[MUD-Dev] RE: Value of PvP avatars (was: To Kill an Avatar)

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 24 July 2004 Robert Lemos wrote:

> My read on the price difference between male and female avatars
> was not discrimination, but just a preference of a predominantly
> male base of players for playing male characters.

That would explain why there were more male avatars traded than
female avatars, but not (in itself) why there was a difference in
price.

To illustrate, let's say that male players ONLY play male avatars
and female players ONLY play female avatars. Now suppose Y male
avatars were for sale by auction and X female avatars. All else
being equal, if Y men wanted to buy an avatar and X women wanted to
buy an avatar, the prices would be the same. If >Y men want to buy
and <=X women want to buy, the price of male avatars will be higher;
if <Y men want to buy and >=X women want to buy, the price of female
avatars will be higher. Here, since we have 100% "discrimination",
the prices can still be different - it depends on the demand.  The
demand could be different for any number of reasons, except (in this
instance) discrimination.

In the live data, we don't have 100% of men wanting to buy male
characters and we don't have 100% of women wanting to buy female
characters. However, we can be sure that there isn't 0% of men
wanting to buy female characters and 0% of women wanting to buy male
characters because otherwise the prices would be the same (if we
accept the auction price rather than the "buy now" price as being
the truer representation of value). Unless we do have a figure of
0%, there's an element of "discrimination" based on gender. We knew
this anyway, though, from surveys that discovered something like 60%
of players always play characters of their own gender. Furthermore,
as I've just shown, the actual amount of discrimination doesn't
necessarily affect prices one iota. If there were a game with evenly
balanced numbers of players of each gender, and one group would
switch genders more readily than the other, then such discrimination
might make a difference.  Because there are way more men than women
playing EQ, though, we can't even appeal to that rationale here.

		Richard
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