Nope, I’m still around, but I was on vacation for a couple of weeks, away from my gaming rig.

Yes, the North American Server cash grab did torque my jaws enough to take a Darkfall sabatical. In the meantime, I’ve been playing around with Guild Wars, but it is too quest centric for my taste, so Mortal Online looks like the best bet for my next Free For All PvP attempt.

The KGB is still playing Darkfall, but with reduced numbers since the announcement of the North American server situation. In three months, when they permit US players to transfer characters from the EU server to the NA server, I may jump back in, but in discussions with guild mates and friends locally, I’m thinking I prefer the UO pvp model that hopefully Mortal Online will offer more than the ShadowBane pvp model combined with city sieges and conquests provided by Darkfall.

Many of our players prefer the ShadowBane model. In practice, I found it to be too defensive in nature. In many ways, it’s is the Maginot Line implementation of PvP. I’ve never been a happy resource gatherer, and city building does require the gathering of a lot of resources. If I do go back to Darkfall in a few months, I and a group of like minded KGB members will be concentrating more on fighting and raiding than city building. We have plenty of builders that need defending, so it will be a useful division of labor, but first many of us will have to overcome the taste of betrayal about the whole North American server debacle, and that taste is a bitter one.

In the meantime, while watching the Mortal Online development with great interest, I’ve actually been spending most of my time on a free UO server, In Mani Ylem. It recreates the early days of UO, which to my mind is an advantage, since this was a period before the advent of Trammel and much of what crippled UO, in my eyes. Alas, the shard is very unpopulated, and it’s almost like playing a single player game, which isn’t altogether bad in that it lets me see areas I never visited when I was occupied in the endless PK/Anti-PK wars. With all the current easy skill gain Monty-Haul free UO servers around, a slow skill gain old school free UO server is a hard sell. For some of us, it feels just right, and is a nice change of pace.

Personally, im expacting Global Agenda, mainly because its a heavily instanced MMO that plays like an FPS and where you get more guns, not more powerful ones. Personal acumulation can work based in breath, not depth. At least i hope that.

Other betas like Fallen Earth doesnt atract me because i predicted that due to high costs in ammo, the guys in the faction of the guns were all going to be alts of the melee guys. In a supposed faction vs faction game thats lame.

But well, Vetarnias defend Puzzle Pirates (that he plays), i defend EVE(that i want to play but need a credit card) and geldon critics everything (and he doesnt play MMOs anymore-as far as i know).

I play everything… just not for very long. I’ve outgrown sucking at the teat of a grind in order to add a never-ending parade of foobar to my growing banana pile. Now, I demand that MMORPGs entertain me. Disappointingly few can.

I still insist in saying there was no pickle over closing the foraging loophole, because of the PP financing model.

Alright, if you insist. My only doubts come from a certain tendency to want to believe there’s never truly a “only one sensible answer” scenario where virtual environments are involved.

having to ditch personal accumulation altogether (and what a boring game that would lead to)

I’m working on testing this, really.

Remember when we were discussing Darkfall (I think) a few months ago, and someone (not Owain) showed up to say that a smaller group should never ever aspire to owning a city but should go guerrilla instead? That’s what I mean. That was a perfect example of being prohibited from playing a large part of the game because you weren’t large enough.

Perhaps. But then, if accumulation is to produce any results, there will be things that those who have larger piles of bananas will be able to do that those with lesser piles will not.

I think that the problem with EVE’s economy was that it was entirely at the service of the political/military, because it was not designed to be anything else.

True. If there were maintenance costs, or colonists to feed, or magic foobars to find, that might be a bit more interesting.

“But well, Vetarnias defend Puzzle Pirates (that he plays)”

Not anymore. I played it for quite a few months in the summer of 2007, came back to it last summer for a month, but I don’t think I will return to it.

@geldonyetich

I still insist in saying there was no pickle over closing the foraging loophole, because of the PP financing model. The foraging loophole just allowed you to make insane amounts of money if you pursued it on a grand scale, while I’m pretty sure Three Rings would have much preferred to have all of us buy doubloons with real money. So who would they lose as players? Freeloaders who never bought anything, and so on, so no big loss, but it was probably because of RMT (and the possibility to convert doubloons into game currency, and vice-versa) that wiping the servers was impossible. You paid for stuff with real money, and now it’s gone? Had it taken place, it would have been ethically questionable, to say the least.

That’s why I’m saying there was no pickle, no dilemma. There was just one sensible course of action available: Close the loophole by introducing a puzzle, and don’t do a server wipe.

Yes, I rather like the skill system of Puzzle Pirates. It’s not as annoying as, say, the “if you do something long enough, you will be rewarded” of WoW.

Without having to ditch personal accumulation altogether (and what a boring game that would lead to), I like to think that in an online game you need a possibility to succeed on a smaller scale, that you can open your little store and stay in business against Walmart, even though your corporate bank account doesn’t have as many zeroes at the end of the fiscal year.

What I’m dead set against is the play-to-crush, number-one-or-nothing mentality, where the smaller guys immediately get killed off, are forced to amalgamate with larger groups, or are relegated to eating crumbs. Shadowbane, EVE, Darkfall, they’re all examples of that. The first notoriously had three dead servers when the Asian large alliances took control of the map; the second is a perennial fight between the Goons, BoB and maybe some Russian alliance. The third is still up for grabs, yet the dots on the map seem to appear in patches of the same colours these days: df.urme.com/map/ (It appears to have changed somewhat, but maybe that has to do with the North American release.) And if you’re inquiring about PotBS, it really doesn’t belong in this list because guilds don’t hold genuine power, and alliances don’t stick; you’re still The British, The French, The Spanish or The Pirates, and you play accordingly, as opposed to EVE where Gallente and Caldari players can still mingle and go pew-pew together even though they’re supposedly mortal enemies.

Remember when we were discussing Darkfall (I think) a few months ago, and someone (not Owain) showed up to say that a smaller group should never ever aspire to owning a city but should go guerrilla instead? That’s what I mean. That was a perfect example of being prohibited from playing a large part of the game because you weren’t large enough. Small crews in PP can still achieve something on a smaller scale, because they play a game parallel to Their Leetnesses, best demonstrated by the fact that the Goons couldn’t exactly wreck everybody’s day, except for those who played on their level — high-stakes politics. Those who despised the Goons were mostly their adversaries; average players didn’t give a damn. Yet PP is not exactly “never the twain shall meet” either; if you know the right people, you can still progress, or so I’ve seen, not like EVE where everyone is paranoid of their own shadow.

I think that the problem with EVE’s economy was that it was entirely at the service of the political/military, because it was not designed to be anything else. PotBS had the same problem, though far more acute, because crafting required no time involvement from the player, just money. One of the game’s most famous players once said that he was puzzled that PotBS was “an economic game where your financial success is intentionally gated by grind”. Yep, grind for money, then turn the money over to finance in-house ship production or unrest bundles to flip ports. It was a game where economic players were seen as second-rate, or just cows to be milked by PvP players for funds.

In comparison, the opposite, that of politics/war serving the economy just leads to lopsided maps once a side has access to all the capital it needs as well as strategic resources, because the economy still remains a tool for war. So I don’t really know where this is going, or whether there is any nice exit point/miracle solution.

Mainly because said crazy are, well, crazy. And they come and post long walls of text defending their crazyness.

About EVE, a slow combat sysem by design its less frustrating than a slow combat system by laaaaaag. And many recent MMOs are learning that the hard way. “Leveling while logged out” it isnt that important because you can only gain a 20-25% more in skills, the rest its depth. Player skill does matter more than ISK or skillpoints. Thats why many people get killed by smaller ships 1 vs 1.

But well, Vetarnias defend Puzzle Pirates (that he plays), i defend EVE(that i want to play but need a credit card) and geldon critics everything (and he doesnt play MMOs anymore-as far as i know).

Its all about tastes, and DarkFall doesnt taste good to nobody.

My personal favorite example of amateur design: There are no clipping brushes. Thus the climbing up near vertical walls and the ‘stuck in the wall’ so the mob can’t hit you while you kill it with your mount exploits.

Regarding the ‘leveling while logged out’ mechanic of EVE… Darkfall does have it’s own unintended version of this. In order to truly compete at the highest level, you need to be logged in as much as possible. When you aren’t actively playing you are either macroing your skills up or standing motionless at a ‘blood wall’ where other players beat on you to an inch of your life to raise their combat skills while you raise your defense skills. I spent a good 75% of my time in game ‘at the keyboard’ farming some of the few mobs that were worth killing in order to get gold to buy reagents (sometimes buying thousands one at a time with a click macro, until they put the ability to buy multiples in the ‘expansion’) in order to set up an afk macro to train my magic skills. There are fanboys who will say “You don’t have to macro to compete, just play the game naturally and have fun” but they are noobs who will never be competitive at endgame… and if Darkfall isn’t about competing at a high level then it’s about nothing at all. Since there are no skill caps or diminishing returns, keeping up with the Joneses is an inflationary system out of control. Also, there is no such thing as a character template… all of the top players had highly trained skills in every area: Melee (both one-handed and two-handed), Archery, Magic (multiple schools) and Defense. Combine this with the fact that early in the game there were multiple exploits (like the above mentioned wall exploit) allowing the min-max hardcore early adopters to raise their skills at a fast rate and you end up with a system in which the inevitable result is an ever growing gap between the haves and the have nots.

Although the discussion about whether Darkfall is an example of poor game design has mostly petered out… I am still interested in the fact that Aventurine has pulled off this North American Publisher pay twice for the same game scam. How do they get away with this, and what does it mean for the future of MMOs milking clueless players out of their cash by any means necessary?

So there was no pickle, or if there was, it did not get expressed by the players on the forums, who were wholeheartedly behind Three Rings, and certainly not by the developers. [...]it was being abused, but as long as you didn’t mess with the game files to create more accounts on a computer faster than the three months, there was nothing to be done.

I’m not sure I understand. It may not have been expressed as a pickle by the developer, but the very presense of exploited virtual assets is one.

Some choose to write it off entirely (e.g. Asheron Call’s “if it’s in the game, it’s not an exploit” approach) but those who are willing to put a bit more work into trying to maintain a balance face a question of who are you more willing to displease:

1. The players who feel comfortable because they’ve exploited their way into riches. (Therefore, leave the assets in tact.)
2. The players who feel uncomfortable because they know the exploits had allowed people into riches? (Therefore, remove the assets.)

One way or another, you’re going to lose a player. In this case, they lost you because they chose #1. Ironically, it seems you yourself were a privy to exploiting, but you still were upset because you knew the assets shouldn’t have been there. So, even in trying to please your niche as they perceived you, they lost you.

Now, if that isn’t a pickle for a developer, what is?

This, in fact, is the darker side of Puzzle Pirates — a class-demarcated game where your puzzling skill in large part determines your status. For example, I excelled at precisely one of the more useful shipboard puzzles, and my status was semi-elite; financially, middle-class. [...]A new player in Puzzle Pirates has a place, and the better he gets at puzzles, the higher he can climb; it’s perhaps what makes PP unique.

In my opinion, this is a good thing. Most MMORPGs instead reward your status based off of one thing: persistence. (Of course, social status helps too, but that’s an external asset.)

A game that assigns where you are in the game based off of your actual skills seems a far better alternative. It quickly takes you to the part of the game in which you’re actually challenged. It’s more fun that way, by the definition of fun as Flow Theory would see it.

What I really want to bring up here is how different PP is from EVE in regard to what the game offers to people at the top and at the bottom; the hardcore and the casual.

EVE sees fit to separate the two games (hardcore-elite and casual) by distance, with Empire space and nullsec as the two extremes [...]Puzzle Pirates, on the other hand,[...] everyone uses the same space, but never run into one another because of the inherent skill-based class system.

It’s a good system to promote fairness. I’m reminded of a Guild Wars tournament ladder. Even if instancing isn’t quite as realistic, it certainly provides a means to promote fair play.

EVE is all about alliances and corporations with nothing outside of them, but PP is more about skill-based connections. To be part of PP’s elite pillages, not only do you need the skills, but you need to know the appropriate people, and as long as they aren’t your political enemies, it’s perfectly fine to team up with strangers as long as you know something of their reliability. Somehow I can’t imagine this being possible in EVE, amid the paranoia.

It would be a stretch in EVE, I agree.

You don’t necessarily need a game that will alienate the hardcore grinders; you need a game where it is possible to succeed without being one.

It gets really tricky when an accumulation mechanic is involved because, under many definitions of ‘hardcore,’ they simply have more time to play. Under an accumulation mechanic, having more time to play means having more time to accumulate (wealth, levels, whatever). The players will come to perceive those who have accumulated more as “successful’ while those who have accumulated less as “unsuccessful.”

So a game in which it’s possible to succeed without being hardcore? Seems like you’d have to ditch the ideals of personal accumulation altogether.

So how about this for a chicken-and-egg dilemma: In an ideal game, should the economy serve the political/military, should the political/military serve the economy, or should the symbiosis be so complex that it becomes impossible to find out which serves which?

From a design standpoint, I’d probably look at political/military and economy as just different activities in the game. Whether one serves another has a lot to do with what the primary activity.

As such, it would vary from game to game. It’s tricky for me to say which is ideal without a specific case, but I will go so far as to say that there’s fairly obvious ways to do it wrong. For example, forcing people to participate in an activity they hate (like a boring trade skill system) in order to succeed at an activity they like (such as adventuring) is one such snafu. Forcing a real complex symbiosis that no player can truly understand their place within the economy/military relationship is another snafu.

So what’s to talk about? A game we’ve only read of and never experienced first-hand? That protracted Eurogamer controversy provided ample fodder for discussion when it started, as you could discuss reviewing standards or criteria for success without ever having to address Darkfall itself. But now? In a way, you’re right, nobody seems to care about that anymore, and if Eurogamer had stuck to its 2/10, or given a worse score, nobody but the dwindling Darkfall supporters would have been manning the walls, and everybody else would have been pointing out how stupid and deluded those supporters looked. And Eurogamer sure seems to have dragged its feet before bringing us this latest review; it’s been more than two months since the controversy, yet Kieron played what, 20 hours?

@geldonyetich
Regarding the loophole, I was the only one who actually asked, though obliquely, for a server wipe. On the official PP forums, everybody else was seemingly more content with closing the loophole while continuing to enjoy the wealth that some of them had derived from it. But that was the problem, I found, with the PP forums: those reading them were the elites, not ordinary players — and therefore those most likely to be using the scheme on a large scale.

So there was no pickle, or if there was, it did not get expressed by the players on the forums, who were wholeheartedly behind Three Rings, and certainly not by the developers. Because you see, mass-foragers were seen as exploiters, who then used bots to move their fruit to market. Bots were forbidden, and I certainly did not use any, but mass-foraging was not an exploit. It was frowned upon by the devs, but it was not a bannable offense; I made damn sure of that before starting out.

Here is how it worked: The game would keep track of how many accounts you created on any computer, so you could theoretically only create three accounts (or 9 characters overall), but it would only keep records for three months, so at the end of those three months, you could create three new accounts using the same computer. And if you owned more than one computer, it would go even faster as the system worked by computer, not by IP address; so you had the horror stories of one guy going through his college dorm to create accounts from each computer.

So yes, it was being abused, but as long as you didn’t mess with the game files to create more accounts on a computer faster than the three months, there was nothing to be done. All you needed to forage was to have a character stand on a forageable island for ten minutes, then you could forage, log off that character and log in the next one. Not to mention that you could run as many accounts simultaneously as your computer or connection could hold. The maximum this computer could run was four accounts, or twelve characters overall, and it probably took me, with delays, 40 minutes to have them all forage.

Enter the foraging puzzle, and suddenly you’d realize that it would take 10 minutes per pirate to forage, if not more — so 120 minutes in my case, as you were forced to pay attention to the puzzle. People with more characters would have spent more time doing it, so they could have wasted entire sittings just playing the foraging puzzle.

The unraveling of this was quite fascinating, as it brought the hypocrites out of the woodwork, those who were welcoming the new puzzle because it would be a triumph of skill over exploiting. This, in fact, is the darker side of Puzzle Pirates — a class-demarcated game where your puzzling skill in large part determines your status. For example, I excelled at precisely one of the more useful shipboard puzzles, and my status was semi-elite; financially, middle-class.

Instead of repeating myself, I’ll just direct you to a recent post on this blog where I commented on PP’s class system: brokentoys.org/2009/05/15/freerealms-has-a-million-users-not-including-your-raiding-guild/

What I really want to bring up here is how different PP is from EVE in regard to what the game offers to people at the top and at the bottom; the hardcore and the casual. And just to prove that there are enough similarities between the two to warrant a comparison, guess who was running the largest alliance on Hunter Ocean in 2007? If you answered the Something Awful Goons, you’re correct; if they showed up, that says a lot about the game.

EVE sees fit to separate the two games (hardcore-elite and casual) by distance, with Empire space and nullsec as the two extremes, which means the gameplay is affected, and if you stay in Empire space you will see only a fraction of what the game has to offer; Puzzle Pirates, on the other hand, prefers to use a parallel system, where everyone uses the same space, but never run into one another because of the inherent skill-based class system. The elites have their own pillages, etc., and everything short of the political game and some high-end events can be played by everyone (blockades, for example, demand so much manpower that everyone can usually take part). EVE is all about alliances and corporations with nothing outside of them, but PP is more about skill-based connections. To be part of PP’s elite pillages, not only do you need the skills, but you need to know the appropriate people, and as long as they aren’t your political enemies, it’s perfectly fine to team up with strangers as long as you know something of their reliability. Somehow I can’t imagine this being possible in EVE, amid the paranoia.

A new player in Puzzle Pirates has a place, and the better he gets at puzzles, the higher he can climb; it’s perhaps what makes PP unique. None of this really affects the economy, though, so on the latter point, I will add that it is possible to get involved in the economy quite early on, as long as you have the capital for it. You can rent a stall and start making money if you have enough savvy (except shipbuilding, as mentioned above, and tailors/furnishers are also seen as money pits though I never tried them).

You don’t necessarily need a game that will alienate the hardcore grinders; you need a game where it is possible to succeed without being one. If that’s enough to piss them off, all I can say is good riddance. I can’t imagine succeeding in PotBS or EVE without being a hardcore grinder — nor in WoW, for that matter, which makes the hardcore players of that game even more annoying for their weak attempts at denying it.

But I’ll just make an attempt at explaining my general theory of what makes a successful game economy:
1) The economy, including crafting, can be played independently of the general levelling treadmill, without hurdles not economic in nature, such as the impossibility of access to resources in higher-level areas, or a blur between mob-killing and resource harvesting. Hence WoW’s economy is a failure by being based, in large part, on your general level and forcing you to grind mobs for resources.
2) The economy must play a vital part in the endgame (such as RvR) instead of being an aside (making WoW’s yet more of a failure, because it is irrelevant), but at the same time must be broader than just a means to an end, with a particularly faulty pattern being that vicious circle of economic production on which we seem to agree. EVE, for example, would fail in this regard because it limits itself to war production, which must be wasted on making war in order to justify more war production (and keep the game going).

So how about this for a chicken-and-egg dilemma: In an ideal game, should the economy serve the political/military, should the political/military serve the economy, or should the symbiosis be so complex that it becomes impossible to find out which serves which?