I'm not aware of any games which actually do this and I'm not sure how you'd implement it in practice, but I was really just thinking out loud for some different approaches to providing character enhancements in competitive games.


That's not necessarily a bad thing though. Many players like to blame their losses on something other than their own performance.


That may be true, but it's not what I was describing. I said that the impact of a paid enhancement would scale relative to the skill of the player. So yes the skill and capabilities of the participants would still have an impact on the outcome.


I was proposing a different system specifically designed to address that concern. A better analogy would be if the shoes improved the performance of the slowest athletes but had little effect on the performance of the fastest.


To continue the analogy, I wasn't proposing that everyone would finish the race at the same time, but rather that the difference in finishing times between the fastest and the slowest would be reduced.


The way you describe it, probably not. But then you've constructed an analogy that supports the point you want to make and doesn't really describe the system I was proposing, for the reasons I've just given.

I'm talking about a system where a player who might lose consistently to another player with very little chance of winning could get an enhancement which gave them a better chance to win. They might still lose the majority of the time, but they would win a few more times than before and the losses wouldn't be quite as severe. If the losing player were to then dedicate the time and practice to improving their own skill the benefit from their paid enhancement would scale down as they got better. Certainly you can argue this would be difficult to implement, but I was more interested in what people thought about it in principle first of all.

Well it's still a damn hard game/sport to master, that's all about manual dexterity, control
and consistency. And in baseball, there was Babe Ruth and a whole host of great pitchers
and batters with beer bellies. Golf is similar to pitching and batting; running and fielding
are probably the part of "athleticism" one might be thinking of. :-)

Ah, then I misunderstood what you were proposing. If you only want to narrow the gap between the two players then I think that might be more feasible, because the expectations aren't so high and you can intentionally make the perks just a little weaker than what a good player can achieve.

To give another Travian example (sorry), when building things you normally have to wait until one construction has finished before you begin another. However their "Plus" mode has a queue option, where you can queue a second building - however it inserts a 60 second delay between the two orders (so doing it manually gives a tiny edge).

To give an example from my own mud, if you're swept you have about 2 or 3 seconds to enter a recovery move before you crash to the ground. However there is an ability called Sure Footed that gives you a 50% chance of automatically landing on your feet if you're not fast enough to recover manually - although I've implemented it as an ability, the same concept might work as a minor perk. You'd still be better off typing it manually, but it would be great for people who weren't fast enough.

If you're using one of those balance/affliction combat systems, you could perhaps build some of the scripting options into the mud, so that players don't need to rely so heavily on writing complex scripts. Perhaps an option could also unlock access to some sort of "getvalue" mud command that allowed paying players to access data that made scripts easier to write.

I've long been thinking about things like purchasing "AI modules" either for your character (on a normal, one-player-one-character type of game) or, more usefully, for your party members or other minions (on party-based games, or more RTS-style games). A "tower defense" game's towers might by default target the nearest enemy, but you could purchase upgrades to have them target more intelligently or simply use different tactics (such as, concentrate all firepower, target enemy closest to escaping, …).

In our MUD we have an ability called "Remedy" which will attempt to cure one injury or affliction that your character has based on a simple priority system. You could script something more sophisticated yourself and the Remedy ability requires your character be on balance in order to use so the expert player will probably prefer to do it themselves in most circumstances, but it definitely helps to narrow the gap between the expert and the novice.

The reliance on scripting is one of the major drawbacks of a balance/affliction system and while I hope we're a long way from the ridiculous levels of scripting required in an IRE game for example, I wanted to make our combat system as accessible as possible. While I implemented this as an ability that all characters get access to early on, it could certainly have been done as a premium feature and I think it would have been popular with players.

Obviously this isn't a game, but it is very disturbing in my opinion. "Microtransactions for grades"… http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33854822/ns/...

The short of it is that a school board and leadership decided to sell points 20 for 20$ after a failed fundraiser. Students can place 10 points towards a test, so say to raise a B to an A. What is really more the point is the edge student who goes from failing to passing. Overall I see this kind of mentality as the real issue with microtransactions. This is a good example of it being brought into real world scenarios and why it is imo bad.

That's not really an issue with microtransactions: that's an issue with people just being dumb. You could just as easily have sold grades with any other form of transaction; this really has nothing to do with microtransactions in particular nor would I blame this mentality on microtransactions.

Yeah, I think this the typical "selling things that shouldn't be sold" model. It can be found in a lot of places including games. Keep in mind, though, that schools that readily practice this type of thing usually have degrees that over the long term are worth less than a degree from a school that does not. Particularly if you're one of these people who 'pay to pass' without actually learning anything.

Isn't it more of an issue, though, when schools gives easy grades without teaching anything in the first place? … You know, to people who pay the tuition?

This is a middle school, which makes the entire idea the more asinine in my opinion. If it were a college or some such, its no more excusable but at least I can choose not to go to school there. It can be much more difficult to do that in a public school system.

My comparison to micro transactions is this. You have a competitive game which by and large is free. You can purchase small advancements which can give you tactical advantages long term. You have a school which is largely free, you can purchase small amounts of test help which turn you into a straight A student, or keep you from failing. Its a microtransaction schema, that was my point. Small amounts of money for 'small' tactical gain.

-just as a note, I really only intend a very very loose comparison when I claim it is the same as microtransactions in games. I think it is similar in design and intent though which is why I brought it up.

I was just skimming over the old MUD-DEV archives, and came across a reference to an interesting article written 5 years ago by Richard Bartle, which brought to mind some of the earlier posts in this thread:

http://muddev.wishes.net/viewtopic.php?f...

In particular, this part:

"The market for regular computer games is driven by the hardcore. The hardcore finishes product faster than newbies, and therefore buys new product faster than newbies. The hardcore understands design implications better than newbies. They won't buy a game with features they can see are poor; they select games with good design genes. Because of this, games which are good are rewarded by higher sales than games which are bad.

In virtual worlds, the hardcore either wanders from one to the next, trying to recapture the experience of their first experience or they never left in the first place. Furthermore, in today's flat-fee universe, the hardcore spends the same amount of money as everyone else: developers aren't rewarded for appealing to the cognoscenti, except maybe through word of mouth that always comes with caveats (because of point #3)."

It seems "today's flat-fee universe" is rapidly becoming "yesterday's flat-fee universe". I mostly agree with the points raised by the article, but I do wonder whether the shift towards microtransactions will help to overcome some of the problems Bartle discussed.

I also recently read an article complaining about WoW catering to the hardcore players with their end-game raids and such, with the author convinced that it was destroying the game. I'd post a link, but I can't for the life of me find it. If I stumble across it I'll edit my post.