[DGD] player economies: npc clients

[Noah Gibbs]

Yeah, these things are all fixable.  "BGP with roads instead of wires" is a great image, but please don't assume it's trivial to do :-)


________________________________
 From: Shentino <shentino at gmail.com>
To: All about DGD and Hydra <dgd at dworkin.nl> 
Sent: Saturday, July 7, 2012 5:47 PM
Subject: Re: [DGD] player economies: npc clients
 
On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 5:06 PM, Noah Gibbs <noah_gibbs at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Some ways it can go wrong, off the top of my head:
>
>   - the buyers can look in a wide area, resulting in everybody winding up in the same place

I'd probably restrict geographic seeking to consider transit
time/energy to get there as part of the cost of purchase.  But thank
you for reminding me as I had forgotten about this.

>   - the buyers can spend enough money that it's not useful for players to stock a variety of goods -- just most efficient "calories" since that's how buyers react

I'm assuming here of course that carnivorous orcs and vegetarian elves
(for example) will have different diets.

Races can be very picky...

>   - the buyers can look in a very narrow area so players want to jack up prices and herd them into specific areas to fleece them
>   - "seek store" could require a lot of CPU time or other resources, hitting your server
hard at meal times

My guess here is that members of the same group can explore and build
a cache of routing information that is simply looked up on demand as
needed.  Think BGP or OSPF with roads instead of wires.

>   - "seek store" could require very little CPU time or resources, meaning buyers get stuck and starve to death frequently

Perhaps, but I'm guessing that changes in geography or routing
information are expensive to actually cause on account of having to
engage in costly and time consuming building or road construction.

> ________________________________
>  From: Shentino <shentino at gmail.com>
> To: All about DGD and Hydra <dgd at dworkin.nl>
> Sent: Saturday, July 7, 2012 12:12 PM
> Subject: Re: [DGD] player economies: npc clients
>
> On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Noah Gibbs <noah_gibbs at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> It's a neat idea, but hard to get right.  Basically you could do this, but expect to set aside a fair bit of time to make it happen.
>
> Besides implementation effort, what could go wrong?
>
> I'd pretty much have them "seek store" whenever their stomachs start
> rumbling or whatever, and they'd use a map of the town for routing
> information to actually get to one, and then
>
> Throw in a bit of casual window shopping and soon the soldier's HQ can
> maintain a price list of what goods can be acquired the most cheaply,
> and boom, capitalism rewards the efficient.
>
> I'm probably oversimplifying but I would like to know some of the ways
> this scheme could go wrong.
>
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>>  From: Shentino <shentino at gmail.com>
>> To: All about Dworkin's Game Driver <dgd at dworkin.nl>
>> Sent: Friday, July 6, 2012 2:24 PM
>> Subject: [DGD] player economies: npc clients
>>
>> I was just thinking if it would be feasible for NPCs to be
>> participants in the market instead of just springing out of nowhere.
>>
>> Suppose that we have an orcish warder.
>>
>> Instead of having him magically be not hungry, what if he got to go
>> around town and buy his meat rations from the cheapest store he could
>> find, one of which might well be player run?
>>
>> I just thought of this and figured that NPC demand may help bootstrap
>> a player driven economy.  Especially in the early days when you have a
>> barren wasteland without many players.
>>
>> And of course, the NPCs would shop around for the best deals.
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