[MUD-Dev] Crafting/Creation systems

[Ron Gabbard]

From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>
> On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Dave Rickey wrote:

>> Just FYI, your numbers are low by about a factor of 5.  In
>> general only 20% of all players are logged on at peak time.
>> Also, you need a jigger factor for alts, there are a non-trivial
>> number of players with multiple 50's in the same realm.

I guess I wasn't particularly clear with my point.

Imagine that I buy a car and drive 15,000 miles a year.  I pay to
have the oil put into it when I buy it and then once every 3,000
miles (cheaparse dealer won't even supply the oil for my brand new
car).  Thus, I have to pay for 6 oil changes in that first year and
5 oil changes per year thereafter.  Now, instead of buying one car,
I buy two.  I have to pay for the oil in two new cars.  However,
since I can only drive one car at a time, I still only have 5
additional oil changes based on my 15,000 miles.  In short, buying
multiple cars (starting alts) will provide a short-term boost in
demand for oil.  However, the long-term effect is negligible if oil
changes are tied solely to mileage and I can only drive one car at a
time.

Thus, if I have 6 families in a neighborhood where each family
averages 15,000 miles driven per year, there will be an average of
2.5 oil changes needed each month by those 6 families regardless of
whether they each have 1 car or a dozen.  Maybe more appropriate for
the situation... 30 families that have a time share in 6 condos.
Only 20% of the families will be in the condos at any given time and
they average 15,000 miles driven per year while they are at the
condo.  The total number of cars owned by those 30 families could be
300 or 3,000,000... the Jiffy Lube that services those 6 condos will
still only see an average of 2.5 oil changes per month in the
long-term from those families as the oil isn't "decaying" for the 24
families that aren't there or in cars owned by the families that are
there that not being driven.

With regards to the other 80% of the players that aren't logged on
at any given time...  If I can't sell to them because there are no
mechanisms to facilitate off-line trading, they aren't in my market
of prospective buyers.  That's one of the reasons I'm a proponent of
off-line in-game trading mechanisms -- it allows for the formation
of one big market on a server instead of several fragmented markets
based on time zone.

Here's another question that wanes more on the philosophical...

Why is it that two players playing the same game can spend the same
amount of time repetitively hitting a set of buttons yet one player
is rewarded with a positive in-game cash flow while the second is
penalized with a negative in-game cash flow?

The first player sells bug parts, bones, and other items with no
conceivable use to the NPC vendor at a profit while the second
player sells brand new functional items to an NPC vendor for less
than the raw material cost to make them.  When I started playing EQ
when it was first released in 1999, it kind of made sense as players
could spend a couple hours doing pottery or brewing and make 50 to
100 pp which was huge back then and the reward for doing trades was
too high given the overall economy and the risk/reward factor.
Today, players in EQ commonly pay 50 to 100 pp to another player for
a teleport to avoid a boatride or 20 minute run.

Another concept that is going the way of the dodo in the post-EQ
world is that of risk/reward.  With no PD, death is already pretty
cheap.  Now add shrinking death penalties, no corpse retrievals, no
looting of opponent corpses after PK deaths, convenient 'bind'
locations.  There is little more real risk to doing a dungeon crawl
than there is in sitting under a tree making doilies... but a heck
of a lot more reward.

I understand that some economies are designed with crafts as money
sinks following a Hyphen-Crafter principle where crafting is not
meant to be a primary activity.  And, it makes sense in that it is
being used as a release valve for currency and a means for a PA to
sponsor some individuals to make needed items.  It just seems like
there is little difference between hitting buttons to make 'swords'
no one needs and hitting buttons to engage in a PvE encounter that
the player(s) has a 99.5% of winning and then selling the bloody
entrails back to Bob the Vendor.

Am I missing some fundamental principle in MUDdom that says that
crafting must be unprofitable in a fixed-price, NPC-driven
world... especially when that profit made on a sale to an NPC would
become virtually worthless as the economy inflated over time?

Cheers,

Ron


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