[MUD-Dev] banning the sale of items

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2000, Zak Jarvis wrote:

> --> On Sun, 16 Apr 2000, Par Winzell wrote:
> 
> >> I'll never understand this argument. The difference is enormous. Time is
> >> the ultimate resource, the great equalizer, the one that humans have in
> >> common. When you spend an evening in a group to clean out the orc caves,
> >> the simple fact of the shared time is what bonds you to these people.

 
> However, I would argue that another incentive for reducing real-money sales of
> characters and some items (though I think items is a tricky issue, as it's easy
> for me to imagine systems where item sales enhance the game and world rather
> than detract) is that excessive purchasing of what your content developers have
> designed to be attained through in-game mechanics demoralizes staff. Content
> development staff is more important per-head than players. You'll always lose
> players here and there, but you need your staff around to make the stuff that
> attracts the players. It very much behooves the designer to development staff
> happy and efficient.

We have no such problems. There's a lot of talk of the "problems" of
selling things in-game, but frankly, none of you have any experience doing
it, and I have seen it work in two commercial games I have been heavily
involved with. So if you want to say it doesn't work, you need to come up
with compelling reasons as to why it isn't scalable. Just tossing out
these conjectures doesn't really prove or show anything. There is positive
evidence it works, but I don't really see anyone bringing examples where
it didn't work.

 
> The problem with this statement is that it's application cannot be universal.
> There are plenty of players with the same background without your abilities to
> impress. Do you really attribute all your success to the wealth of your family?

Of course not. Background gives an advantage though. Listen, I was being
slightly facetious, but my point was that you can _never_ remove
advantages gained through real life. It can't be done, because a game is
PART of real life.

> Can you say that your background predisposes you to be more effective? Perhaps,
> though it likely depends on your field of study in college. An engineer is far
> less likely to impress than an English major. An actor might well impress more
> than an English major.

Yes, it does. Compare someone with a college education to someone who
didn't finish high school, and tell me that the person with the college
education isn't highly likely to be more effective.

> I don't think the players in Achaea would really give me any social advantages
> if I carried on at length on the relative merits of the Copenhagen
> Interpretation, Niobium doping in Josephson Junctions, or the potential of
> superfluids as an industrial byproduct in future applications of orbital
> assembly. They'd probably think me a terrible bore, in fact. Unless they were
> studying the history of quantum mechanics, theoretical applications of
> electronics or lunatic theories of matter in zero G environments.

You'd be surprised. If you could find an in-role application to this sort
of thing, a lot of players would be willing to sit through long posts
about it. We recently had a discussion on our public boards that was
kicked off by a debate about whether Achaea is round, flat, or shaped like
a carrot. I chimed in saying that in fact reality was a Calabi-Yau space
(a shape into which the extra spatial dimensions required by string theory
can be curled up, consistent with the equations of the theory). A couple
players went and looked up what it meant, and started a discussion about
it. It doesn't matter WHAT you talk about. If you can sound impressive to
them, they will be impressed.

--matt




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