noticed that I divide the RDKP among five people despite one of those five being the one who won the need roll: it's just accounting and could be done just dividing among the four, with a corresponding reduction in the RDKP cost of rolling.

Because the system is close to zero-sum, it is not necessary to worry much about inflation.  Someone running an instance for no loot with other people who need no loot will not gain any RDKP, so farming is not an issue.  If players are running when they don't need loot, the amount they gain still does not exceed the amount spent, so even farming cannot cause inflation.

Because inflation is not an issue, RDKP can be safely traded without creating adverse incentives because it cannot be farmed except by joining groups that spend it, so that instance running transfers RDKP without creating it, just as player-to-player trade would.  The rule exception is that a character must be at least level 60 before they can trade, to ensure that players do not make new characters just to trade the free initial RDKP.  Again, the exact level isn't something I think is important, just so that it is high enough that no sane person would spam characters just to farm RDKP.

The benefit to having a trading system is that it would allow for market flows to even out the irregularities of distribution which would likely be created by instances.  Some classes and roles are likely to get more from instances than others, so they will need more RDKP while others need less.  A trading system allows this imbalance to be corrected.  This could also provide some useful information to developers: if they notice that a particular class or role is buying or selling a high amount of RDKP, it would indicate that they are too dependent on instances for gearing, relative to other classes, or are finding little useful loot in instances

The downside to a trading system is that it could create the impression that players are getting loot because they bought RDKP, despite the amount of RDKP a player has not influencing rolls.  It is irrational, but given that one of my goals for this system was to reduce a potentially irrational sense of unfairness, creating a different sense of unfairness is not productive.

For consistency, RDKP would be used in all non-raid instances (though it could be extended to raids).  This includes pre-made groups and partially pre-made.  Due to the ability to trade RDKP, friends can undo any redistribution the system causes.  By making RDKP a constant feature, there is no ambiguity or confusion when forming partial groups.

As before, comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

DKP for Random Groups

This is a modification to the standard need-greed-pass loot system which would reduce the frequency of ninjaing in randomly formed groups and increase the perceived fairness of loot distribution.  It does this by adding a currency from killing bosses which is then spent when rolling need.  The exact mechanics would need working out, but I think the general framework would be beneficial without adding much complexity.

All players in a group when a boss dies gain  Random Dragon Kill Points or RDKP.  There would only be one kind of RDKP, though higher level and higher difficulty instances would grant increased amounts.

When items drop, players can then spend RDKP in order to roll need on items.  The amount would not be set by the players, but would instead be presented to them as a set charge for picking need.  They would not lose RDKP unless they won the item.  Players with no RDKP would be able to pick need but would be subordinate to those without enough.  This is so that early on, when players may have no RDKP or are frequently finding upgrades, that they are not stuck rolling greed (that would negate the perceived fairness and effectively cause unintentional ninjaing).

Players could not have negative RDKP.  RDKP could not be traded.

The Benefits
The first goal is to increase the sense of fairness.  An earlier post related to whether players should roll on items when they were only present for the final boss, with some pointing out that it seemed unfair that they didn't have to help the group through the rest of the instance and some taking the position that can, may, and should are perfect synonyms.  By having an RDKP system, players would still have a sense that someone was only helping them for one boss", but would also get an indicator that they had helped other groups over other bosses, and on average, we'll have joined at last bosses as often as we've missed last bosses.  In effect, this creates a social accounting, so that even if two individuals have not helped each other in an instance, they will have helped someone who helped someone, and given the size of the pool, let's say fifty steps, and finally Kevin Bacon will have won the item you wanted, but it will be slightly less annoying because by spending RDKP, he's showing that he's not just some lucky guy who perpetually hops into groups on the last boss and runs away cackling with all your loot.

Or in short form: even if they haven't helped you, they have helped others, and others have helped you, so it all loops back around to be fair.

The second goal is to reduce ninjaing.  By putting some cost on items, a ninja roll is at the cost of a later, legitimate roll, so the ninja may be setting themselves up to lose on an item that they wanted.

Technical stuff that would need muddled through but shouldn't impact the two main purposes
The amount of RDKP overall, per player, from kills, and per roll, would need to be managed.

Clearly there are more details to work out.  With that in mind, I want to make a request regarding comments.  I'd love to hear suggestions for improvements and for filling in missing details.  However, criticizing details is utterly pointless because there are none (beside the half-thoughts at the end), so stick to pointing out that the overall idea is terrible rather than the specifics.  That is, unless someone brings up a specific, then you can say it is stupid (or great).