Topic
The Magic of Glitch
I had been looking forward to a weekend-long test since i began playing glitch and holy groddle pig crap was it amazing. From day 1, i knew that Glitch would be an amazing game. I realized its possibilities and potential. This weekend we witnessed and experienced what makes Glitch shine and why this game will be HUGE.
Community collaboration and contribution. I have never played a game that brought together the community as well as Glitch does. Street creation is the first big feature that allows this. A huge project where all glitchizens come together to create and even vote on a new street. The leaderboard even allows for some competition but for those who only care about the output and making groddle a better place, street creation is a really fun feature.
I woke up on saturday morning to find dozens of people crowded around hechy track and leftmost graze. We came together to make it happen! Here is a screen of the moments before leftmost graze was created:
i53.tinypic.com/5m0dw4.png
You can see hoe-ers, tinkerers fixing peoples broken hoes and people radiating to keep energy up. There were others who shared food and simply words of encouragement. It didnt end there. We worked together through the upgrade as well. BBQ and blending seemed to be the biggest obstacle and i was one of the only ones who had the skills to do it. I ended up with about 30% on the project leaderboard but i could not have done it without the help of everyone there. It wasnt me. It was all of us. It did not end with me powering through it by myself. Everyone offered their assistance and helped any way they could. We split up the tasks and everyone did their job. We had people on meat, people grinding spices, people making grocery runs. I ate a lot of cabbage.
Not only that, but i made tons of new friends! My friend list nearly quadrupled this test as i met so many awesome people. Despite the fact that someone robbed my house and kidnapped my chicks, everyone in glitch is amazing.
Here we are in awe of our creation, moments after we finished the upgrade. i51.tinypic.com/a3jdk8.png
Of course we ran into problems. With all that awesome collaboration, our chat totally bogged up the help channel. We were kicked out but we made a New Streets group to talk in (which i encourage everyone to join). The global help channel will eventually be killed so a possible solution could be hub chats. Meaning public chats for the current hub(neighborhood/area) that you are in. The global chat definitely helps in communicating with others on different streets. We found this useful in getting ingredients and stuff for projects.
Unlike other MMO's, we are not grinding away in dungeons to become stronger to defeat everyone. We do things together, we socialize, communicate, and contribute to make Glitch a better place.
Street creation is a wonderful feature. I'm sure Tiny Speck will create more features that bring together the community and encourage social interaction and collaboration. That is the magic of glitch. We're all looking forward to more of these.
Party at my house (31 middle valley clearing quarter east) on the next weekend test! Free beer for everyone. Bring music.
Anyways, lets hear all your stories from this awesome weekend test.
Replies
- (yay! that's what we were hoping for!)
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Wow, see, as an antisocial person I completely missed this side of the experience. I helped build a couple of streets, but it never occurred to me to talk to anyone and collaborate. Based on experience from other games I just assumed everyone was out to be in that Top Five and ground at what they knew best to get there!
Big mistake, I guess. Maybe I should start talking to people in the game and making friends? I do have one friend request but every time I try to accept it, I get an error. - I found the people in the help chat really helpful, Cefeida, just asking for help when I was feeling stuck, and offering help when I knew the answer to a question. People were remarkably nice and articulate! I don't know if I got to the level of friends in my few hours playing before the game closed again, but I certainly made some nice acquaintances!
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Great story. I only got to play for a few hours at the end of the test, so I missed this kind of collaboration busy with my own exploration. But it's great to hear that you can create streets and that this kind of teamwork is even possible.
And I did find Leftmost Graze. Beautiful place. -
Help chat was really useful (though I know there was a couple of quibbles when it started going too off-topic, but that's because chat is a bit empty atm).
I don't really use the social side of it very much — and that's something I'm fine with — but even when I did dip in to talking to other people in-world, it didn't really work. There was one point where I was getting a little frustrated during a street building project because every single time I went to collect the necessary stuff I would return only to find out that it had been completed in my absence. I asked to see what the plan was, what was required, what was closest to being completed and absolutely nobody answered :(
Another time I was grinding away and completed something like 5% of another project when nobody else was around. Other people finished it off, but I completely missed out on the group dynamic. (also, if you were low level, you miss out on this entirely since higher level people were very active)
That said, I think the social side of the game is great fun, and I really enjoyed this test. Some thoughts:
- Perhaps there could be more in-game connection between people who are working on a project — obvious party chats, specific badges, clothing items or other things that link the disparate actors so that they can get to know each other or recognise each other in-world.
- Perhaps some aspects of a build *have* to be completed by LOWER level characters. You can only get the grunt work completed if somebody convinces newbies to join in. They get extra rewards for doing so.
Thoughts? -
I had a lot of fun with the last test, but to be honest, I found the street building experience to be TERRIBLE. I liked the idea of it, but it seemed it was always the same few people getting to the streets first, completing the more accessible (ie - those lower level players could complete) items almost as soon as the street appeared, and then finding myself really left out of the street building experience. The hoard of people gathered around the street spirit was also problematic as in my experience having a large number of characters / animations on screen always makes the game run quite slow for me. At times I was completely unable to bring up the spirit dialogue, and it just really wasn't fun for me.
I completely agree with what wurzel said:
- Perhaps some aspects of a build *have* to be completed by LOWER level characters. You can only get the grunt work completed if somebody convinces newbies to join in. They get extra rewards for doing so.
And I'm not sure I have a solution for the hoard issue - maybe some streets can only be completed by lower levels? Maybe you have to have a house on that section of the map to complete some streets? I'm not sure. -
quoo and wurzel made some good points, kind of replicated my experience (or lack thereof) on street building. I decided I needed to approach any street building with a crap load of stuff in my bag already so I could donate it right away, but I would rather just have the option to commit, be tagged to be providing something and then have time to go away and do it!
I know that eventually there will be many other kinds of projects, which will help alleviate that situation, but I have to say it felt a bit like a party that was hard to get entry to.
I was thinking that actually de-construction projects would be pretty cool too. -
"it felt a bit like a party that was hard to get entry to. "
this sums it up perfectly! -
I would love for there to be some way to know which streets / spirits have Projects Available. Some kind of pulsing flag on the map or something.
Also, I've seen a few references to "the help chat" ... are you referencing the on-screen box where you can chat with people on the same street as you? Or is there an arm of the forums that offers real-time chat? Would love to have access to something like that. Kind of like ... this is something that *could* go on the forum, but it really only affects me, right now, in the context I'm currently in. Example: "How do I make a tortilla? Do I need one of the tools?" (I actually know how to make a tortilla; that was just an example.) - The global Help Chat is right above your local chat, charliepark. It is collapsed by default, so maybe you've missed.
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My feelings about the street building projects are pretty much the same wurzel, quoo and Nanookie described. If you are not in the right spot and don't have items at hand when a new project appears it is almost impossible to participate.
I like Nanookie's idea about committing to get certain items. It should probably be time-based to avoid people logging off leaving the project unfinished. If you don't provide the amount of items you promised in a certain time others have the chance to do so instead. A status bar (like meditation cool-off) will keep you informed on how much time you have left. - Another post about contributing to projects: alpha.glitch.com/forum/idea...
- I had the same thought that it would be nice to be able to sign up for various elements of a building project, potluck style. You could sign up for one thing at a time, ideally for no more than a certain percentage of the total needed so as to not lock too many others out, and you'd get a certain amount of time to come back with your items before your reservation expires. Then you could sign up again, or maybe you'd only get one reservation slot per project, so the individual/group play elements don't get too unbalanced.
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Of course, if eventually there will be lots of different kinds of projects, and projects of varying complexity, and each project has different kinds of participation, that would make it less hard to get in on one.
Right now, it looks like you can spend time creating stuff for a project, and/or you can be there right before the completion, offering up general support in the form of radiation, tinkertooling and such (at least I gather that is how it worked).
I can't remember--do you get to vote on upgrades even if you don't contribute anything? Seems like getting to vote on the upgrade for anyone even remotely interested would be another basic way to participate.
I do think there should be some kind of broadcasting mechanism, some kind of temporary God megaphone, to announce the imminent creation of a street, and thereby attract as many witnesses to it as possible. We can't rely on Jeff to do that in the Help channel forever ya know. or is that in place already? I haven't see a street be born yet either, it was always just too far away to get there. - Thanks, Mina. Had totally missed that.
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\o/
I'm in the first screenshot all the way to the right. I contributed as much as I could, but I was still at a low level, so I did my best at making/dropping drinks and food, and repairing items as fast as I could tinker.
That was the first "social" push I've seen in the game - and it was BEAUTIFUL! The anticipation of getting closer and closer to 100% was brilliant. I remember running excitedly off to the new signpost, entering the new world, and hopping around in happiness. Seeing everyone working and buffing and cooking and hoeing... :D
Thank you stoot, Beefcake, jdawg, and the rest of the awesome team for working more on these aspects.
The balance is amazing, because the focus is no longer on the "top 3" or whatever - even if there is one. I never felt to drive to donate JUST to make it to the top/leaderboard. Instead, there was a feeling of "this is helping everyone". -
I would also like some form of global info about community projects.
I had to reboot a lot yesterday, which means that information was not always available to me. (Granted, one hopes that rebooting will go away.)
More broadly, I don't think it should be necessary to be online at the moment a project starts to know it's happening, so an extra display (with the rock or maybe another character) would be helpful. -
I do think it would be nice if there were a way to make the community projects less of a feeding frenzy. I guess that was part of the point of my post in the other thread.
Another possibility beyond the claiming "futures" (which I don't quite like, but I'm not quite sure why) is that one could contribute only so much in a given time period. That would slow things down and allow more people to participate. - i miss glitch :-(
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"it felt a bit like a party that was hard to get entry to."
I felt the same way. And since I was usually as far away as possible from where the action was taking place, I was usually late to that party anyway.
A restriction of participation in one creation project per [time period] might be another way to spread the joy a little more rationally. -
Ha, two people friended me since I posted about not being friendly :D. So cute.
I like the idea about committing to a part of the project and having a limited amount of time to come back with the stuff necessary, but I LOVE the idea about requiring lower level glitches to perform certain actions before the higher levels can get a crack at it. So many MMOs end up with a social network that's virtually inaccessible to n00bs because everyone is so far ahead of them that they can't get their foot in the door unless they grind like crazy.
But the mechanism doesn't have to be the same for every new street, does it? Just to keep it varied. To keep things fresh. I would really love it if oldbies could still be forced to try something new every now and then, to keep the playing field level. Maybe changes in the rules, just like they happen in the real world? After all, if n00bs are the new generations, they should be able to change the game, instead of the power always remaining in the hands of the firstcomers. -
"...instead of the power always remaining in the hands of the firstcomers"
Yep..if the alpha players aren't completely sick to death of Glitch (please don't hurt me for saying that) by the time it launches, they will have a pretty hefty play advantage even if it launches with a universal reset. -
"I do think it would be nice if there were a way to make the community projects less of a feeding frenzy. I guess that was part of the point of my post in the other thread."
This. But also, for testing purposes liked that the projects went by fast, but for long term they seemed to go too fast leaving people feeling left out (particularly when the project is as game changing as "building a new street").
i'm sure there are lots of ways to do it. perhaps limits on percentage of each requirement an individual can contribute. only being able to contribute to one of the requirements per project.
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This also seems as good a place as any, but I also think the weight of contributions should be watched carefully. A few times I dumped a pile of /something/ in and outside of wanting to test I don't think I would have un the future due to returns. Having mined a bunch that was usually either ore or elements. Wondering to myself if I would, in the future, carry 10 or 15 slots of ore wondering when a project would show up. or contributing 2000+of an element and the work and food that went into it for the small fraction of the project contribution.
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sounds whiney as it sits there in the textbox here, but I think the overall mechanic was great to see! -
"There was one point where I was getting a little frustrated during a street building project because every single time I went to collect the necessary stuff I would return only to find out that it had been completed in my absence. I asked to see what the plan was, what was required, what was closest to being completed and absolutely nobody answered :("
here is the problem. "local" chat is useless.
there are so many status messages flowing through the local chat that most conversation gets lost.
i doubt people were ignoring you so much as not even knowing that you were saying anything.
the people working on the plan were using a group chat. the group chat was open to anyone joining the public group the chat represented.
and believe me, the people in that chat wanted all the help they could get from as many people as possible.
problem is, the chat might have been fully open to the public, but it was incredibly difficult to find.
really, every project should have its own chat, and anyone should be able to join it by clicking something on the street spirit.
i'm not sure that there is much need for *requiring* people of lower level to participate. that's a bit unfair to people of higher level who want to chip in and might just lead to people making low level secondary accounts.
i do know that in the street building chat there was a lot of discussion along the lines of assigning level appropriate tasks. asking what skills people had and assigning tasks based on that, making sure the higher level players didn't hog tasks that could be completed by lower level players, because there was plenty of higher level work to do.
the key isn't further requirements, although i wouldn't be adverse to that if that's the way the devs want to go with it... the key is making it super easy to get involved in the street creation conversation. -
@striatic — if you use local chat and the other characters are visible (as they are if everyone's gathered around a street spirit) the text bubbles pop up on screen from their avatars. Sort of makes it more straightforward and not so easy to miss. Everyone else would have seen my questions if they were looking at the playfield.
But yes, I think it's a problem if people are organising things somewhere behind the scenes in a way that's not linked directly to the project itself.
I think the chat aspect is secondary to the fact that those who get there first can dominate proceedings. And yes, it will get easier as more of these projects become available but who wants to be disheartened? -
"i'm not sure that there is much need for *requiring* people of lower level to participate. that's a bit unfair to people of higher level who want to chip in "
I disagree. The higher levels already have an advantage. Here, we've had a small test, but imagine Glitch has been running for a few months, a year. People will have had time to hoard and accumulate materials- say, planks. Now, a project begins, and before a n00b can even figure out how to get any planks, in swoops in an oldbie and contributes a couple hundred of them. Before you know it, the required amount has been collected and the n00b can't catch up, because the higher level task is too complex for him. There, once again, the oldbie can come in and take the prize.
I guarantee you this is going to happen, no matter how friendly the community seems right now. It will get bigger once Glitch goes public, and that small-town collaboration will be lost to the crowds who just want to level up. Even now, I was able to dump all the materials I could into the street without once considering that there was a chat, somewhere, where people were organising themselves. Players are usually selfish, and I assumed I had to scramble in order to get a chance to contribute. And to get the prize. Who doesn't want the prize?
Another thing is, oldbies might accumulate so many currants over their playing time that when a project pops up, they might just go to an auction and buy all the materials needed. A n00bie won't stand a chance against millionaires.
That's why I think the game should keep shaking things up, to keep oldbies on their toes. -
Speaking as a hardcore casual player (who is in awe of the players that leveled up so fast after the last reset that they could really go nuts in the inaugural street building), I agree with Cefeida here.
Glitch has achieved a kind of excellent fullness for me in that I noticed I have started to make the same kind of pathetic bargains with myself that I make in real life, eg, "As soon as I get that firebog house, I will donate any jewels I get to shrines" or "I just need to get Levitation, and then I swear I am going to get going on cooking" . But I don't want to know that I am shut out of street building because I am never going to accumulate a warehouse full of beryl and of course, lots of other people who can play for days at a time are already doing it, so why bother?
But I don't know about requirement. Instead give me lots of ways to participate in street building, even on the edges, you know? Especially if just want to hang out, do some stuffs, chat and such.
Street building kind of needs to be mega-complex and huge anyway, doesn't it? Each street needs something new added to the mix, otherwise streets start to resemble those giant box shopping centers that are so prevalent here in Texas: Best Buy/Linens n Things/ Home Depot, and then the same damn thing five miles down the road. Or there needs to be some kind of essence to creating something new that isn't crushed by sheer numbers--a curve of casual participation that seems insignificant by individual player, but contributes overall.
eta: Remember the paint-by-numbers idea? (http://alpha.glitch.com/forum/ideas/512/). Think of that as a place attached to any street building project where people can casually participate and socialize a whole lot...it could also be the place where planning/task assigning for the project gets done. And its activity level could also increment the completion of the street. Make it look like a construction trailer or something, I don't know. -
"@striatic — if you use local chat and the other characters are visible (as they are if everyone's gathered around a street spirit) the text bubbles pop up on screen from their avatars. Sort of makes it more straightforward and not so easy to miss. Everyone else would have seen my questions if they were looking at the playfield."
but the playfield is almost constantly covered by the street building interface.
i highly encourage you to look at this from a perspective other than your own, and hear what i'm trying to tell you, which is that you weren't being willfully "excluded". -
"really, every project should have its own chat, and anyone should be able to join it by clicking something on the street spirit."
yes yes how did I miss that. -
"Even now, I was able to dump all the materials I could into the street without once considering that there was a chat, somewhere, where people were organising themselves. Players are usually selfish, and I assumed I had to scramble in order to get a chance to contribute. And to get the prize. Who doesn't want the prize?"
I don't want it.
and again, try to look at this from the perspective of working on the project instead of being "excluded".
there is no prize!
i lost almost 25k currants in one day, streetbuilding. WITH the so called "prizes". i wasn't making money.
i was also levelling at a far slower rate than during solo play.
unless all you are doing is the low level stuff like hoe digging and watering and donating planks, the "prize" doesn't even offset the basic energy costs involved in street creation.
and if it isn't a "prize", but a token amount that slightly reduces your losses, how does the point you are making stay pointy?
if i was a player interested in currants or XP, I wouldn't go near street building because even if the prizes were twice what they are now, there'd be no profit in it. even if there was, soloing would still be more efficient.
all that the "prize" seems to be, is a way of making sure players aren't totally bankrupt at the end of the affair. -
@striatic Fair point: I forgot that people were probably spending a vast amount of time inside the street building dialogue boxes.
And maybe this is just me as well, but it sounds like you're getting a bit defensive — and completely unnecessarily so. Dial it down a bit: there are lots of new players coming onto the forums and all contributions are valuable, whether you think they're blinkered or not. -
@striatic, I never felt excluded, and never said I did, you know. I didn't even REALISE there was a party to be included in! And that is my point, I think there will be far more players out there interested in their own individual goals (i.e. getting a prize, a badge, leveling up) than having a nice community barn-raising. But they won't pass by a project like this- no, they will tackle it in the way which seems most suited to their selfish goals, like I did.
Let me tell you what I saw, as a casual, non-strategising player: a special, rare project, a finite project which everyone can participate in- but you have to be quick. You get to build a street. You get to create a new bit of the world- and then, there was something about a reward, something about getting a high rank, probably a chance to gain some prestige. And I went, oh, quick, quick, I should do this and give as much as I can so I get a chance to be top five, and not number #786 whose contribution is appreciated but feels insignificant. I should do this so I can say, hey, I built this street. Maybe there will be a plaque with our names? Maybe I get a shiny badge which is not so easy to get? I don't know, but it sounds probable.
Now, of course, this is just a quick impression, if I had taken the time to analyse the project and how much it would cost me etc etc I might have seen it differently. But I didn't feel like doing that. I don't know if the average player will, either. I suspect they might see things the same way I did.
You don't wan't prizes, high ranks, whatever. I kind of do. A lot of others will, too. It's one of the reasons people play computer games, like it or not. The only thing I am trying to say here is that I don't believe Glitch can rely on community spirit alone to keep an order in the game once it goes public. -
"You don't wan't prizes, high ranks, whatever"
Oh yeah? Try taking his Ayn Rand doll away from him sometime. I almost lost a finger. - :D
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"You don't wan't prizes, high ranks, whatever. I kind of do. A lot of others will, too. It's one of the reasons people play computer games, like it or not. The only thing I am trying to say here is that I don't believe Glitch can rely on community spirit alone to keep an order in the game once it goes public."
i kinda disagree.
first, precedent. WoW. sure, guilds have all manner of internal and external politics... but so does every community. despite all that, the game has a thriving social/collaborative angle. for nearly a decade now. street building is not unlike raiding.
secondly, structure. look at how street creation is structured. when people try to go it alone they can end up wasting a tremendous among of energy and get nothing in return, since they aren't coordinated with the overall effort. collaboration and community isn't just a feel-good thing, it is the optimal strategy.
thirdly, scaling shouldn't be assumed to favour competition over collaboration. sure, as the game goes on "oldbies" might develop individual power, wealth and ability - but on the other hand, groups like the New Streets group can only get larger, more powerful and plentiful as well. we can't just assume there will be no counterbalancing forces that haven't been added directly by the game developers.
lastly, we don't know how many projects will be available relative to the population. if there are enough, if you feel excluded from one project, gather some friends and get cracking on another one.
like you said, not much of this is apparent to your average "Joe Glitch" passing by a street project, but that's why i suggest a public chat channel for organizing each project. if more people are tapped into the conversation around the project, the more they'll be asked to contribute and the clearer the nature of the almost fundamentally collaborative endeavour will be. - and I would share my Ayn Rand doll if I could, but when I try to use her "share" verb, nothing happens except the game telling me that the Ayn Rand doll doesn't believe in sharing : ]
- Even being in the new streets group chat, my questions were frequently missed (I don't want to say ignored, I think people were really just engrossed in the project), so I don't think a dedicated chat is really a solution to this problem - but it would be a nice feature.
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what was an example of one of your questions that was missed.
it is quite possible no one had current information to answer it, and that has pretty much nothing to do with being high level or low level.
i'm being defensive because by framing this as a low level versus high level issue is flat out *unfair* and disregards what was actually happening in the public chat, which was making sure the higher level players didn't waste time on the lower level stuff if there were higher level tasks that they were capable of doing and lower level players able to do the lower level stuff.
and here's the problem with mandating lower level involvement. if you mandate the involvement, the so called "oldbies" will leave the low level slots for random low level passersby who will have absolutely no incentive to communicate or directly collaborate with people divvying up the labour, because the labour will have been pre-divvied. that seems much more anti-social than even the current state of affairs. it plays into the "random people competing for share" model that it proclaims to be a bulwark against. it adds a solo quest divorced from the group activity.
presenting it as an uneven playing field power grab, or that it will become one in the future is wrong. here you have Jeff in the top post articulating how the experience was only better with more people involved, saying nothing at all about prizes or feeling good about beating people to the punch ... only to have people essentially uninvolved portray it as something radically different. -
I asked a number of questions - the only one that was ever answered was when I asked where the new street was. I'm not quite sure what these questions were - perhaps something along the lines of are planks still needed, etc, they were all relevant questions.
I'm not sure whether the mandating the low level player participation (and mind you - at level 13 i'm not exactly low level) is a solution, but something needs to be done about players showing up with all the ingredients in their inventory already and dominating the street building.
And while you have Jeff saying it was a great experience there are numerous others (wurzel, Nanookie Nackhouse, Cefieda, Another Chris to name a few) saying it was problematic for them. I think the street building experience was really only great for those higher level folks who got the hang of it right away. I had a much much better experience with it on Friday when less people had discovered it and you could check a street, go find the ingredients and go back and contribute, instead of having to have everything in your inventory already.
I'm not quite sure why you're being so defensive about this, I don't think anyone's attacking you. We all love glitch and want it to be a better experience - thats why we're bringing up these issues now while glitch is in alpha. I wish I had a great solution for the problems I experienced with street building, but the glitch team is full of super smart people and I'm sure they'll be able to figure out something that works well.
Sorry for the tl;dr - This may have already been said, or ruled out, but I don't have time to read through a ton of long posts, so: Nanookie, quoo, wurzel, and anyone else saying that they went off to get stuff, and then came back to find it was finished, or stuff like that: In the third or fourth upgrade to Leftmost Graze, we sent people who volunteered to get something to go get it, so that wouldn't happen. For instance, me and a couple other people went to get Dulite and Beryl.
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In a mechanical sense it might not be about high level versus low level, Striatic, but it felt that way. You have a different opinion, fine, it's not a competition to see who's the most correct. But since Jeff's experiences on projects didn't chime with mine, I thought it was worth mentioning since that's what we're here for.
There's absolutely no reason to get defensive. We're just talking. I think the point is that we all have different motivations for playing and get enjoyment from different things. There's no reason to bark at anyone and if you feel like you're getting defensive, it may be worth taking a step back a little.
We're all participating in these tests because we want Glitch to be better, and nobody owns the experience apart from Tiny Speck. I mentioned the idea of mandating lower level involvement as a suggestion, not an order. It might be using a hammer to crack a nut, but this is just a discussion: treat it like one. - @Houdini I think the problem was in spotting people who were volunteering. It's a learning curve, probably easily improved by a couple of tweaks to party chat etc.
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I can't imagine that street building is going to stay as quick as it is currently--surely the process was made simpler and less time consuming so the devs could get a feel for problems and successes with it. Not to belittle the efforts of those who spent all their time street building in the game, not at all--it just seemed to me that if it takes so little time to create a street, once the full game opens up, they will be popping up all over the place.
So maybe the issues being discussed here are (yet again) a distortion created by the whole alpha situation. There have been other situations which wadded up my knickers (I do not speak for the trees thread, etc), when I was just actually experiencing the effects of a kind of magnified game cycle or experience or whatever.
The Ayn Rand doll says: "A Glitchren is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. " -
Striatic, everything you say makes sense...but the condition for it to work is for people work as a community, like they did this test. How can we presume this is what will happen once the game is public and thousands of people start playing all at once? You're assuming that people will want to work together, and thus will divide the jobs up fairly. I on the other hand assume that something else will happen- that people will race to the finish and to heck with those who can't keep up.
"and here's the problem with mandating lower level involvement. if you mandate the involvement, the so called "oldbies" will leave the low level slots for random low level passersby who will have absolutely no incentive to communicate or directly collaborate with people divvying up the labour,"
When the idea of mandating lower level involvement first came up in this thread it was suggested that this would get oldbies to seek out newbies and invite them to collaborate. What you are saying can also happen, but then if we don't lock certain tasks to lower levels, the exact same mechanism you predict will occur, but with people who have the most power and resources completing all the tasks. Unless you have faith that there will always be a wiser group of higher levels, large enough to take the lower levels under their wing and coordinate such events, and that none of the higher levels will go rogue- I don't have that faith at all. -
there's no need for "faith", because there is zero incentive to do an easy job instead of a difficult one, provided you have the skill.
collaboration is the optimal strategy in an absolute sense, since the prize only really compensates you for what you've done, so you dont really gain anything by doing more, other than *possibly* having the project complete more quickly.
you can't take a consumer capitalist model and air drop it on a system where it just doesn't work - primarily because there's no real profit and the primary reason it is fun is precisely because the work is because the work is shared.
you've never explained the mechanism by which someone would want to be greedy about a money and XP losing enterprise. people build streets because they want to see the game world grow and work with other people, and there us no mechanism for what you describe. it's like assuming the glitch economy must operate like an early 21st century predatory western capitalist economy, because that's the only economy that could possibly exist.
the economic physics, for lack of a better term, are different in glitch. we can't just assume that a predatory capitalist model where people with existing capital rob the poor by monopolizing opportunity will magically manifest itself without a profit motive. if anything, the overriding incentive is to spread the loss. -
FWIW, my experience of the New Streets group chat was also that I was being ignored. (Not directed at me, just that that chat was ineffectual. I generally felt like an outsider.)
Despite striatic's objections to this possibility. -
Wait, let me correct that.
On one of the building projects, people were feeding me so that I could keep doing whatever high-level thing I was doing (that they couldn't). That was very nice of those folks and a different experience.
The shut out sense happened later on Sunday, and was possibly related to the fact that the game was about to close and people were especially driven. -
I agree with the observation that street building has to SLOW DOWN so that it can't all happen in minutes. It should take days or weeks or even months.
Again, one possible way to effect this is to limit the amount one can contribute in a given time period. I think that would also eliminate the feeding frenzy of the event, and also potentially, the hoarding in anticipation of building. -
street building should inevitably slow down. the speed this weekend was unsustainable. in fact, trying to think about how one could possibly turn a profit at street building.. the ways I can think of are meditation, emblems and energy net positive cooking/gardening.
problem is, while these energy positive, currant neutral strategies might enable a profit, they also slow the process waaaaay down, which would prevent the task hoarding necessary for making big profit.
this is what I mean by the "physics" being really against predatory capitalism in this situation.
i wasn't there on Sunday so I can't speak to that, but I would ask what exactly you were saying that was getting ignored. -
"there's no need for "faith", because there is zero incentive to do an easy job instead of a difficult one, provided you have the skill."
Uh...yes there is? The most basic incentive- the easiest job is available, and easiest to do. Economically you seem to be right but I'm talking about the emotional approach which I think is also important since this is a game and a lot of people will just play it by ear. I'm an average person, not very mathematically skilled- I don't calculate the project. I just go for it. My first thought wasn't "let's go see whether someone has organised this so that no one misses out and we all co-operate", but "hey, how much can I get done here before it's all taken by someone else?" You have to take into account that there will be people thinking the latter as well as the former. Generally, when there's something to do in a game, that's incentive enough to do it. We click as much as we can.
"you've never explained the mechanism by which someone would want to be greedy about a money and XP losing enterprise. " Well, why do people get into it in the first place, then? Why bother building a street? You lose money and XP whether you are greedy or not, so I could argue that the ONLY special benefit an individual can get is making the Top 5. The street, after all, will be public, so everyone benefits, whether they've contributed or not. And there's the incentive, if you get into building a street at all, you might as well get a high rank. And to ensure that, you have to get greedy. Some people won't care. Some will. It's those I'm worried about.
"people build streets because they want to see the game world grow and work with other people"
Yes to the first. To the second, not necessarily. Not everyone cares about working with others. A lot will just want the prestige, the high rank, the possible prize (whether because they have miscalculated how much this will actually cost them, or because there might be more valuable stuff offered later, of course I can't know that, but I'm not discounting it.).
Look, I admit I didn't study economy and whatnot, looks like you have so you know more about that, but I still think that playing this game in a small crowd like we are now is different than playing with the whole world. Village mentality versus global mentality, I'm just not sure it will be the same happy community experience with room for everyone to join in.