>>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.)
---
>>(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.
---
>>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.)
---
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.
---
†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.
no subject
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.)
---
>>(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.
---
>>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.)
---
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.
---
†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.