Massively: Richard Garriott and Starr Long on how SOTA wins at player-generated content

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/1...ow-how-shroud-of-the-avatar-wins-at-player-g/

 

I'm happy that I found a way to contribute within my skill set.

 

Great article! Thanks redfish for sharing. The most interesting tidbit for me personally:

 

I thought the industry standard abbreviation was UGC.

 

Two things stand out as interesting....

Trying to decide if this is a disaster waiting to happen or just another cool concept. It could go either way. Hopefully we can catch all the problems in pre-alpha.

That would be great.

 

Player made coins are only as valuable as they are perceived to be. This will help keep down inflation over time as more people learn to use player made gold and not "game" gold. It will take time though and there will be ups and downs.

 

It doesn't say that this will be player-denominated coinage but simply coinage (if we restrict our knowledge to that article). There has been suggestions elsewhere that this could lead to player-made / player-denominated coins, e.g. Blake-coins or Jat-coins. If it is game gold then it gives greater cause for concern (it could work, but I think it would be harder to get right).

 

You mean other than the fact that players are making the coins, the best stuff is made by players, and the devs want a player made economy (all of which were stated in the article and are consistent with what we have heard for the last year and a half)?

I would suspect that players will be able to create a better quality of gold coin (meaning that it will have more gold in it and therefore be able to be melted down into more gold) much like some countries (for example, Australia) does in real life to make their coins retain more value and appear more attractive to investors.

From Jan. 10, 2014

 

That will set the minimum price for ore at the very least.

 

I said if we restrict our knowledge to that article. I agree that what you are saying is the more likely, what I'm saying is that it was not 100% clear from the article (I had some doubt to the exact meaning of what he said).

Going from your Jan 10 quote, which is outside of the article, then yes it is clear what Richard meant. That particular quote is not something I've seen before.

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...d-get-10-minutes-of-his-time.4043/#post-75129

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...0-minutes-of-his-time.4043/page-2#post-104439

 

The sooner, the better, though, since it has an effect on how the game will play and feel. That's why everyone needs to go and pledge for the stretch goals :>

As long as we get coins of mulitple values and different metals, and coins have physical weight ;>

 

Mostly interested in ships, then horses, then combat pets. I wish I could 'like' the stretch goals but I'm not a fan.

I think that will be implicit in the system, e.g. 1 Paxlair coin would is unlikely to have the same value as 1 Phoenix coin.

Physical weight I can do without, but that's my preference.

 

Yea, but even for the default system in the game, so people can convert their 1000 coins or whatever to 10 coins of higher denomination, plus so gold can be rarer.

Hopefully this is what RG's comments mean

 

I was wondering if you meant the face value. E.g. there could be a Paxlair 10 coin and a Paxlair 5 coin. That would be cool, although I fear more complex than most would want.

Or did you mean more simply a Paxlair gold coin and a Paxlair copper coin? I could see players being more happy with this. 1000 Paxlair coppers could be 10 Paxlair silver or whatever. Depending on how they implement this the conversion rate could be fixed by NPCs or it could be entirely floating.

 

Could be of different sizes also in addition to different metals. We've had thread discussions on this before. Could be gold vs. copper or something like 'crowns' vs 'double crowns' vs 'half crowns' (size).

Unless they got a modern banking system, though, gold should be gold should be gold; just IMO. The minting of coins was just a kind of a guarantee that the coin was always of a certain content and weight. But thats just my opinion on how it should work, and better to talk about this in the threads for that purpose.

 

Richard made a further comment on player minting.

"The recent article mentioned player-minted coins. Question: will the realm force (e.g.) 1 PaxLair coin = 1 Gold Coin?"

RG: "My suggestion (not yet plan) is that all coins are same, but converting bullion to coins with rare official die sets."

"NPC vendors could accept them since all coins have same value. PM coins have a collector's value in open market?"

RG: "My proposal was all coins were "coins if the realm" minted under "license" not a stack of coins per city state. But..."

Hitherto there was no follow-up on the "But...". (All quoted words were copied / pasted! No editing.)

Summary: Players will mint actual gold coins from bullion. There won't be Paxlair coins (or similar).

Which is exactly what I said in my previous posts. I'm not saying that I desperately want this outcome but rather I inferred this to be true from how the article was worded:

My guess is that the number of coins minted from a single gold bar will be fixed, which could lead us to naively conclude that the price of gold bullion would be fixed. I'm not convinced that the price of gold bullion would be fixed (necessarily) by the number of gold coins it can create. Clearly we need more information on the ease of extracting gold and the number of coins that are converted.

Will there be other costs involved in minting? Other reagents? Are the number of coins produced by this process designed to be cost neutral / positive / negative?

If gold is far harder to mine and produces a lot of coins which is greater than the sum of the effort / time / luck involved then people will not bother to mine gold to make coins as it is too much hassle. If gold is hard to get then the market will want to force the price up. If the number of coins is fixed then it is much more difficult for the price to rise. If gold bars are cost neutral or negative then there is little to no incentive to mint coins (currently ignoring the suggestion of greater inflation leading to higher rares prices -- which is a special case).

On the other hand, gold coins are useful since they are accepted by all vendors so it isn't difficult to conceive of situations where people will 'pay' extra for gold (i.e. trade items of greater value than the coins --> liquidity premium).

 

That is a good article. It increase my enthusiasm for the game. One wonders if Richard was blessed somehow when he was circling the planet and sent back down to earth on a mission to make SOTA.

 

It is, coined by users of SL back in 2002.

So, having been the actual person who wrote the code for the radio, I am underwhelmed.

I am still sitting here, 7 months after the handoff of the entire asset submission application that I wrote with unbrae and bubonic, to get the pipeline streamlined for player content submissions, to see that rolled out.

Even more waiting for information on various things such as to HOW to contribute content.

Assets are one thing, the code for that radio? It was never in the scope for them to accept coded items, and yet there is one. Why not build a list of other things users could do?

I have asked, created with prompts (radio), created without prompts(unity editor scripts for scene jams), content, since June of 2013, and yet I still scratch my head at how this is touted as a real contribution game more so than other existing worlds?

To be frank, even stupid MOBA's like DOTA2 have more avenues for player content contribution and feedback.

Of course someone is going to go all budget on my thoughts now, perfectly fine, but I am not the one holding this up to some ridiculous light of the ever original idea of content contribution from players, nor have people not asked about a workflow/pipeline/process since 2 months into this, least we all forget, not young, 20 month project.

meh.