Topic
How one guy ran the economy of a MMO
Interesting article from a guy who, it seems, more or less ran the economy on Star Wars Galaxies:
www.mediumdifficulty.com/20...
It all started during alpha testing:
One day, I inquired as to how the economy would be structured. The answer I got very literally changed my life. “We haven’t really planned for much of anything. I think the players will structure it organically.” I was dumbstruck. I didn’t respond and started taking notes. I took a lot of notes — entire composition books sat next to my monitor.
Replies
- Dude had entirely too much time on his hands.
- How did he 'destroy' the game like he said in the last few sentences? I don't get it - it seemed more like the devs of SWG was destroying everything by spoiling players to become Jedis in a snap. Holo-grinding your way to be a Jedi sounds much more satisfying than instantly becoming one in a minute.
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Funny, I'm doing the same thing in Glitch!
Seriously, though, it's crazy how this personality type works; the need to make money hand over fist and dominate a market. I have a friend who plays EVE Online like his second job. He's my age (mid-late twenties) and has already sold a business and owns a second. That same mindset of "winning" in the business/tech realms applies to games like this and the real world.
But, to respond to Nayeli, the destruction comes from oversaturation, at least in part. Whereas the game was designed for players to progress to a certain point in a certain way in their own time, this system (indeed, the very game itself) becomes lopsided when you have guys like Desjardins selling stuff outside of the game for real money and providing instant access to characters, and thusly content, that should take months to build. There is definitely more to it than this but if you can, say, buy a Jedi and millions of credits worth of stuff in one day the appeal to stay in the game and actually play it is gone; you'll use it up and be on your way very quickly. As I said there is more to it but that's the basic idea, I think. - I dunno that it's the same thing for me, winning IRL and winning at an MMO. I'm highly competitive (often too much so) IRL... I just can't get it up for hardcore (and mostly meaningless) grinding in a game. I'm 9 levels from 60 and I'm having a difficult time getting motivated to go the last few, even though I have a pretty good strategy. I'm not a hardcore gamer, so I don't tend to look at an open-ended game without a well-defined endpoint as something to 'win'. For me it's just something to do when I'm bored or I want to unwind. So when I read about people shutting themselves up in a room with a dozen computers for a few weeks to, I dunno, amass more credits than the next guy or whatever... I don't really understand the point, I guess.