The values of Competitive Resources in MMO's

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  1. DrHat

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    Hi everyone! *bows with sincerity*

    I didn't know where else to put this and I don't know if it will even be worth reading to anyone, but I thought I would at least share a small part of a large game theory that I am working on, so here goes:

    (Note I will try to put this stuff in a more readable format on a website later, for now those of you who are hardened readers and genuinely interested can get something to chew on)

    Notice

    Before I get started on this article, I would like to bring a notation to something that will become apparent to the You (the reader) as you go along in this little writing of mine; quite simply this is not a scientific article and shouldn't be taken as one. What I am writing is based on accumulated knowledge of gaming through anecdotal evidence (also known as personal, but unscientific, experience and evidence) in my many years (20+ years as of the date of this writing) as a passionate gamer, a great amount of debates and discussions on the subject fuelled by a large interest in Game Design, considerably large amount of feedback from Gamers over the many, many years as a Gamer myself and as an administrative figure of several long-term (8 years+ or less) semi serious- gaming communities. Finally my writings are based on the knowledge and impressions I've gathered from immersing myself into considerable amounts of literary works in the Gaming Industry and from working in the Gaming Industry professionally.

    <b>Part 1 - Whoever controls the spice..</b>

    Fighting over important resources isn't enough, location and diversity is important too.

    Among the many types of MMO games you are likely to find "out there" on the market today, you can almost be sure that most of them put some sort of emphasis on "You in the world" as opposed to "you in The World" and all that difference of emphasis means is, that for all sakes and purposes the Player is a hero and/or protagonist (maybe antagonist?)of the world, all good things will come to him without too much trouble, he is protected way above any average NPC and the world is already built to facilitate all the changes to this effect and by and large the player has absolutely nothing to worry about. The obvious problem with this sort of game model, is of course that this kind of thing goes for everyone who plays that game and thus because everyone is special, nobody is special.

    You could focus your world on something that, on the face of it, would seem like equality of the sort I have just described. That world whereby what is achievable is as accessible and easy to do for 1-10 people as it is for 100-500 people, where all the potential loot, resources, progress, equipment and so forth are things of common ownership for every person, without the slightest hint of exclusiveness and finally a world where everyone is, by every calculation of every variable, a hero and all get the same in the end. I have to be honest with you though, I cannot come with you in this venture - it seems a well-known and boring road to me and there is a long story of reasons I could tell you as to why this is and I'm quite sure it would be a fascinating critique of modern Game Development, however I would much rather tell you what I would do instead and why I would do these things since that would be an expression of my ideas rather than my concern of other people's ideas.

    First of all I would like to suggest to you the simple concept of "The resource". It is a concept which tends to invoke the territorial impulses of many-a ambitious, cruel and/or even brave men and women, it is indeed such a thing that it can change the course of history depending on who's hands it resides in. Now take the thought further and make it a bit more concrete - History is not just heavily tossed from one side to the other by the struggle of 1 resource in 1 place, but rather of a multitude of resources in a multitude of different places (Note: This is of course not counting the various other reasons why people tend to fight one another, of which there are several), which then in turn allows for different groups to fight over these different places and for those groups to be reshaped over time depending on their initial strengths and weaknesses and their eventual strengths and weaknesses. This is important because it potentially forms the basis for a significant part of a competition-driven world in terms of MMO Gaming and furthermore, provides a significant source of self-generating entertainment value.

    Now to fully appreciate where I am going with this "resource" business I have to start putting this idea into a hypothetical MMO, lets call it "Damkjaer Dynasty: Online" or DDO for short - The setting doesn't really matter so lets assume it is a MMO-QPG or Massive Multiplayer: Quantum Probability Game where the setting is whatever you imagine it to be, or whatever suits you the most (Don't think too much about this and also it is not worth embarking on a long discussion of it now because it really is terribly complicated (bonus points to whoever got this reference)), which will aim to make you think in terms of an actual hypothetical game. Additionally the path I am about to head down can become a little hairy since a generous increase in the amount of mathematical probability follows, due to the introduction of more and more variables as the world of DDO becomes more nuanced and dynamic.

    First example (You know, just to get us started)

    Consider the first simple example of 5 different resources, all of significant value. These 5 different resources are in 5 different areas and furthermore these 5 areas are equally reachable in terms of accessibility and everything carries on being beautifully symmetrical like that in comparison to each other (Some might say this sounds absurdly boring, me included, but don't worry we'll get to that later!). Now lets suppose that each of the hypothetical areas I have outlined, are inhabited by 5 equally strong alliances, each consisting of 100 people and these 100 people are all of equal strength in every important respect that you can think of. In addition to these 5 alliances, there is a 6th alliance with people in it that are also the same strength as the people in the other alliances, except in this case it is an alliance of 200 people instead of 100 people and this 6th alliance, lets call them Kanium because I'm the one who made them up, wants some of the valuable and delicious resources out there - Now before I move on lets just recap and list things in a simple fashion:

    5 resources of equal, but high value - Resource A, B, C, D and E
    5 areas of equal availability (without any further considerations) - Area A, B, C, D and E
    5 alliances of equal strength living in these areas - Alliance A, B, C, D and E (again without further considerations)
    1 additional alliance of twice the strength of any 1 of the other alliances, by numerical value (200 members &gt; 100 members) - Kanium Alliance

    The Kanium alliance wants 1 of the 5 valuable resources, so it goes and wages war on one of the alliances (Alliance A) that currently holds one of the valuable resources (Resource A) in one of the areas (Area A). After much fighting, propaganda, lies and slander and destruction of property - The Kanium alliance emerges victorious as the new custodians of Area A and harvesters of Resource A, much to the delight of all the members of the Kanium alliance.

    Kanium alliance is experiencing the reasonable MMO-equivalent of "the good life" at the moment, however there is a problem because they are an ambitious lot and thus they also fancy a go at Resource B. The problem in more detail, is that they do not currently posses the military means to sit tight on Resource A (requires a minimum of 100 people to hold off the other 100-man alliances, if you remember) while also being successful in conquering Resource B (requires a minimum of 101 people, meaning they are at the very least 1 person of the same strength as the rest, short), so what do they do? Well they could recruit new members from the "common pool" of players, unfortunately that means a lot of time and effort has to be spent in giving these new members the required experience to make them as strong as they are needed to be to fight properly and so forth, and in a world so fast-paced and competitive as the one in DDO, who has time for that sort of thing? People are likely to get there before you and that would, if viewed from the perspective of the Kanium Alliance, be a terrible outcome.

    The remnants of Alliance A are scattered, some giving themselves up to live more safer lives in the, considerably lesser competitive areas of DDO, others still not sure what to do next and so they hang around and ponder the proverbial "return" of Alliance A, while others "abandon ship" and immediately start making plans to finding their way back to Area 1 (not to mention the wealth that came from being in Area A)and aren't so terribly held back by this concept called "Loyalty" (All manners of reasons could be cited for this - make up your own reasons if you wish, provided it suits you) and put themselves up for recruitment, specifically they try to make contact with the Kanium Alliance because they are the ones running Area A.

    The Kanium alliance now has a potential solution to their problem of having to spend too much time training new members, because of the remnants from Alliance A that are now advertising themselves to the Kanium Alliance. Now to make a long story short, all goes according to plan, the old Alliance A members join the Kanium Alliance and return to the glorious lands of Area A, the Kanium Alliance now has enough members to conquer Area B from Alliance B, in order that they (the Kanium Alliance) may enjoy the succulent flavour and wealth of Resource B - all the while still having a strong enough military backbone to keep Area A from being taken over by anybody else while they are away. Drinks all around and huge celebrations are had upon the smouldering remains of Alliance B and with that, the example has come to an end without any further consideration to potential consequences.


    As an example, the one we have just had is a very simplified one, because it does not begin to consider all the implicated factors that its actions touches upon. For starters it has the variable that considers the accessibility of a resource, completely disabled - in other words, the variable which determines how hard it is to reach the area in which the resource is located, which is something that could be constrained by things like high travel time, dangerous travel, local dangers once you get there and furthermore natural barriers that you might have to put a lot of effort into traversing and so on. Another thing it ignores is the availability of the resource, specifically we are talking here about the quantity of resources which can be retrieved at any given rate over X time.

    To quickly sum up the rest of the variables without too much effort put into their description, the example furthermore ignores the variables of: The market (supply &amp; demand), trade routes and their security, reactions of disapproving parties (Someone is going to not like the Kanium alliance for various reasons), deterioration of forces over time (People come, people go), politics and global distribution of the resource (How many more places is this resource available?) - now for each and every one of these variables I have listed there is a finite number of outcomes added to example at different stages of the example, in other words every time you add a variable a new continuum of possibilities opens up, possibilities which are then in turn multiplied in proportion to one another when they interact.

    In some sense it seems to me that all you have to do in order to see the potential of self-generating entertainment via conflict, is if you grant me the simple assumption that if there is something worth having ("The Resource") to a degree that is considerably above average, people will fight each other over it and will not stop doing so because they suffer defeat once or twice.
     
  2. DrHat

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    What does all this mean to Shroud of the Avatar you might ask? Well as overly ambitious as it might sound, I hope and wish for Shroud of the Avatar to adopt a similar kind of thinking as mine and create a game accordingly.
     
  3. DrHat

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    Also as I said, this is only a very small part of a larger game theory I am working on. I welcome critique though :)
     
  4. DrHat

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    In addition to all of the above I can tell you the other subjects I am working on, on my theory, which should give you an idea about where I am heading:

    The values of Competitive Resources in MMO's (The stuff I posted, still WiP)
    Security should vary (Still hasn't been written, but you get the idea)
    Death is vital (A pun, but it is important that you die and can be looted - for psychological, social and economic reasons)
    The market is master of all (All of it centers around this bad boy in some way and I will attempt to explain why)
     
  5. DrHat

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    More readable version: http://kanium.org/jacobdamkjaer/jacob.damkjaer-ThevaluesofCompetitiveResources-WiP-220313-1422-35634.pdf
     
  6. Isaiah

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    You're really enthusiastic, and that is admirable. Honestly I don't understand this at all, but there really seems to be some logic here. I read a book on Texas Hold'em theory and it took some study to really understand any of it. I don't think I could have understood that from a blog post because I'm not a genius like that.

    A positive criticism though would be for you to provide us more statistics substantiating your theory. If you are really inspired maybe do a study of 30 or more diverse on-line players of these games over a period of two or three years, and then present us the findings as well. You are definitely interesting, and I like the way you think. However to have a true theory we need statistics.
     
  7. DrHat

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    Thank you! I wasn't actually aiming for making something complicated - I'm a simple gamer myself of some 29 years and by no means a genius :p

    You are right though that it needs more data and also imagery to underline and support the things I am writing, the reason it isn't there is quite simply because I haven't written it in yet or compiled the little data I have (keep in mind that everything I've written is something I'm writing because it makes sense to me and because it is what I have observed - and most importantly, it is not scientific, just my opinion :) )

    There is a lot of text that I haven't supplied because I wanted to just paste some here, to see how well it would be received and if anyone was interested (Portalarium guys, I mean you :p)

    Thank you though for the feedback, it is much appreciated ^_^
     
  8. Urganite

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    Hello there. While I understand the concept you're going after, there's a major issue that this overlooks...this isn't an MMO, therefore there is nothing preventing each faction from harvesting the resources of the other. Moreover, the project lead has stated that he doesn't wish for craftspeople to necessarily have to engage in combat as a part of their profession, and in fact this pans out with presumably how the skill system works, in fact it may be a matter of necessity that you drop combat skills altogether in order to be better at your crafts if the skill system is similar to UO.

    That said, I wrote <a href="https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?topic=fully-segmented-regions" title="Fully-Segmented Regions">a big ol' post</a> about how the map could be laid out to create the kind of scarcity that will enable functional trade of otherwise localized resources. I lay out other benefits of making the overworld difficult to traverse, I just hope it's well received or already part of the map paradigm otherwise there will be no value to otherwise remote locations as the world evolves.
     
  9. DrHat

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    This isn't an MMO? Well gosh that is a surprise, I was under the impression it was o_O

    As for the "Crafts people to necessarily have to engage in combat", no I address that in my writings as well. You don't have to do these things at all - its dependant on how expensive stuff you want to make. The more "uber" stuff you wish to make, the harder it is to get the material for it.

    It is all about the basic concept that for anything to matter at all, it has to be about the choices you make, rather the inevitable access you have to everything..the latter is a bad thing because it means everyone will invariably get and make awesome stuff, which rather defeats the whole purpose of "awesome stuff" don't you think? ;)
     
  10. Urganite

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    Nope, not an MMO. You can selectively opt-out of seeing and interacting people to varying degrees or altogether, so there is no realpolitik involved and no zones of control over resources that makes things more scarce for one faction than another. That said, Dr. Garriott has suggested that doing certain things, like collecting an item or special resource of value or initiating certain events will then flag you for open PvP and make you visible to people who are then hunting you...I don't think this will be nearly common enough to matter from a commodities perspective. Either that, or it will be super common and slaying helpless miners/crafters over and over will get really boring and eventually people will stop doing it as it's kind of a drain on the economy anyway.

    As for "awesome stuff", well, given consideration of item decay, I'm hoping people will be more accepting of "normal stuff", rather than the game doling out "awesome stuff" that people then either hoard, or else only buy awesome stuff and normal stuff becomes a big pile of garbage that makes low-level crafting a worthless endeavor just like in every other game.
     
  11. DrHat

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    But then I have to say I rather don't think you've read what I wrote carefully. The whole point is precisely not to make normal stuff a pile of crap..its supposed to be what its name implies, normal - The thing that most people will use and it should be useful to that extent.

    "Awesome stuff" is a thing that requires quite a lot and has a considerable amount of risk involved with it.
     
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