The loops of Diablo 3

In Vanilla D3 (D3 for short), players could buy or sell gear for in-game gold or real money at the auction house (AH). Players reported feeling frustrated: they drop legendary gear (yay!), but when they check the AH, they realize their legendary gear is actually average. So they buy amazing gear from the AH for cheap, roll over monsters they used to have so much trouble with, and become bored with the game quickly. Damion Schubert, a designer on SWTOR, echoed that the core loop of D2 was much stickier than D3's. So did players during a Reddit Q&A session with D3 designers. Personally, I started a year after the game launched, bought all my gear from the AH for little gold, never dropped any better gear, rarely managed to sell gear on the AH, and left after a month.

Blizzard removed the AH for the D3 expansion, Reaper of Souls (ROS), released in March 2014. The game feels better. Is it because the core game loop is back to what it was in D2?

Two core loops

At its core, Diablo (D2, D3, and ROS) has actually two intertwined core loops: the usual XP loop and the item-game loop. XP loop: kill monsters to accumulate XP to increase level to improve stats and skills to do more damage to kill harder monsters. Item-game loop: kill monsters to drop gear to improve stats and skills to do more damage to kill harder monsters.

To mix these two loops together, the Diablo designers decided that damage was dealt by skills, but increased by stats (e.g. each point of DEX increases damage by 1%) and gear (e.g. increase the damage of fire skills by 10%), especially weapons (which is why 40% of all drops are weapons or off-hand gear).

In D3, characters unlock skills every level until they reach 70. After level 70, characters gain Paragon levels. Each Paragon level gives 1 point to increase a stat. The real goal of Paragon levels is not better stats, but rather frustration control. The item-game loop triggers randomly and irregularly: a player could go for hours without dropping a better gear. The XP loop, on the other hand, is reliable and constantly increasing. In other words, the item-game is a roulette, while the XP loop a grind. While not super fun by themselves, combined they make the game more fun. Interestingly, Paragon levels were an afterthought, and only shipped 3 months after launch.

ROS and removing the AH

The XP loop did not change between Vanilla D3 and ROS, but the item loop did. In D3, the primary way to convert gold into items and vice-versa was the AH. But the AH went out of hand: powerful items were available for cheap, and a hyper-inflation boosted by a gold dupe bug made the economy collapse. In ROS, the AH was decommissioned and replaced by a beefed-up crafting system (crafting was insignificant in Vanilla D3).

As of patch 2.0.5, though, the gear available from crafting is mostly defensive or utility. The best gear is offensive, and dropped from monsters in high difficulty or found randomly in bounty rewards. Except for enchanting, crafting is pointless.

Clash of Clans - mechanics

Clash of Clans (CoC) is a mobile game for Android and iOS. It launched in August 2012, was the most lucrative iOS game of 2013. CoC was developed by SuperCell (SC), a Finnish game company founded in 2010. In April 2013, SC was generating 2.4 million dollars per day with only two games: CoC and Hay Day, a Farmville clone. In October 2013, a giant Japanese conglomerate bought half of SC's shares for 1.5 billion dollars.

I have played CoC actively from February to December 2013. I always played the game for free.

Resources

At the first glance, CoC is very much like Farmville: two resources, namely gold and elixir, are produced automatically over time. But resource production is perfectly done compared to Farmville: crops do not wither if they are not harvested on time. So it's always rewarding to come back and collect resources from the gold mines and collectors (mines, for short).

Building upgrades

Most buildings can be upgraded by spending one of the two resources. Gold is used to upgrade defensive buildings such as cannons or walls. Elixir is used to produce troops to attack other players, and to upgrade troop-related buildings such as barracks or army camps. Mines can also be upgraded to produce more resources per hour, but also to store more resources until they are collected. For example, a level-2 mine takes 2h30 to fill up, which may encourage new players to visit the game more often. But players quickly realize that they are wasting resources during the night or a day at school. So players want to upgrade their mines to level 5 because then they take 10 hours to fill up. But upgrading a mine to level 5 requires Town Hall level 3, which itself requires a significant amount of gold, usually obtained after several hours of play. And that is how players get hooked.

Player versus player

After 3-4 days, the core mechanics change progressively. The amount of resources produced by mines becomes negligible compared to the cost of building upgrades. The player realizes that to keep her upgrades going, she must steal resources from other players, or from the solo campaign missions. The solo missions can only be completed once, so PvP is unavoidable. At this point, I suspect most players to take a decision. Some decide PvP is not for them, so they stop playing. Of those who continue, a very small minority decide that the game is all about competing against other players. These players are called trophy hunters, since winning a battle rewards the player with trophies. A leader-board shows the 100 players with most trophies. Most trophy hunters spend real money to instantly max their buildings and troops. They eventually become regular buyers, the 2% whales spending $200 per week.

Farming

The remaining 98% who decide to keep playing focus on stealing resources from other players. The most dedicated of them are called farmers; they train cheap armies and ignore trophies as long as they loot resources. Farmers are very practical and calculating: should they build an army costing 5-50k elixir in 15 minutes, and loot 100k-500k of resources from another player, or wait for their mines to produce 5k of each resource in these 15 minutes? Their behavior is obvious: 1) turtling is a waste of time, 2) they login when their army is trained, and 3) they logout when they have attacked and do something else (like playing another game) while their troops are training.

Sinks

There are one elixir sink and two gold sinks. Elixir is sunk when the player trains expensive and powerful troops. Since farmers usually train fast and cheap troops, they often have more elixir than they can spend. The first gold sink is walls. Each of the 250 walls costs 8M gold to max out. The best farmers make 1M per hour, so we're talking about 2,000 hours of (sporadic) gameplay here. For someone playing 5 hours per weekday night and 20 hours during the weekend, walls take around 10 months. So walls are a humongous gold sink. The second gold sink lies in the match-making. When a player goes to attack, she is presented with another player's village. If there is too little loot, she can next for 200-1000 coins. Spending 50k gold in nexts to find a 200k-gold raid is very common. That second sink is very big too.

Pace of progression

To give an idea of the pace of progression, below are screenshots from my village from March to November 2013.

Gold buying patterns

Picks from a paper I wrote about gold buying patterns for FDG 2012. The data comes from an online questionnaire completed from March to May 2010 by 2800+ WoW players from around the world. Unless mentioned, all results are significant with a p-value below 0.01.

• Overall, 14% of people have ever bought gold.
• Men are twice more likely to buy gold than women (17% vs 8%), but there is no difference between Asians and Westerners.
• Achievement increases the likelihood to buy gold, while immersion decreases it. The effect of achievement is stronger on men.

• 12% of people who only play with people they know IRL have bought gold. This ratio increases to 15% for people who play with both RL relatives and friends made IG, and to 21% for people who play only with friends they made IG.
• Overall, people who have taken longer breaks from the game are more likely to buy gold.

• But really, it's a big mess to know which variables influence gold buying: in the correlation graph below, vertices represent variables, and edges bearing positive/negative values indicate positive/negative correlations between two variables. Values closer to 1 in absolute value indicate higher correlations.

• That's where GLM come in handy: they account for interactions between variables in regressions from multiple variables.
• Controlling for all other variables, the odds of buying gold increase when playing on a private server, being a man, having frozen one's subscription, having made friends IG, playing for achievement, and having played the game for a long time. On the other hand, the odds
• Controlling for all other variables, the odds of buying gold decrease when having had a college education, playing for immersion or socializing, and playing with cousins, siblings, or spouse.

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.

Fundamentals of Game Design, ch 14: Strategy Games

Strategy = planning series of actions against the opponent(s). There's usually a large variety of potential actions. Analysis paralysis happens when players have to wait for the other to be done thinking about his next move. In RTS, decisions have to be taken quickly. The basic mechanics of strategy games involve units and the factories that produce them. There can be diplomacy if the scenario is long enough. The attributes of units can be: (max) health, (max) armor, atk, ammo, aspd, area of effect, range, and others ...

Melee unit's value (eg footman) = max HP * shot power * aspd * accuracy * range * walk speed
Ranged static unit's value (eg tower) = max HP * shot power * aspd * accuracy * range^2/2. Squared because the area defended increases quadratically. Halved because units can generally only cover one side/half, the one side towards the enemy.

Most RTS make little use of line of sight and terrain realism; a unit on top of a hill could see further, a unit behind a hill could be hidden from those behind it, units have atk/def/... bonus when they are in their favorite terrain.

Gold is too important for war for mines to be spread out randomly. Spreading randomly means randomly-chosen players get a random advantage from the start, which is unfair. Mines randomly spread also means that players will hunt for mines instead of fighting strategically against each other. Large mines should be positioned symmetrically if they are decisive. Random mines should be smaller and not be decisive for winning.

Lanchester's laws: 1- In melee combat, army strength is proportional to number of units because each fighter can engage only one enemy at once. 2- In ranged combat, units can concentrate their power on a single enemy. When 1 unit is attacked by 3 archers, its life decreases 3 times faster, and it can only attack one of them, ie 1/3 of the enemies. Therefore, 3 ranged units are 3*3=9 times stronger than a single unit (whether ranged or not).

Imagine the tight and strong negative feedback loop: "wounded units attack weaker". Then players have to play sub-efficiently all the time, and they're going to wage attrition skirmishes, not big epic battles.

Do not block or forbid certain units or skills in a particular level. Instead, make the level so that this unit or skill is very inappropriate. Ex: to prevent the player to use air units, give the opponent lots of anti-air missiles. To prevent the use of iron, set the victory condition to "collect lots of iron".

Upgrades

Upgrades can apply to a single unit (veteran units have +1 dmg), all units of a particular kind (grunts get +2 atk), all units of all kinds (Iron Age = +2 def to everyone), or even the whole mechanics (production speed divided by 2). Upgrades can be unlocked by spending resources, time, achievement, ... The tech tree can be:

• totally open: player spends point in any tree she wants, like in WoW
• constrained: finish one branch to start another
• fixed: once player starts in a tree, only this tree is available for the rest of the game

Production and distribution

Production process should be concrete and visible, while the distribution process should be abstracted. Ex: plant farms for food = concrete food production. No supply lines as long as there are roads = abstract supply distribution. There are different shades and techniques for supply lines: troop caravans between cities in Heroes of Might and Magic IV, trade caravans between cities in Civilization series or Age of Empires, or Armored Personnel Carrier that transports troops and fuel in Advance Wars. Another approach is to have cities within a zone of influence to be supplied: cf the influence zone mechanics of Populous (you can only build in your area of influence), Civilization, and Black and White (you can only exert your god powers within your zone of influence).

AI techniques

• Game tree search, as used in games where there is a finite number of possible moves, such as Chess or Checkers. Problem: the search space increases exponentially, which is a problem for games like Go which have too many possible moves.
• Neural networks: patterns are identified after repeated exposure. Problem: training takes time, the system can hardly be tweaked, and adding new patterns means re-training the whole system.
• FSM: units transition from one state (walking) to another (shooting) because of events (enemy appeared in sight). Problem: the unit can only be in one state at once.
• Hierarchical FSM: FSM of the commander gives orders such as "take this hill" to captains. Captains have an FSM that gives orders to soldiers in the squad, such as "cover fire" or "make diversion". Each soldier has its own FSM as well: "if I see an enemy, run for cover". hFSM can create emergent behavior.

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.

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch 10: Mechanics

The mechanics are the data and algorithms that define the rules. Mechanics implement the internal economy inside the game engine and present challenges to the UI perspective. Mechanics are also in charge of the NPC AI, mode switching, and links to story engine. The mechanics define how resources can be created/deleted/exchanged, the state or attributes of entities, and the relationships between entities.

Economy

Quantifiable entities are produced by sources at spawn points (health pack in FPS or gold mine in RTS), consumed in drains (shooting consumes ammo, units cost resources), and exchanged through traders (exchange A against B, both A and B exist) or converters (A is consumed, B is produced). Players do not mind getting money for free, but they want to know why they lose some. Explain the drains. A resource is tangible if it takes physical space (space- and weight-limited inventory in Baldur's Gate vs potion stacking in RO vs limitless inventory in JRPG).

If the player has no way to get into a feedback loop, there is a deadlock. Example: when player has no money in Monopoly, she can't buy properties, and can not get money.
Mutual dependency happens when two production mechanisms require each each other's output as their input.
Equilibriums relieve pressure from the player: she can just sit and watch what happens. Therefore, there should be a mechanism to break the equilibrium or require player's intervention (e.g. farms in Age of Empires produce food automatically but expire after 3 harvests). Static equilibrium happens when offer = demand. Players can see their impact instantly in static equilibrium. Dynamic equilibrium happens when the same production cycle repeats itself over time (offer and demand follow patterns). Players may have to wait to know if their actions disrupted the equilibrium.

Mechanics and gameplay

Passive challenges do not require the mechanics to operate (e.g. climbing over a wall). Active challenges (solving a puzzle) have the player progress between states to reach the solution state. However, the player often has the same actions to solve all challenges (jumping, shooting, running).

Guidelines for designing mechanics

• Strive for simplicity: do not make more mechanics than necessary. Occam's razor.
• Do not try to get it perfect on paper. Playtest instead.
• Give enough details to programmers, but do not waste your time going too deep. Minor bugs and misconceptions can be fixed at tuning time.
• From higher-level game design documents, detail what the player is going to do, the flowboard of the game's modes, outline of the story, level ideas and progression, and victory and loss conditions.
• Do your entities: store resources? Are affected by processes? Have state and transitions? Have relationships with others? interact with or by the player (and how)? Also, find verbs these entities will enact.
• Resources: detail how sources, drains, and conversions work.

Debugging tip: always use the same seed in random number generators.

[Literature] Game Balance ch10 - Economics and Multiplayer Dynamics

My notes from course 10 of the Game Balance class of Summer 2010, by Ian Schreiber.

Economy

In an economic system, players can generate, consume/destroy, or trade resources in a zero-sum fashion (what a player consumes is what another can not consume). Supply and demand curves:

• supply = f(price) is monotonic (increasing): if I sell for $5, then I also can sell for $10
• demand = f(price) is decreasing: if I accept to buy for $10, I also accept to buy for $5

Market price = where the 2 curves intersect. Prices fluctuate as players need or produce items. Prices fluctuate more if there are fewer players. Demand curves affect each other:

• substitutes: SP potion (+ casting Heal spell) is a substitute for HP potion. Increasing supply of X means decreasing demand of Y.
• item sets/collectibles: when together, sword X + shield Y give +10atk bonus. Increasing supply of X means increasing demand of Y.

The price per unit can increase or decrease depending on how many of that unit the player already has. If more units of the same kind brings increasing bonuses, then marginal cost decreases. If each unit costs more and more, the game is more stable and homogeneous.

Demand increases with scarcity. Example in FPS: ammo can be limited (player don't shot all the time, therefore it'd make sense if they died in one shot) or infinite (trigger happy, players should only loose a bit of life when they're hurt). In RTS, limited number of mines to get gold from means shorter games, whereas more and bigger mines means longer games (and more military encounters).

Closed-system = game systems that are self-contained, nothing outside of them can influence what's inside. Somehow, gold farmers open the closed economies of MMOGs, making them harder to design and control. The game should not allow players who have more RL money to have more power, it should just allow more options/variety. Experts using cheap/default CCG decks should beat novices using expensive/rare decks. Yet RL money could be used to speed up progression/avoid grinding.

Inflation happens in MMOs because the game is positive sum (money comes from quests and monsters). New players will never catch up unless negative-sum (sinks) or zero-sum elements are included. Negative-sum/Sinks can be: NPC, repair and death penalties, luxury items, or even tax richest players and give that money to poor players (Robin Hood transforming positive-sum into zero-sum). Zero-sum can be: player-bound/non-tradable items, quests can be repeated but reward only once. Nothing tradable also is a solution.

Trading mechanics

By giving players resources they do not need, they'll have an incentive to trade. Trading mechanics usually serve as a negative-feedback loop, especially within a closed economy. Players are generally more willing to offer favorable trades to those who are behind, while they expect to get a better deal from someone who is ahead (or else they won’t trade at all).

• future agreements: I give X now for Y now and Z later. Players could renege, making them more suspicious when trading with delays.
• scope: powerful resources (eg victory points in Catan) should not be tradable. Tradable resources become more fluid.
• time and phases: players can trade all the time, and trades could take effect at once. Or trading could be limited to certain phases (every 5 turns, or before player starts his building phase) and/or this phase could be timed (eg 5-min timer to bargain).
• evenness: gifts (0 for n) vs even trades (1 for 1) vs uneven trades (1 for n)
• quantification: trading can happen only once per turn/per hour, or as much as player wants. Number of exchanged objects may be bounded as well.
• tax: if trading coalitions are too powerful, put a tax as a cost to trade
• forced: I look at the cards in your hand and pick the best, and give you in exchange my worse card.

Auctions

Auctions = players' willingness to pay for a resource. Auctions work best when the actual cost is variable, different between players, and situational. Each time players decide how much the resource is worth to them, they are making an «interesting choice».

• Many types of auctions (increasing, blind, decreasing, ...),
• with different kinds of rewards (winner gets the entire lot, or first pick in the draft, and/or looser gets bonus or penalty),
• different payers (top bidder, top 2 bidders, top and bottom bidders, all players, ...),
• different recipients (bank = deflation, shared fund, or to other players),
• different events when no one bids (resource given to a random player, or more resources are added to the current resource and the auction restart, or resource is just discarded)

Misc. problems

Name	Problem	Solution
Turtling	Everybody shelters and nobody actually plays because attacking seems more costly and inefficient than defending and waiting for opportunities.	Give incentives to attack (when players wins, she gets more resources next turn), or force players to attack (player has to draw and play one card each turn, and 90% of cards are attack cards).
Kill the leader and sandbagging	Players recognize a clear leader, Players see their best chance to win as eliminating the leader, Players coordinate to attack the leader Players fear to become leader, and play suboptimally	Hidden scores make it impossible to know who is the leader, or make it obvious that eliminating the leader is not the best chance to win, or make the game non-PVP, or make players not able to team-up against another/give advantage when a player defends against many
Kingmaking	One player recognizes they cannot win, Player recognizes that they can give support to any leading player, Losing player chooses one leading player to win	Make players believe they can always win, or make it impossible to know which action will make a king, or make it impossible to choose who to make king, or simply do not allow last players to help leaders
Elimination	Player is killed at the beginning of the game and has to wait for the game to end	Players can only eliminate others if they are strong enough to eliminate all others, or the goal can be to collect points (instead of killing others), or when one player dies, the game stops immediately or within a certain time, and winner is current leader, or make the killed player take control of NPC, or make it interesting to look at other players playing (cf Mafia or Werewolf), or let killed players have goals as well (Cosmic Encounter or BSG)

Final note: balance is not always a must-have. Some games are ostensibly unfair but fun nevertheless. In single-player games, progression matters more than fairness. The unfairness of some one-against-many multiplayer games sometimes makes them fun.

[Literature] Game Balance ch6 - Situational balance

My notes from course 6 of the Game Balance class of Summer 2010, by Ian Schreiber.

If 10% of monsters are dragons, "double dmg to dragons" = 10% * 2dmg + 90% * 1dmg = 1.1dmg overall.
Situational balance = depends on the situation in the game; the cost is fixed cost, but the value changes depending on the situation. Ex: in DND, if atk + 1d20 >= AC then hit. Is +1atk (for player) balanced with +1def (for my opponent)?

• yes if 1 vs 1 (+1 on each side)
• no if enemies attack more often than player (because player will roll more often on AC than on atk) (eg 4 trash mobs vs one player)
• no if player(s) attack(s) more often than enemies (more rolls on player's atk) (eg player group vs boss)

=> Level design tip: player should be outnumbered half of the time, and outnumber the enemies half of the time if atk and def have the same cost and value. This adds replay value ("I could start a new game with 20atk/80def instead of 50atk/50def")

Versatility

In FPS, players usually have a close+strong+fast, a far+strong+slow and a far+weak+fast weapon. If player can switch weapons quickly, then it's as if the player had all of them at once. The overall price becomes the sum of all of these weapons, they should not be balanced individually.

A character/weapon is more versatile if it is able to handle more situations (Swiss-army knife). Examples:

• RTS: archer very strong against flying creatures and very weak against footmen. If wizard is (a bit) strong against flying AND footmen, wizard is more versatile than archer.
• FPS: knife = good in tight rooms VS snipers = good in large open-spaces VS machine gun = average on any map (= versatile weapon). Machine gun is the most valuable choice for players when they do not know which map is going to be played.

Solution against versatility: cost for switching can be time (it takes 5s to switch weapons), money, frequent weapon reload, etc. If switching is free, then player accumulates everything and uses each tool when he needs it. If inventory is limited, player will look for optimizations (eg only get fire and wind swords if you can only get 2 swords of the 4 elements). Balance depends on how fast player should be receiving new items.

• fast: price = constant (but player earns more and more as he progresses, so player gets swords quickly)
• faster and faster: "Since you’re such a good customer, you can have a 10% discount on all future swords."
• slow: prices increase

Two kinds of versatility:

• Ability of a single game object to be useful in different situations
• Ability of the player to change between game objects (if this type of versatility increases, then the value of each object's versatility decreases)

Shadow costs

Object cost = resource cost (how much player buys it) + shadow cost (maintenance, etc.). Shadow costs can be sunk costs or opportunity costs.

Sunk cost

Sunk cost = pre-requisites/tech tree costs. Examples:

• building a RTS unit may require buildings + techs. Building only 1 unit = lot of sunk cost, building many units = factored sunk cost
• WoW tech tree: powerful ability now VS weak ability now opening VERY powerful ability later?
• buying expensive shop discount card or a potion-making machine VS buying cheap potions repetitively?

Opportunity cost

Opportunity cost = how much versatility is reduced = when a choice prevents the player from taking another action later on. When an action adds constraint, how much is it as a cost? Examples:

• Protection from Fire costs 10 G. Protection from Ice costs 10 G. How much costs Fire+Ice protection?
  • 10G if player knows opponents' atk ahead of time,
  • 20G if player can not know,
  • 15G if player can not know but can purchase the other one if you guessed wrong.
  Giving hints (eg if player is told about a red dragon, she expects fire) reduces the cost.
• strong single-target VS weak AoE
• Alternates: Situational objects that can be brought into play if needed, but the player isn’t forced to use them when suboptimal.
• Metagame combo: not useful on its own, but useful if paired with something else (eg support class in MMO, building a CCG deck); the game should be balanced assuming optimal play, not average, because players will become good and play well anyway.
• RPG multi-classing and 'either/or' choices: lvl 10 thief = lvl 10 warrior = lvl 7 thief-warrior. Cost = more than either but less than both.

[Literature] On virtual economies

On Virtual Economies by Castronova in 2003 points at the growing importance of VW on real-life society. Similarly to real-life, people live, consume and generate profit in VW. However, the software nature of VW means controlling the market is much more efficient for the regulating authorities. In cyberspace, the coding authority does indeed have the power to create and destroy any amount of any good, at virtually zero cost. What are the possible evolutions for these VW economies? How do VW economies influence RL economies?

Establishing an economic model of VW

Economists are forced to recognize that VW are not only mere entertainment, they also have a RL impact on people. Indeed, economists do not make any difference between real and virtual items or properties: if people are willing to incur large time and money costs to live in a virtual world, economists will judge that location to be lucrative real estate, regardless of the fact that it exists only in cyberspace. For economists, our behaviors follow constraints: we cannot have everything we want. The tighter these constraints are, the less choice we have. Presumably, people feel happier when they are less constrained. However, a MMOG providing too little challenge is not constraining enough, and people get bored quickly. Example/comparison: people prefer a 100-piece puzzle than a 2-piece puzzle. Castronova deduces a function regulating hours of game time for gamers based on the 3 following assumptions:

• People do things that make them feel happier
• confronting and overcoming challenges makes people happy
• higher rewards is preferred, holding challenge levels equal

This function shows several particularities. Gamer can be willing to pay for tougher constraints. Rich people can play because they can afford it. Poor people can play because they are not sacrificing very much income to do so. However, those not rich nor poor may be very sensitive to the impact of gaming time. Some people make money from their virtual activities: there is a substitution between Earth work and game time that depends, to some extent, on the financial rewards available in each. The economic phenomenon emerging is: Game time is a substitute for other consumption goods, and it is also a substitute for work time.

Many actors in the VW market of the future

The development of VW companies of the future can be classified in three domains: connections (Internet, wireless), interfaces (voice chat, body-motion detection) and content (media delivery services, game retailers). A monopoly may emerge because our time in virtual worlds is more valuable if everyone we know is in the same world [see Facebook...] and the more players a VW has, the more attractive it is. However, several reasons limit the possibility of a monopoly:

• People have different tastes, and they go in VW that fulfill their needs. A VW so big it would satisfy everyone would be too expensive to build and maintain.
• Congestion in a VW limits its number of simultaneous users
• It seems players get attached to their avatars as they get stronger and build their stories. However, incentives could be given to switch from a VW to another: in Ultima, you can directly buy your levels; in Camelot, you can start a new avatar at level 20 if you have already gotten one to level 50.
• the star phenomenon widespread in artistic markets: If a company designs a better game, it will attract players

The impact of VW on RL societies

The fact that labour hours that were once producing automobiles are now producing avatars does not mean anything about the level of wealth in society. Online economies do not belong to any country. Hence if economic activities move from RL to VW, countries would seem to be in recessions or depressions because state taxes would not bring as much as they did, and people would still use public infrastructures (roads, social welfare). Poor people may find VW attractive because they could earn more money in them than IRL. It would cost nothing to rich people to travel between RL and VW. New statistics and economic management policies may have to be developed

Who regulates VW economies? At the moment, game companies are not taken as legally responsible by RL law for what happens in their worlds - video games are speech. The EULA and ToS restrict users' rights, and profits drive the company. Hence, some players complain (more or less uselessly) on forum boards after patches and updates. RMT is another governance issue in which companies are the only ones to decide. Buying avatars or items from other players with real money frustrates the players who do not spend money in RMT. But players are not serfs. They have both voice and exit as options for resistance.

Bonus: differences between RL and VW economies

Unlike IRL, in VW ...

• It may make sense to control some prices.
• Players must have something to do or they will be bored: Work is good.
• increases in per-capita wealth [...] will lower the challenge level of the game: Growth can be bad.
• Avatars' abilities can change a lot over time and the number of connected avatars fluctuates.

Mapping Marketers: Godin versus Goblin - 3/3

This post is the last of a series of three in which I am trying to map WoW marketer strategies to RL ones based on two marketer blogs. The first part deals with the methodology, I put the data in the second part and this last part contains the discussion, limitations and conclusion.

Discussion

Most of the time, the two marketers have strongly different strategies. But it happens that they agree on particular domains such as niche markets or lay offs. Their opinions also often differ about general topics such as respect or misunderstanding.

Image and communication

(Data)
Unlike Godin the RL marketer, Gevlon the VW marketer does not rely on his image to sell his products. This is particularly obvious when looking at the "Celebrity", "Offering Gifts" or "Donations" quotes, and when observing how they have decided to manage their increasing number of blog followers. At a certain point, managing their community has started to consume them a lot of (their precious) time. On the one hand, Seth Godin, careful with his image, disabled the comments on his blog so that he does not have to moderate or answer them. On the other hand, Gevlon stated he would stay quite involved in the moderation of his blog comments (I delete troll comments) and skim through his followers' mails (I'll have a very effective and anti-social mail policy [...] I know that I'll lose some readers because of that. But my own time is more important than reader count (especially when readers are in pretty large supply).). While Seth Godin keeps thanking his readers, Gevlon admitted that Most of my readers are not idiots and lot of them don't like me at all, they come here to bitterly argue and troll.

Moreover, while Godin promotes respect, tolerance and sharing knowledge, Gevlon pretends that business tricks are kept secret and he does not care about treating someone an idiot (see the "Sharing strategies" and "Respect" quotes). But actually, Gevlon shares if not all at least some of his strategies with his readers. So I think that both Gevlon and Godin have the same goal (keeping the blog followers), but they achieve it through different communication strategies (inspirational, pleasant and agreeable versus selfish, meritocrat and cynical).

Anonymous strategies

(Data)
Back to marketer strategies, a successful WoW marketer does not own a loyal customer base. When they need a particular item, Auction House buyers take the cheapest and do not really care for the vendor's name. This particularity echoes the unique rules in WoW economy mentioned by Gevlon: WoW has no second-hand economy mostly because of soulbound items, and no cartels are dictating prices because avatars' needs are not matter of actual life and death. Consequently, I could only find basic "anonymous" economic strategies shared between the two marketers.

First, niches are considered as successful economic strategies for both RL and VW marketers. Niches are small by definition, but small is larger than tiny, and potentially pays more. Both marketers agree that even though they pay less than mainstream marketing, niches are free from competition and easier markets because the customer base relies on the (most of the time) single vendor's products.

Second, choosing to sell in markets where the supply does not meet the demand is another strategy shared between the two. Gevlon explains it very simply at the end of a post. Let us say one vendor has a monopoly and sells overpriced items. The possible reasons for monopolies detailed by the two marketers are very similar. The main difference between RL and VW concerning monopolies is that in VW, monopolists can be pushed out of market. In WoW, a smart marketer simply enters a market in flooding it with lower-than-monopolist's but still high-priced items. This flood forces the former monopolist to buy all his/her concurrent's items to keep the monopoly. This means, the newcomer is selling to the former monopolist, hereby making profit! Seth Godin explains that for "nice" RL items or services (eg luxury hotels), customers are ready to pay the intrinsic "extra" for the "nice", but vendors can still make huge benefits. This does not seem to apply in WoW: any marketer can jump in the gap between the median/normal price and the current higher price and make profit, ruining other marketers profits. This strategy and undercutting make it usually rare for marketers to gain on mainstream "nice" virtual goods (eg glyphs).

Third, both marketers recognize that the customer is king. It is useless to try to sell unappropriate products to your customers. It is even more difficult to sell to people who do not want to buy your products, more particularly in VW where drinking water is not a matter of life and death...

Limitations

This study examined only two marketers. Even though each of them was supposed to be a somewhat representative sample of his respective marketer population, the samples' very small size raise obvious external validity issues. However, given the short time allocated to this study, I could only do with these small samples. I recognize that some WoW marketers disagreed with some of Gevlon's strategies, and Gevlon adressed some of them. While Gevlon does not hide his fight against "socials", Markco, a rival WoW marketer of Gevlon, claims his social side loud and clear: Don't Be Anti-Social says the left-wing panel of his blog. But at the same time, Markco wrote a book about how to make gold in WoW, and he certainly wants people to buy it. Yet another marketing blog used to effectively get customers ...

Still about external validity threats, I do not think this study relied on "perishable" materials (ie quotes that are not valid anymore). A few quotes from Seth Godin date from several years ago (2005) but I do not think that RL marketers change their opinion so quickly about efficient marketing strategies. As for VW marketer strategies, it is very possible that they change very often: one can use patches to make profit (buying in mass when cheap and selling after a patch when it becomes more interesting) and above all, one has to permanently come up with new strategies (because A single guy being aware of the trick can ruin it for you). However, all Gevlon's quotes but one are dated 2009 or 2010, so I think the collected quotes are still relevant today.

On his blog, Seth Godin has been talking about marketing for years, but he has also been effectively marketing (if not his company's products, at least his image). Gevlon has rejected advertising on his blog several times because he presumably simply wants to spread the goblinish widsom: Spreading goblinish ideas is a very selfish move: I convince people not to waste gold and time to M&S in the game. [...] "I want my hard-earned money to be mine. I don't want to support complete strangers just because they are poor." If enough people will say that, the world will be a much better place. As seen in the mapping framework, the motivations of the observed samples matter a lot. Indeed, keeping in mind throughout this study that the two marketers had somewhat different motivations helped me be particularly cautious when picking quotes, especially when dealing with the image and communication strategies.

The line was sometimes blurred between marketer strategies (the study interest), effectively marketing (eg "get my new book!") and blog followers management (eg "morons of the week"). This is a relatively small threat to reliability as I have been following these two blogs for over 6 months, and I have learned to detect when each of them looks for what. For instance, I realized that 2002 articles from Godin contain more links to/comments about external sources than nowadays's articles, and Gevlon's September 2008 articles had a less cynical tone and nearly each of them contained WoW everyday life screenshots. Even some of Gevlon's rants about bad groups were softer (well OK, World of Retardcraft was a particularly harsh post...). I guess people tend to speak more about themselves when they multiply by 100 their number of readers.

One can argue that me picking up myself particular post quotes to make my point introduces a severe bias. I think it was not: if we take a blog as a long and recurrent interview about various topics, quoting particular article lines was no different from selecting excerpts from traditional interviews. At the first glance, I found analyzing blog articles was a methodology that gave even more freedom to the analyzed individuals than unstructured interviews. Indeed, these bloggers have been writing spontaneously about what they want. I was definitely not obtrusive and there was no possible Hawthorne effect. However, there was no control of the data materials.

Finally, I have only considered the anonymous and somewhat basic Auction House trade chanel as it was the only one mentioned by Gevlon. I did not look at other possible trade chanels (friends, guild ...). I might be wrong, but I do not think that VW marketers can massively use other chanels than the one specifically designed for trading by the game designers, ie the Auction House for WoW. I agree that for Second Life, where people sell goods they created themselves to each other, one should not only take into account the B2C trade chanels, but also the C2C ones.

Conclusion

I have tried to keep in mind the mapping principle framework suggested by Williams throughout the study. Although the methodology of this short comparison of RL and WoW marketer strategies could largely be improved, I have found interesting mapping and non-mapping results in the direcionality VW to RL. Cutomer relationships do not exist in WoW because the current trade system was designed so that consumers can buy the cheapest item from any one at any time, independently of their previous purchase. However, some WoW strategies mentioned by Gevlon such as niches marketing seem to map to the RL strategies mentioned by Godin.

I do not pretend having done any top-research-quality work with this short study. Although I have tried not to spend too much time on this post, I have also tried to be as critical as possible, particularly concerning the methodology. Collecting quotes from blog posts was much more difficult than collecting data from interviews. Google Search mastery and Google Reader sometimes helped finding relevant posts, but this study took very VERY much time and did not bring that many satisfying results.

In the end, I think the mapping framework helped keeping in mind particular issues (eg motivations), but I do not think it should be taken as an article template to follow blindly.

Edit: Tobold, a WoW player, found in January 2010 that current posts from Gevlon contradict the ones Gevlon posted a year ago.

Mapping Marketers: Godin versus Goblin - 2/3

This post is the second of a series of three in which I am trying to map WoW marketer strategies to RL ones based on two marketer blogs. The first part deals with the methodology, I put the data in this post, and the last part contains the discussion, limitations and conclusion.

I have found for each topic one quote from each of the observed marketers. These topics can be considered as my dependent variables, my independent variable being RL versus VW. I have divided topics into two broader areas: "Image and Communication" and "Anonymous strategies". I will refer to these areas later in the discussion section.

Image and communication

Topic	Godin says	Goblin says
Offering Gifts	The key is that the gift must be freely and gladly accepted. [...] Plus, giving a gift feels good. in The hidden power of a gift	In best case, giving gifts is just as good for the group as not giving. In the average case it produces some waste. In worst case: wastes all value. in Presents!
Donations	I want to send you a copy of Linchpin (at my expense) three weeks before anyone else can buy one. [...] The first 3,000 people who make a donation to the Acumen Fund (at least $30) get one in Get a review copy of my new book	all of the guys giving him [Kungen, a famous WoW guild leader,] gold are not premiere raiders wanted to get some tips [...] They were morons. in Celebrity
Celebrity	Most marketers are opening acts. [...] Some marketers are rock stars. [...] I just went to see Keller Williams in concert. Without a doubt, he's a genius and a rock star. [...] If he was selling something, I'd buy it. in Opening acts and rockstars	The celebrity followers are a masterpieces of stupidity. What does a goblin do if he sees a stupid? Takes his money! [...] The celebrity industry is a great indicator of human stupidity. in Celebrity
Sharing strategies	Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you. from How to get traffic for your blog	no one will teach you the recent business tricks, partly because you would use it against them, and also because they are usually immoral from Surgeons and goblins
Respect	it doesn't matter who's "right". What matters is that giving people the benefit of the doubt and treating them with respect is not only more fun, it works better too. from You can always be mean later (respect works)	I have no problem telling someone that "you are a useless dead weight and I want you out of my instance, idiot" from Women and hearts
Customer service	Call your customers. Or write to them. [...] You'll end up doing a lot for your customers. Which is a wonderful privilege. Even for those that don't reciprocate. in Easiest cheap way to dramatically increase sales	Standard M&S letter with the standard answer by Nicciter of Smolderthorn-US. Someone could make an addon to answer this automatically from Morons of the week
Misunderstanding	It's almost impossible to communicate something clearly and succinctly to everyone, all the time. So misunderstandings occur. [...] If we're engaged with a stranger or someone we don't trust, we assume the worst. The challenge, then, is to earn the benefit of the doubt. in Benefit of the doubt	he [another WoW marketer] offered a shady virus-ad [about WoW gold techniques], and when I declined that, he claimed that he's just been "misunderstood" [...] While this trick seems lame, I guarantee that it's not. Social people find it very hard to look someone's eyes and say: "you are lying!". They usually accept that "misunderstanding" happened. in No means no

Anonymous strategies

Topic	Godin says	Goblin says
Choosing a niche	The reason you can make money in the niche pocket is that it costs far less to compete here. First, because there's less competition and the competition is less fierce, and second because it's cheaper and easier to reach your target market because they're choosing to pay attention. from The long tail and the dip	The best things about niche markets is that no one cares for them. You mostly run without any competition. So you can list lot of items at once without fear for undercutting. [...] If you find a niche, go for it. It's all yours. from Niche markets
Niche size	It's entirely possible that you will choose a niche that's too small. It's much more likely you'll shoot for something too big and become overwhelmed. When in doubt, overwhelm a small niche. from Make the world smaller	If you need a better item, you may find a niche producer who sells a high-end product. Unfortunately they are extremely expensive, exactly because they have to make profit from a smaller customer base. from Premium products for valued customers
Monopolies	There are three things that led to the monopolies we now enjoy: 1. The FCC limited the number of TV and radio stations in every market [...] 2. Copyright ensures that we can charge a lot [...] 3. The limited number of physical distribution outlets [...] guarantees that distributors with clout get more shelf space. from Monopolies seven years later	There are some cases when the monopoly works. * [...] If you are the only one on the server who have the recipe [...] * The market is about to shift, usually because of a patch. This case the "monopolist price" is actually the "new market price". [...] * Market of the fools: you can be a monopolist if your buyers are plain idiots. from Monopoly
Unanswered demand	if all I want, the only extra, is for someone to be nice to me when I visit your business, how much extra does that cost? [...] I think there's a huge gap between what people are willing to pay for nice (a lot) and what it would cost businesses to deliver it (almost nothing). Smells like an opportunity. from How much extra for nice?	most of my profit comes from "top-scanning": seeking items that are mostly overpriced. If the auctions of item X are listed between 150% and 999%, then it's an item with increased demand. I find a way to supply to this increased demand. I find a way to craft the item in need and sell it in this boosting market. from Invisible Hand
Forcing consumers	People don't adapt to what you make, they adopt it. They can't be forced to adapt, so they won't. from Five common cliches (done wrong)	We must keep in mind that we are not needed. So we can't dictate prices. Our items may be wanted by players, but they can live without it. from Unique rules in WoW economy

You can read the discussion, limitations and conclusion here.

Mapping Marketers: Godin versus Goblin - 1/3

This post is the first of a series of three in which I am trying to map WoW marketer strategies to RL ones based on two marketer blogs. This first part deals with the methodology, the second part contains the data, and the last part contains the discussion, limitations and conclusion.

Methodology

Following my last post about the Mapping principle, I tried to use, throughout this entire post (and the next one), the framework suggested by Williams to map marketers' behaviors. A few obvious questions came to my mind very quickly. Could a successful RL marketer be also successful in VW? What about the opposite? If there is no direct mapping, are there similarities between the two? These questions are too wide to be magically answered in one blog article. In fact, trying to answer these big broad questions require a minimum of expert RL economists, VW social scientists, VW economists and a few years of journal publications. I do not pretend being able to play all these roles, particularly for a single blog post. So I decided to simply look at what RL and VW marketers say about their business. No better place than blogs!

Crawling all possible blogs from RL and VW marketers to collect data would have taken really much time. Also, I planed to write a post and not a whole 10-page research paper, so I have looked for one representative marketer of each kind. I have chosen to follow Seth Godin's blog for the RL marketer, and Greedy Goblin for the VW marketer. I have been following both of these blogs for at least six months. Both are intense bloggers - they post every day - which means they provide a lot of data to analyze.

To be more explicit about the directionality of this study, I tried to detect if VW marketer strategies map RL ones. That is to say, if the real impacts the virtual (direction is offline to online). To my mind, it is very unlikely that VW economic strategies have been mapped to RL strategies. However, there might be a very interesting bi-directional connection between some RL and VW consumer behaviors (eg impulse purchase or conspicuous consumption), but this might be the topic of another post!

In VW, and more particularly in WoW, a marketer (also called gold maker in WoW) has to react to other marketers' actions and price fluctuations at the Auction House (a server-wide Wall Street). Consequently, even though he/she has to care for other players, a VW marketer is the only one who chooses which strategy to follow. Hence I consider VW marketers can be treated as individual entities. As for the RL side, I have only taken into account the RL marketer's opinion as an individual, not as a company spokesperson or a member of a group of RL marketers. However, I think it could be very interesting to compare RL marketer teams to VW cartels.

I should also explain how I compared topics between the two marketers. From their blogs, I have randomly read articles of the past 6 months - this was done easily in Google Reader. When I found a relevant article on one of them, I searched the other blog for an article about the same topic. I also thought about traditional economic principles such as monopoly or niche markets.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin is a New-York marketer. He is considered as a celebrity/guru and as of February 22nd, 2010, his website is the 127th most influential according to Technocrati and has the first ranking of the top English-language marketing blogs in the world (as of February 22nd, 2010, and out of 1092). Roughly 15k people visit his website every day. Many other famous marketers, if they do not agree with Seth Godin, at least they talk about him and his marketing strategies. After the publication in January 2010 of his last book, Linchpin, Godin talked with dozens of marketers and economists. Godin has been regularly mentioning other marketers in his posts. Hence, even though I am certainly not an expert marketer, I found Seth Godin's blog to be quite representative of RL marketers.

In a January 2010 article entitled The 2.0 media tour, he wrote:

You know by now that I haven't gone to any traditional media for the launch of my new book - no pitches to newspapers, magazines, or television. Instead, I went directly to my readers and the many intelligent voices online. I sent review copies by request to my readers - who were generous and creative in their reviews, and now we'll hear from the bloggers and other online denizens.
-- Seth Godin, January 2010

Seth Godin has not only been using his blog to talk about marketing, but also as an effectively marketing place. His target population is his readers. This seems like the first reliability issue. Even though in Death of the personal blog? (2008), he explains that a blog's point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking, he has disabled the comments on his blog since 2006, so they will not be taken into account in this study. Intriguingly, even though comments are impossible on his blog, a large number of people keep following it anyway.

Gevlon the Greedy Goblin

Gevlon is the pseudonym of a Hungarian WoW player born in 1977 - he uses freemail.hu and mentioned Hungary a few times. His blog about making gold and soloing instances in WoW, and bashing altruists and other idiots, has reached more than 4k readers in February 2010. In the last 7 months, he has doubled his number of readers. Interestingly, this particularly misanthropic character stands as one of the most recognized WoW marketers: many other WoW marketers or players keep mentioning him. His prowess as a skilled player were even mentioned at wow.com. Being well-connected in the WoW marketing blogosphere, Gevlon's blog list suggests he follows many other WoW player/VW marketer blogs. I guess if Gevlon was a charlatan, he would not be so followed and cited in the WoW blogosphere.

Like Seth Godin's, Gevlon's articles mix personal opinions and business strategies: making gold, soloing instances and bashing altruists and other idiots is the motto written on his blog banner as of February 2010. As his blog has been growing older, Gevlon has been talking more and more about RL economic issues such as National Debt Crisis or Underwater loans, or about more trivial issues such as how stupid he found a recent comment on his blog. Same threat to validity as Godin's articles.

But unlike Godin, Gevlon's motivation is to share his ideas to have them improved by his readers' comments. That is maybe why he sometimes answer comments.

Data

You can read the data here.