Ramble: Auction vs. Consignment

I recently started playing City of Heroes again to check out Going Rogue. One of the first things I noticed on coming back was that various changes to how money is earned, the merging of the markets between heroes and villains, and the growing number of max level characters with nothing better to do than farm currency meant that my assumptions about how much it should cost to “gear up” a character were out of date. I started reading some market strategy guides out of self defense, and found them very interesting… primarily in that my assumption about how the player to player market worked was fundamentally incorrect.

But first, keep in mind that the dominant player market system in MMOs is World of Warcraft, which has an auction system. Unless it’s changed a lot from when I played a few years ago, it works a lot like eBay. A player lists an item along with the minimum he or she will accept for it, whether he or she is willing to let it go for a “buy it now” price, and how long the listing will be available. Players see the current winning amount, and know that, if they want the item, they will have to beat this amount and hope no one else comes along offering more money before the listing expires. Impatient players can spend the “buy it now” price and get the item immediately, but for potentially far more than it could be had if they were willing to wait for the auction to expire. Players have to rely on 3rd party sites or their own research to track what the current average sale price for the item is, or, if it’s a common item, they can simply bid on the one that’s cheapest at the moment.

Most MMOs that I’m familiar with use a similar auction system, though often less polished or complete than WoW’s.

City of Heroes is different, in that it uses a consignment system. Players that want to sell an item simply list it and the minimum price they are willing to accept for it. Players that want to buy an item select it from a list of all available items and enter how much they’re willing to pay for it. For slow-moving items, there may be only one person buying or selling at any given time. If you’ve listed an item, as soon as a buyer requests it at a price equal or greater than your asking price, it’s sold and you receive the amount spent. If you’re a buyer, as soon as someone lists your requested item for equal or less than you’re offering, you get it for that price. There’s even a list of the last five sales to show both parties what the going rate is for an item (this is far more accurate for rare items than for common ones: if an item is selling in huge amounts, the last five merely displays a constantly shifting snapshot of current demand, and can easily skew the perceived value of an item by a single person paying too much for several of them).

What I hadn’t understood about the consignment house until reading the market threads was the method the system used to match buyer and seller when there are a lot of bids and/or a lot of sellers. When something only has 1 buying or selling, it’s very easy to (barring listing fees for the seller) figure out through trial and error whether the seller is willing to sell for the price the buyer is willing to pay, even though the transaction is completely anonymous. Things get more complicated when things are selling briskly: you may have to bid 1,000 to immediately get something that has a thousand for sale and usually goes for 100. Meanwhile, you might be able to bid 20,000 for something currently selling for 100,000, and get one in a few minutes. From a seller’s perspective, you’ll sometimes list something for what appears to be the going rate, and fail to sell it for hours or days even though the sales are still turning over at roughly the rate you listed, sometimes lots more, and sometimes you’ll list something for a pittance and receive way more than you expected to get.

I had assumed that there was something complicated going on with first in/first out based on time of listing being compared to amount offered. The common wisdom on the forums is that it’s much simpler than that: bids are sorted from highest bid to lowest, sales are sorted from lowest list price to highest, and the two are paired off until the highest bid no longer is enough to get the lowest list. If there are three people bidding 5,000, 4,500, and 4,000, the item listed at 1,000 will get 5,000, the item listed at 3,000 will get 4,500, and the item listed at 5,000 will get nothing (because the remaining 4,000 bid is insufficient, even though it would have matched perfectly to the original high bid). This goes a long way to explaining how there can be certain items that will have hundreds of the same item both listed and bidding: high bids don’t peel off the high list prices until all the cheaper items are sold. Meanwhile, theoretically you can list an item at 1 and get the maximum amount currently on offer (though you may have no real idea how much that is).

I’m genuinely curious why the market was designed this way. If I’d set it up, as mentioned previously it probably would have had something to do with priority: earliest listed item goes to the first person to bid at least that amount. Another way to do it would be to try to match highest to highest: If there are items listed for 5,000, 4,000, and 3,000, a bid of 4,500 takes the 4,000, then a bid of 4,000 takes the 3,000, and, finally, someone will have to bid over 5,000 to take the 5,000. Either method would seem to make it less likely that the situations of lots for sale and lots bidding would happen, but I wonder if the current method doesn’t have advantages. My first thought would be that the load on the server/database is less severe by doing a simple sort of two tables and matching the top rows; anything even slightly more complex might add up over the presumably millions of transactions hitting the system each day. Another benefit is adding in a risk vs. reward scenario: a low-listed item might sell very quickly for the going rate, but just as easily might sell for a pittance if the demand suddenly drops.

To sum up: City of Heroes has a very unusual player to player market system, and I’d be interested in seeing more games attempt a consignment system rather than an auction system, possibly with different rules for matching players to see what variations do to the overall model.

Two Trinities

The classic “holy trinity” of MMOs is the tanker, nuker, and healer: One character to take nearly all the hits, only character to deal nearly all the damage, and one character to repair nearly all the damage.

• Tanks typically have the highest hit points and the most armor, but the most essential facet of the role is the ability to concentrate fire upon themselves. This is typically accomplished via taunt mechanics: either an ability that forces the enemy to attack them, or a range of abilities that the enemy’s AI interprets as a disproportionate threat. Since most MMOs seem to have the enemy AI simply attack whoever has done the most damage to the enemy, taunt-based abilities tend to be treated as if they did high damage, even though the tank generally does far less than the nuker.
• Nukers, or “DPS” classes, have a much higher damage per second output than the others. In certain games, their damage rating may be required to defeat certain enemies (as the other classes’ DPS is not sufficient to overcome these enemies’ healing rates). Traditionally, DPS classes are much less resilient than the tanks, and will be defeated much more quickly by the enemies if they catch their undivided attention. Thus, a tank is far more useful for keeping them alive and is far more economical to heal.
• Healers have the ability to repair damage to ally HP in excess of that ally’s innate healing abilities and recovery rate. Without a healer, a group of tanks and DPS can generally only fight for a set period of time directly related to the incoming damage from the enemies: once their HP runs out, they are done fighting one way or another. A healer skews this limitation, able to compensate for damage. With a good healer on the team, the limit to the duration of a battle becomes much longer and is limited only by the speed of the healer’s recharge of abilities and endurance/mana.

A second trinity encompasses “support” roles: buff, debuff, and control. While these are often considered subsets of healing, they can be distributed among the other classes as well.

• Buffing is the process of adding effects to allies that increase their power in certain spheres: generally attack or defense. A buffed character will generally take less damage and/or do more damage, effectively acting as a higher level while the buff is active.
• Debuffing is the opposite of buffing: applying effects to enemies that make them deal less damage and/or take more damage. While debuffs are very similar to buffs, they aren’t balanced one-to-one: if a buff and a debuff were exactly equivalent in their effects, it would be more efficient to use the buff, as the intent is to defeat the enemy quickly, removing the debuff, while a buff might last through several fights.
• Control is any power that restricts an enemy’s actions or movement. The classic controls are roots (which hold the enemy in place but allow it to continue attacking) and stuns (which completely incapacitate the enemy). Other control include fears (which usually keep the enemy from attacking but allow it to move and defend) and silence-type effects (which prevent the enemy from using a certain class of abilities). Some MMOs, like the original Guild Wars, include soft controls: an action is not impossible, but doing it is tactically unsound (e.g., making an attack deals damage to the attacker).

Most MMOs stick very closely to this model. The question is, do they do so because it’s a tried and true formula, or because combinations of the two trinities can account for nearly every action programmable for an MMO.

What effects outside the two trinities are possible, but rarely or never used?

MMO Crafting’s Vicious Cycle

The amount of currency earned from selling crafted items is less than earned from selling the components required to craft the same item.	→	Savvy players don’t bother to craft at lower levels; they only harvest components and sell them (for enough currency to simply buy items and have cash left over).
↑		↓
These players buy up lots of lower level components, turn them into crafted items to grind up their craft skills, and then sell off the crafted goods for almost nothing (the item was just a side effect of the skill-up).	←	Once they get their character to high levels, players begin to desire the end-game benefits of maximized craft skills. They find they have enough wealth to buy up lots of components that seemed very expensive at lower level.

Reference

The Transliteration Problem

MMORPGs are in a weird position: halfway between multiplayer video game and virtual world.

A virtual world’s central tenet is immersion, in that it is trying, ultimately, to create something that feels like a real place, even if not a real world, to its participants. The goal is to get users to create a shared space that at least has verisimilitude, even if it doesn’t have realism. A successful virtual world is one where users log in consistently because it feels like a vacation spot where all their friends are.

Multiplayer video games have a different agenda, frequently: fun. The trappings of the system aren’t as important as providing an enjoyable game experience for the people that log in: either cooperatively or competitively. It’s a rare multiplayer game that actually achieves anything like immersion, as the kind of play that stands up to multiple players is hard to blend with true immersive touches: the chance that someone is going to do something out of character goes up exponentially for each added user.

Virtual worlds can sometimes bypass this problem by virtue that so many people will be there for the shared illusion, rather than any other motives: if the world doesn’t even have much gameplay, those there are the ones that want to treat it like a world.

MMOs try to straddle this line, and, going beyond, differentiate themselves on the third tier: entertainment (e.g., story). There are very few major MMOs on the market right now that aren’t based on recreating an existing IP (or, at least, an easily definable story genre). So MMOs are almost all trying to be a triple threat: an immersive virtual world where users will come just to hang out while creating an atmosphere of fun that has people exploring the game mechanics of the system together, all the while providing enough veneer of entertaining story to draw in those who don’t just want to escape, but to escape into their favorite story.

It’s next to impossible to do all three things right, because they’re all in some ways competing styles. The interesting thing is seeing what each MMO achieves, and thinking about why they did it that way (and whether it was a good idea).

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about this due to the free City of Heroes weekend after several months of playing Champions Online.

City of Heroes is decently immersive: it works very hard to explain away as many gameplay conceits as possible within the setting, and create lots of opportunities for people to mingle. It has fun multiplayer gameplay: there’s good synergy between the character types without precluding having success with any random group, and everyone has something to do. But it’s a terrible transliteration of comics: no matter how much work goes into the mission descriptions, they’re still all about entering random buildings and obliterating foes in a craze of particle effects. It’s no more representative of comics than dressing up as your favorite hero to go bowling: fun if everyone is doing it, but not really the same as being a superhero.

Champions Online seems to have tried to do the opposite. The world looks, feels, and plays like an (admittedly farcically campy at times) four-color superhero story. Missions exist to do a variety of comic style things, combats are often clear and varied in ways similar to comics, and the art and VO are designed specifically to feel very similar to a superhero theme park, if not to a comic exactly. This is the problem, though: the game can’t be immersive because it’s not much deeper than the Marvel Islands of Adventure at Universal Studios. Comics can get away with only focusing on the fun parts, and skipping boring travel with, at most, a few scenes on the team’s jet. Champions tries to do this by squishing every significant area into a couple of square miles of each zone. Unlike CoH, there’s very little dead space on any of the maps: story content fills almost every place you can visit. Paradoxically, though, the dead space is precisely what makes the game feel like an actual world (which is full of space where nothing exciting really happens).

In the end, players are choosing between the two games based on graphics and loyalty and gameplay, but the real differentiating factor is immersion vs. story: one game made a somewhat functional world designed with superheroes in mind, while the other actually tried to tell superhero stories, no matter the consequences on the space.

Maybe when DC Online comes out it will do an exceptional job of feeling like both an exceptional comic story and a living, breathing world, but sacrifice gameplay to do it. Then players will really have an excellent trio of choices to meet their exact MMO needs.

Consciousness Twinning

(Originally posted August 2009)

I had an interesting idea for a weird-sciencey explanation for respawning in a scifi videogame context:

Late in the 21st century, we figured out transportation. You know, like Star Trek: the state of all your atoms and molecules and stuff is determined and replicated somewhere else. The method for doing it wound up being quite elegant, if you’re a big-brained string theorist guy. But, the interesting part, was the first guy they tried it on raised the obvious objections: “don’t I just die here and a copy of me is made somewhere else?” He made them see if they could create the copy somewhere else without destroying his current body. And damned if they couldn’t. But there was the weird part.

You’ve heard of quantum entanglement? The little quarks bouncing up and down one place and affecting their brother quarks across time and space with no regard for the speed of light? It turns out consciousness is like that. Something about your brain state, when it’s copied exactly, results in you basically being in two places at once. The first guy had to be put in sensory deprivation to deal with it, but he had two bodies and was aware of them at the same time. You have to be a special kind of person to be able to deal with that much sensory overload, though, and nobody’s figured out how to effectively use two bodies, yet.

Anyway, the persistence of consciousness issues aside, they tried a standard transport: kill a guy here and build him there. That worked out less well. That guy showed up at his destination with nasty gaps in memory and personality shifts. Turns out, without his consciousness holding the wave state open or whatever for even a moment, when they recreated him his brain pathways collapsed just a bit. They figured if they tried to clone someone out of cold storage that way, he might just wake up a vegetable. Religious folks rejoiced that there was something special about sapience, even if it was just the weird quantum wave form generated by the flow of electrons through your nerves.

There was a solution, for the wealthy or the special: a brain in a jar. You selectively clone someone’s brain, drop it in a nutrient bath, and go about your business. The guy dies or needs to be transported, there’s still a brain in a jar in a lab somewhere holding open those consciousness pathways, seeing everything the guy saw up to his moment of death, creating a stable platform to resurrect him on. Plus, if you stick a couple electrodes in the jar brain, you have a completely secure way of communicating with agents in the field by giving them the information in a locked-down facility and twinning it over to the live dude.

And that’s how the elite agents operate. They have a backup brain in a jar somewhere. They can receive orders deep in enemy territory, be transported willy-nilly wherever there’s resources to do so, and even be recreated with full memories after the moment of “death.” I hear it’s an awesome insurance package… if you trust your boss to own a working copy of your brain.

MMO Theory: Incentivizing Crafting

(Originally Posted June 2009)

Right now on City of Heroes, generic crafted level 50 accuracy-improving enhancements are selling for 500k each in the game’s currency at the player auction house. This isn’t too bad, considering that level 40 versions of the same enhancement are selling for 400k.

Except that level 40 enhancements cost 200-300k to craft (depending on how much you paid for the components), while level 50 enhancements cost 1 million to craft before you even add the components. Anyone off the street can make a tidy profit from crafting and selling the level 40s, while anyone trying to sell the higher level versions is going to bleed currency like a sieve.

The problem comes from how crafting is regularly incentivized in MMOs.

Back when I was playing World of Warcraft (and I have no reason to believe it’s any different now), the advice to players wanting to make money as quickly as possible was to take two gathering professions (instead of a gathering profession and a craft). The reason for this was very straightforward: for almost every crafted item at every level, the components of the item would sell for more on the auction house than the actual item. Nearly every crafted item was sold at a loss.

The reason for this is very simple: the crafters weren’t making items for sale, they were making them for skillups. WoW’s crafting follows a very hierarchical progression; a crafter can’t make items appropriate for a higher level until increasing his or her skill by making many items of lower level. The vast majority of crafted items posted to the auction house were, therefore, priced mostly incidentally: their value to the crafter was that making them had increased his or her skill by a point, not what they’d sell for.

Remember those people with two gathering professions? Once they reached the level cap and had plenty of money, they might decide that they wanted to dabble in the crafting system. They’d drop one of their gathering skills, start a new craft at 0, and then proceed to buy lots of components (driving up the price), craft recipes to skill up as quickly as possible, and sell the crafted items as an afterthought (glutting the market with cheap items and driving down the price). The cycle repeated itself.

Why level a crafting skill at all? Each contained a few decent crafted items that were either usable only by the crafter, or were hard to get. Thus, amidst the dross of crafted goods, there were a few rare items that were worth more than their components, and worth all the trouble of skilling up crafting to get.

City of Heroes’ situation is a bit more complicated, but similar. Instead of offering skillups, CoH offers crafting badges. Once you’ve made a certain number of enhancements of a given type and level, further enhancements of that kind don’t require a new recipe and the actual crafting is done at half-cost. For the Level 40 Accuracy enhancement mentioned above, that’s a saving of around 150k (3/8 of the sale price becomes pure profit). In order to sell enhancements at this profit, though, a crafter has to make a lot of enhancements at a minimal profit, or even a loss, first.

And even when the crafter gets the badge that makes crafting the enhancement profitable, he or she is still competing with random-drop non-generic recipes that cost the same to make no matter who crafts them. The level 50 enhancements are so much less profitable largely because level 50 is the max level, and characters there would rather buy specific set-based enhancements than the generics.

But, ultimately, the low price of crafted enhancements is the same problem as WoW. Accuracy enhancements are one of a few exceptions that are in high demand; most crafted enhancements sell for far less than the cost of their components, much less the cost of crafting. I spent the last week as part of the problem: I was trying to get all the crafting badges* on one of my characters, so the actual enhancements were just the trash left over from getting the badge. Anyone on when I was could have gotten enhancements that cost up to 200,000 to craft for as little as 100. And I still had to delete a lot of the lowest level ones because the market was so glutted that it wasn’t worth tying up an auction slot for days on something I was basically giving away.

This long and rambling explanation brings me to my point: MMOs will never actually be virtual worlds for the purposes of crafters as long as learning to craft is part of the grind.

In the real world, crafted goods very rarely cost less than the materials used to make them. There are simply too few people making any given thing relative to the population as a whole, and even fewer of them that can afford to take a loss on their work. But in an MMO, fully everyone in the population can be a crafter; and as long as a number goes up on the character sheet and something useful eventually comes out, very few are going to actually care that crafting is an expense rather than an income. The game is to make the crafting skill number go up, not to make money with the crafting.

But I think there is a significant minority of players that go into these games with the fantasy of becoming a crafter in the traditional sense: buying components wisely, putting hard work and love into a creation, and selling it for a profit. For these people, requiring them to make 10 of Widget A and 10 of Widget B before they can make Widget C (the one they really want to make) is not a feature. Requiring them to go gather their own materials if they want to actually make a profit on their crafting (and still knowing they’d have made more of a profit just selling the components) is not a feature.

And you’d likely have enough of these people that your economy would be perfectly healthy if they were only competing against one another on price, instead of against the unrealistic prices set by high-level characters grinding up a tradeskill. The rest of your players probably wouldn’t care, as long as they still had things to do that interested them.

For this to happen, it requires designing part of the game around players that have little interest (or even capability) in beating up walking sacks of EXP and leaving one more number that goes ding off of the majority’s character sheets. It’s a lot harder than just letting everyone craft, forcing them to grind it up, and thereby adding an additional time sink to the game.

But it might result in a much healthier economy and much happier crafters.

*And I did, too!

Modular Game Idea: Inverse Ninja Principle

Originally posted July 2007

Applicable to: Any MMO that uses levels, and wants to provide a continuous leveling pace, but wants to minimize the tendency towards higher level characters being exponentially more powerful than lower level ones.

Players gain levels in a typical fashion, gaining new combat abilities, hit points, and special abilities as appropriate to the game. At all levels, the system needs a way to generate average or default values for character interaction with targets in combat (e.g., how much damage does the character deal to an average target and how much damage does the character take) .

The system requires a method for determining which characters are targeting one another, with a reduced chance of exploiting (i.e., a player should not be able to game the system by temporarily de-targeting his actual opponent).

When two characters of unequal level fight, their combat abilities are set to within one level of one another. For example, if a level 20 PC is attacking a level 30 monster, the PC will defend and take damage as if fighting a level 21 monster and the monster will defend and take damage as if fighting a level 29 PC (the experience and treasure awards will also be adjusted to these values). Much higher level characters maintain an advantage in variety of special abilities and such gained from levels, but do not have an overwhelming advantage due to massive damage output and hit points relative to the lower level character.

As described so far, this is very similar to the sidekicking and giant monster systems from City of Heroes. However, the Inverse Ninja Principle goes a step further: swarming a foe makes each individual less effective.

Each additional lower level individual attacking a target increases the level spread by 1. For example, a level 30 monster fights a single level 20 PC as if fighting a level 29. However, a pair of level 20 PCs are fought as level 28s, and nine or more PCs are fought as their original level 20. Once characters are reduced to their actual level, no further adjustment takes place.

Additional modifications to the system might mean that elite/boss creatures are always adjusted high (a level 20 PC vs. a level 30 boss is adjusted to effectively level 28 while a level 20 boss vs. a level 30 PC is adjusted to level 30).

Disadvantages of this MGI:

• Players will discover interesting exploits, no matter how much logic is put in to prevent them.
• Content cannot easily be gated by level; PCs will have at least some chance of tackling high-end content immediately.
• If mob AI isn’t tuned to make use of higher level abilities, fighting higher level foes will not feel any different than fighting lower level ones.

Advantages of this MGI:

• Content is never truly outleveled; higher level PCs can be sent into lower level areas and still maintain some challenge
• Content cannot easily be gated by level; PCs will have at least some chance of tackling high-end content immediately.
• While individual players will have a chance in all situations, assembling a large group zerg will not enable players to easily overwhelm all foes.

Modular Game Idea: The Star that Burns Brightest…

Originally posted January 2007

Applicable To: Any massive multiplayer game that wishes to implement permanent death (PD) as a check against players ultimately clustering at the level cap/unsatisfying endgame, but doesn’t want to drive off newbies who are afraid that they’ll get killed.

All player characters have a flag that defaults to enabled, but can be disabled at will. When disabled, it can be re-enabled at will, with a slight delay period.

When the flag is enabled, the character is in safe mode (“insured,” “resurrectable,” “registered at the cloning facility,” or whatever else the world fiction is for recovering from losing a fight). The player plays the game normally.

Each time the flag is disabled, the player is warned that the character is now vulnerable to permanent death. Individual games may decide whether or not to allow some benefits to roll to a new character after a character dies permanently. When the flag is disabled, the character is deleted from the server on death, and the player must switch to an alternate character.

Additionally, while the flag is disabled, the character accrues intangible game rewards (exp, skill increases, etc.) at an X% greater rate. This percent increase can be tweaked to whatever provides the greatest risk/reward proposition to players. While the flag is disabled, the character’s level cap is Y% greater than the normal level cap; if the flag is re-enabled while the character is beyond the normal level cap, the extra levels are temporarily lost until the flag is once more disabled.

Disadvantages of this MGI:

• Unflagged players will complain when they die
• Flagged players will complain that they don’t receive the same leveling benefits as unflagged players
• Add-ons and strategies will be developed to unflag the player for the optimal periods to still make use of the safety net when in actual danger (the reason for the delay on re-flagging, to prevent a mod that re-flags at the instant before death)

Advantages of this MGI:

• The endgame can be tweaked to be difficult but possible for flagged characters. Unflagged characters gain a benefit of increased levels to tackle endgame challenges at the risk of permanent death. Outleveling the endgame becomes an ongoing risk commensurate with its rewards.
• Those adamantly against PD regard the game as having no PD by default. Those most likely to outlevel content, for whom PD is a typically touted balancing mechanism, will be more likely to enable it for themselves.
• Players can disable PD when they are in situations where PD would be unfair: when idle in a dangerous area, when engaging in unregulated PvP, when there is above average lag, etc.
• Even in open PvP situations, griefers have no way to tell when most players are unflagged, so will not know who can be attacked in order to player kill (PK). The only players that are obviously unflagged are those beyond the level cap; these targets are both the hardest for griefers, and griefers will generally have to open themselves to PD to have a shot at killing them.

Modular Game Idea: Diminishing Return Cooldowns

Originally posted January 2007

Applicable To: Any massive multiplayer game with abilities (especially buff/healing potions) that need to be put on some kind of arbitrary timer so all challenges can’t be overcome by spamming a button/item. This has probably been implemented before, but I don’t have an example so I’m putting it here for my own memory .

All consumable healing/buff items display a colored background that defaults to green. This may also include powers/abilities with a negligible resources cost to the player that are normally limited by hard cooldowns.

Each such item can be either diminishing or damaging. Diminishing items are never harmful to the character, but become increasingly less effective when used repeatedly in a time period. Damaging items may or may not damage attributes with the first use, but they become increasingly damaging with each additional use in a time period. Damaging items may or may not be diminishing (particularly potent buffs should probably diminish and damage).

Each such item has a percent effectiveness/damage rating, a use modifier, and a recovery rate.

Diminishing items start at 100% of their full potential. Their use modifier is the percentage reduced with each use, and may be a compounding percent (e.g., each use may remove a flat 20%, resulting in 5 uses to 0%, or a relative 20%, resulting in 80%, 64%, 51%, 41%, 33%, and so on, never actually quite reaching 0%). Their recovery rate is expressed in percentage recovered per second until returning to 100%, and may also be a compounding percent (with a flat recovery rate, there is a chance of a sweet spot where it’s advantageous to use the item every second rather than waiting for it to return to 100%, with a percentage recovery rate it may be harder to visually track how much time is left to return to full potency.).

Damaging items that are safe on their first use start at 0 damage/cost to a specific attribute. Damaging items that exact a penalty even on the first use start greater than 0. Their use modifier is the percentage the damage is increased with each use, and may be a compounding percent, or may need to be an actual number if starting at 0 (since it’s not useful to increase 0 by a percent). Their recovery rate is expressed in a percentage reduced per second until returning to the original percentage, and also may be a compounding percent.

For diminishing items, the colored background for the item begins green, and shifts to yellow and then red relative to the current percentage effectiveness. There may be a WoW-style visual clock-wipe timer to indicate when the item will return to a higher level of potency.

For damaging items, the colored background for the item begins green if there is no initial penalty or yellow if there is a small initial penalty. After the first use, the background becomes yellow or red, depending on the severity of the second-use penalty. The item then goes in the red to indicate that continuing use will have continuing penalties. As with diminishing returns, there may be a clock timer to indicate when the penalties will be gone.

Disadvantages of this MGI:

• Harder to code than a simple cooldown period for items, and requires the server to track cooldown at a variable rate (however, WoW already does most of this for every character power with a cooldown, so it’s probably not that intensive)
• Players may feel obliged to use more consumables, since there’s no hard cooldown to indicate how frequently a consumable is supposed to be used
• Inattentive players may wind up seriously injuring their characters by using damaging consumables too frequently in a period
• It may be less intuitive to balance the effects of cooldown items/abilities than with a hard cooldown; does the 100% effect need to be reduced to compensate for more uses in the period, or can the same effect be achieved by tweaking the modifier and recovery rates?

Advantages of this MGI:

• Players are not arbitrarily limited by a bad timing choice with a consumable (e.g., a healing potion can be used at reduced effectiveness as a last measure to cheat death even if it was used for a big heal recently)
• Players (like me!) that are disinclined to use consumables/cooldown abilities for fear that they will be unavailable due to cooldown when they’re really needed can risk a diminishing return instead of total inability to use the item/ability.
• Players gain an increased feeling of choice regarding their use of cooldown items/abilities

Modular Game Idea: the Post

Originally posted December 2006

I got Designing Virtual Worlds for Christmas, so these armchair game-design thoughtlets may crop up with increasing regularity as I read it.

The Post

Applicable To: Any massive multiplayer game with a setting that expects travel and communication between cities/population hubs to be potentially dangerous and slow (fantasy, post-apocalyptic, space, etc.). Eve may already do something similar, from what I’ve heard.

There is no instant mail communication between players in game, particularly when sending items or money. There is no game-protected, reliable mail, either, such as WoW’s one hour delay post.

To send a letter or ship money or goods, players place the intended correspondence in an envelope/box, seal it (giving it the Sealed flag), and address it to a city and player name (automated functions selected from a drop-down).

Players deliver this mail to the local post office. If the mail is going to a recipient in the same city, the player pays a small fee and the postmaster NPC holds the package for the recipient (potentially alerting the recipient as necessary to other design goals). The recipient picks up the package at his or her leisure, and there’s no risk to the package unless the game also features the ability to attack NPC vaults.

Individual players or guilds can register with different post offices as mail carriers. They pay a fee to register, and the postmaster takes a portion (maybe 10%) of any wages earned by carrying mail. They set their own fees for different categories of packages to different cities.

If a player wishes to mail a package to another city, the postmaster displays a (slow and expensive) NPC carrier as well as all the PC carriers registered with the office, and their relative rates for the package in question. Carriers are sorted to the top of the list based on their number of packages delivered and their success rate. The postmaster might also display an average time to deliver a package, based on previous experience.

Players can choose to pick a reliable carrier near the top of the list, but may wish to choose a less reliable carrier due to price or speed of delivery. Top mail carriers will likely compete on prices, driving down the rates, while a particularly infrequent delivery route may become increasingly expensive.

Based on other design goals, player mail carriers may be automatically flagged for PVP when carrying a certain value of shipped items, with an additional option of looting the mail from slain carriers. NPC carriers may be killable as well, and will definitely be killable if PC carriers are flagged. In this variation, sending mail is not made dangerous just by monsters and untrustworthy carriers, it also risks delay and loss of the mail due to PVP. Particularly difficult trade routes may become cash cows for the mail carriers brave enough to run them (this is where I think the idea intersects with Eve).

Based on design goals, PC carriers may be offered a skill that lets them tamper with sealed packages with a decreasing risk of detection, allowing them the ability to skim with less chance of being noticed.

Disadvantages of this MGI:

• Players lose reliability of mail delivery time
• Players may lose mail shipped to other cities
• Players may wind up paying unreasonable amounts for delivery if a competitive market fails to develop

Advantages of this MGI:

• Player economy gains a structured, competitive market
• Players can earn money for a non-traditional role (traveler)
• Players can send mail within the same city without an arbitrary delay
• Time and difficulty to deliver mail aids in world verisimilitude/suspension of disbelief
• If the PVP flag is enabled, PVP-minded players gain a structured, obvious opportunity to benefit from PVP, while PVP-unfriendly players can stay away from it by keeping their mail deliveries under the PVP threshold
• An alternate, purely PC-driven market may develop where PC postmasters establish themselves with competitive fees and percentages for mail delivery at the cost of decreased reliability