23 Jan, 2010, Ubasti wrote in the 1st comment:
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For a while now I've been obsessed with a game called A Tale in the Desert. (www.atitd.com and Wiki entry) Basically, its a social - economic game. I've played EmpireMUD and had a thought. Could we make this game (or a better one) as a MUD. If I were to build it, I would use either CoffeeMUD, LPMud or even EmpireMUD as a base.

I envision it as a survival game. Players would start from scratch: collecting rocks, slate, wood and grass, etc to fashion into tools. Then eventually go from building shoddy lean-tos to castles. I would also introduce PvE combat so that animal meat and other byproducts could be a commodity as well.

Some resources will be abundant and others will be rare. So players can either horde, share or sell resources. They can work with or against each other to find the resources or unlock new skills. Staff can throw in skills that both help production, but bring harm to the enviroment or to the community. Like a skill that strips a large amount of wood from a tree. It works quickly, but the tree grows back 3x as slow as it would had bare hands or an axe were used and there's a chance that the tree would never grow back. I had more to type, but I think there's a limit. ( I could really go on and one with this one!) Anyway, does this sound like something anyone would like to try to develop or play?
23 Jan, 2010, Brinson wrote in the 2nd comment:
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As an Economics student, I would be interested in developing or playing it, but am unsure how many others would.
23 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 3rd comment:
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I've wanted to create a rich economic simulation game with commerce, market fluctuation, population desires and growth, etc., since I was about 14. It's now just a few years later, and I am more convinced than ever that it's an extremely difficult task unless you scale things back very considerably. :sigh:

Ubasti said:
I had more to type, but I think there's a limit.

There might be a post size limit, but trust me when I say that you were well under it. :wink:
23 Jan, 2010, elanthis wrote in the 4th comment:
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I have personally disproven there being any kind of meaningful post size limit and more than a few occasions… ;)

So far as my take on the concept, I'm not sure it would work well as a MUD. When it comes to economies and the like, you really end up with an awful lot of data that you need to present to the human brain in a form it can easily cope with, and that generally is going to require a good deal of in-depth graphs and charts and such that you just can't draw (in enough detail) in a text-based output. I would honestly just go to Irrlicht and whip it up as a very simple graphical game. I know the lack of art can be daunting, but one thing I've learned is that for non-professional games, "coder art" is actually more than acceptable for most people.
23 Jan, 2010, kiasyn wrote in the 5th comment:
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65535 characters, just to put the 'post length' limit to rest :P
23 Jan, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 6th comment:
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There are a lot of things you'd need to do to make a really good (but still fun) economic game in a MUD context.

First, the act of harvesting raw materials has to be fun AND it has to entail some risk. As you suggest, raw materials shouldn't just magically respawn, they should take time to grow back, and unless there's a way for the players to specifically plant/farm things, they may not grow back in the same place. Star Wars Galaxies had a nice take on metals and minerals, they had scanners which you used to find the richest deposits, and then you set up harvesters to extract them. Thing is, there was an ebb and flow to things, so what was the "best" spot for one resource today, won't be very good at all next week, and another spot that barely registered will be rich for plundering.

Next, you need a crafting system so people have something to DO with all those materials. Ideally, crafted gear should be either far superior to loot drops, or loot drops should be extremely rare. At the same time, you can't make mass-production easy unless you also take into account quality, and make the materials needed for high-quality crafting very rare and/or difficult to obtain. Again, I'll point to SWG, as they had stats in every material which affected the end products, all the way up the chain. If you started with low-grade wood, you could at best make low-grade lumber, which in turn made crude wall sections, and low-quality housing. You could still build any of the buildings using low-grade materials, but the maintenance costs were higher, the stats (interior space, etc) were lower… high grade lumber was much in demand by the crafters.

Finally, you need a market system (which is where the economics gets to play out), and I'll point to EVE-Online as a good example of a fairly complex market. I suggest regional markets, since it promotes the trading profession where players can earn money by buying low in one region and shipping it to another region to sell. It also promotes piracy, since I can see a group of players getting ready to head out with a caravan and set up an ambush on the route I expect them to take.

As a last note on all this, resist the urge to allow goods to be purchased from NPC vendors. If you want a diverse and vibrant economy, it should take place through player action. If nobody has found a way to make a +4 sword yet, there shouldn't be any out there except the occasional rare drop. If they have found a way to craft them, people should be scrambling to try and find the rare materials needed. If any of that can come from vendors… Meh.

An example I can think of from EVE is the price of tritanium (a mineral refined from low-grade ores, common in high-security space). For years, the price of veldspar had been going steadily down, making it harder and harder for miners to make any profit without finding the more rare minerals that were harder to obtain without a guild and some real time investment. The folks running the game hired an economist to analyze their game's market (he's actually a full-time staff memeber), and discovered that the price was kept at an artificial ceiling because shuttles were purchasable from NPC vendors, and it was cheaper and easier to simply buy shuttles and reprocess them into tritanium, than to mine the low-end ores needed to make more.

They removed shuttles from the vendor lists, and the prices rose on both shuttles (since now they had to be player crafted) AND the tritanium metal (which is used to build almost everything). I believe the price stablized at about 4 or 4.5 times the value it had been when the "exploit" was in place.

As elanthis said, there's a LOT of data you need to keep to make all that work, and finding ways to display it to the player may be the biggest hurdle of all. I think it can be done, but a text-only interface will be very hard to learn to use effectively.
24 Jan, 2010, Idealiad wrote in the 7th comment:
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Just my take on it, I don't think the OP was talking about a detailed economic simulation presented to the player, but something more along the lines of a traditional mud crafting system. Actually I'm not sure that Tale in the Desert has a very detailed economic simulation either. Crafting is a big part of it but it's also very much about the social PVE/PVP.

edit: I wanted to add that I'd be very interested in a TITD kind of game as well. There's nothing around like it in muds as far as I know.
27 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 8th comment:
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Quote
and discovered that the price was kept at an artificial ceiling because shuttles were purchasable from NPC vendors, and it was cheaper and easier to simply buy shuttles and reprocess them into tritanium, than to mine the low-end ores needed to make more.

They removed shuttles from the vendor lists, and the prices rose on both shuttles (since now they had to be player crafted) AND the tritanium metal (which is used to build almost everything). I believe the price stablized at about 4 or 4.5 times the value it had been when the "exploit" was in place.

Why couldn't they just make the shuttle cost more than its components? Surely work goes into the shuttle, so it shouldn't be easier to just chop it apart. If it's so hard to mine this stuff on its own, the price of shuttles should reflect that.
This seems kind of like fixing the broken forearm by chopping off the forearm…
27 Jan, 2010, Koron wrote in the 9th comment:
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Beyond the economic impact, though, removing mob vendor shuttles encourages the player based economy (and maybe also interaction) in the process of fixing an exploit. I give kudos. :P
27 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 10th comment:
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It's not fixing the actual problem though. Nothing should ever be sold for cheaper than its fabrication cost in a game like this barring rather particular economic circumstances. If they want to do this in general with their current approach, they should just disable NPC vendor except for the most trivial of items.
27 Jan, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 11th comment:
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quixadhal said:
The folks running the game hired an economist to analyze their game's market (he's actually a full-time staff memeber), and discovered that the price was kept at an artificial ceiling because shuttles were purchasable from NPC vendors, and it was cheaper and easier to simply buy shuttles and reprocess them into tritanium, than to mine the low-end ores needed to make more.

They needed a full-time economist to tell them that? They didn't consider perhaps checking where else the players were getting their tritanium from?

David Haley said:
Why couldn't they just make the shuttle cost more than its components?

My guess is that it probably did to start with, but that they didn't think to have the price adjust as the cost of components increased. Pretty serious design flaw IMO, but it should have been glaringly obvious what the problem was when people kept dismantling shuttles instead of mining.

David Haley said:
It's not fixing the actual problem though.

Agreed - they could well find themselves running into the same issue with other items in the future, caused by the exact same fixed-price problem. The original prices must have been based on some assumed material cost, and that could have been used to calculate an approximate production cost, which could then be applied as a modifier to the current material cost.

Alternatively they could have based the cost on the price of player-crafted items of the same type (probably making it a little higher than average) so that the prices would fluctuate based on current demand. Or if that's too slow, they could just give the NPC vendors limited stock that replenishes over time, so that if demand is high the NPC vendors will sell everything and then people will start buying from the players (pushing up the NPC vendor prices once they have more stock).
27 Jan, 2010, kiasyn wrote in the 12th comment:
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David Haley said:
It's not fixing the actual problem though. Nothing should ever be sold for cheaper than its fabrication cost in a game like this barring rather particular economic circumstances. If they want to do this in general with their current approach, they should just disable NPC vendor except for the most trivial of items.


I don't think you got the same amount of tritanium (?) out of the shuttle as you need to build it. But people would look at the time it took to get and would rather buy a shuttle and get less quicker etc.. imho
27 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 13th comment:
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I don't think you got the same amount of tritanium (?) out of the shuttle as you need to build it. But people would look at the time it took to get and would rather buy a shuttle and get less quicker etc.. imho

Think about what this statement would mean IRL. Let's say that it was easier to get steel by purchasing a car (or whatever) and salvaging the metal. "Mining" (I use the term loosely, yes) steel is harder than salvaging. OK. What exactly does this say about the people selling the car? They're putting all this effort into getting the steel, and then they're putting all this effort into constructing the parts, assembling them into a car, etc.. They've already paid the price for the steel, in addition to all this extra stuff to assemble the final product. And yet, somehow, their sale price for the finished product is less than the cost of obtaining the raw steel in the first place? (Not to mention that salvaging itself costs something!)

Of course there is sometimes a reason to do things like that. You pay extra money to get something quick. This is fine. But what Quix was describing was that everybody did this, so the entire player supply of tritanium was being purchased at what should have been a large mark-up and yet ended up pushing the price down quite far.

I think that the proper solution would be to make the shuttle cost fluctuate correctly with material cost. But if that's too annoying to do, then KaVir's solution of fixing NPC vendor prices at just above player prices would probably work too; it's probably easier too.
27 Jan, 2010, donky wrote in the 14th comment:
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KaVir said:
quixadhal said:
The folks running the game hired an economist to analyze their game's market (he's actually a full-time staff memeber), and discovered that the price was kept at an artificial ceiling because shuttles were purchasable from NPC vendors, and it was cheaper and easier to simply buy shuttles and reprocess them into tritanium, than to mine the low-end ores needed to make more.

They needed a full-time economist to tell them that? They didn't consider perhaps checking where else the players were getting their tritanium from?
You're reading a lot into a little. It's kind of like having a pet peeve bug in a game you play and posting "Why haven't you fixed it? It would only take one line of code?"

The fact is that in development of a large commercial game like that, there are numerous tasks that would be nice to do, but no matter how many people are hired there is never anyone who can concentrate on them. The economist was hired to be a specialised person for the market, otherwise it would likely only get partial attention from anyone else who had some spare time at some point. Up until the economist came on board and discovered problems like this, the market was probably considered to be working well enough, that no-one had to be taken away from other pressing areas. If I recall correctly, before the economist came on board, one of the graphics programmers was researching economics in his own time.
27 Jan, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 15th comment:
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donky said:
It's kind of like having a pet peeve bug in a game you play and posting "Why haven't you fixed it? It would only take one line of code?"

No, it's more like hiring a mechanic to find out why your car doesn't work, and him coming back and telling you "Because it doesn't have any wheels - it's just sitting on bricks".
28 Jan, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 16th comment:
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KaVir said:
donky said:
It's kind of like having a pet peeve bug in a game you play and posting "Why haven't you fixed it? It would only take one line of code?"

No, it's more like hiring a mechanic to find out why your car doesn't work, and him coming back and telling you "Because it doesn't have any wheels - it's just sitting on bricks".

Not being overly defensive of them (it ain't my game), but they are a pretty small company running a game that handles 50K+ concurrent players on a single server cluster, with just about everything that happens being done against a live SQL database in real-time. I think there are probably other things higher up on the radar most of the time.

To extend Kavir's analogy, it's like you take your car to the shop and everyone there is busy building the store, running wiring, driving out to get parts themselves, and every now and then one of them takes a few minutes to look at the cars which are in for repair. Then they decide to hire a full-time mechanic to actually try and fix the cars.

Also, in response to the generally snarky tone here, it's pretty obvious how to fix it once someone HANDS YOU THE PROBLEM. Perhaps before being so cocky about it, you should go download their static datab... and look through it. Oh, but that won't really help too much, since it won't contain all the live market data. You could always look through this stuff here, I guess.
28 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 17th comment:
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quixadhal said:
Also, in response to the generally snarky tone here, it's pretty obvious how to fix it once someone HANDS YOU THE PROBLEM.

I'm not really surprised that the problem wasn't utterly obvious to them. I am however rather surprised that they chose to fix one symptom of the problem rather than the actual problem.
13 Feb, 2010, Ashon wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
Quote
Think about what this statement would mean IRL. Let's say that it was easier to get steel by purchasing a car (or whatever) and salvaging the metal. "Mining" (I use the term loosely, yes) steel is harder than salvaging. OK. What exactly does this say about the people selling the car? They're putting all this effort into getting the steel, and then they're putting all this effort into constructing the parts, assembling them into a car, etc.. They've already paid the price for the steel, in addition to all this extra stuff to assemble the final product. And yet, somehow, their sale price for the finished product is less than the cost of obtaining the raw steel in the first place? (Not to mention that salvaging itself costs something!)


Well sure it's cheaper for industry to mine ore, fabricate the steel, design and manufacture a car, upholster, paint, and sell that car. But as an Individual it is much more expensive for me to get my pick, find the mine, smelt the ore, design a car, build a car by hand, and then try to sell it. But if i need a lot of aluminum, it's easier for me to go to costco, buy enough coke and shape the aluminum into whatever i want, then it would be for me to go mine and smelt the aluminium into the sheet i need.
13 Feb, 2010, Cratylus wrote in the 19th comment:
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for me to go mine and smelt the aluminium into the sheet i need.


Y'know what they say about whoever smelt it.
13 Feb, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 20th comment:
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Ashon said:
Well sure it's cheaper for industry to mine ore, fabricate the steel, design and manufacture a car, upholster, paint, and sell that car. But as an Individual it is much more expensive for me to get my pick, find the mine, smelt the ore, design a car, build a car by hand, and then try to sell it. But if i need a lot of aluminum, it's easier for me to go to costco, buy enough coke and shape the aluminum into whatever i want, then it would be for me to go mine and smelt the aluminium into the sheet i need.

If you need a lot of aluminum, for sufficiently large quantities of "a lot", it's actually probably cheaper to go buy the raw metal rather than purchase coke cans.
If you need a lot of aluminum, for sufficiently large quantities of "a lot", it's actually probably cheaper to go buy the raw metal rather than purchase coke cans. [url=http://www.speedymetals.com/pc-2511-8378... quick research[/url] shows that you can buy about 30 pounds of what is apparently construction grade aluminum for $130. I couldn't find the price of Coke at Costco online, but if you assume, oh, $0.50 per can then for $130 you're getting 260 cans. [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverage_ca... helpfully points[/url] out that there are roughly 30 empty cans to a pound, so 260/30 = 8.66 pounds.

In other words, by going to Costco and buying cans, the amount of raw material you are getting is [b]28%[/b] of what you would get if you spend the same amount buying the raw metal.

To get 30 pounds of aluminum from coke cans, you need 30*30 = 900 cans. The cost of 900 cans, for a price [i]p[/i] per can, is 900 * p. To get 900 * p = $130, we solve for p and get $0.14 per can. (Or in other words, a six-pack for less than a dollar.)
And you still haven't accounted for the process you need to actually recycle those coke cans into usable aluminum.


The point is not at all that it's cheaper for everybody to mine it, refine it, etc. all on their own. The point is that it is very unlikely for sufficiently abundant raw materials to be cheaper if obtained from recycled finished products rather than as, well, raw materials. This would be the case if, somehow, the raw material sources are extraordinarily difficult to obtain, and there is a glut of unwanted finished products that happen to contain this material. But if you think about it, this situation would in fact rapidly rebalance itself because people would recycle the unwanted finished products into wanted finished products, at which point it becomes more difficult to recycle the products into the raw material because you want to keep the product in the first place. As this happens, the price of recycled metal will grow, because the supply (of unwanted finished products) will be decreasing while demand is (most likely) not decreasing at the same rate.
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