If anyone’s leaving, can I have your gold?

Oh, and in response to Blizzard, since when is posting on the Blizzard forums NOT manditory? I don’t know about you but there are times where I have to resort to the forums to get questions answered. Not to mention how else shall I defend my honor or find out who the hell is killing me and tell him to knock it off! How is that optional?

I’m not sure what the complete focus on PotBS is. I’m refering to your comment, “Another barely ethical design is the one which gives an advantage to multi-boxers.” There was no mention of PotBS anywhere in that post.

That being said: You’re simply wrong about dual boxing. People have been dual boxing forever. We did it back in the MUD days. We do it today. It’s trivial. Healer /follows tank or dps and you reach over and hit the F1 key as needed. It’s the same exact thing in EvE except you only have to hit F1 once. With EUO you could even automate it in UO. Controlling both from one terminal. Shaman/monk combo rocked in EQ. Who didn’t have a buff bitch in AC? Etc blah blah blah etc.

Hell one guy plays 36 WoW accounts at once. http://www.spooncraft.com/the-daily-spoon/excessive-player-owns-36-wow-accounts-and-plays-them-all/

Fishing in WoW is totally dual boxable. Cast, wait, cast, reel, reel. The bobber is to prevent macros not dual boxing.

So I ask again. How do you design a game that can’t be dual boxed without making it a single player game? If having a friend play with you gives you an advantage then you can dual box.

IP tracking? That’s not a design solution and it doesn’t work due to spouses and roomates.

If people buy gold to bypass the grind, then paying money to bypass the grind is the same as buying gold. And there’s already at least one reputable subscription-based MMO that sells prebuilt characters in its online store. Oh, and of course you can sell that prebuilt character in-game for gold! It’s right there in the FAQ. That seems to pretty much close the circle: if I have a credit card and can fog a mirror, I can buy my way out of the grind and turn the rest of my real money into gold as fast as the player economy will let me.

That’s right. Once again, it all comes back to Ultima Online.

The first step to skewer organized RMT is to realize that what the bots are doing is no different from what the players are doing. If it’s so simple that a machine can do it, it’s probably not very good game content.

The next thing to do is to keep NPCs and PVE, but remove most accumulable resources from any (repeated actions/t) equation. Especially remove liquid goods, or units of common exchange.

Remove the spectacle of NPCs as anything but humdrum background. Make +90% of NPCs innocent civilians engaged in commercial or domestic activities. You need to have some sense of division between the secular and the sublime, or the commonplace and the spectacular. If it’s the same spectacle everywhere, everything becomes passe.

Any interaction with them should lead to opening up new gameplay possibilities, or lead to less than immediately fungible rewards. That interaction might lead to situations where profit is possible, but never directly repeatable actions.

Preferably, the majority of income should come from interaction with other players. Some times it will be involuntary interaction, such as piracy, but if a substantial amount is voluntary commerce, then that is even better.

Some faucets will probably always need to exist. Every faucet needs to be balanced with drain though. The better the p2p economy though, the smaller you faucets and drains can be. Different barter economies will arise around goods which which are scarce, and those which are limited only by the scarcity of available man or bot power.

The stronger your p2p economy is, the less significant RMT is. If most profitable commercial activity is centered around controlling scarce assets (and not simply farmable territory), the less easy it is for bots to succeed against savvy human competitors.. at least until the singularity anyhow. The players will simply steamroll the assets of bot operations without mercy. They’ll have fun and they will simply steal all of the bot operations profits.

By positioning conquerable or vulnerable assets as a prime mechanism for asset acquisition, and a vehicle for creating salable inventory, you create a kind of “means of production.” This allows a virtual bourgeois class to arise in deeply social MMOs. This class will have intense pressure to employ most of the rest of the player base in high intensity conflict regardless of how dear failure penalties are set for the individuals or groups.

The primary annoyance of RMT is not actually RMT itself. It’s the tertiary aspects of it like ingame spam, and of course the non-participatory bots themselves provided the standard failure in game design. If you simply give players the appropriate venues for RMT, the vast majority of the problems subside. Much fewer resources can be diverted to curbing the problem of obnoxious users operating outside allowed channels. Further, illicit activity derives the majority of its profits when sanctioned participants are locked out of that market. Large scale RMT operations will crumble under the onslaught of many casual competitors operating through a compact, transparent market. Equilibrium prices will be felt out rapidly, and margins will be crushed.

If you want the clearest example, think of EVE. Now imagine concord payouts evaporating, and put in a more restrictive faction standing system. Then watch everyone start sharpening their teeth.

Regarding PotBS: Guild warehouses aren’t into the game, even though this has been, along with buy orders, among the top economy-related demands by players on the forums. It’s as though the suggestion were deliberately ignored just to throw hurdles into the vertical-integration model of closed guild production. Worst of two worlds, really: The lack of warehouses did nothing to stop it, and it only made guilds mad for being unable to coordinate more efficiently. Especially annoying since the endgame lineships (a.k.a. “bundleboats”) were so outrageously expensive that they were designed as collective efforts.

And the other problem with PotBS is that the economy — all of it — is dedicated to the war effort, whether for shipbuilding, ship supplies, or unrest supplies. Not a single item has a civilian application. Certain goods such as tobacco are in fact only useful for trading to NPC’s to obtain goods dedicated to the war effort — it’s only barter, no hard cash involved. I’d be ready to guess that if a market had existed for non-essential goods (I’m thinking Puzzle Pirates here) — or better still, products used for both military and civilian products — it would have been possible for some players to find a niche market and grow very wealthy out of it.

And well, that’s the problem with PotBS — not only everything must go towards the war effort, but everybody can be a crafter without any time commitment, or skill, on the part of the player.

Vertical integration had been predicted for months, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, really. Once a guild starts doing it, all the others follow lest they be at a disadvantage. Then you had a few phenomena together. Guilds were so busy supplying themselves that they posted next to nothing on the auction house. With insurance brought into the game, prices skyrocketed (a trend that had begun before insurance, by the way) for the few goods on there. At the same time, market demand, as far as I could see when I played, was practically nil. What goods there were, were ridiculously overpriced. And new players were stuck with a lack of low-level ships, everybody being concerned over production of endgame ships.

As for your question: I believe I did address it. If your friend plays with the second account, then it’s not really dual-boxing. Sure, it might yield advantages in powerlevelling, and you can go into business with someone you trust (extend that to full guilds, and yes, that could cause serious problems in guild-driven games like Shadowbane, but not from dual-boxing). But unless you’re playing with two computers side by side and are gifted with amazing dexterity (or using some less-than-legitimate mechanisms), you can’t play two accounts at once. I’m thinking of fishing in WoW here — you still have to click on that bobber to reel in the fish. Or think of all that mining in Runescape, where you’d occasionally get interrupted as an intentional method to prevent bots.

Playing with a friend would double your output, but dual-boxing wouldn’t work there because you can’t play both accounts at once; if you’re using one, you’re too busy to use the other at the same time — whereas in PotBS your labour would accrue even without you being logged in or doing anything. Also, what I forgot to mention about PotBS, and this might clarify matters, is that although you can create up to a certain number of characters with one account (although they all have to be in the same nation on any given server), the number of economic lots is account-based, not character-based. So if your main character has all 10 structures to his name, your alt from the same account can’t build any.

I agree with you, dual-boxing can’t be detected (unless they routinely started checking for IP addresses, but then would they discriminate against husband-and-wife teams?), so if anything, the game mechanics would have to make it impossible or at least a waste of money. Would that lead to a single-player game? No, insofar as you and your friend can still play it together, and yes, that will give you an advantage if you play with reliable people. But it means you can’t build an economic empire by your lonesome.

Most people in EvE have multiple accounts due the nature of the design. You effectively only get one character per account. it’s slightly more complex than that but that’s the end result. If you want to try something else you can’t just make a new char on a new server. You either have to buy a character, start a new account, or wait a few months while you train the new skills. There is no significant economic advantage to having a second account. The best money making in the game can be done solo. A second account is great for espionage. Seeing what’s on the other side of that gate is invaluable.

SWG also had a ton of multi-account players for the same reason. One character per server. At least in EvE if you play long enough you can do everything. In SWG if you wanted to try something new you had to stop playing with your friends or give up the skills you earned.

I don’t understand the economic problems with PotBS. Vertical integration is the peak of efficiency. This is an old concept. Plus if you never use the market you can never aid your enemies. As you said it’s the logical conclusion. Do guilds have guild warehouses where they can stock pile items for memebers?

You never addressed my question. Take your mine the rock or cast the line for hours. If you do it with a friend it will double your output. If you dual box it will double your output. If you have a healer your tank or dps can grind faster. Regardless of who is playing that healer. How do you design a game so that a friend can help but you can’t help your self by doing what the friend would do? Did that make sense? Basically I don’t think you can prevent multi-boxing. Unless you sell them a pet cleric like EQ does there will always be a benefit to having a second box.

RaelyfAm I the only one in the world who thinks our current model of suppressing RMT as much as possible through banhammer usage is the only real solution?

I, for one, will not support a game that only uses the sub model, but have been quite happy with Puzzle Pirates and Wizard 101. There are more people out there in the market than sub devotees. That’s the point.

Beyond that, I find it interesting that fighting RMT with the “banhammer” is effectively making paying subbers pay the company to keep other potentially paying customers away. It’s a huge expense to maintain some sense of “sancity” of rare items, rather than just designing a game that is fun to play, rather than a loot lust treadmill.

harl :
@Vetarnias
Another barely ethical design is the one which gives an advantage to multi-boxers.
Any design that allows a friend to help you gives an advantage to multi-boxers. The design can’t tell if it’s 2 people each single boxing or 1 person multi boxing.
How exactly do you propose to accomplish this without turning it in to a single player game?

There is nothing wrong with a friend helping you; this implies there is someone else playing the other account, as opposed to the problem of multi-boxing, which involves more than one account per person.

I’ve never played EVE (though I might try it at the time of the next expansion), which allegedly has endemic multi-boxing, so let’s consider Pirates of the Burning Sea. In that game, you can gain a definite production advantage by buying more than one account, because production isn’t tied to the player’s own time but rather to a third-party pool of labour, which can accrue up to three days. And in addition, you could just produce the entire output for those three days by just clicking on a button for each structure you owned. It took minutes to drain off the labour to produce what you needed.

In other words, in PotBS, you could log in with your second account (or third, or fourth) only ten minutes every three days, and produce as much as if you had been online eight hours a day, because the output of economic structures was determined by its pool of labour (24 hours per day, with products having various hour requirements), not the player’s own time.

The only limitation to this was how much you could afford to produce, as there was not only a production cost but also a weekly rent, but these were minimal for most products and structures, and theoretically you could recoup that money very easily by playing the market for mid-tier items and consumables (for which you’d have an advantage by having produced everything yourself, as opposed to other manufacturers who had to buy basic resources at a markup). Worse still, some players soon started openly offering to exchange their 20 lots on Server X (by creating a new character there) for someone else’s 20 lots on Server Y, basically reducing their need for multi-boxing by colluding with someone else playing on another server.

I say “theoretically”, because the situation soon devolved into its natural conclusion: self-sufficient guilds that produced everything internally, bypassing the market completely. So in the end, the grind was very much there for those closed-production guilds because the market as a moneymaking venue was closed off, so the market became dead. (They’ve announced an economic revamp recently, but I’m not sure what effects it will have on multi-boxing or, indeed, on internal guild production; my guess is, not much.)

For the record (and since I see that DrewC is posting here he can correct me if I’m mistaken), FLS is trying to clamp down on cross-server production exchanges, but multi-boxing is still fine as long as you play all the accounts for the same nation on any given server. I am *not* saying that in the case of PotBS the design is barely ethical; I think that what they wanted to do was to get economic production out of the way for people to concentrate on PvP (or PvE). But I still think the design was a mistake in that it prevented the creation of a crafter class among players, where the crafter’s own time would be rewarded with wealth and perhaps consideration within his/her nation. Instead, you’d get every guild player — even those not interested in the market — producing their ten lots’ worth of hemp, because they pretty much needed to do it to help their society’s effort to produce that First Rate, without having to sacrifice more than a few minutes of their time every day. (Also, I’m not too sure how that would have played out if suddenly internal guild production were out of the equation. When everyone is or can be a crafter, how long until market saturation? And then how long before some crafters get discouraged, reducing supply and driving prices up again? What would be the impact of grinding then? And, more pertinent to this discussion, what would be the impact of multi-boxing?)

So a wall of text to essentially say: In economic terms, the best way to get rid of the need to multi-box is to make the players’ own time, not some independent structure labour, the real measure of how much gets produced. In other words — and yes, it does sound dull — mine that rock or cast your line for hours.

EVE’s multi-boxing for economic advantage (and espionage) seems much more of concern, especially since I recall reading that the average EVE player had two accounts.

harl :@VetarniasAnother barely ethical design is the one which gives an advantage to multi-boxers.
Any design that allows a friend to help you gives an advantage to multi-boxers. The design can’t tell if it’s 2 people each single boxing or 1 person multi boxing.
How exactly do you propose to accomplish this without turning it in to a single player game?

Would that really be a bad thing ?

MMORPGs could only gain by being good single player game first and offering good multiplayer capabailties second. It is pretty much what WoW pre-60/70/80 is and for many this is still the best part of the game.

Am I the only one in the world who thinks our current model of suppressing RMT as much as possible through banhammer usage is the only real solution? Yes, it’s a dirty solution and it costs developers a great deal of money – but I don’t really see any way around it.

To be frank, I simply will not ever play a subscription based game which supports RMT in any meaningful way (payment for server transfers, ect. excepted). But the fact is this ideology that better design or removing grinding will eliminate RMT is ridiculous.

As long as your game contains anything difficult to obtain, be it items, equipment, ponies, character levels, ect. there will be people willing to pay for it regardless of how much ‘fun’ it is to obtain. Some people don’t have the time, or won’t be willing to invest the time, to get things thsemlves – and the only way of eliminating demand for ‘instant gratification’ is to eliminate scarcity completely – which is, of course, ridiculous.