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It's the Video Game Economy, Stupid
11 Plays5 months ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about the importance of shoe health, staying warm, and then drive right off the edge into financial advice (for the economies within video games). They break down how we wheel and deal across Diablo, MMOs, live service games, and even more in this week's episode!
Intro:
- Rush - EX-LYD
Outro:
- MegaMan Legends - The Apple Market
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Transcript
Introduction and Cozy Atmosphere
00:00:46
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined, but my co-host is always Dave. How's it going today, Dave? It's going pretty goddamn eepy today. A little bit overcast, a little bit windy. Um, I haven't opened the blinds yet. It is past 1PM. So it's kind of got those, those vibes today. That's fair. That's when you need a big, easy chair and a couple of hot chocolate, like a newspaper, uh, a pipe, I guess with tobacco and peppermint. Um, just crushed up peppermint sprinkled on top of the tobacco. Uh-huh. I don't know that when you go to light, it just scorches the top. Yes. Even though you're trying to corner it. And then most importantly, some sort of like comfortable slippers like these, you can just like slap on that basically held up very fancy moccasins. I think where are they that I put them on? I have a pair of slippers nearby. They are very basic. I'll show Jake here.
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty similar. I think it's the same thing. It's like, uh, what would you call this inside material? It's like, um, Oh, I have no idea. It's very fluffy though. It's, it's basically a full foot pillow is essentially what you're wearing. Yeah. So it's like, I took the two out of my bed and then put them in shoes. Um, also I can always feel like for a shoe or anything, a footwear I've had for a long time that there's always like, uh,
00:02:25
Speaker
a divot is like, Oh, Hey, by the way, you're always pressing on your, uh, your big toe. And now this part's just flat. Yeah. Yeah. That is the trick with slippers is they don't have the same, uh, resiliency structural rigidity compared to like sneakers or other more, um, respectable kinds of shoes, but slippers, very comfortable.
00:02:48
Speaker
So I'm sure that they have like a, here's a very fancy looking shoe, but the inside just like, Ooh, nice. Cause like, I don't mind getting dressed up, but I remember for every single wedding or formal event that I've been to afterwards, my feet hurt because you're wearing these thin fucking black socks yeah and you're wearing these boxy ass shoes that you're not supposed to be in for the whole day, but you are. andrew dance And you're dancing sucks. That's where you need the, uh, you need the doctor.
00:03:19
Speaker
Dr. Scholz. I have used things like that. um I don't know. I don't want to endorse the name brand. I'm pretty sure I have used Dr. Scholz branded things, but literally just foot inserts, like a gel insert or something like that. Are you gel? World of difference. Are you? Yeah.
The Comfort and Nature of Footwear
00:03:37
Speaker
Are you gel? What was that? Magellan or something like that? There's some type of like gel slip in that was supposed to be like a big thing. Those are nice. I have used those. Yeah.
00:03:48
Speaker
I think at one point I had to get like a specific one for my right foot because of how I was walking. They're like, Oh, this would be better. And I don't remember if it did enough or not, but like, I haven't used that since I was a teenager.
00:04:05
Speaker
right So I either grew out of it and it fixed me or I've not been taking care of my right foot for years. It is kind of funny how like, I don't know, I don't know enough about human anatomy, I guess, to know whether shoes are more on the natural comfort or unnatural side, right? Like if everyone walked around without shoes, would their spines be more or less messed up?
Nostalgia for Bartering and Trading
00:04:31
Speaker
I don't know the answer to that. Um, but.
00:04:35
Speaker
with shoes, you can definitely go down the path of like, okay, this is mildly uncomfortable, uncomfortable. And then it is just screwing with your spine in some weird way if if stuff's out of whack. So I believe it. I think something like heels are much more unnatural because it's changing the active shape of how you walk. With shoes, it's kind of like the same structure as far as if I was just walking barefoot. Yeah.
00:05:04
Speaker
But I would never walk barefoot on just my tiptoes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Heels, ballerina slippers, the um wooden blocks. Those are all those are all insane. None of those make any sense. um Not about that life. Slippers, though. Good slippers. I like how there's all the slipper stuff. and There's like nothing as far as like, oh, close. Mm hmm.
00:05:27
Speaker
Yeah. People are like, yeah, it's a hand. Put it in ah a hand sock. You're good. Uh-huh. I mean, gloves with gloves, there are a lot of fancy and nice gloves and stuff like that. um But I don't know. Other than driving gloves, I guess I'm i'm less particular.
00:05:44
Speaker
um It's been a while since I even used like driving gloves because you know global warming things for that by the way guys ah I Used to have these full winter gloves, you know, like you could pack snowballs with these and oh, yeah, everything would be fine um or the little like Touch-sensitive sort of gloves where it would get like some capacity so you could like use touch screens and things like that That's a cool technology But I have not found cause to wear those types of things for a long time. Well, I'm outside with the dog a couple of times a day. um So I have started to incorporate using like the little the mittens, the ones where you should not be packing snowballs because it will yeah water go through the material. um yeah But as far as like an initial glove, it's like a starder glove. it's it's a start It fits a lot of situations.
00:06:35
Speaker
yeah Like I wouldn't be out there for like two hours with it, but like 15 minutes. Yeah. Yeah. And it is also, it's worth noting that as we get older, it's like, I, I appreciate, um, keeping my instrument is warm. If it is cold, right? Like there were, there definitely was a time where it didn't really matter what time of the year it was. I would just be walking around in socks or even bare feet throughout the house.
00:06:59
Speaker
And now it's like I wake up and I'm like, are my socks nearby? Or are they in another room? I need to go get those, put those on, place the slippers on my feet. Okay, now I can go about my day. I am i am approaching geriatric tear very, very rapidly. Well, I think it's fine to want to be comfortable if you have the option to.
00:07:21
Speaker
My main reason for wearing gloves outside has not been for the cold, which I mean, definitely is a factor. But it's more so that like I come in and like my hands are like super dry, like things look sad as far as cuticles and other stuff. I'm like, oh, this is actively not great for my hands. Right. Yeah.
00:07:41
Speaker
um Like skin can dry it on the leg or anywhere too. So I try and be a little more bundle conscious. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. You got to take care of yourself. That's the, uh, that is the dream. Um, I have no way how to segue into our topic. So.
00:07:58
Speaker
About that economy. yeah People like talking about economies, right? Is the economy doing well? Is it doing bad? No one knows. Is well is it donkey or elephant? It's video games. That's what
Game Economies and Player Experiences
00:08:15
Speaker
we talk about here. We've never talked about politics, I think, not even once. oh It's bull or... Is it bull and donkey? You're talking about a bull market or a bull or bear? Oh.
00:08:28
Speaker
Yeah. We got a lot of animals that we assign random things to. so The doggies and elephants or the political parties and the bulls or bears are like, hey, are you buying or selling right now. but um Video games, sometimes, I mean, there are some examples for us to talk about here ah that might get to that tier, but usually are a little bit less complicated. You're not trading on derivatives for the most part. Oh God, I really hope not. um But yeah, it's going to be me talking once we get there.
00:09:04
Speaker
but Specifically, in I assume Eve. It's Eve, yeah. That's the only one. Of course, it's Anyways, I'll save that. I'll save the Eve discussion where we drop off a cliff at the end of the episode. But um yeah, we ah have been putting some thought to these various games that we've played where the economy might have impacted how you played the game, your enjoyment of the game, how you interacted with other people.
00:09:30
Speaker
um And we're like People need to know right like our opinions specifically Well, I mean something that I found out just from talking with you is how much of a variety of trade systems there are. yeah And I don't think there's any anyone, oh, this is the best for a universal situation. I think a lot of them will depend. And I was kind of trying to think of if I had to make the ideal system for a game, what that would look like. right
00:10:03
Speaker
um
00:10:06
Speaker
And pretty much it's my approach, which is definitely the V1 and not good, ah is kind of just unfettered trading. Free market capitalism. Kind of, yeah. And just to break this down a little bit between ah for people, I think overall we're going to be talking about multiplayer games.
00:10:27
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think it makes as much sense as far as single player game because you could just manipulate spawns or something as far as generating value in the game. So like there there is a factor to it. But yeah, it basically is like it probably it's probably part of the core gameplay loop. Right. In the same way, like you're getting an experience or progress. The game is also trying to give you material wealth in order to progress at the same tier as like experience. So it doesn't work the same way as trading between players necessarily.
00:10:56
Speaker
Right. Because I'm sure, as you'll remember from the days of Pokemon or other trading card things, a lot of deals were done on the bus. And this is before everyone had access to the internet freely on their phones at all times where you could kind of price check things and see the value is very much just bartering, agreed upon thing. So you go to somebody that's like, I want this. What do you want for that? And you kind of haggle out a lot of deal. um So that's kind of the direct trading approach.
00:11:25
Speaker
Um, I think normally the deal will be kind of discussed ahead of time. Right. Um, if you're gonna be posting on a job board, you can say, Hey, I'm willing to sell this, but here's what I expect in return. Right. Um, now maybe in the moment, if you're like, Hey, I would like to do that deal, but Hey, can I hit you up instead of seven of those? Could I give you six? Would you accept six? Right. And maybe you can haggle, um, or maybe like you are just in a public lobby.
00:11:54
Speaker
And you just kind of put in the alt chat like, hey, I'm selling this. And somebody sees it. They come from 20 feet away in town. They're like, hey, I saw you were selling that. What would you want? Another type of haggle opportunity. um But I would say that, generally, direct trading does not happen as much anymore.
00:12:16
Speaker
There is, for anything that we discuss, as far as, like we're gonna get in danger of actually talking about economics for this episode. But like for anything we discuss, there's gonna be trade-offs. And I think the question of like what's the ideal is gonna be harder to answer because of that for me, because there are trade-offs. But like indirect trading, it can be nice because you're dealing with a more localized market.
00:12:40
Speaker
um And we'll get into some examples, I'm sure. um But the deal, what you consider worth it for you and what the other person considers to be worth it for them, that's like two people contributing to the discussion of what something's worth versus like a global market where anyone could be competing on sale price and like buy price. And now it's like, okay, your own two opinions about what things are worth, those don't matter at all, almost.
00:13:08
Speaker
um Unless you're like literally buying or something like that instead everyone else's input matters, right? So walking over and trading two sticks for a goat with your friend Like that could be a perfectly good trade until you look at the global economy. You're like man sticks are super valuable right now um and i these goats so yeah worthless voiceless yeah um but yeah It's a thing of having the direct context of Hey, if we were to swap these things, would you feel good or bad? And you're like, oh, I think I'd feel okay enough. Versus if you're looking at the actual global market where someone's saying, hey, this ah donkey is usually worth three sticks on average as agreed upon by the community as a whole. I mean, cause if you can honestly like price pick
00:14:01
Speaker
You're going to pick the best deal for you, right? Right. Most of the time there might be reasons not to like, I have some examples of that too, but, uh, do we want to pick a game? We can, we can jump into one of these and start penning ideas to a more concrete implementation. I hate that. I'm going to say that 99% of my use case stuff is going to be based off of Diablo two. It's a good example though. I think it is. Um, it's also kind of where I learned the ropes.
00:14:30
Speaker
Right. As far as online interactions, not the trust people. um So before we tear it to pieces, how did the system work in Diablo 2 for trading? So Diablo 2 was.
00:14:44
Speaker
Direct trading that was really its only option. It was player to player. There was no global marketplace An economy did kind of settle Though I'm not entirely sure how that was decided But basically the stone of jordan or asajj soj became the kind of unit of currency, right? And I believe that kind of came about from How rare it is to find?
00:15:14
Speaker
ah compared with kind of how common enough it is. Did it have intrinsic value, the Stone of Jordan? Like, could you use it for something that in-game players would care about? It gave a plus one to all skills and some other bonuses. So like, for any type of character you're leveling up and is not at endgame tier, you could you could pretty much throw in anybody. So it always had some value. um But if you're trying to like, get rid of a specific thing or buy a certain thing,
00:15:44
Speaker
ah The way Diablo worked is you would make lobbies lobbies could fit up to like eight or nine people and you would name the lobby what you wanted to do with people in game. So it was like, hey, this is a PVP area. People go there to PVP. Or if you're like, hey, ah looking to sell or buy this, people would come because that was the information it's essentially like a little. Job posting. or Yeah, like a market board sort of. Yeah. Really, really basic, though.
00:16:13
Speaker
But it's really only based on game lobbies. So if you refreshed and you didn't see anything there, it wasn't there at the moment. Could you tell? Because I know that PvP was also an element of Diablo and we can get into that too. But could you tell like PvP was disabled or enabled or whatever on the posting? um So it didn't quite work that way as much. ah Basically, you could turn hostile to other people in your lobby. OK.
00:16:42
Speaker
Um, but you had to be outside of the camp and past level nine. Gotcha. So that there wasn't like, uh, Hey, I'm ambushing people trading type situation as much. So here's where it gets a little bit fuzzy. Um, and hopefully this resonates with one other person who's played Diablo two who can go. Yeah, that actually is factually correct. Um,
00:17:07
Speaker
Because the trade thing opened up little two inventory windows, you'd drag in items and then you'd both click check as far as a, here's our dual factor authentication. And we both agreed to this purchase and trade transaction, and then you'd move on. But sometimes people will try and be sneaky and like remove and re-add items. I think there were some items that because of item duplication or something else, or maybe it was all made up, um, that they could not do direct trade in window. And so they wanted to.
00:17:36
Speaker
do kind of remote trades outside like, Hey, I'm going to drop this 10 feet away. You drop it 10 feet away, right and we'll circle around. And that if you weren't sure, uh, comes off as awfully suspicious, uh, because there are abilities you can use to move quickly. You can use telekinesis to pick up things from a further distance away. Um, I think it was probably honestly all bullshit, yeah but there wasn't usually the issue of somebody interfering with your trade to very long-windedly answer that question. Right. So for the people that were aware of the mechanics, and maybe it took a little while to get accustomed to that, then you could reach a point where you weren't being ripped off um just by the mechanics. Maybe the deal was bad, but you weren't going to have someone like turn trader in the middle of your deal or something like that, as we might find as possible in some of the other games we talked about.
00:18:31
Speaker
But that was kind of like the overall structure of it. um And I will say the other big thing which we can delve deeper into later if we want is any type of bad experience I had in Diablo 2 as far as me being ripped off or not understanding the value of something. I was often offset by some people who've been playing Diablo 2 for like however many years and they're like I'm good for right now or I want to take a break or like I have a mule character that's just storing items and I just want to get rid of a bunch of shit. So somebody would make a lobby called like mule drops and they would load in and they would just go to the inventory and start dropping stuff. So everybody is joining this lobby, swarming like flies around the items, they're dropping and they're just trying to like mash click them up as fast as possible because that was the only way to do it. So hopefully you're close enough and the fastest person. Um,
00:19:29
Speaker
But yeah, a lot of the value I had in those games was initially seeded by the generosity of another player. Right. Yeah, and I think that's a fair point. There's the strict game theory of like trying to get the most out of a trade that you can, but not... These are also video games, right? So um outside of EVE Online, which I guess isn't. But the rest here are probably intended to be played for fun.
00:19:54
Speaker
Um, to some extent, and maybe you're trading with friends, maybe you're trading with people that you need to have a better relationship with in the future, or maybe you just like don't want to be known as this Scrooge McDuck of whatever video game you're in, or maybe it just makes you feel good to give other people a good deal. Those are all completely valid, um, approaches to trading as well. Um,
00:20:20
Speaker
And some games may encourage or discourage um generosity um compared compared to others. but um yeah And I think Diablo 2 is a perfect example of a very formative
Evolution of Game Economies
00:20:34
Speaker
game. right like This is early in the ah the ecosystem of online games. I mean, obviously there were other online games, but for us, this is a good example.
00:20:45
Speaker
um And it wasn't all super fixed and formatted, right? Like I think there, there were several Diablo games worth talking about the differences like between their economies and stuff. And two was the least formed. It was the most. Okay. If two friends are playing together and they want to trade items, they can do that. Right. I'm sure that's how it was initially pitched and like, yeah, we'll give that as an option.
00:21:08
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. i mean like i'm sure yeah It probably was a lunch room discussion. like Should we have an option for players to trade or is it just fine to have them drop things on the ground?
00:21:19
Speaker
right um Because so many things around those early era like early era games, they didn't really know how the players were going to play it. The game was less um like aggressively designed to only be played one way.
00:21:35
Speaker
Yeah, but I didn think as online games developed and the sense of having an in-game economy and player to player interactions, things did kind of get put in place to mitigate somebody being fucked over. Right. Yeah, absolutely. and That's going to be, you know, some of the others we talk about.
00:21:58
Speaker
um but that is a pretty good example. I wanna mention this, because it's gonna come up in some other games. I know that for Reborn, um I think is what the the the remaster was called, Diablo II Reborn, like there are third party trade sites um that basically act as market boards. um So you don't have to use like a lobby in such cases, you're much more tied into a sort of ah global economy to a certain extent. um They'll come up in some other games too.
00:22:28
Speaker
I, I think that as an option is nice because if I'm looking for a specific item, at least going back to that Diablo two example, I don't want to have to be searching around constantly for it and then asking or messaging random players, Hey, do you have this one thing? It is really nice to be able to go to, in this case, a third party trading site, search in, Hey, who is selling this item? And then just have things come up. Um,
00:22:56
Speaker
And that's something that Path of Exile did as well. And I really liked how well put together it was. um But you might be asking yourself, but why is it third party? Right. And basically, it's somebody in the community filling a need that the game did not do because lots of games do have in game. Hey, here is the marketplace here. You can search for whatever you're looking to buy or sell. Yeah. And You can essentially establish that communication and connection between players within your game, which I think is better because, it again, encourage people to get in the game instead of oh launching Binding of Isaac have to open up Platinum God on the side. yeah Right. um
00:23:40
Speaker
or just having some third party tool you always have to have in conjunction with the application feels weird. You know, it doesn't seem like it should be necessary, but like everything, there would be tradeoffs. Right. So, um, I do think that when you have taken taking path of exile, for example, when you have out of game trading, there is sort of this, like,
00:24:03
Speaker
ah the people in the know versus the people not in the know um knowledge gap, perhaps, because like, I don't know how prevalent ah people are, like, how many people know about the path of exile market. I guarantee you a lot of people play the game and probably never use it. um But as soon as you start to get into trading, maybe it's like, obviously, you're going to use this third party site, right? Because there's one, basically, right? Like, there's the big one. um And it really facilitates trading across different languages and all of these other things.
00:24:34
Speaker
It's a cool solution to the problem that was not solved within the game. um But like, ah you know, players don't have to use that. They could also trade things in the game. um But now you're looking at like different elements of competition. You're going much closer into like, okay, maybe it's easier to rip someone off if that person doesn't know what other people paid paid for an item or something like that, right?
00:25:01
Speaker
But as soon as you open up that global economy and people can be like, I don't know what the equivalent item for path of exile would be, but the stone of Jordan example, um, you're like, okay, a stone of Jordan is worth 15 sticks. Gotcha. Like that's what other people were paying this other guy who's going to charge me 50 sticks for a stone of Jordan. Can you believe that? Yeah, it is kind of crazy. Um, in path of exile though, it is a chaos orb. Chaos orb. That's the unit currency. Um, but what I like about path of exile is.
00:25:31
Speaker
For the most part, there's an agreed upon progression of items and their values. A lot of the items within Path of Exile are for item modification, whether it's rerolling the number of sockets you have, rerolling the color of those sockets, the quality of the armor, adding an affix or a suffix or something else.
00:25:53
Speaker
um because that's how you get to like the late game stuff. You're basically manipulating the RNG to, oh, this is the perfect six socketed all white thing that has a bonus to these skills for this class, et cetera, et cetera. That will go for some crazy money.
00:26:09
Speaker
um But like a chaos or orb is going to have an equivalent value of, Oh, this many color changing stones or this many socket stones. Um, there's just an agreed upon value and kind of like us currency going like a penny nickel dime, so on and so forth. There's like an equivalent exchange of like, Oh, a dollar. Yeah. That's 20 nickels. And it's just a known exchange rate. Um, though it's not listed as.
00:26:41
Speaker
Commonly there, but you figure out pretty pretty quick what it is. Yeah, I have seen on sites in the past It's been a couple years now but like people had basically the currency exchanges Because like the difference in the example that you presented is it's like 20 nickels to a dollar but a nickel is also 5% of a dollar. yeah right The difference in Path of Exile is like if for like a given season or given ladder or something, certain items had more value, maybe based off of how far along the ladder is. um The relative value of that item may be higher than it would be later. um But it is it is super cool because the difference is like when you're thinking about US currency, um everything is just a percentage of like a US dollar.
00:27:30
Speaker
And, and path of exile, everything also has intrinsic value, right? The the equivalent would be like. If in our real world, it's like, yeah, you could like use nickels. You could trade nickels if you want, but you could also just like put them in your car and it'll recharge your battery if it's about to die. Or it's like, if you have a dollar, you can also just eat that. Like dollars are just edible, all right? like the But there is no way actual intrinsic value to the currency in our society versus the way it's set up in Path of Exile, um which is super unique, even on our list of games. Yeah. I like the idea.
00:28:06
Speaker
of it actually having value because then it it has more than just a purpose of, Oh, I have 567 Schmickel bucks. Well, I can only use them to trade for items. It can't do anything else. Yeah. You can go to a Schmickel back concert.
00:28:24
Speaker
I like that way too much. um Like I think one of the starters was literally the um the town portal scrolls. Like when you start out the game, they're a very basic currency. um And it's just it's funny to think about that. So another thing is like when you are going to trade with a vendor like an NPC vendor in the game, they take these different types of shiny rocks. If I remember correctly, they don't care about i don't think money so much.
00:28:58
Speaker
Like at all. Um, and that's nice because now it's just, again, it's not just Schmickel bucks sitting in the the corner for the next Schmickelback concert. Uh-huh. It's specifically, hey, everybody wants this. It has, you know, all of it has utility. Yeah. So it makes you kind of weigh the options of, do I keep and hoard to try and save for something good? Or do I leverage this utility? Um,
00:29:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it's cool to explore those options. I think another angle to it is when you have a more complicated currency, like Path of Exile does, um, that can be more rewarding to people who want more complicated engagement in the economy, right? Like for me, if I'm going through and I'm like, the enemies are killing me, my build feels pretty bad. I'm not sure exactly what I should do or whatever. If I'm.
00:29:49
Speaker
not ready to make that jump to learn about good trades and things like that. It could be a little overwhelming to have 50 currencies to particular, like to invest in. You're like, should I be going for chaos orbs? Or maybe the town portal scrolls are a better investment right now, right? Like you don't know how to hoard wealth when it's not super centralized. You don't just have a bank account saying like, hey, you have $10,000 in savings.
00:30:13
Speaker
Um, you have a collection of shiny rocks. yeah So the thing that's a pain in the ass about that type of system is I've definitely used the external site. Poet trade to look for certain items. And maybe they wanted a certain number of chromatic orbs. And let's say I didn't have that many. Okay. Well, I can find a separate person to trade my chaos orbs with to get a certain amount of those colorful orbs, but then go trade with that other person.
00:30:44
Speaker
So the problem there is I'm now making two separate transactions when effectively I just wanted to do the one, but I need to do like a currency exchange in between. Exactly. And again, that's not something that is built in where if it was, it would be more convenient for the player experience. Right.
00:31:03
Speaker
But again, because they don't have that, because they don't have that universal one world economy or currency, there is more depth in the system. They made a a conscious design decision. And for a Path of Exile's case, like I wouldn't ask them to change it because so many games have gold or credits or whatever the crap, right?
00:31:25
Speaker
um And Path of Exile is unique. And in a world where there's so many games, like unique is better in a lot of ways. Yeah. So. I mean, they kind of normalized having just one quote unquote system of currency, whereas something like Diablo 2 had gold, which you would pay specifically to NPC vendors. Yeah.
00:31:50
Speaker
And then like drops, which you typically trade to players. Now you can trade players gold, but nine times out of 10, they don't give a shit about gold. That's like gold doesn't have value outside of, Oh, I need to res my mercenary. Uh-huh. And that's going to cost a shit ton of money. Cause it's end game. That's the only time. Uh, so it's weird to have, i don't I don't know. I'm going to go to gi to see if he has the good items. ah Right. Yeah, exactly. Um, but yeah, it's,
00:32:19
Speaker
A two currency system where one essentially becomes outdated or useless. Yes. And I will say for for most of the games here, and we' go where we will talk about other games too, um they don't have a two currency system. Um, they don't have that kind of like diverse economy. Some of them might. Um, but, um, yeah, and you know, just to, to talk about some of those elements, I think path of exile is going to stand out as a very unique one in my list. Um, one that I had here was a classic RuneScape. Um, so I'll be completely honest. I don't totally remember. I don't believe there was player to player trading and classic RuneScape. I.
00:33:02
Speaker
can tell you what I did, which was made apple pies after gathering wheat and stuff. And then I went and I sold them at like a market. Um, or, um, once I realized that that took more effort, even though it made a slight amount of money, it was more effort. It wasn't really worth it.
RuneScape and Player-to-Player Trading
00:33:19
Speaker
Uh, fished out lobsters, cooked lobsters and sold those to PVP years because people wanted it for the health. Um,
00:33:28
Speaker
And it was a very, very um like local people are just talking type market. Um, maybe there was direct trading. I think there must've been had to have been at some point. Yeah. Cause I don't remember actually using like a market board. I remember people talking and I'd be like, Hey.
00:33:46
Speaker
Uh, someone would be like buying lobsters for 20 gold or whatever. And so I have to be like, all right, I've got lobsters. Here you go. Right. It was very much bring your goods to market, which was like a very satisfying, uh, gameplay experience. There's something very.
00:34:02
Speaker
unifying about it because I remember in my little stint of World of Warcraft playing on my cousin's account and computer just going to the actual trading area and you'd see all these messages and you'd have to try and like filter through them because they would always stack on top of each other based on your camera angle.
00:34:22
Speaker
um But you were trading with real people, which was nice. And you could kind of pick and choose. You could maybe start your own a trade thread conversation.
00:34:34
Speaker
Maybe you'd kind of pull people away being like, hey, there's a lot of chat boxes coming up here. I'm going to go over to, I'll be in front of the Smithy ah hu selling lobsters or apple pies or what have you. Exactly. Right. And there would be locations that were regionally important for trading. Like you would go to banks. That's where it was. We would trade at banks.
00:34:55
Speaker
um And certain ones would be more popular than others, but you would just be looking for people that wanted to buy your stuff. And there was a trade option. It would show up as like your offer, their offer. You both have to accept, similar to what you described for Diablo two. But like the demand was not global. It was very, very local. um And that was that was obviously really interesting. Like we we talked a little bit about how Um, there was some opportunity to perhaps like scam players basically in Diablo and RuneScape is known for it, right? Like, Hey, free armor trimming in the wilderness. All you gotta do is come out here. Um, but, uh, that's kind of outside of the, the other way. I sort of localized economy and it was up to like player knowledge in that case, to know what your stuff was worth.
00:35:46
Speaker
um because because people are just trading with other people. It's very, very local knowledge. The person who knows more about what something is worth is going to get the better deal. um Yeah, that's just that's the way that system worked. um I I don't love that system, but like I feel like it's just the the most basic. What are you going to do? Like if you have kids again, going back to like a school example, if you have kids at the lunch table and they're like trading parts of their lunch or things, it's all based on. and Yeah, that sounds good enough to me. Barter basically. Yeah.
00:36:25
Speaker
um Yeah, it's not my ideal either. Cause I, I think I'm not a huge fan of a system where there could be huge gaps in knowledge yeah between participants in the system. Cause that's where your exploitation could happen. And it definitely didn't runescape. If you're a noob in any game, ah you typically will be preyed upon. Um, but it's not a good thing to get players into the game. Yeah. yeah Um, I also feel like we need to briefly talk about the need for trading.
00:36:57
Speaker
Sure. Economy. Yeah. This will take me two seconds. ah Let's say there's something you want, but you don't have it. Okay. Now let's say somebody else has it. There you go. I murdered the person that didn't take their stuff. Yeah. But yeah, like ah with any of these types of games, there's always going to be different drop rates, different loot tables, and you're not always going to be the one who's finding the most magical, shiny, unique items. Yeah.
00:37:26
Speaker
Um, in the case of Diablo two, there's a stack called magic find. I'm sure other games have that built in, whether explicitly or kind of more in the background. Um, but yeah, you might get like a really shiny drop for, Oh, this has nothing to do with the character I'm playing. Right. I don't plan to play necromancer anytime soon. It's basically just going to collect dust my inventory. Oh, somebody is assigning value to that. I can, you know, give them that item that I don't need and return.
00:37:56
Speaker
get that value that I can then use in the economy to get something else that I do want. Exactly. Yeah. So really it's and allowing people to help each other out in a degree kind of similar to like, I know our one friend likes to use Facebook marketplace as far as, Hey, I have this extra thing I'm looking to get rid of. Does somebody want it? Could they make use of it instead of just going to throw something out? Yeah.
00:38:25
Speaker
And it drives community engagement, right? When you design your game in such a way that players may not always get exactly what they want, but they get something that's useful to another player and the systems exist or the players can make the systems, um, in order to like trade those items, then that's just another form of engagement in the game. And like, honestly, I like trading in games. Uh, I have, I have one example coming up, um, where recently I've been trading in games. So like.
00:38:53
Speaker
There is a reason for it. It's one of the, like the the core pillars of what makes like an MMO is like exploration, combat, and socialization. Like those are the three. um And then yes, there's more specific groups that split off of those, um but trading is a big part of socialization. So um it can.
00:39:15
Speaker
It's honestly a lot of times like the difference between of an MMO that feels like it's dead where you're basically playing a single player game and one where you actually have a community where you're actually engaging with other people and it feels more collaborative because of it. um So.
00:39:31
Speaker
That's good. i'm glad you I'm glad you called that out because yes, it is very important in a lot of games. But not all games
Diablo 3's Real-Money Auction House
00:39:39
Speaker
implemented the same way. Coming off Diablo 2, I want to say the differences for Diablo 3 at launch. And I'm going to be relatively brief um because this could be an entire episode on its own. Because I just have a big smile. If you know the lore, you know where this is going. If you don't, tune in. ahha Right. ah People just turn off the radio right now.
00:39:59
Speaker
um But Diablo 3 at launch ah had a in-game shop where players could post their items for sale um using either in-game money or real life money.
00:40:16
Speaker
And this was wildly controversial. It also had impacts on the economy because the game was designed in such a way that they want people to get drops occasionally that are good or worth selling, but it doesn't necessarily have to relate to their character at all.
00:40:33
Speaker
um So they did less gear shaping is what I'm gonna call it and later games do a lot of gear shaping where it's like you're playing a Monk you're gonna get monk gear most of the time Almost like exclusively it's like 90% of the gear that drops will be for your class and later games Not the case at Diablo 3 at launch Um, and there was a limit on like what you could charge people for some of these items in like real life dollars, but I remember they were like literal magic rings, uh, in the game that would go for 25 us dollars. Um, and I, if I remember correctly, there's stuff that was even more expensive, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. And that system's gone, thankfully. Um, but people hated this.
00:41:17
Speaker
They really hated it because it really was taking the economy aspect of it. And also Blizzard made money off all of these sales, right? Anything in US dollars, they were taking a percentage. Maybe Blizzard's not the good guys. Yeah. I mean, fair take, honestly. But even in in this particular instance, the downside was it made your personal gameplay. If you wanted to play the game as like a single player game or a small co-op game.
00:41:43
Speaker
You could get magic items that drop that were useless to you. Even if they were super valuable to other players, now you have to sort of engage in the economy. um And if you wanted to just have a casual evening, it would really suck to get an excellent drop that was worthless to you. um And now you have to go through an in-game market to try to figure out how to trade it roughly into something that you want.
00:42:06
Speaker
um And on top of that, people are now able to inject real life money yeah into this. So whatever the economy was in Diablo three at launch, it's now immediately going to be heavily skewed because let's say I'm in my thirties and I have some free time and disposable income and I, boy, howdy, do I love Diablo three. Okay. Well, I can buy the items I want now pretty much. Mm-hmm.
00:42:34
Speaker
I don't need to really trade anything amongst other players, I'm just putting my real life money. Into this. Exactly. Yeah. You're not thinking. Like, let's say going back to Magic Find, which I still think was in Diablo 3. Initially it was. They took it out eventually. Good. It's one of those things where like you feel like you're missing out if you're not investing in it. Exactly. um But like, let's say you specifically went and tried to farm items that were selling high on the market for real life money. Okay, cool. Now you've paid for Diablo 3. Yeah.
00:43:10
Speaker
ah yeah That's the whole part where it's like, why why why have you done this? Were there arguments for it that I'm not remembering? i mean The argument for it was probably mostly from the board at Blizzard, which was just like, hey, we're basically getting microtransaction skimming off the top of any time that people sell things for US dollars.
00:43:34
Speaker
and um That would be their argument for from the gameplay player perspective. I mean, you could say some players who maybe are in other countries where like the currency conversions a little bit different or like the amount of money that they would get.
00:43:47
Speaker
um just doing a normal job might be a little bit less valuable. Like those players potentially make it actual real life money in amounts that actually matter to them um compared to like well off guy in the US in your thirties and you can like, you know, spend a hundred bucks on a couple of magic items. Like maybe that's a lot of money to someone in another country. um So it gave them an option to kind of hybridize their gameplay with real life. for an actual financial scheme. But for me, that's a bad thing. Yeah. I got to log on to work. What do you mean log on? This is before remote works even to think. Well, no, I got to sell items in Diablo 3. Exactly. Yeah. um Also, at the time of Diablo 3, bots have already existed for a long time. Yes. You can script things to
00:44:42
Speaker
do pretty much anything. Yeah. Well, it seems entirely plausible in the same way that people were farming for Bitcoin or Bitcoin or Doge or anything else ah to just say, Hey, look for these types of items and then sell them for real life money. Then have that real life money go to me directly. Yeah, it was a thing. It was literally a thing. Um, and the concept of me playing a video game that somebody else made right and me making money from that game.
00:45:12
Speaker
does not make sense to me. Yeah. It's like the, the amount of influence that real life money should have on an online game. That's an entire like perhaps separate discussion, but like this is clearly a case of you could just buy as much power as you wanted. Basically to what you said earlier, it's kind of, again, that gap between somebody who's starting out versus somebody who's been in it for awhile and, or maybe just has a lot of that currency to expense.
00:45:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think an attribute of my ideal economic system in a game ah would be that everybody has the same level of access to it. Right. Yeah. Time spent in the game, doing activities in the game should translate to power in the game. It's a closed system. You're not looking at outside currencies um manipulating it. I would agree. I agree with that point of the ideal system.
00:46:11
Speaker
um Although it gets muddy for later live service games and things like that. um To their credit, ah however much that's worth, eventually they remove the in-game market, the the real market system.
00:46:24
Speaker
um And they upped the drop rates on all the rare items because they could now, because now rather than expecting that you're going to need to, they need to support this global in-game market economy. And so it's like, well, if a player never sees a legendary item when they're playing as an necromancer.
00:46:42
Speaker
Doesn't that just suck? Like, doesn't that just feel bad as a player? And so they just, you know, they can up those drop rates massively because now none of these items or few of these items are tradable unless you played together with friends at the point when they dropped, which is an entirely different thing. That is something I actually wanted to ask about. Yeah. ah How do you feel about twinking mules, ah trading around items?
00:47:10
Speaker
basically giving, let's say, accumulated time or power to a player or account that was relatively new. I think it's a really dangerous slope. It is. In my head, I think there is there is an implementation where it's like, hey, for your first character, other players cannot just give them the latest, greatest in-game gear or infuse them with tons of currency and then be done.
00:47:36
Speaker
Um, because I would like to some extent to have some of those accomplishments, like play out for that player who's experiencing the game for the first time for subsequent characters. It's really nice if you have some sort of gear sharing, um, some way to like trade things around because it's like in this particular example, um, you may not want to farm a hundred hours.
00:48:02
Speaker
to get any drops that you need for any of your characters or or things like that. And in Gear Shaping, like they implemented it in Diablo, does kind of mitigate this because it's like, oh, do you want more stuff for your um for your paladin? ah Play your paladin. 90% of the stuff that's going to drop is for your paladin, right?
00:48:20
Speaker
um But I have had games, I don't want to say they necessarily be ruined, but I've had to push back against infusions of gear in certain games. When you have that friend who's been playing for months or years, you go to play and you're like, I'm just a newbie with a club. And they're like.
00:48:39
Speaker
Well, here, here is a crafted set of armor that was made from the remnants of a God you have not heard of yet, but you'll beat him in a hundred hours of gameplay from here. And it's going to be really good for you. Nothing in this game will be challenging from this point on, right? Like that's a bad experience. Yeah, it it definitely takes away from you actually experiencing the game.
00:49:01
Speaker
ah for yourself. But like, I understand that desire to want to play with friends and like, hey, I found this really good item for your character. Yeah. And it feels bad to have the game be like, actually, you're going to have to not be able to do that or you got to wait a week yeah of real lifetime or some other type of limitation.
00:49:22
Speaker
Um, it feels weird. There are sane limits though, right? Like I kind of thrown together the negative argument here. The positive way to just deal with this is have like a character level limit on gear. Right. Like then, cause that was one thing that Diablo two didn't have on all of the really good starter items is sometimes those start items really good. And there was no level limit at all. Um, that's pretty uncommon these days.
00:49:49
Speaker
Yeah, they've gotten better with it, but like Stone of Jordan, I don't think had a level requirement if it did is pretty low. Right. um But yeah, that is one way to limit it. So if they are level one, they're like, cool, I have to wait until level 87 regardless to use it. Yeah, exactly. Because now you've alleviated their RNG maybe by like giving them a cool piece of gear. As soon as they hit 87, they know they can use it. So that trading still has an effect.
00:50:15
Speaker
But you're not giving them the end of the game power at the beginning of the game. Yeah. I. It feels weird to have somebody log on for the first time, like they go in through the the the logging in gates and they see this beautiful new world. They take a step and then they kill the final boss with a thing and you're like, that was so cool. Uh huh. Yeah. It's probably not what the game designers want either, which is why you don't see this as much.
00:50:47
Speaker
So would you say that you're in agreement with me as far as you understand the the need for the restrictions, but you would like it to be convenient to give items to a friend from time to time? Yeah, exactly. um I agree with that wholeheartedly.
00:51:03
Speaker
um I don't know exactly what the restrictions should look like. like um We played, trying to remember exactly what it was. Oh no, maybe it was it was Diablo IV, I think, has a co-op play like currency basically, or drop. um It's like an item that allows you to trade other items um if they didn't drop within the same session. If you're playing together and an item drops, you can just like trade it free like for an hour or whatever.
00:51:32
Speaker
however long it is. But if you wanted to trade items outside of that, you could also like play in co-op. And so you know what? Maybe this wasn't Diablo. We played another ARPG.
00:51:47
Speaker
Last epoch. I was just going to think of the name and I realized I wasn't going to get it, so I'm so glad you landed that as early as you did. Yeah, these are both ARPGs, so that's where my confusion comes from. But like then that they have a mechanic where it's like, hey, if you spend time playing with this other person, um you're likely to get this affinity buff, basically, is the way you could think about it, which would allow you to trade any item that you want that is tradable.
00:52:13
Speaker
to that other player, even if you wouldn't normally be able to. And so like there are there are different ways that games have made it more or less um possible to like trade all of these items. um But there definitely needs to be some degree of that. Completely locking off the system so that you can't trade with other players.
00:52:32
Speaker
I mean, that doesn't even belong in this episode, basically, since we're talking about trading, um, and going in the opposite direction of just like free fall, just give people the best stuff and right at the beginning of the game. That's too much too. Yeah. Cause again, just going back to somebody could abuse it. Somebody could have a bot that's going and farming items and then, Oh, I'm just going to give it to this player. I just created, Oh cool. They have all this stuff. Exactly. Yeah.
00:53:03
Speaker
Um, so I had a couple other examples. I want to rapid fire a couple ideas from
Trading Systems and Player Protections
00:53:08
Speaker
them. Um, the game I have been playing recently is warframe little bit less, um, super recently, but that has an out of game, both an in-game trading chat.
00:53:18
Speaker
where you can go if you want to get scammed, or you can use the third party out of game ah website, the market, um and you can just click like a button that's just copy paste, hey, I'm buying this for this price that you're selling, send it to the person, go to their dojo, or whatever, make the trade. It has plenty of protections against people doing rapid fire item changes, like it'll actually put a visual indicator if someone puts in platinum, which is the premium currency,
00:53:47
Speaker
um and then like reduces it. It'll have like a down arrow next to it, to a red down arrow to show that, hey, this is not the same amount of money that it just was. um And then there's a double confirmation where people have to both hit OK, um which locks in the items being traded. And then there's a countdown where it says, you are trading in text, these, four, these, five seconds or whatever, and then you can both hit OK. They really, really don't want people to be scammed, and I never have been.
00:54:20
Speaker
um Man, you missed some good days in Diablo too. aha um Because it's one of those things where people will create this sense of urgency. And you're like, oh, I have to you know do this quick so they can go put out their houses on fire or something. Yeah, cats in the oven or something. um And like people would just swap items. um I'm glad that Warframe does have a system like that. A Path of Exile system is like you have to mouse over each of the items in the trade window of both trade windows to be like, yep, these are the ones.
00:54:51
Speaker
And then you go, OK, cool. But I do like the listing out, hey, just in case you made a visual assumption or weren't paying it to like in text, your last chance, here you go. Yes, it's on you beyond this. And the last thing that they do that's different than some of the other systems you talked about is limited trades. So based off of your character mastery level, which is basically the number of warframes you load up, the number of weapons you've used, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:55:19
Speaker
um you have a certain number of limited daily trades, and you can't go be beyond that. If you hit the cap, then you can't trade at all. um You have to wait until reset in order to do that again. And so for some players, that's like, you know, early, early game, you're looking at like five trades a day. um Later, you're looking at like 30, which is a ton, and it's very difficult to go across like 30. But,
00:55:49
Speaker
I'm split on this because on one hand it's very limiting. um If you really just wanted to sit down and trade for three hours and that's the type of player you want to be, this is the worst mechanic they could put in the game, right? On the other hand, if you want to trade for like half an hour or an hour, you're probably never going to hit that cap.
00:56:10
Speaker
and all of the tryhards that do wanna trade for like three hours, they hit their cap hours ago, right? You're not competing with them anymore. The market is more, quote unquote, distributed or fair because anybody who's really really sweating, ah they ran out of trades already. You don't have to like compete with their prices or anything.
00:56:33
Speaker
um So that's weird. I guess from your point of view, like how often do you find yourself trading? What's the situation where you would need to trade? Is it just getting rid of loot you can't use? Yeah, it kind of. I can't jump into like the full discussion because it literally gets to the economics of Warframe.
00:56:56
Speaker
in general, but like usually what you're doing is loot you can't use for the premium currency for platinum um or trading the premium currency for ah stuff that you don't want to farm for. That's mostly how it works in short. um So the times where I do find myself trading, a lot of times it's just, I'm just you know sitting in my dojo watching something on another monitor.
00:57:22
Speaker
ah Waiting for people to message me for like an hour or less, you know um And it does feed into the whole like Are you spending real life money on this game or are you just doing things in the game to get the real life money? there's a whole bunch of interplay there, but Yeah, that's normally how it works Well, then I wouldn't really see from my point of view as an outsider I wouldn't really see the trade cap as too much of an impedance. Yeah. Uh, like you said, it really just seems more so for tryhard sweaty people who want to trade all the time, but like, yeah, you could do that in another game. I feel like it doesn't have to be war frame free games that have economies. No. Yeah. And, um, it also keeps people from like hoarding a particular corner of the market.
00:58:19
Speaker
Cause like it could be that there's a profitable item that I could sell for 15 platinum. It's pretty decent. Um, and I have a hundred of that item. Great. Each person that wants to make a purchase, maybe they only need one copy of it. I can do like, I can sell 15 of those items in a day and I'm done. I'm out. Right. Anybody else who wanted to particular, like to participate in that particular corner of the market, they can now.
00:58:46
Speaker
because I'm not sitting there slowly reducing. Oh, you were selling for 15. I'm selling for 14 now. Sorry about that. You know, like um it makes it a little bit less cutthroat and. OK, I think I see what you mean. Basically, people have different time slots. Yeah. As far as price stuff. Yeah. Kind of like turn ups and animal crossing. um Yeah.
00:59:13
Speaker
That's actually a funny example, but yeah. um So that's the way that it works there. the The other example I have on the actual opposite side is Guild Wars 2, which is there are a bunch of servers people can play on. They all have the exact same market. All of the market NPCs for all of the orders are um shared across all of the servers and all of the regions. And if you ever put anything up for sale anywhere,
00:59:42
Speaker
you can just buy it um someone else can buy it everyone's competing all the time there's no limit on trading there's like a little bit of in-game tax or whatever but like it's very very buyer focused from a uh optimization standpoint because everyone's competing to sell you something i think that's again it's fine to have a system and has it has a zip size has its drawbacks but like I think that's one of the things that's probably better for the consumer because now you have a whole array of options to pick from and you're going to pick the one that is most economic for you. Exactly. Yeah. All right. This person is technically trading a little bit high per unit, but I really only need two. So I'm going to go with this one. This seems the most cost effective for me. Yeah.
01:00:32
Speaker
And there's no reason to spend more on the exact same copy of an item compared to spending less. So it almost leads to this like subsistence trading on the seller side. If you are like, what is the minimum amount of profit that I'm willing to like take on this item or like, yeah, to take on this item.
01:00:52
Speaker
And then there's going to be someone else who just didn't run the math. They didn't think about what the components costed for what they crafted. And they're like, well, they're selling it for 15. So I'm going to sell for 14. And you're like, no, I literally have the math. It's literally right in front of me. If you're selling this for 14, you could have just sold the components individually and made more money and.
01:01:12
Speaker
It's terrible. That's my thing. I, although it's, it's very fair from the buyer's perspective. Um, it's too cutthroat from the seller's perspective for me. Yeah. Cause somebody could just undercut you. Like, let's say you had those 100 things at 15.
01:01:32
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Regardless of how many you have, if I see them being sold for 14, why am I going to pay 15? Yeah. It's not like you're some reputable, you're just another player on the game. Exactly. Like there's no reason for me to pick the higher paid one when I can always pick the cheaper one. And that's the issue with that system. Yeah. Cause it's like, it's probably easier to implement. I fully understand, you know, it's better for buyers and stuff, but it's a less engaging market.
01:02:02
Speaker
Yeah, I, I kind of like, again, Path of Eggs are like last year, Parker might go to examples. Um, but basically just having some inventory like, Hey, I'm going to mark this for sale. Uh, this much. Yeah. So when people go to look for it, they will see your thing come up. Um, but you don't really have to do the inventory management. You don't have to set up like a store. You're just like, this one's 50 silver. Yeah. And then if nobody buys it, cool. No real sweat off your back.
01:02:32
Speaker
If they do awesome, you've now freed up some stuff made a little bit of pocket change for yourself But it doesn't feel like there's this active. I have to be on all the time waiting for trades Yeah, I like the idea of I can be offline. Oh a trade has happened cool That's an important distinction because we actually haven't pointed that out specifically for warframe You can't trade with offline players path of exile. You can not gonna be able to trade with offline players Guild Wars, you're posting your items to a market board. You don't need to stay online. You're not only competing as a seller with everyone else who's online, you're also competing with everyone else who's offline, right? So it's a very different type of environment. It's ah it's harder to engage with those systems, the more distributed, the more global, and less universal, which I'm sure also applies to real life economy economies, too.
01:03:25
Speaker
um But yeah, it's it's it's tougher to to find a way in in those situations. um If you like wanted to make tons of money passively in Path of Exile without ever logging into the game, sorry. That's like not an option. right you You can't trade while you're not literally in the game. I still like the idea of that from a seller's perspective because you're like, Oh, I have to, I have to go on vacation. Oh, damn. Oh shit. ah Um, but you'd still have the option to, Hey, while I'm offline, people still have access to these things if they want to buy it. Exactly. Yeah. It feels weird to have this currency like, Oh, they're offline. Sorry. Uh, no communicado. Uh-huh. All done here. Yeah. It forces.
01:04:15
Speaker
fewer sellers or whatever. It makes it more competitive on the seller side, but I also agree that it is kind of nice to have that, uh, that dopamine of I signed into the game and it's like, Hey, you sold 50 items while you were out. Here is your money, sir. Member. Give me a log on bonus. how oro Yeah, exactly.
01:04:34
Speaker
ah I know we're approaching time. I got to mention this one because it's it's it's for the homies. um And it's a different economy to what we described. Star Wars Galaxies. Be brief. I'm not telling you about all the the the good stuff the game did. One of the good things the game did was um You had trade terminals. You could trade while you're offline. That's fine. Well, I mean, you buy stuff while you're online, obviously. But um the difference was, in order to pick up goods, you needed to go to the planet, to the city, to whatever location the good was physically located at. um So you may still have like trade hubs, like Mos Eisley or Theed or whatever, um where people would go to like bring their goods to sell,
01:05:21
Speaker
But you may have other locations where they're more remote, they're more distant, and people have higher prices, ah perhaps, or lower prices, right? And so it led to this situation where, since you need to physically go to where the item is to pick it up, you're now traveling. You're taking shuttles. You're you know taking a swoop bike across the desert. um You're checking out the mall where the players set up this presentation ah with all of their vendors.
01:05:48
Speaker
um and you had the option to always just go for convenience. I'll spend a little bit more because the item's right here where I'm at. Or I i think it's worth saving some credits. I'm gonna fly out and actually go visit this place. Or maybe it's a large purchase where that actually is justified, right? um And that was a really cool solution to the problem of like the global economy thing we were talking about with Guild Wars.
01:06:15
Speaker
Because like you don't have to compete with everyone to undercut people the most. If you're in like Mos Eisley, yeah, people know where Mos Eisley is like, it's going to be aggressive, right? People are going to be undercutting each other all the time, but you can also just go to like a slightly less populated location and try to sell your goods there. And people may pay a little bit more because they happen to be there and it's convenient to buy that onsite. So.
01:06:43
Speaker
For anybody who doesn't know what Jake's hot, this is basically how CVS works. They have some common items that other stores will have. CVS is closer, but they will charge you like $10 for a thing of toothpaste. It seems unreasonable. And it is, but you don't want to get in your car and drive two miles. You want an $8 Ben and Jerry's?
01:07:05
Speaker
um But yeah, it is nice to give a player the option of do you basically want to pay extra for convenience? Exactly. Yeah. And it allowed people to engage with the system differently. Right. Like where you want to sell your things matters. I was a war profiteer profiteer. Like there was a PVP place on Naboo. I think it was called Restis was the name of it.
01:07:30
Speaker
And people were constantly blowing up each other's ah bikes, their vehicles, multi-person or single-person vehicles. And I was like, I know that this isn't a trade hub, but by there's this PVP hotspot near here. So I just went out there with tons of manufactured desert swoop bikes from like ah at the the early Star Wars movies, if you remember those.
01:07:52
Speaker
and just loaded them all up on the market, charged a little bit more than what people would be paying if they went somewhere else. But I just counted on it. I was like, players will not expect that their bikes blow up as much as they will once the empire starts coming down on them. And I made a ton of money. It was really good for me. And it was just because it's like the dynamics of how the system was set up allowed me to engage with it from the side, from a little bit a different perspective.
01:08:21
Speaker
Um, awesome. What, what I'm hearing basically is if there is a need in the market, Jake will kind of show up peddling his way. Yeah. ah yeah That was, that was kind of the case. Um, and it was, it was fun. It's also good for role playing and it's good for engagement with the game. And but yeah, I'm not knocking it. You were definitely seeing an opportunity and jumping on it and making use of it.
Complexities of EVE Online's Economy
01:08:49
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:50
Speaker
There's actually like, why does nobody want this item that I don't want? Uh-huh. Yeah. No, that's fair. Really cool game. Never going to have an episode on it, but that's fine. Um, and then Eve online, everything's made up. It doesn't matter. Uh, it's all spreadsheets. Uh, people are blowing each other up, um, while they're trying to drop off goods. Um, you can look up any news article over the last 10 years. If you want to hear more about the economy of Eve, but Uh, it's gotten worse from my perspective because they've injected some of the real life money into things recently. So huge mistake. Yeah. Not a big fan of that. Any closing thoughts on the economy? Have we, have we, have we narrowed in on the ideal? No, no, not at all. I think we picked like one thing. We're like, that seems okay. Um, I, so I'd say a couple high level points before we close it out here. Yeah.
01:09:50
Speaker
I think everything should be equally accessible, regardless of how much time you've put into the game or how much money you've spent on the game as far as access to trading. Right. I mean, obviously, if you play the game or you're going to have more in game currency, um I would think that all.
01:10:11
Speaker
things should be within the game. You should not start involving things outside of the game. Mm hmm. Stuff like Poet trade is cool um because it's a really well done system. But like if it was in the game, even better. Right. And then I think lastly, there needs to at least be some type of dual authentication. Just make sure you're not being fucked over. Yeah. um And then local versus global.
01:10:40
Speaker
I think you can have a degree of both. I don't think there's, oh, this one's perfect. This one sucks. um It's a little more flexible there for me though. Yeah, I kind of, I kind of told, when I, when I mentioned Star Wars Galaxies, I was like, that's pretty much my ideal global read. So you can like have the decision to go as far as you want to pick something up, but local acquisition. So it comes down to convenience.
01:11:08
Speaker
Um, so you can bait people out to your mall in the middle of Dantooine by being like, Hey, I'm selling bikes for 10 K a piece. And then they show up and they're like, there's so many vendors here. I guess I'll spend some money here. I'll spend some money here. It's literal real life mall strategies, doorbusters, like highly get them in the door. Exactly. I love that. I love that. Well, see, we put a loss leader near the front so that people want these, uh,
01:11:35
Speaker
I can't think of applesauce chips. I don't know what is a good loss leader. Honey, people, people, honey is pretty expensive. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I would agree with those. I think those are fair. Um, and if you're doing a traditional MMO where you're not like free to play, trying to blend currencies and stuff like warframe is, it's probably a little bit easier to, it's a little bit easier when you're just like, all right, the players in the universe play around with their in universe stuff.
01:12:04
Speaker
Um, but say la vie la vie. But, um, I will say my final closing thought is regardless of what system you think is the best. Um, I would be curious to hear, have you ever hit a point of just, Oh, I'm going full don't know. Cause I have in real life with a one or two things. Like when I got out of magic, all my magic cards just went to other people who were playing magic. Cause I had.
01:12:33
Speaker
Appreciated the benefit of the cards I had but it wasn't providing me any value is essentially collecting dust So right if you can give it to people who are getting into it um And let them have that value it's huge because like when I got into magic there were several people who were just like Do you want these cards? I don't play magic anymore. I'm like, oh my for free, right? holy Shit Um, so yeah, just basically in those games, uh, try and find some way to make your money while you are playing. But if you're taking a break or just, you're not playing anymore, uh, pay it forward, you know, yeah help out a newbie, be the role model that somebody was to you. It's like they say in Eve online, friendship is the most valuable ship you can fly. so Um, yeah, absolutely.
01:13:25
Speaker
And you're playing games, have fun. yeah Make your experience better, other people's experience better. As long as that's happening, you're probably having a good time. You can worry about real life stuff in real lifetime. Keep the vibes good. But we covered a lot of economies, but not all of them. Maybe we missed the big one. If you have information about the big economy, the one you think that it's implemented better than any of the examples that we presented,
01:13:55
Speaker
Send that in. Soapstone Podcast at gmail dot.com. Or you could join the discussion on Facebook at facebook dot.com slash soapstone podcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Get that bread.