Diablo 3 - Randomized content

A lot of game content in Diablo 3 is determined randomly. Arguably, more randomness means more diverse content and therefore players less likely to become bored by repetition. But randomness also has drawbacks.

Maps

Maps are generated somewhat procedurally. Some elements like the map borders remain constant, but events and dungeon entrances are picked randomly among a pool and placed randomly in predetermined places.

Maps like The Den of the Fallen sometimes have loops, which is annoying: players kill monsters on their way, but when they realize they have been looping around, they go back on their way without any monsters to kill. It is a waste of time. A solution could involve using heuristics to prevent loops.

A Greater Rift (GR) is a dungeon in which players race against time. The higher the level of a GR, the tougher its monsters. GR is a competitive activity: leaderboards show the teams who achieved the highest GR levels. Problem: the GR map is picked randomly; sometimes it is a maze, sometimes it is linear, and sometimes it has loops. The randomness does not make for a fair competition. One solution would be to remove maze maps from the selection. Another solution would involve keeping the map and monsters constant, and make one leaderboard per map. It would be pretty much like a racing game.

Elite affixes

Elite monsters can have up to 5 affixes. Affixes have 3 categories: crowd-control such as Vortex, defensive such as Extra health, or offensive such as Desecrator. These affixes are picked randomly, with a couple heuristics making sure that an elite can have at most one crowd-control affix and at most one defensive affix. Some affixes such as Invulnerable Minions were so annoying that they were removed from the game altogether.

Still, some combinations remain more deadly than others. For example, elites combining Molten (they burn where they walk on), Fast, and Horde (create 8-10 Molten and Fast minions) are the bane of melee characters.

Gear

In the original Diablo 3 (also known as D3v for Diablo 3 vanilla), loots were completely random. For example, a Wizard could drop a mace only Barbarians can use. Enters the Auction House (AH for short): the Wizard sells the mace on the AH and, with the money received for it, buys a better wand from the AH. Trading through the AH worked well from launch in May 2012 until August 2012 when the designers realized that the AH can short circuit the natural pace of item drops, making the game feel less rewarding for some players. Indeed, players could obtain second-best gear in only a couple days, play for a week, get bored for not progressing, and leave the game. Conclusion: completely-random loot with an AH for trading does not work.

Loot 2.0 landed in the game just before the Reaper of Souls expansion. Loot 2.0 has 3 parts: 1) little to no exchange between players (to prevent gold farming), and no AH, 2) loot is targeted to the player, ie Wizards only drop Wizard gear, and 3) the Mystic lets the player reroll an attribute on any piece of gear. Six months after the release of the expansion, this has been holding fine.

Play Money - Dibbell 2006

Play Money, Dibbell, 2006

Notes from the book, re-organized in sections by myself for easier summarizing and reading. Below, UO stands for Ultima Online, and OSI stands for Origin Systems Inc, the game company who developed and ran UO. OSI was owned by EA.

Playing

Players keep playing because they want to go up the player ladder the same way RL people want to go up the social ladder. At some point, you have to decide either to leave the game cold-turkey or to give the game a point: make it productive. Giving the game a point is easier because the game is addictive. Although flow happens 3 times more often at work than during leisure times, play makes flow more enjoyable.

Huizinga: play has always been part of society. Weber: the Protestant Ethic of Puritans considers productive activities as recommended by God, and sports and leisure as wastes of time. Capitalism principles come from Ethic of Puritans, hence a capitalist society considers play shameful. Dibbell: Games are symptoms of post-modern rampant abstraction and transformation of wealth creation. Marx: solidity melts into air. Dibbell about games: production is melting into play.

Troy Stolle is a RL carpenter who played a grandmaster blacksmith. When fired IRL, he decides to sell his 52-month old account on eBay for $500, when the account is going to be resold for $2k. He thinks it's all fake anyway and does not realize there is demand for virtual items.

Being part of UO's virtual economy

Virtual economies require and implement constraints and scarcity. Castronova: in MMOs, scarcity breeds market, and markets cross realities at their onset. Dibbell realizes there's a complex supply chain of warriors who drop, artisans who craft, hagglers who buy/sell IG, brokers who buy/sell on eBay or on their own website, and finally the clients. Example of a client: a Mum buys a $25 virtual item for her kid's Christmas. Why people sell for so low is the mystery that lies at the center of market economics: it generates profits at all levels of the chain.
Lesson: Theory of ludocapitalism, where play is a latent force waiting to be tamed the same way steam was the energy of the industrial revolution.

Julian Dibbell: born 1963, starts playing UO in early 2003. Weekly play time: 20 hours per week. First step in the economy: farming and selling batches of leather suits to another player. He Starts a blog in March 2003 to track his business adventures. A journalist VIP pass grants him earlier access to maps of the next update; he uses it to avoid the rush on new houses and buy 2 houses. Why keeping an uber house worth $600? I wanted to be envied. He accepts to share his house with a 17 year old kid, who sells IG some items for him and brings him a small profit. Unusual/weird "friendship". He plans to sell the other house for 30m gold, but a famous player on his shard asks for 20m and he accepts, honored and intimidated.

IG runebooks let players memorize places to teleport to them later on. Memorize all the mining spots in that book. Once the spots have been written in the first book, duplicating that book takes little time. Dibbell sells each book $3 on eBay. He quickly realizes this is too little profit for too much time spent. Some "rares", on the other hand, can sell on eBay for $75. Rares, along with other luxury items such as hair dyes or houses, are often only sold by NPCs to implement gold sinks.

Although virtual economies enable players to bond, when you get too deep into it, you're not a player anymore. The social aspects and the fusion with fiction disappear. Yet vendors of virtual gold are still immersed in some ways: Dibbell has no idea what he's doing at DiGRA or State of Play, talking about virtual economies and law, because he's more eager to live in [MMOs] than to understand them. He has self-doubt and wonders if the study of virtual economies has an intellectual substance about as substantive as pot smoke.

Scams and (lack of) protections:

• Kids buy from their Mum's PayPal or credit card and receive the item within 15 mins. After a day or two, Mum reverts the transaction, but the player still has the item in his inventory, or even sold it to someone else.
• Scammer advertises selling an item for half its market value. When buyer comes, the scammer sends him a link to a Paypal-looking phishing website in an email, and then empties the buyer's Paypal account.
• A seller advertises a rare item. Using a thief character, another player goes to the seller's house, steals the item, and sells it IG or on eBay. Dibbell knowingly buys from the thief: in-game robbery is part of the game.
• eBay and Paypal do not provide insurance over "intangible" goods. They provide insurance for soccer match tickets, presumably "tangible". Still, they say they can't insure a real paper ticket with a code written in real ink for virtual gold.

In 2004, the IRS said:

• Declare as income anything you receive IRL, be it work of art, real dollars, or virtual gold. Illegal income such as stolen or embezzled funds must be included [...] if from your self-employment activity
• For normal players, prizes won in lucky number drawing must be included in your income at their fair market value
• Organizations that facilitate the trading of goods and services, such as OSI with virtual gold, should send tax forms to and withheld taxes from its players.

In 2005, an IRS specialist on the phone said there's no legislation yet on Internet barters or virtual economies.

UO vendors

IRL, dozens of monetary startups create "fake" money. E-gold backs their virtual currency with real gold stored in private vaults. An artist draws custom dollars and sells them, as art pieces, for more than their face value. Dibbell: We live in an age of money hackers. Make-believe [is] required to establish monetary value.

Blacksnow Interactive is located in Orange County. Business model: gold farm of 8 Mexicans in Tijuana, Mexico, paid $19/day, generate $30k profits per month. They play according to scripts given to them daily by their on-site supervisor. $800k sitting in inventory. Blacksnow trialed Mythic after they asked eBay to shut down Blacksnow's DAoC's gold auctions. Too bad Blacksnow vanished after being trialed by another game company, because justice would have had to determine who owns the IG wealth: players who spend the time, or companies who make and own the games?

Bob Kiblinger used to work as a chemist with decent pay. After playing UO nights and weekend, his wife divorced him. He bought and resold Troy Stolle's tower to Dibbell. Bob is a popular broker with 10k+ ratings on eBay. Has list of furnishers for each shard on IM. Spends 14 hours per day trading accounts and items. Belongs to the Markee Dragon conglomerate of the top 7 UO brokers. Markee Dragon provides server transfer, lets you pay your game time by gold instead of real dollars (they own the account and pay it for you), and brokers IG gold. Markee Dragon's ethics say: don't buy from bot farmers because they cheat. In 3 months of 2003, Dibbell bought $3700 of discounted gold from bot farmers, so he felt kind of unethical. Later, Rich the bot farmer gave him the list of his top 10 clients for 2003: Dibbell is 10th, all Markee Dragons belong to the top10, and number one is Bob who bought a total of $35k of gold in 2003.
Lesson: you need to buy from bot farmers to make a living in the US as a gold broker.

Using DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool, gives the market state and the list of vendors in a particular eBay category:

• Weekly sales of UO items and accounts: $160k
• Yearly sales of UO items and accounts: $4.2M
• Change rate: $16 for 1M gold

And there are other sources of revenue for vendors that are not visible on eBay:

• buy whole accounts for $300 and sell all the items in them for a total of $1200 = 400% profit
• IG gold suppliers run big malls
• A Guild has the monopoly on mining spots in a shard. Its guild leader sells gold to his broker.
• Camp houses that will soon be re-opened for sale because their owner has not logged in for a long time. Can be done with a bot. Then resell houses for a lot of gold or dollars.

Working for Bob, in a solitary and obsessive interlude of 3 weeks in mid 2003, Dibbell made $1100 of sales by taking his share on buying and delivering suits on his shard. In the next 3 weeks, he only dedicated 2h/day selling packs of 100k or 1m gold and suits on eBay or to Bob. His sales remained around $850 per week. On average, brokers make 20% profit from their sales. After 3 months, Dibbell made $800 profits and ranked 65th out of 800 in terms of sales of eBay UO vendors. Bob is ranked first with $8k sales and $2k profits per week. Dibbell compiled those results thanks to the DeepAnalysis tool.

Gordon, a Cantonese exec, just opened a 10-man gold farm. He asks for partnership with Dibbell and Bob: his farmers would bring items that Dibbell and Bob sell to clients, and they all share profits. Predictions of $1600 sales per week. Gordon says he pays his farmers $1.5/hour and they can generate $5/hour. However, a NYTimes article in 2005 revealed that Chinese farmers are usually paid $75/months in 12-hour shifts, ie less than 30 cents/hour. Anyway, Gordon never generated the profits he mentioned. However, Dibbell, on a road-trip from Indiana to California, reached a max of $1k/week of profit for 4 weeks, mostly only selling 1m gold packs.

Bot Farmers

The game allows the use of a macro API provided players stay in front of the screen. Bots use macros on exploits such as 1) buy clothes from NPC 2) tear down clothes into tissue using basic tailoring skill and macro 3) sell tissue for more than the clothes. This technique generates 350k gold per hour. A Georgia man used it and amassed 20b gold, ie $300k. The total wealth of UO on all English shards was estimated at 35b, hence huge inflation wave coming up and detected by GMs. OSI fixed the exploit and wiped the extra gold by banning the bots.

Richard Thurman: 30 year-old software engineer. Leads the hacker group who developed EasyUO, a UO bot program. Rich's bots on 20 machines brought him 60k gold per hour using cartography exploits. Competitors denounced him to GMs and he was banned. Came up with a more defensive strategy: 1) eBay is too risky, hence build network of IG wholesale gold buyers. They get gold for 40% less than the eBay price. 2) to check for bots, GM wear a colored stick and ask the player "what's the color?". The bots would IM or SMS Rich when they were faced with a GM, and receive text to say to the GM by IM or SMS from Rich. 3) Plug A.L.I.C.E so that bots talk by themselves.

Blacksnow's leader and Rich meet in October 2003. Blacksnow proposes to agree on gold prices in return of receiving a dll used by EasyUO. Rich says it belongs to his group and refuses. Blacksnow discovers the hacker group had been blackmailed in the past by a player and had had to give the dll to the blackmailer. Pissed, Blacksnow reports Rich's bots to GMs.

An updtate from OSI on the merchant NPCs implements an offer-and-demand scheme, but assumes that players won't buy more than 500 items. Rich and another bot farmer find the glitch: buy 2k items at a time, the NPC believes you only bought 500 so the price does not increase as much, then resell the 2k items for small profit. Bot farmers use the exploit for a while, making millions of gold per hour. Blacksnow finds out they're making a lot and blackmails them for their technique against not denouncing them to GMs. The 2 farmers decide to stop their scheme and tell OSI about the exploit so that no other benefits from it. They made a total of $150k profit from 20b gold.

PS: Dibbell thinks that designing a single-shard MMO for 100k players is an impossible dream, and that's why MMOs stay sharded.

For the win - Doctorow 2010

Doctorow C. 2010, For The Win

Notes from For The Win from Doctorow. The book's license is Creative Commons NC-SA. No spoiler here, only some interesting concepts mentioned throughout the book.

Part I: The gamers and their games, the workers at their work

• Some players in developing countries like China or India farm gold or are paid to raid with richer solo players from the West to drop them gear or level them up. Western players want to keep up with their friends gear- and XP-wise.
• The parents, whether Indians or Americans, don't understand how their kids can spend so much time playing online games. American parents talk about addiction whereas Indian parents about waste of time.
• There are multiple, competing interworld exchanges: want to swap out your Zombie Mecha wealth for a fully loaded spaceship and a crew of jolly space-pirates to crew it? Ten different gangs want your business. Even RL traders place money on the value of virtual gold, because virtual gold fluctuates a lot and can be exchanged against RL money through the official in-game banks. RL criminal cartels also turn IG gold into real money.
• Big gold farming businesses hire hardcore gamers to kill other farmers. The biggest sellers of virtual gold are game companies themselves and they hire killers too.
• Dungeons are made so that farmers make less and less money: grinding gold gives 12k the first hour, 8k the second, 2k the third, and 100 at the end. Then, a GM appears and bans them, but they've already collected as much as they could for the night before going to sleep.
• Mechanical Turks were an army of workers in gamespace. All you had to do was prove that you were a decent player -- the game had the stats to know it -- and sign up, and then log in whenever you wanted a shift. The game would ping you any time a player did something the game didn't know how to interpret -- talked too intensely to a non-player character, stuck a sword where it didn't belong, climbed a tree that no one had bothered to add any details too -- and you'd have to play spot-referee. You'd play the non-player character, choose a behavior for the stabbed object, or make a decision from a menu of possible things you might find in a tree.

Part II: Hard work at play

• Mushroom Kingdom is a Mario-based MMO from Nintendo-Sun. You can play on the side of Princess Peach, or on Bowser's.
• Prikell equations: a certain amount of difficulty plus a certain amount of your friends plus a certain amount of interesting strangers plus a certain amount of reward plus a certain amount of opportunity equalled fun
• virtual currency tended to rest pretty close to its real value, plus or minus five percent
• Socio-economics experiment about envy: lock 25 grad students in a room for 8 hours. Give each of them a poker chip and say "Every hour I'm going to give each of you $20 per chip you hold". At the beginning, each chip is worth 8*20=$160. After 2 hours, chips start being exchanged against dollars, and at the end of the 8th hour, some chips even get traded for $50, while they only bring $20 to their owner. Each of them started and kept trading because of the fear that he was missing out on what the rest of them were getting: the sirens called Someone else is getting richer, why aren't you?. Greed is "if 1 is good, then 10 is definitely better". Envy is about what other people think is good, and being part of the crowd.
• Gamerunners spend most of their time in the Command Room, watching the world through logs, screens, chat channels, or charts, to get a feeling of the game worlds - Fingerspitzengefuhl.
• the game soundtrack has its own AI that creates more dramatic moments

Part III: Ponzi

• Gold farmers used to login from Asian IP addresses, give all the gold from an account to a newbie without speaking a single word, who in turn would give it silently to a bunch of other newbies from guilds with names like "afasdsadssadsa289". Later, gold farmers logged in using American proxies, started speaking broken English, and became indistinguishable from profitable Western kids.
• After their 12-hour shift, some gold farmers relax by playing some more with a separate avatar that they only use to play, not to work with.
• Pacific protest: ask everyone to gather in downtown and eat ice-creams. Recruit people passing-by in giving them ice-creams.
• If you nuked every account involved in a gold-farming buy, we'd depopulate the world by something like 80 percent.
• Coke ran games that turned over more money than Portugal, Poland or Peru.

The life of the Chinese gold farmer

Notes from a June 2007 New York Times article about gold farming by Dibbell.

Julian Dibbell, June 2007, The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer, 

• 100k Chinese workers are involved in RMT. RMT market = $1.8 billion worldwide
• 80 MMOs and 30M players worldwide. WoW brings $1bn/year to Blizzard.
• The Gross Domestic Product of the MMO player population is between $7bn and $12bn.
• The gold farming wang ba given as an example has 10 employees and generate $80k/year. 12-hour day/night shifts. Dormitories are in the second floor of the wang ba.
• Farmers collect 25 gold/hour. For 100 golds, the farmer receives $1.25 by his boss, and the boss receives $3+ by the gold selling website which sells those 100 gold for up to $20.
• After Blizzard banned 50k gold farmers, the exchange rate went from 6c/gold in Spring 2006 to 35c/gold in January 2007.
• Differences between power levellers and gold farmers: bigger teams (25 per 12-hour shift), less sweat-shop-like, have a company tee-shirt/polo, team spirit, less ban (because they use the customer's account and act nearly like actual players). Some leave gold farming to power levelling to have more room to play for themselves. They like the game/work because playing WoW = learning. Some even buy gold because they don't have time to grind.
• Raids have drops bound when picked. Therefore, gold farming/power levelling for high-end content is hard. Solution: make a guild, invite the customer in it, raid with him, and have him pick the loots when a boss is downed. Problem: too few customers buy it => cancelled.
• Gold farmers too want to play.