[MUD-Dev] Expected value and standard deviation.

[katie at stickydata.com]

<EdNote: Please do NOT reply to multiple different messages in one
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Jeff Cole wrote:

> And that got me to thinking.  In MUDs/MMO* advancement entails
> (ridiculously?) increasing the expected value of a player's
> performance.  Gameplay would certainly be more complex if, like
> poker, advancement required one to balance expected value with
> standard deviation--if advancement involved more decreasing of
> standard deviation and less increasing of expected value.

> My concern, though, would be that players, like my friends, would
> have a difficult time recognizing such "advancement."  Dunno.
> Such an approach would necessarily require rethinking other
> "standard" gameplay systems.

I'm not sure that system would work, but less because players would
have a hard time understanding it, and more because of the nature of
a standard-deviation-style reward system.

Essentially, what you appear to be arguing here is a system wherein,
as the character advances, the character is spending more and more
time failing, even though when he or she does succeed, he does so in
a "bigger" way.  I personally believe that this would be incredibly,
incredibly frustrating.  Frequent smaller rewards give consistent
positive feedback to the player in a way that helps him feel that he
is accomplishing something.  If you are talking about expecting
players to essentially gamble, and gamble well - meaning perform
some kind of mathematical analysis of the probability of any number
of possible outcomes, and choose a single route of play in the hopes
that the chosen route will be the "winning" route - I think you're
expecting way too much.

Several games already do implement related systems: DAoC's Crafting
is representation of a very basic implementation of the idea, and
SWG's Surveying implements almost an inverse concept, wherein
players start out with a great deal of deviation while Surveying
(choosing from a list of a number of things to look for, in the
hopes of picking something that shows up in a survey), and as the
concentrations of that item become higher, it becomes easier to
locate other high concentrations and also to collect samples and
therefore earn advancement points.  There are a number of
illustrations of how much high-level crafting is enjoyed in DAoC -
not very much at all.  It winds up being a chore wherein you poke a
button and at some point, probability indicates that you will
succeed in your attempts to craft.  The higher the level of the
item, the further from the highest probability of creation it gets,
resulting in sometimes hours of poking a button.  Even though the
reward is pretty good, for most players it rapidly becomes both
boring and frustrating.

Vladimir Cole wrote:

> To put it another way, as soon as you allow in-game objects to
> have out-of-game value, you are no longer a game designer but a
> central bank for your game's economy. You'll have to behave in a
> consistent, defensible, central-bank manner or the citizens under
> your rule will complain loudly (best case) or take you to court
> (worst case).

I wonder what would happen if games stopped resisting being a
central bank and instead adopted value control systems that were
very different from real-world value control systems.

For example, in the U.S., any mass produced item that can be traded
(physically) for another item or for cash is considered currency and
must be granted a value.  Camel Cash (little pieces of paper you can
send in for rewards like jackets and keychains) here is labeled as
having a value of 1/1000 of a cent.  Meaning, technically, if you
collected 1,000 Camel Cash, you would be entitled to redeem that
Camel Cash for a penny.  It might be interesting to look at the
ramifications of quite literally associating extremely small
real-world currency values to in-game items as a solution to
liability.  If the game from the outset declares that, say, Happy
Fun Staff of Doom is worth 1/10,000 of $0.01 USD, unless a player
manages to amass billions of those items, it would be impossible to
redeem them for any real quantity of money.  It would not even be
necessary to relate that value to outside markets, since in-game
items, just like real-world items, have a value to an individual
player that is determined by personal investment, not by currency;
the player's time is worth X amount of value to that player, and
usually a value close to X by other players.

By associating such an infinitesimal currency value to items, it
would seem to preclude anyone's ability to sue over that value (or,
if they did, to issue them a check for, say, 23/10,000 of a cent),
notably since players pay by the month rather than by hour or day.
If players paid by the hour, I think there would be a much stronger
case for determining real-world value by associating it with time -
since all players pay the same amount regardless of hours in-game,
it would be difficult to say that any specific unit of time was
worth a specific amount of currency.

-k
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