[Mud-Dev] Virtual Suicide (Was: Money supply in game economie s)

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

On 10 April 2001 14:40, Dave Rickey wrote
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com 

>> Of course then you get onto the topic of 'uber' guilds when a
>> subset of the population decide to play the game harder. Frankly I
>> don't see the issue there as the only real objection seems to be
>> that they monopolise epic encounters. If there are enough
>> encounters though then its really a non-issue. The unity of purpose
>> when working within one is actually pretty cool.

> But "Uberguilds" are central to the whole thing.  It's the idea of
> taking on gods and dragons (and getting the associated phat lewt)
> that keeps you in, but in order to do so, you need to be part of a
> large organization (much larger than would normally form in EQ
> otherwise).

> These organizations are not particular cheery places, most of them
> are *way* out on the entropy curve and would split, except that the
> resultant organizations would not be "Planes Capable".  And the
> "points system" many use to determine who gets the god loot
> encourages you to go along on raids where you have no personal
> interest in the result.

Its really hard for me to make generalisations here as I've obviously
not got high level characters on vast numbers of servers in EQ. My
experiences of raiding with an uber guild don't really tally with
yours, the guilds are generally pretty stable (more so than the
smaller guild I've been in) and very comradly. As I said, there is a
unity of purpose and it can be fun working as part of a well oiled
machine.

As to point systems, I have no idea how prevalent it is on other
servers, but no guild uses it on my server. I really think that a lot
of people make assumptions about the behaviour of uber guilds without
necessarily looking into it very deeply. From my experience, they just
facilitate skilled players with similar goals getting together. EQ is
very equipment-centric which obviously plays a part, but most of us
really like to see our friends get new toys and go on raids for the
fun of it, not because we expect to:

  a) net gear for ourselves b) improve our right to it should it drop.

> Social environments are defined by their challenges, in EQ the
> defining social challenge at high level is managing the spawn of
> god-loot.  Uberguilds are significant because they are the response
> of the society to that challenge.  But once you have that
> organization, maintaining it becomes its own challenge.  I'm not
> saying that the high-level game in EQ is all about god-loot, simply
> that it is defined by it.

Frankly, I expect similar organisations to arrise in DAoC. The
motivation is unlikely to be loot in your game (ok I'm guessing, but I
have done some research :D ), but the pvp aspect. I'm hoping mythic
isn't losing sleep over it and trying to prevent it. I leveled up
slower than a lot of people in the uber guilds, so I am a bit of a
late arrival. I can't tell you how nice it is to find a pre-selected
group of people who are skilled, like to tackle the harder encounters
and are fun to hang out with. The problem with these games is that
power tends to be a funtion of time invested, not skill, so finding a
group of competent players is harder than it sounds.

> Social motivations ultimately come down to the personal, people
> participate in social organizations because they, personally, expect
> to get something out of it.  Because humans are social creatures,
> that organization process becomes a game unto itself.  But it needs
> the defining challenge, the individual reward that the individual
> can not secure by himself.

On the whole, people participate in uber guilds for the same reason
people play these games - entertainment. Having a defining challenge
that requires such levels of organisation is imho a good thing, it
adds complexity to what are generally very simple game mechanics.

As you say people only do things because they get something personally
from it. Thats just human nature.

Dan
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