Comment and Link Roundup: October 14, 2019

[brin_bellway]

Had to postpone last week's backups because my laptop had enough on its plate, so here is a somewhat larger roundup.


Comments on my own posts:

[none this time]

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Comments on other people's posts:

(Note: this post is subject to a formatting glitch. The last post is still last, but all *other* posts in the thread are in reversed order.) [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by icarian-arts) Today in "memes that came to people in visions": accidental tips on phone customisation.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by femmenietzsche) The social acceptability of the word "bitch".

[Dreamwidth; Wayback crawling forbidden OP apparently later turned crawlability on] (OP by yvannairie) The complicatedness of musical taste. [three comments]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by yvannairie) Pokemon Go identity logistics.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by thisismycursed3rdblog; addressing itsmaledict (Halloween alt of itsbenedict)) Just how many twists can we put into enemies-to-friends-to-lovers?

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Links:

[FiveThirtyEight; Wayback] (by Ben Casselman; h/t Scott Alexander) As a 25-year-old part-time student in a certificate program at a school that prides itself on its *high* acceptance rate and who has never lived on-campus, I really feel this article.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by doctorbeth) Adorable stuffed-animal clothing.

[mild cw: war] [Tumblr; Wayback] (by the-battle-lesbian; h/t consumptive-sphinx) Shaun Keenan does some excellent art of dinosaurs in (relatively) modern contexts.

[BBC News; Wayback] (can't find a byline; h/t Matt Levine) The best roundabouts in the United Kingdom.

[cw: abuse] [The Outline; Wayback] (by Joanna Mang; h/t Scott Alexander) I remember Shakesville, though I was never a regular reader: it was too intense for even 2011!me to handle. (And I say this as someone who was once among the top 5 most prolific commenters on Ana Mardoll's Ramblings.) I disagree with Scott's assessment, though: to the extent that Shakesville strikes me as less terrifying than it did before, it is only because I have since met people whose goodwill is not conditional on staying in the good graces of Shakesville's ilk.

[Raph's Website; Wayback] (by Raph Koster) A postmortem of the MMO Star Wars: Galaxies. I never played it and am not sure I've even heard of it before, but the series is interesting nonetheless.

(although why one would deliberately create a world in which everything decays I do not know; decay is the worst part of the real world and I for one would rather not have it in my escapism, especially not in such a...well, *inescapable* manner)

Laugh rule:
[Sputnikmusic; Wayback] (by SowingSeason)

traits not necessarily suitable for a band that regularly references animals and shouts hey! an average of nine time per song.

(I finally got around to listening to this 2015 album recently. Very solid album, only a couple of duds. (Whereas with My Head Is an Animal I only liked about the first half.) My favourite was "We Sink", because I am predictable and also it is pretty.)


Bonus: a few selections from my recent bookmark-tidying.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by deird1) The Vegemite Effect. (A memory: "This food tastes of lies," I say, waving around a piece of food from the Chinese buffet when I'd been *told* we were going to a steakhouse.)

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by thatsnotwatyourmomsaid) Hello, you must have found my camera!

[WordPress; Wayback] (by Chris Witham) Welcoming new zombies to the collective.

[K.B. Owen Mysteries; Wayback] (by James Thurber) Viewing Macbeth through the lens of murder mysteries.

Laugh rule:
[Bandcamp; Wayback (while for *best* results you'll need the audio, Wayback *will* at least get you the lyrics)] (by Brooke Abbey) Let me tell you the story, as sad as it's true...

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Re: SWG, I assume you know the boring answer - "Because people won't need to participate in an economy if they don't have upkeep costs to a certain level of power". I say with the deep wisdom of having link-crawled that blog, probably off the same source as you?

Hmm. I wonder if that's solvable. Because players won't do things that they find fun (like crafting, buying and selling) unless it matters, and since you have stuff going into the economy you need stuff going out. I suppose there's e.g. flight rising's exaltation mechanic, but in an old-school-MMO context you specifically need people to be sinking their best gear/character resources. Upkeep and/or decay is the obvious choice but I would like to know if there's another one?

[brin_bellway]

(I'm going to use some Runescape terminology in this post because it's the MMO I'm most familiar with: let me know if anything isn't understandable from context.)

I feel like, at least in my psychology, there's a significant difference between degrade-to-broken and degrade-to-dust, plus a significant difference between repair-with-currency and repair-with-items, plus a significant difference between only-high-level-gear-degrades and all-gear-degrades. And SWG expects me to repair all my gear with items when the items are nonrenewable, of unknown total-quantity-in-existence, *and* of unknown location? Screw *that*.

And if *you* can't find any items to repair with, the crafters probably can't find any to craft with either, and so when your weapon degrades to dust you're forced to switch to a *different* type of weapon, with different pre-installed perks. *And* you have to live with the knowledge that maybe there *was* another weapon of the type you're accustomed to out there, and you just couldn't find it.

(Speaking as a player merchant, I *love* centralised marketplaces. Before the Grand Exchange there were so many goods that I just didn't sell, or sold for a pittance to NPCs, because it was so much of a pain in the ass trying to find a buyer for them that it wasn't worth it. You can find a buyer for damn near any tradeable item in Runescape now, no matter how obscure, and that's wonderful.

If you want to leave open more arbitrage opportunities you can have something more Flight-Rising-style, where you can do things like buy in bulk and then resell in smaller packages at a higher price, or notice when someone is doing a quicksale and snap them up for resale at market price. (I hear you can do some quicksale-snapping through the Grand Exchange, but it's trickier and I haven't tried it yet myself.))

I'm not opposed to randomised and/or finite resources in *all* contexts, but MMOs are extremely not the place for them. In roguelikes it's okay because you can just go up a meta-level: resources within a game may be randomised and/or nonrenewable, but *games* are a reliably renewable resource. You don't care very much about each individual character, and so you don't mind their hardship.

Whereas with MMOs, you have a single character you nurture over the course of years. I always figured that a sense of stability and progression was the main *point* of MMOs. That's the fantasy they're selling: a world where tomorrow is always brighter than today, where the rug will never be pulled out from under you.

I see from some of the dates he mentions that SWG was a pretty early MMO, so maybe the genre hadn't settled into that niche yet. Maybe other people don't even get the same things out of MMOs as I do. (I *know* I don't get the same things out of Flight Rising as most players do.)

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>>"Because people won't need to participate in an economy if they don't have upkeep costs to a certain level of power"<<

Right-tail chasing seems to be very helpful in driving player economies. Runescape does this well, I think: there are quite a few tiny improvements you can make to a high-level build in exchange for vast sums, so you pretty much never have to go "what would I even *spend* these resources on"? In Flight Rising, significant swaths of the economy are driven by people competing over rare familiars: if you've ever bought a secondhand gene scroll, you've likely bought a secondhand gene scroll from a Boolean hunter.

[contrarianarchon]

>>I feel like, at least in my psychology, there's a significant difference between degrade-to-broken and degrade-to-dust, plus a significant difference between repair-with-currency and repair-with-items, plus a significant difference between only-high-level-gear-degrades and all-gear-degrades. And SWG expects me to repair all my gear with items when the items are nonrenewable, of unknown total-quantity-in-existence, *and* of unknown location? Screw *that*.

That's totally valid - it's pretty much the most hostile possible way to have that layout.

>> Speaking as a player merchant, I *love* centralised marketplaces.

That's fair, I think. I like the idea of mercantile business being viable but I think you'd need to write an entire game around making player-to-player mercantile work viable and this wasn't it.

>>sense of stability and progression was the main *point* of MMOs

I was under the impression that the point was keeping your Skinner box and your social life in the same convenient package, TBH, but this is also a reasonable take about why they're good.

... further thought suggest that in fact the point of MMOs, and the thing which makes them good and novel compared to other games is that they serve many masters and have many populations who like them for many different reasons - that interaction of competing interests and needs is one of the things which makes them how they are.

>>SWG was a pretty early MMO

Early MMOs are fascinating and full of bizarre design choices. I love reading about them, and MMO design in general (if you have any good sources for modern-era high-level (i.e. non-game-specific) MMO reading I'd be much obliged - all of my non-game-specific sources date to the early 2000s right now) It fills me with a deep sadness that we will not be able to revist that age - MMOs are simply too expensive (In terms of people-to-make, infrastructure-to-maintain, and social-capital-to-populate) for there to be many weird ones, now that we have working patterns.

>>Right-tail chasing seems to be very helpful in driving player economies

That does seem to be the consensus on how you're supposed to do it, yes. I'm not sure I like that because it feels unnatural to me, but I suspect it could be well-designed enough that the hypothetical game which was good enough for me to play too the end-game would also be compelling while right-tail-chasing. (I care for systemic optimization more than numbers-going-up, so comparing "Spending mental effort to narrow your supply chain loops" and "Spending mental effort to optimize the grind for the next tier of resources", the former seems much more enjoyable.)

>>In Flight Rising, significant swaths of the economy are driven by people competing over rare familiars: if you've ever bought a secondhand gene scroll, you've likely bought a secondhand gene scroll from a Boolean hunter

This is a unclear causal chain to me due to lack of familiarity with context. Could you please explain?

[brin_bellway]

>>they serve many masters and have many populations who like them for many different reasons - that interaction of competing interests and needs is one of the things which makes them how they are.<<

True. I tend to relate a lot *more* to [the writers of Runescape guides, discussions among Runescape players of what goals they're aiming for] than to Flight Rising equivalents--most FR players seem to like "cultivating an aesthetically-appealing collection" and possibly "impulse-buying things in a way which causes you no real harm", neither of which I have any desire for--but even then the thing they're often trying to optimise is "very difficult, high-reaction-speed-requiring PvM", which mostly just seems stressful to me. I dislike and am bad at thinking on my feet (in related news, last week I finally went and surrendered my expired learner's permit (and $35) in exchange for a non-driver ID card).

Oh, hey, Raph actually links to a 1996 paper on the Four Types of MUD Players. Interesting. (Under this paradigm I am an Achiever with a side of Explorer, and very not the other two. I actually leave my chat turned off most of the time: the ideal world is one in which lots of other people *exist* but one mostly doesn't directly interact with any. Being able to selectively tune out speech when the people around you are too loud and annoying is definitely also part of the MMO fantasy for me.)

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>>(if you have any good sources for modern-era high-level (i.e. non-game-specific) MMO reading I'd be much obliged - all of my non-game-specific sources date to the early 2000s right now)<<

No, sorry.

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>>This is a unclear causal chain to me due to lack of familiarity with context. Could you please explain?<<

Ah, sorry, I think I overestimated how much else [someone who knew what exaltation was] would know. An accessible version (probably erring in the other direction, but at least an underestimated-knowledge phrasing can still be understood, and I suppose there's the lurkers to consider):

If your team wins the weekly contest to exalt the most dragons per capita (dormant players excluded), one of the prizes is a 15% discount at the non-premium-currency NPC marketplace throughout the following week. Many items ("scrolls") to change the pattern or species of a dragon are only generated through this marketplace. These items are very popular with aesthetically-driven players, which--as mentioned in the previous section of this comment--are the majority.

Many people (maybe also see above re: impulse-buying) do not wish to wait until their own team has won, nor to seek out a player who currently has the discount and is willing to do them a favour. Therefore, non-premium-currency scrolls generally trade on the player marketplace at a mere 5 - 10% discount, making them guaranteed profit for someone who can buy them at 15% off. (And if there *is* a glut of desperate people selling for a profit margin you consider too low, just wait them out! The price will never go below 15%-off for long, since no source in the game can generate them for less than that price.)

While you *can* do a bit of scroll-reselling with only a small amount of seed capital, it scales up very high, especially since ideally you want enough inventory at the end of your victory week to last you until your team's next victory (which could be months away). To make a business of it one wants perhaps 20m currency, and for best results about 60 - 100m. Note that most players consider 2m to be a major purchase for which they save up for several weeks or months, and have given up on ever having 20m at once, let alone 60 or 100. (Only a few items cost 100m+, and only a couple cost 200m+, so even most people who *do* save up for something big will never have that kind of money, or have it for only a fairly short period when they are almost done.)

Meanwhile, there's me. I have 300m. (And about that much again in premium currency, and about that much again in investments; Booleans cost ~900m when you can find them at all†, so I'm pretty much there.)

Since they cost ~900m, anyone who is serious about wanting a Boolean will eventually find themself with 100m+, and have the ability to become a major scroll seller. And since it's guaranteed profit, there is little reason not to.

(Though one has to be careful about the competition: while you might still sell as the second-lowest price, there's a lot *less* point in spending half an hour pricing and listing a hundred scrolls if someone else comes along immediately thereafter and does the same thing. Fortunately the biggest scroll seller lives on the other side of the world, so I have settled into an informal collusion in which I only update my prices while she is asleep, allowing her to undercut me when she is awake. Also, I recently had a deal with her in which she sold a very large quantity of investments on my behalf (while I was on hiatus) in exchange for ~25% of the profit, so she probably feels pretty positively toward me right now, which is always a plus in a competitor.)

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An interesting side effect: rich people tend not to stay in teams that rarely win, instead moving to teams that will give them more opportunities to restock. Of course, setting out to win takes money, so you get a certain amount of feedback effect in which some teams lose a lot because they're poor and are poor because they lose a lot.

(It's not *solely* a money thing, of course: there's also the effect of reputation and self-fulfilling prophecies. Plague's lore describes them as being competitive, and so Plague players are mostly people who looked at that and went "yeah, that sounds like me", and so Plague wins a lot. And the exaltation bottleneck tends to be how many dragons you can obtain from non-competing teams, so Earth--as a relatively small team--wins a lot because a small absolute increase in dragons exalted leads to a large increase in dragons-exalted-per-capita. (The devs assumed most exalt dragons would be exalted by their own breeders and did not predict this.))

Since I'm not quite as all-out about scroll selling, I have stayed in the team I originally joined, which turned out to be of moderate strength. (I might have left if we'd turned out to be particularly weak, though.) I haven't been *directly* participating much lately, but have been giving them a million or so worth of premium currency every time they push, which is a small-but-noticeable chunk of their total war chest.

I've been considering, once I've finished my familiar collection, turning my merchanting prowess towards funding my team: I'm curious to see how large an effect adding a single extremely-rich funder would have on our standings.

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†There are perhaps 80 - 100 in existence, many of them in dormant accounts, and no more will be created. The only way to obtain a Boolean is to get it from someone who already owns one and has decided they don't want it anymore: this generally happens about once every year or two.

[contrarianarchon]

>>Raph actually links to a 1996 paper on the Four Types of MUD Players.

Richard Bartle (the author of that paper) is also the author of my early-2000s MMO design textbook - he was very prolific/influential in that Era of MMOs and MUDs.

(I am Explorer>Socialiser>Achiever and little to no killer. I think that paper underestimates the effect of other people on making a virtual world interesting to explore though - in general he seems stuck on moving through space as the vector for exploration)

>>[Long explanation about Flight Rising economic dynamics]

Thank you! I had gotten to "Boolean's very rare, must have much cash" from looking stuff up when you've mentioned them previously, but the specific trading scheme you have there was not something I was familiar with.

(Also let me say, that whole scheme is *really* cool and I think highly of you for being able to do something like that, even in a video game. Good job!)

[brin_bellway]

>>(Also let me say, that whole scheme is *really* cool and I think highly of you for being able to do something like that, even in a video game. Good job!)<<

<3

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Flight Rising has helped me a lot in discovering and nurturing my talents, and I'm very grateful for that.

As I said in an informal essay once (prompt: "my favourite game"):

I've heard claims that the original purpose of play, evolutionarily speaking, was as a way to practice skills one would need in one's adult life. By this measure, Flight Rising is--despite not specifically setting out to be educational--a very good game. Becoming an in-game merchant has made me better at real-world finances. A few months back I converted some currency (American Amazon store credit to Canadian cash) by buying a valuable, high-demand object for one currency and selling it for the other, a trick I first learned while navigating the dual-currency system on Flight Rising. I learned to make spreadsheets in order to keep better track of my inventory and profits, and later used them to create budgets and cost-benefit analyses for my family. I am now considering a career as an accountant, thanks in large part to Flight Rising giving me a chance to discover how much I enjoyed such financial analyses (and how I continued enjoying them after branching out to analyses of my family's real-world finances).

[vyctori]

I remember hearing about Shakesville pre-2008. Damn did I dodge a bullet by never getting involved.