Did anyone ever realize?

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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DirkAustin wrote:

Posts dont need to be signed...

I seem to accept post signing lately, its annoyance has been trumped by animal faces that you only know to be animal faces because the creator goes so far to tell you they are.

War

-Anu-

I actually appreciate a name in the post, as it saves me the few (milli?)seconds required to look to the right and see who's typing. I appreciate less the animal faces or non-moniker related signoffs - as they're just useless.

P.

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DirkAustin wrote:

Aaaaaaannnnnndddd i derailed my own thread. :P

While we're at it... I do wish more people took the time to edit the quotes they used. I hate having lines and lines of historical posts quoted when you really only need the immediate one quoted. It's lazy and a waste of time for the reader to scan down through relatively useless backstory.

P.

Yes, it's true. A fine example of how more realism inside a game makes it more boring.
:)

You are your own worst enemy, this holds true for PoE, both in macro and micro scale.

Peace,

-Boem-

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DeviantLightning wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

In terms of challenges, I honestly believe the bulk of making a challenging economy is in making a balanced non-economy. If players do not know what build is best, which uniques are best, which rare affixes are best... then you have challenge in valuation. (Not just economic, either; even staunch self-found types have to make evaluations to determine what to equip. But I digress.) Take away the obvious answers and you can make determining "uber" an actual challenge.

Since the non-economy does the heavy lifting for making the economy challenging, the only thing the economy itself needs to do is avoid interfering with players' own valuations. Priority one is avoiding telling players what the value is and forcing them as much as possible to actually designate a price themselves, avoiding yes/no mechanics and favoring price-designation mechanics (for both buyer and seller). Priority two — not far behind — is to make things as fast, convenient, easy, fun, immediate-impact, and automated as possible.

What you propose sounds to me to be ultimately unworkable, both from a design perspective and from the fact that players will establish a meta and establish a somewhat stable system of value exchange (i.e. bartering). As long as there are common wants at all, there's just no getting around the fact that some commodities are going to be a kind of gold standard.

As it is, the market actually isn't that rational and putting prices is already pretty non-obvious outside of uniques.

The economy is technically a challenge as it is, even if it's not the sort of challenge you'd prefer.

Where you see impossible, I see inevitable conflict. Perhaps that's the part of the "game lamp" story you're missing.

Players want to be challenged, and they also want to win. These are contradictory motives, because victory implies a lack of future challenges. In a game like Path of Exile, the challenge for the developers is to create an endless stream of challenges such that players can conquer some of them, but will always have more challenges left to face.

This is also true of Path of Exile's economy. The challenge is in valuation, and yes, the players will always be trying to conquer these challenges in valuation so as to establish a stable system of value exchange. The developer's job is to thwart this stability — not with lame tricks like a clunky trading UI or requiring knowledge of third-party tools in order to proceed, but by making the actual valuing difficult.

This is a daunting development challenge. They are not facing off against individual players, but a mass collective, using a form of "cloud problem-solving" communicated through price data. This collective also uses third-party tools to gather and distribute its data among participants. It's a small team in New Zealand versus the Borg.

However, the Borg want to be challenged. They don't want an easy economy which they can easily solve. They want a Borg-sized challenge. If they don't get it, they'll just complain about how boring things are. (Which might not usually matter, except for the whole "hopefully paying customers" part.)

Your answer to this situation apparently seems to be to tell GGG to give up. It's not unrealistic advice, to be honest. What is being asked of them is monumentally difficult.

But I want them to try. I want them to try really fucking hard.

@ScrotieMcB



Well said man indeed.

And i would say not only are u correct But that GGG has a task i hope they put the resorses to to simply understand what it happening.

CCP the company that makes EvE online ( Good god i hate i have to keep refering to this game in this thread ) Employs economic specialists to understand what is happeing in thare game.

Lets just say that again ...THE COMPANY NEEDS TO PAY PEOPLE TO EXPLAIN TO THEM WHAT IS HAPPEING IN A GAME THEY CREATED

The reason is cuz it's so far from the grasp of a normal guy/gal that they have to.

GGG hase a problem that is not yet solved and this is a big deal . Imput ( amount of items / curencys genterated vs Output ( amount of value removed from the economey ) . ATM this is a slope in that has no way of getting back up the hill.

How will GGG ( if they atempt to at all ) deal with this ?

Ggg also have a paid economist on their books if I'm not mistaken. I don't think their challenge is a lack of understanding. Anyway, I hope the joy you all get from finding an item to sell (cf use) is all worth it - let's not forget what the purpose of this economy is.

P.

Poor people does not get poorer in RL necessarily. A poor today is in much better shape than a poor in in the XVIII century ( not to say the X century).

RL economy is way more complex than this game economy, both in shape and in relationships (for starters there are not institutions or complex social structures in PoE, because economics is as much a matter of production and exchange as it's a power and social relationship byproduct).

Now, ofc the game economy follows some basic principles, but the behaviour of each economic agent depends much on the framework of the system. In one framework you will see some behaviour emerge and in a different framework you will see other sort of behaviour.

The only reasons this sort of games can survive is because the slave work can be done by machines (botting), otherwise a feudal (peasant-lord relationship) deflationary model where capital accumulation bottom-down is way too skewed to the top would collapse (and in fact there is always this tension of population riot present if you check things like forums or playerbase trend).


The problem is some day someone decided that business school types were good at game design and they started implementing all this awful ideas that DON'T work in RL (no, really, they don't this type of things are the ones that cause revolution and world wars, or a terror authoritarian nightmare to conrol the dissatisfaction) and much less in a social game. As said, the only reason this games doesn't collapse is because botting exists. But that failed ideas don't work can be learned the hard way, when you have to close the shoop because you are not making any money.

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mrpetrov wrote:

Ggg also have a paid economist on their books if I'm not mistaken.

Nope. You're thinking of Valve.