Books

Yet, another Crazy idea...

Just how are you planning to enforce "stock" sales? I suppose if your "Corporation" decides to file "Bankruptcy", you will have the Dev's sieze all your assets to split amungst the creditors? Bill's, what are you going to be Billing me for? Loan's, how do you want to collect unpaid debts, "Foreclose" on someones property...

Who's going to protect us against "you", the Banker?

 

Let's never do anything daring, different or risky...

... said no one at Portalarium, ever.

#thankful

 

Common sense is the answer to all of your questions, but I'll expand on that and break it down to the lowest level of logic, for you.

A guy walks up to me and says "Can I borrow 1000 gold?"
I say "sure, can you sign your name and date on this contract?"

The guy says "I don't care, whatever". He signs his name, dates the contract and then runs off with my 1000 gold. He spends it, laughs at me a few times, and then logs off the game never to be seen again. I just lost 1000 gold. There's simply no way to enforce that.

So I learn not to give gold to strangers.

A few days later someone else walks up to me and says "Can I borrow 1000 gold?" I say no and walk away.

Later, someone in the community that I know of says "Hey, can I borrow 50,000 gold?" I say "Sure, what's it for?" The person says that it's so their daughter can have a row house. I say "That sounds like a great reason to take out a loan, but I'll need you to sign a contract." They agree, and I give them the 50k.

The contract states that I get 20% of the 50k as a monthly payment for 3 months. At the end of 3 months I get the 50k back in full. (I just made this up, as an example) After two months, the person stops paying me and tells me to jump into a lake. I'm now out a good portion of my investment, but here's the thing. The guy that I loaned money to isn't leaving the game, in fact his whole family is playing the game and many of them have the same last name.

So I take my grievance to the general public, many of which could care less if I lost money and quite a few are actually glad to see it happen. But it's doubtful that any of those people are going to loan money to this person again, because his name and by proxy his family name (in the game) have just taken a hit.

Over time, I'll learn who pays their debts and who doesn't, and the people that do will be the ones that keep a good name, and good credit and are therefore able to leverage that in the game for years and years to come.

The stock market idea works similarly. It's not something I'm pursuing, but I like the idea of it being an option.


All of this ONLY works if there is a secure way to sign and date documents in the game. If we don't have that, we have to go outside of the game and use the forums and that's very unimmerssive.

 

^ Not *only* .... I've already explained why an infrastructure for trust is more important. Moreover, after checking the protocol that I presented it could be done entirely in game.

 

Daring, Different and Risky, are not words I would choose to describe this...

More Power to you, if you think reputation counts, this sounds more like "Loan Sharking" to me... 20% a month is pretty steap interest rates (I know you just made it up, but still)... Back to signing/dating Books, you can already do that, as I understand, when a book is published it can't be changed afterwards, so there is your "contract" in writing... It still doesn't mean anything, but only to your circle of friends...If someone breaches the contract, what are going to do? You can't attach their property with a lein, you can't force them to sell through a judgement order (there're no courts/judges/prosecutors)... I suppose if you want to try it, then who am I to but in...

A Stock market would be even more dawnting...

 

Expecting a secure transaction system out of a MMO is perhaps too much. Sure it will be great if we have "write once" books, with timestamps, but that won't fix the bad lendings issue.

 

We do have a secure transaction system... but I suspect you mean a secure transaction system that sits on top of what we already have. The trading features are currently rather limited so we are looking to do is enhance that functionality. I've made quite some headway into developing that would allow for a way to securely trade books when they are receipts for deposits.

The books currently are "write once", and attach a "signature", which is one of the reasons we don't actually need timestamps. The books are single use and an have a notion of logical time in the content (e.g. a serial number (sequence number) or a random value (cryptographic nonce)). These values, currently, can't be modified once the book is published.

Clearly, that says nothing about loans. I've suggested "ratings" systems in the past which might reduce the need to trust blindly.

 

Been playing around with books and formatting them this release. Some more thoughts:

In addition to having the date created as metadata on the book object, it would be nice to have markup to display those exact values in the book.
[sign] would render the exact value of the Created By field
[date] would render the exact value of the Created On field
And [title] to render the exact title of the book.

These would give players the ability to create their own custom title pages for their books, and to leave their signature at the end.
Bonus points if the signature can be done in a more cursive style font. More bonus points if the date can be formatted as shown in game below below the compass.

 

Formatting wise it would be nice to be able to enter a page break to force the start of a new page. Currently it seems each page starts with [000000] to force the color from white to black.

A page break would thus reset the current color to black, and there is not a lot of control on where the page break might occur given the variable width font. Of course this only matters to the extent that people want to be able to control the text color at the start of new pages. More importantly it allows players to end the title page and start the next page without having to guess the exact number of blank lines to enter to force it manually.
[page] would end the current page and start a new one.

And don't think about removing colors all together. Without the color red there is no way to put red X on a player made map, rendered in the text of a book using the set of characters and formatting rules currently available. This is the cheap way to provide players with the ability to create treasure maps. Though it requires a lot of work on their part.

Long term being able to change fonts throughout the book would be nice. Especially if it gives us different character sets or a fixed width font. Of course this is immediately useful for those in game treasure maps.

Bonus points for getting a single page 'book' (i.e.. letter or piece of parchment) into the next release that works the same as books, but only renders a single page of text, regardless of how much text is provided.

 

The in game journal looks remarkably similar to in game books and has a separator bar and date line. If we had a markup element to include that, then players can write their own journal-style books.
[sep]The fifth day of Smarch[/sep] Lousy weather
would render the journal's separator bar with the date followed by the authors complaint about the weather that day.