Wishful Thinking: An Ur without Vendors Part San

Ur without Vendors Part San: Advertising

When we left off, I had shown how buy orders could maintain the standard of living for players who prefer to be able to sell instantly and not think about the economy.  I admitted, however, that even with buy orders, there remained the additional challenge of how players would locate buy orders.  Simply having buy orders is not enough — the game must further support these orders.

If buy orders are implemented through a revised version of the auction system, this need should not be an issue.  Players should be able to easily sort lists, finding the best price for their goods, much like they can with goods for sale.  The problem only arises if buy orders are implemented via player vendors (PVs) — a scenario I actually hope for.

And that’s why this post will not be so much an explanation as a plea: please Tiny Speck, if you someday implement buy orders via player vendors, give in game support for remotely locating and browsing vendors.  To illustrate why, I’d like to compare two experiences.

In the first, I am playing Eve.   If I do not want to sell my goods on the market myself, I fly the goods into a major market system, I sell the goods to a buy order.  Done.

In the second, I am playing Star Wars Galaxies.  I have goods I want to sell, so I pull up a list of vendors, with high enough skills to be listed, on a major market planet.  I read the description to discover what things they sell and use that to try to imagine what they might buy.  I drive to the location.  I discover they are not buying anything.  I drive to the next location.  They are buying, but the order has almost been filled and it only takes a fraction.  I drive to the next location.   The player clearly hasn’t logged in and ages.  And so on.  And so on.

Be Eve, Tiny Speck, don’t be Star Wars Galaxies.

If buy orders are implemented via PVs, then make PVs seachable and filterable.  Make me bring the goods to the location, but make it easy for me to find the location.  Such listings are a good opportunity for skills or upgrades as well.

The alternative is a nightmare for players trying to use the system.  And would turn local chat into an ugly spam fest.

Wishful Thinking: An Ur without Vendors Part Deux

Ur Without Vendors Part Deux: Buy Orders

We’ve arranged for alternate supplies of items only available via NPC vendors.  Of course, no one upset about the concept of a player-driven economy is worried about Tiny Speck adding more content to the game as such is clearly inevitable — as long as the game is running they will add more content.

No, what most people seem to be worried about is that phasing out the vendors will change the way they play the game, forcing them into new patterns, forcing them to study and work with the in game economy in order to make currants.  As for that latter bit, I feel players already do that.  They already investigate, to some extent, what they will get for grinding out a large amount of product and dumping it on a vendor.  They have, consciously or unconsciously, worked out the time spent versus reward ratio—or took someone else’s word for it.   So really the concern is more about not being able to sell product instantly, something they are currently used to.

Even though some people I like and consider friends express this concern, I don’t have much sympathy.  In part, my experience in games with player-driven economies just doesn’t provide any support for the fear.  While playing Eve, I never worried about selling my goods and was always able to do so instantly if I wanted to, yet the game does not give and has never given the option to sell to an NPC vendor.  [Note from future Sauce: I did not think about SWG until I was thinking about advertising.  Suffice it to say SWG, while I never struggled to make money, did have some downsides to its player-driven economy.  So it can be done badly, but it can be done well.]

But even though I do not share this fear, am not even able to relate to it, it is this fear that makes buy orders an important part of transitioning to an Ur without vendors.

Let’s imagine a scenario in an Ur without vendors to illustrate how buy orders would function such that the daily game play of the “I only sell to the Tool Vendor and that’s that” players would not change at all.

In this hypothetical scenario, I have set myself up as seller of furniture items.  The method of sale isn’t important — either auction or my own (coming soon™) personal street vendor.  However, as someone who has been playing the game for awhile, I don’t want to put in the time to gather the components I need for furniture.  I’m tired of gathering.  I prefer to only log in occasionally, check my auction or vendor stock, and craft more things to fill my “shelves,” rather than spent two or three times longer gathering components.

Now I’m not the only one with buy orders out in the world for planks, metal, and snails, so I set my buy price slightly above that of my competition, about 90% of face value.  Quite simply, players that want to just craft and dump items on the vendor will be doing exactly that, with perhaps only the added step of checking for items with high demand — gauged by the number of buy orders available.

In an Ur without vendors, nothing will change for the craft and dump crowd except where they dump.  In my scenario above, they will even get more return on their product than they do in the current system, with only the single extra step of checking buy orders before crafting.

And for those that grind out awesome stews and meat tetras and other finished items — I’ll have buy orders for you too.  After all, if you just want to craft and dump, you’ll be satisfied with any payment at 75% value and up, as that is what you—most of us right now really, out of necessity—are already willing to settle for.

On the other hand, I take a lot of satisfaction from producing items that others want to buy, and though I’m pleased more by making the sale than by being able to markup the price, since I’m not interested in instant sales, I will be able to turn around your finished product for a profit, especially using a personal vendor and not worrying about auction fees.  I will provide a service for those that don’t want to worry about the economy, and they will provide a service for me — allowing me to move fully into the economic meta-game, something I already take advantage of at every possible turn.  When R3 released and all my friends were organizing and decorating their houses, I was out gathering building materials to sell on auction — I just about doubled my currants in a single weekend.

In a nutshell, an Ur without vendors will still have vendors that buy from players — those vendors will just be other players.  With properly implemented buy orders, no existing game play style will be eliminated — instead, the options of how to play will be expanded.  Of course, there’s still the challenge of finding the buy orders, the added step I mentioned but glossed over like it was meaningless.  I confess it’s not meaningless, and how that functions will affect whether or not buy orders replace and improve upon the tool vendors of today.   But that’s part 3, in-game marketing and advertising, and I will cover that later this week.

Wishful Thinking: An Ur without Vendors Part One

Introduction

Now that it’s the third time I’ve used Wishful Thinking as a header, I can officially call it a series of posts where I look at an aspect of a game I play and consider ways to make it awesome, without simply trying to cater to my own play style and while attempting to remain somewhat reasonable, but without any idea of how practical it would be to code or what code is anyway.

I cracked it!

This time, we’re going to talk about an Ur without NPC vendors.  We’re going to imagine it in such a way that evades the nightmare scenarios some have created in their odd little minds.  That’s right, I’m going to take away your street spirits, take away your tool vendor, and you’re going to like it.  But we’re going to need to do this in parts — for both Tiny Speck, and for this series of articles, there’s a lot that would need to happen, ideally, to have an Ur without vendors.

First, we’re going to need alternate supplies of items that are currently only available on vendors.  Second, we’re going to discuss the importance of buy orders, and how those could be implemented via either the auction system or player vendors (henceforth PVs).  Third, we’re going to talk about the importance of in-game support for marketing and advertising for PVs.  At some point, I’ll even sum it all up in a neat little package that erases some of the nightmare scenarios.  Let’s do this.

Ur without Vendors Part One: Content & Other Assorted Ponies

While it may or may not be the first step toward an Ur without Vendors that Tiny Speck plans to take—and I’m willing to bet it’s something that will happen slowly and not in a single step—one of the biggest barriers to removing NPC vendors from Ur are the many items that are currently only available via vendors.   Although not an exhaustive list, some of the ones I’d like to touch on are beer, salmon, honey, and light bulbs.  

I mention beer first because it’s one I’m surprised has yet to enter the game.  When distilling became a skill and hooch moved from a vendor provided item to a player produced item, I expected brewing to follow shortly.  For all we know, perhaps it would have but was delayed when the game went back to beta.  Ideally, I’d like to see brewing be more involved than distilling — not that I want the task itself to be involved; however, as a former beer aficionado, I would like to see several beer recipes enter the game, perhaps moving the seasonal pumpkin ale to the brewing skills.

Salmon often comes up in the ideas forum.  Off the top of my head, I can think of two reoccurring proposals: bear hugging and fishing.  I’m really not the biggest fan of bear hugging.  I’ve always felt the idea was just too simple, just an extension of the same mechanic used to harvest existing animals.  Especially since the introduction of new mechanics with sloths and foxes, I’d prefer to leave hugging to the crabs.

Fishing would at least be a new mechanic, but as I pointed out in an idea thread months ago, straightforward fishing wouldn’t be all that Glitchy.  Right now, no animals are actually killed to provide food products.  And while it’s hard to avoid that salmon are, well, salmon, and the only food players can eat in game that has eyes, I still would love to see the basket fishing I proposed in that thread.  MMO players love fishing — I think Ur needs it too.

Honey: bees! comments on this blog, and out of twisted gratitude, I say we need bees with his face.   I think bees with my face would give me nightmares, so I’m not sure if that would be a good or bad tribute.

Light bulbs are the newest vendor only items.  The solution for an alternate supply could end up being grouped in with things like machine parts and the other tools that are currently not crafted.  But I think light bulbs provide an opportunity for interesting content.

I can imagine a region where light is important, levels in which most of the background or resources are imperceptible and do not even highlight unless there are enough light bulbs present. The bulbs could either grow on trees or be in nodes scattered about the environment like barnacles or jellisacs.  There would need to be something else attractive about the region as well: perhaps non-economic like really impressive, detailed background art.  Here, my ideal would be some other competing resource, only available in these light bulb caves, but only accessible if light bulbs were nearby.  If the resources were designed appropriately, demand for light bulbs—currently not that high as they are only needed to craft lamps— would be in competition with the other resource.  Such a setup would regularly prompt whiny forum posts, but it would at least provide an interesting game-within-the-game beyond simple harvesting.  And light and dark mechanics are just cool.

There are other items only available on vendors, but since inevitably I will miss some, I won’t bother trying to be exhaustive.  I think tools and machine parts are rather important though.  Although an Ur without Vendors would always have its population of vets that were able to buy tools and parts directly before the game changed, I think tools and parts should enter the game in such a way that they could all be created even if the game were reset.  Some basic versions would probably need to enter the game via the tutorial, to ease new players into the economy, but otherwise the materials should always be obtainable without the tool we are trying to craft.

Tune in later this week for Ur without Vendors Part Deux: Buy Orders -or- How to Get Tool Vendor Addicts to Ride this Train.

Glitch: Home Streets and Resource Routes

Housing Release 3, or as it is known in some parts, Housing for Realz, is mostly settled in.  Those that like to decorate have decorated—or are waiting for more credits—and demand on the auctions for building materials has slowed.   This time is actually when I planned to create my own home, so soon I might find an excuse to fit in images of my Glitch castle.  In the meantime, I’ve put my time, resources, and iMG into my home street and the streets of others on Housing Resource Routes.

I figure I can start Bubble Blvd. with a creepy vibe if I want to. The music is excellent, I swear.

The left side of my street is not part of a route. I made it barnacles and jellisacs in response to market demands, and that sparked the idea for yet another route. More on that in another article, I suppose.

The right side of my street, however, is all bubbles.

Like the gnome suggested, visitors to my street can follow the bottom sign to more bubbles.

And the bottom sign again from there for even more bubbles.

Routes are incredibly useful for gathering a large amount of a particular resource.  Traffic seems pretty steady, and projects to restore worn out resources are just as steady — recent tweaks have made those projects much less of a burden if a burden at all, giving them a fair cost to reward ratio.     I’ve passed an hour or two of game time actively seeking out projects.  Just this afternoon, the HRR group grew large enough to reach the top 10 groups, by population, in Glitch.

All hail Scarlett Bearsdale, founder of HRR and a gosh darn swell human being.

The routes have brought a new way of life to Ur — or at least, a new style of game play.  With anything new comes controversy.  Some are upset that less players are wandering the public streets.  Some feel resource routes make things too easy.  I’ve even seen at least one update from someone fearing being added to a route against her will, and a few forum posts concerned that HRR might become the bully on the block.

I have several thoughts about less players wandering the old streets of Ur.  First, I think the novelty of the new homes and streets has yet to completely fade, so it’s difficult to determine the reasons less people are wandering the traditional streets.  Since I’ve scheduled customizing my home as a future endeavor, I’ve actually been spending more time on the traditional streets, taking advantage of my quoin multiplier.   And in the past, prior to any of the updates, it was not uncommon to see a large number of people at home when online.  I think it is also possible that the new naming makes it more obvious when people are home or visiting someone else’s home.  I think it’s just too early to make this objection, and even later, difficult to pin the blame solely on the routes.

As for resource routes making it too easy to gather materials, I will never agree that simply not being able to walk past a resource in quantity in a short period of time should be equated with challenge.  And once upon a time, many of us had other solutions that similarly guaranteed our resource runs.  Routes turn old secrets into common knowledge.

As for the last few, routes are and will always be a voluntary thing.  Route participants agree to the route’s requirements — no one forces them to join.  There are no expectations of those who are not members, and never will be.

But clearly I do not agree with the objections.  More interesting is what the routes provide other than controversial, quick tree runs: a reason for players to work together towards a common objective.  Oh sure, rook attacks need a group of players, but in those situations players all find themselves in the same place for the same reason, take care of business, and move along.  Resource routes have provided a reason to unite players behind a project for a long period of time, and that’s a sandbox element that had been missing from Glitch.  Resource restoration projects give even more reason for these players to communicate — since housing has launched, I have only seen the projects for my street resources once but noticed they have been restored quite a number of times.  The HRR’s chat regularly has members pointing out projects along the routes and asking for help.

I’m sure Tiny Speck has their own plans for long term cooperative projects.  And I’m willing to bet they will be awesome.  But in the meantime, I think the routes help fill that gap, and I’m happy to be a part of them.

Glitch: Housing Release 3

Moving day!  Well, come and gone, but moving weekend! I did get a few farewell photos of my old home.

My Alakol 50k currant modern monstrosity.

more different view

The fated moment was Wednesday afternoon.  Trumpets blared (not really) and word came down from on high that the game was closing.  The clouds parted (not really), and god appeared (not really).

But he did speak to us!

Sometime between that 10 minute warning and the final notice, I heard about an end of the world party on stoot’s home street.  I headed by there for the last five or six minutes before the game came down.   There was quite the crowd, and flash kept kicking me out.  I did not get many pictures, but I managed a screen capture as it all came to a halt.

This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a poof.

Well, a few hours turned into 24, give or take a couple.  But they came back!  Moving day! Woohoo!

 Not everyone shared my excitement for moving day.  It is a rather stressful thing, throwing all one’s belongings into boxes and later sorting through them to find what you need or put it away.  The box exploding and throwing items everywhere didn’t help some of these poor folks with the transition:

This was my third largest box. The contents of the first two took much longer to sort, but I managed easily with the Storage Display Boxes (SDBs) arranged on the back wall.

This box was actually a surprise.  I knew I had gathered a lot of things at my test house, but I did not realize how much I had not been using at my old home.  And not everything made it!  I’m among a number of players missing a real box — some are missing their boxes entirely.   Apparently, Tiny Speck is tracking down the missing items manually, with magic ju ju shoo shoo powder. Basically, it went much like a real move.  The main difference is that our missing boxes will be restored; whereas in a real move they would probably be delivered to a different person that just happens to have good taste in books.  Jerk.  We should all just be grateful that they didn’t put those annoying stickers on the bottom of all our furniture. However, I vow if a current employee of Tiny Speck that is not player support asks me to help them unpack their things after a major move, I will agree.  And then proceed to hurl their things in little random piles all over their home. I really did enjoy it though.  Reminded me of moving days oh so long ago at the dorms: everyone moving at once, everyone prepared differently, everyone lending a hand when they could.

Now I have something I can work with, though I’m low on credits at the moment. I will customize slowly as my stipends come in, likely with a big surge when my beta credits come in.

I’ve set up 8 bubble trees for the bubble route — and the trees are living much longer than they used to.  I’m enjoying the new update, though mostly for me it has meant playing the market with raw materials and construction supplies.

There’s so many things that have been teased for the near future that I’m feeling greedy.  I’m dying to know what’s next.  But in the meantime, I’ll be building up my iMG, finding things to sell, and enjoying the madness.

Spiral Knights: Early Impressions

Over the last two weeks, I’ve put about fifteen hours into Spiral Knights, a game that claims to be a free to play MMO from Three Rings, the makers of Puzzle Pirates.  Of course, the game is just barely free, feels more like a lobby game than an MMO, and Three Rings is owned by Sega now.  I have no idea if that last bit has had any effect on the game at all — but the first two are legitimate criticisms that all new players should be aware of , or they shortly will be once they start playing.

Spiral Knights is driven by an energy mechanic.  Starting levels uses energy.  Unless another player is willing to give you half her health, reviving uses energy.  Weapon slot unlocks, heat (xp) boosts, and items can be purchased for energy.  There are two kinds: mist energy is free, and players are given 100 over 24 hours; crystal energy can be purchased with real money or with in game currency from players that purchased it for real money.  One way or the other, crystal energy represents a real money transaction.

Using an elevator costs 10 energy.  Players are limited to two weapon slots unless they spend energy to unlock more, each for 30 days.  Players cannot use trinkets, items that provide stat bonuses, unless they spend energy to unlock those as well.  Reviving doubles each time a player dies in a run, starting at 5 energy and quickly adding up.  Players with a tendency toward addiction might want to avoid this game — even basic game play can quickly drain your free energy.

But it’s quite possible to set limits and stick to them and spend very little to play.  I chose to spend a small amount of money as I figure the game would be worth at least $40 as a console title — I spent much less than that but will see how I feel in a month or two.  If I’m still playing after two months, it’s already outlived the average console game.

I actually might still be playing quite some time for now, provided Guild Wars 2 doesn’t suddenly release tomorrow.  Although it is more of a jump into the action title than an MMO, the Zelda-esque game play is refreshing and fun for a change.  I find myself actually studying enemies, getting to know their patterns and attacks, learning the moments to use my shield, standard single player action game stuff.  But far from the standard in online role-playing games.  No one will fall asleep while playing Spiral Knights, that’s for sure.

The premise is simple.  An order of knight creature things crash lands their spaceship on a planet filled with monsters and stuff.  Other stuffs and things are needed to repair the ship, so the knights have to explore the planet, which seems to consist of a giant clockwork machine, or something.  What that means for players is that levels are depths of the Clockworks, and that levels rotate in sections: the path from depth 1 to depth 8 will not be exactly the same every time, even if a player starts at the same gate.

If you’re just looking for a casual distraction from a more serious MMO, Spiral Knights is practical to play for free in small doses.  If you’re looking to fill some larger chunks of time, about $6 – $10 is a practical transaction for a month of playing.  I recommend the game as something different to do or as a backup online game for when your favorite is down but you still need a fix.

(feel free to send a friend request to Saucelah in game)

Glitch: Recent Changes for which I’m Grateful

With all the hubbub, with everyone focused on imagination and upgrade cards and how those change the face of the game,  I thought I’d talk about recent changes that are less exciting, less controversial, that have made life a little easier in Ur.

1. Brain Capacity Reset — okay, this one is related to upgrade cards, but as a result, expanding cap now costs less iMG.  That should help a few people breathe a little easier.

2.  Free Redeals — although redeals did not cost much to begin with, spending that iMG to end up with three cards you could not or would not buy was certainly a frustrating and painful experience.

3.  Pig Plop — three crops for one seed was painful and slow.  I stopped doing it a long time ago.  Now a whole stack, for 27 seeds (I think), cool with me.  And it’s mildly amusing to watch.

4. Dots.  Map dots.  Quarazy Quoins plus map dots.

5. Harvesting/Mining sweet spot — the point where avatars stand while harvesting trees and mining rocks has been moved in, making it less likely we will fall of those narrow ledges or move into range of a second tree.

6.  UI changes — some aren’t fans, but I am.  There’s a larger area for single click bag opening, and the bags and their contents have slots of the same size.  That always bothered me, especially early after the original launch, when keyboard inventory navigation worked differently than it now does.

Almost there!