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Let's list good ideas for IGC sinks

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Gangrel
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Cyclops wrote:
Cyclops wrote:

JayBezz wrote:
I encourage alts.. but I think they should cost cash unlike in CO where you'd get a new slot every time you hit endgame, I think you should start with 2. Get one free at lvl 40 (3) then be forced to buy all the additional slots you want to alt.

I'll be dropping some big bucks into this game.
How about with a subscription ($15/month)you get the full 8 slots, and they will be permanent if you stay subscribed for a full year.

Its worth noting that the developers have said (or if not out right said but heavily leaning towards) that if you stop subbing you will NOT lose access to anything that you had whilst you were subbing.

So this would mean character slots as well in my book.

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That's a bit stronger

That's a bit stronger statement than I think any dev has made. Subscribing once and then lapsing won't get you everything you would have had if you'd kept subscribing. However, we are being very careful with what is made a subscription perk vs. a one-off purchase so that anything that is a subscription perk will not lock out a character or force a redesign should your subscription lapse.

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JayBezz
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Cyclops wrote:
Cyclops wrote:

JayBezz wrote:
I encourage alts.. but I think they should cost cash unlike in CO where you'd get a new slot every time you hit endgame, I think you should start with 2. Get one free at lvl 40 (3) then be forced to buy all the additional slots you want to alt.

I'll be dropping some big bucks into this game.
How about with a subscription ($15/month)you get the full 8 slots, and they will be permanent if you stay subscribed for a full year.

MWM has stated that their philosophy is to "not take what players have earned away". That type of all or nothing subscription model (unlimited access until you quit paying) is something they wish to avoid.

EDIT: Wow. I should have read the other responses on the next page first because they beat me to it. Sorry for kicking that horse.

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A thought that came to me was

A thought that came to me was to allow players to use IGC to literally buy "influence". In essence they pay for marketing (for lack of a better term) to proliferate themselves. The details of the hows and whys can be left up to the players' imaginations. This could carry a recurring monthly cost.

The effect of such "influence" would be that it reduces the level difference at which PCs are attacked by enemies. For example, if a PC must normally be level 20 to be ignored by level 10 enemies, they can pay to reduce that +10 difference to a +8 difference, perhaps all the way down to a +5 difference. It could also be a means to explain how enemies know to ignore a higher level PC: the PC is paying to get the word of their exploits "out there".

Rook1: "Whoa, isn't that Captain Obvious?"
Rook2: "The guy who stopped the Black Rose heist on Monday? Oh, yeah, that's him."
Rook1: "He stopped a 'Rose heist? Crap. Act casual!"

It may even only work for enemies who are sufficiently intelligent and/or have access to mass media. Thus enemy groups like Devouring Earth or the Rikti (or at least the likes of drones and monkeys) might neither know nor care about such "influence".



ETA: depending on how factions and reputations, etc., work, this could even have a drawback with one (or perhaps a few) enemy factions. If Captain Obvious' exploits are made more widely known, and he's coming down on the Black Rose particularly hard during a particular month, the Black Rose may well be more likely to attack him (i.e. the +10 difference may actually increase to a +12 difference for the Black Rose).

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For that sort of benefit Fez,

For that sort of benefit Fez, I figure that using a "tax" system would work most simply. A portion of your incoming earnings get automagically diverted into promotion of a public reputation. the bigger the differential from the baseline, the more it costs.


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Cyclops
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I would like to buy two of

I would like to buy the COT version of two of the perks I had with COH: The Nemesis Staff and the punching bag dark-melee attack. I loved starting a new character with those two bonus attacks.

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The Dark Melee temp-power was

The Dark Melee temp-power was 'Sands of Mu'.

Be Well!
Fireheart

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IGC - Interactive Gaming

IGC - Interactive Gaming Council ?
International Grains Conference?
Internal Gaming Commission?

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Herald of Omega wrote:
Herald of Omega wrote:

IGC - Interactive Gaming Council ?
International Grains Conference?
Internal Gaming Commission?

I think IGC = In-Game Currency

-Wolf sends

Cyclops
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Fireheart wrote:
Fireheart wrote:

The Dark Melee temp-power was 'Sands of Mu'.
Be Well!
Fireheart

Thank you!

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Thanks Wolf, now it makes

Thanks Wolf, now it makes sense!

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Alright, so I have made a

Alright, so I have made a thread about this before on the game store forum, but I think I should put here too. Keep in mind that not all of these suggestions aren't 100% mine but are from other people as well. Remember those packs you could buy on CoX that gave you random things? We should make those but with the following changes, first they are a rare drop in the game, second all of the things you find in the pack are things you can buy on the marketplace or can find in the game and third one of the things found in these packs is a wad of IGC, which should encourage people who just find this thing as a drop to check out the marketplace if they had no interest in it before. I'd also like to keep this thing as 3 randomized items in one for one reason, if someone purchases this and gets a wad of IGC that's lower than what they paid for it, they will feel cheated, if they get 2 other items they will feel like they got those two things at a discount, and won't feel like it's something they will never buy again.

not my video just one I lke ===> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6-SdIN0hsM

Radiac
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notears wrote:
notears wrote:

Alright, so I have made a thread about this before on the game store forum, but I think I should put here too. Keep in mind that not all of these suggestions aren't 100% mine but are from other people as well. Remember those packs you could buy on CoX that gave you random things? We should make those but with the following changes, first they are a rare drop in the game, second all of the things you find in the pack are things you can buy on the marketplace or can find in the game and third one of the things found in these packs is a wad of IGC, which should encourage people who just find this thing as a drop to check out the marketplace if they had no interest in it before. I'd also like to keep this thing as 3 randomized items in one for one reason, if someone purchases this and gets a wad of IGC that's lower than what they paid for it, they will feel cheated, if they get 2 other items they will feel like they got those two things at a discount, and won't feel like it's something they will never buy again.

The reason I think this doesn't work is that the whole point of SuperPacks in CoX was to get people to spend real world money on them. I think it's been demonstrated by now that in a game where you can buy it (the game itself) once and play it forever, people would much rather grind for stuff than pay money for stuff if that stuff is available both ways. For one thing, some people literally don't have the money, and for another no price beats free even among those who do have the money. Either way, NOBODY will feel like spending money on a thing that drops for free given enough grinding, unless of course you can quickly get your toon totally pimped out with the best gear that way, in which case people will cry foul that you can buy it at all.

So to my ears, what you're basically saying is "Hey remember that thing that was good but you had to spend REAL MONEY to get it? Let's make it cost ZERO real money instead, EVERYONE would like that, right?" You probably won't get much push-back from gamers about it, because they all want free stuff too, it but it's a terrible idea if the intention is for the game company producing it to make money off of it, as far as I can tell.

On the other hand if your talking about making SuperPacks drop at random then making people pay real money to OPEN them, that's a lockbox, and everyone hates those too as far as I know.

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notears
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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

notears wrote:
Alright, so I have made a thread about this before on the game store forum, but I think I should put here too. Keep in mind that not all of these suggestions aren't 100% mine but are from other people as well. Remember those packs you could buy on CoX that gave you random things? We should make those but with the following changes, first they are a rare drop in the game, second all of the things you find in the pack are things you can buy on the marketplace or can find in the game and third one of the things found in these packs is a wad of IGC, which should encourage people who just find this thing as a drop to check out the marketplace if they had no interest in it before. I'd also like to keep this thing as 3 randomized items in one for one reason, if someone purchases this and gets a wad of IGC that's lower than what they paid for it, they will feel cheated, if they get 2 other items they will feel like they got those two things at a discount, and won't feel like it's something they will never buy again.

The reason I think this doesn't work is that the whole point of SuperPacks in CoX was to get people to spend real world money on them. I think it's been demonstrated by now that in a game where you can buy it (the game itself) once and play it forever, people would much rather grind for stuff than pay money for stuff if that stuff is available both ways. For one thing, some people literally don't have the money, and for another no price beats free even among those who do have the money. Either way, NOBODY will feel like spending money on a thing that drops for free given enough grinding, unless of course you can quickly get your toon totally pimped out with the best gear that way, in which case people will cry foul that you can buy it at all.
So to my ears, what you're basically saying is "Hey remember that thing that was good but you had to spend REAL MONEY to get it? Let's make it cost ZERO real money instead, EVERYONE would like that, right?" You probably won't get much push-back from gamers about it, because they all want free stuff too, it but it's a terrible idea if the intention is for the game company producing it to make money off of it, as far as I can tell.
On the other hand if your talking about making SuperPacks drop at random then making people pay real money to OPEN them, that's a lockbox, and everyone hates those too as far as I know.

Where are you getting "costing zero dollars" from? It exists as a drop sure, but it only exists as a rare one in the game so that people will get a taste for it and then try to buy it off the market place. So where are getting it not costing anything?

not my video just one I lke ===> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6-SdIN0hsM

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The cost of getting a pack to

The cost of getting a pack to drop is not measured directly in dollars. You may have to grind for them, and that takes time and effort, sure, but that time and that effort are not dollars. In a game where you're not paying a subscription to keep playing every month, that time and effort cannot be even indirectly equated or approximated in dollars either. You pay the $50 to buy the box, you grind for everything else, and you're done. You pay no dollars ever again. If the cash shop has anything that cannot be gotten any other way, you MIGHT end up paying more dollars to get that item, but if it's available for free by grinding, you don't really have to. I personally think that making some items "cash shop exclusives" will drive sales of that stuff to the point where you make more money that way than you do when you open it up to "free random drop OR buy for money" because that immediately becomes a money-saving challenge that like everyone will try to rise to. Pay for that? NO, I'm going to get it the FREE way by grinding for it. Or I'll just get the contents of the packs via the auction house for IGC and skip the randomized drop step entirely.

I should point out my personal opinion on this is not the same as what I hear from MWM on the subject. From what MWM has been saying (and I mean this in the general sense for what I gather from the tone of their posts on here, nothing specific) I think they would agree with the statement "We should sell stuff, but also make it available via grinding so that people with more time than money can still get cool stuff. But you can also buy darn near everything too, for the sake of those people who have more money than time." I'm not sure that's the best way to make money, but I don't understand the gamer market any better than any of them, in all likelihood either. Whether I agree with it or not, they're free to run their game any way they see fit.

Of course, I'm coming at this from the standpoint of CoX, which had rampant IGC inflation, so depending on the game's economics, the cash shop and auction house might behave very differently than what I'm used to.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

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The other point is that you

The other point is that you have to consider the TIME IS MONEY equivalencies. Over in Star Trek Online, you can refine 8000 Dilithium per day. At a going rate of 100 Dilithium per Zen (just for illustration purposes), that's 80 Zen per day. 1 Zen is 1¢ of US currency. How much time does it take to farm 8000 Dilithium per day? A couple hours.

So if you do the math, you're spending a couple hours of game time farming Dilithium so as to earn less than $1 worth of Zen. Yes, you can *do it* ... if your time isn't that valuable to you (and you've got very little money to spare). You're literally "earning" pennies per hour by doing it the "free" way using In Game resources only, rather than dropping some real currency to Perfect World Entertainment. Note that there are better paying ... jobs ... than this out in the real world. I mean, even if the refining rate wasn't capped, you couldn't earn more than $10 worth of Zen per 24 hours anyway.

So a better question is ... what is your TIME worth to you?


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Totally unrelated to anything

Totally unrelated to anything in CoT, but analyses like Redlynne's always make me wonder, "Is there a way that work that normally would be a paying job for somebody could be 'game-ized' such that people will play the game and generate the work product...and enjoy doing it?"

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

Totally unrelated to anything in CoT, but analyses like Redlynne's always make me wonder, "Is there a way that work that normally would be a paying job for somebody could be 'game-ized' such that people will play the game and generate the work product...and enjoy doing it?"

Yes there is... however they generally involve systems that most of the CoX crowd never liked.

Gathering materials for crafting for example. I know of people across a wide range of games who seem to spend more time doing that rather than actually crafting/combat. Those aspects never interested the player, but just going out and mining/picking flowers/skinning animals[1]/fishing, that kept them going. They did this because they *enjoyed* it.

However, this is a loot system... something that some of the CoX playerbase *do not* like, nor really want in CoT.

Hell, the number of times I played Eve Online and I just took out my mining ship to mine for hours on end is uncountable (in the thousands).

I didn't NEED to do it, I could earn money faster doing missions... but I did it BECAUSE I wanted to. I didn't want to do the combat side all the time. Sure, I could if I really had to (defend my ship) but that was more of an annoyance rather than anything else.

But more than anything else, I guess this shows that a variety of acquistion methods that are not just 100% combat orientated helps. City of Heroes didn't have this.

You had to do combat to get *anything* from it. Drops? Combat... AE tickets? Predominantly combat... although I am sure that there were some that gave out tickets for "non combat" stuff, but it was minimal.

And yet, if I didn't want to do combat and get stuff? I was out of luck... even the combat system prevented me from "mindlessly fighting greys" to get stuff.

[1] Yes, this is combat in the start, but its the product of that and not the actual combat that kept the player interested

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I think CoT's craft system

I think CoT's craft system should have it's farming of materials be from taking out bad guys :) Or good guys/innocents if you're a villain! It's a different setting, so mining just isn't in the works here.

But a crafting system is a good way to have an IGC sink, though it'll also help determine the prices on the market too.

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

Totally unrelated to anything in CoT, but analyses like Redlynne's always make me wonder, "Is there a way that work that normally would be a paying job for somebody could be 'game-ized' such that people will play the game and generate the work product...and enjoy doing it?"

I don't have details on this, but I heard that they tried that with college students (or maybe it was high school, I don't know, possibly at C.U.N.Y.). They apparently had a system of level ups and awesome looking armor, etc in a computer game sense but the way you progressed through that game was dependent on your performance on tests, homeworks, writing assignments, etc. It apparently worked really well among some sub-set of the population (probably the people with "Badge Hunter DNA").

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Segev
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Radiac

RadiacI don't have details on this, but I heard that they tried that with college students (or maybe it was high school, I don't know, possibly at C.U.N.Y.). They apparently had a system of level ups and awesome looking armor, etc in a computer game sense but the way you progressed through that game was dependent on your performance on tests, homeworks, writing assignments, etc. It apparently worked really well among some sub-set of the population (probably the people with "Badge Hunter DNA").[/quote wrote:
I know you said you do'nt have details, so I am not directly asking you for answers, but I am curious whether they had a means of telling if this reflected an improvement for that subset of students, or if they just had located the "good students" who would "do well anyway."

This is actually LESS camoflaged than I was thinking, too. If it was something people might not even be aware was tracking to a real-world item, it would probably work "better," as they really would think it's "just for a game."

To take a truly silly version, what if EVE Online were actually using remote controls to pilot drone ships out to perform genuine mining and retrieval for a vast interstellar civilization?

Or what if the "investigation" game wherein you had to locate and transcribe "suspect names" or other clue data was using real-world data-entry information scanned in, such that the human ability to read handwriting were being used to do real-world data-entry work while the player doing it was playing a mostly-unrelated game that happened to require the task?

Again: This is not something being considered for CoT; this is just Segev musing about how games' ability to get people to do "work" could possibly remove the scare quotes.

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The sort of thing you're

The sort of thing you're talking about Segev essentially requires creating a space for what we shall call the "Professional Gamer" (for lack of a better term) where Players can devote their lives to playing the game. Most of the time, if you're going to be doing this, you need to do some sort of Cash Shop where people can trade virtual items for real currency ... which, of course, leads to all kinds of problems (as Blizzard discovered with Diablo III).

In the fictional story world of the Sword Art Online novels/anime, there is such a game. It's Gun Gale Online, and it is possible for Players to farm in-game resources and then sell them on a cash exchange market for real currency so as to support themselves in real life. People who did that are considered "Professional Gamers" because playing the game is their profession.

A former colleague of mine at a previous job was seriously entertaining quitting his full time job so that he could play Diablo III "professionally" and sell all the incredibly awesome drops he'd be getting on the game's Cash Exchange. Fortunately, I managed to talk him out of it before the game launched.

The thing is, there's a reason why Gold Farming has the reputation it does, and why nearly all of the sites that do it are scammers and malware infestations.

Probably the closest you can come to this sort of thing, Segev, is the way that EVE Online handles things with its subscription system. The game has an exchange in which it is possible to purchase Game Time (worth real $$$) from other Players using the proceeds of in-game resources.

The next best example of this sort of thing would be Tragic: the Spending Magic: the Gathering ... both the online and cardboard crack varieties. The game supports "professional players" for whom playing the game is their primary source of income.

The key thing however is that it's functionally impossible to DESIGN a game in which the necessary social dynamics for these kinds of activities are guaranteed to occur from inception. Typically what happens is that the Players themselves come up with the necessary marketeering and an economy EMERGES from within the dynamics of the game. The Developers then either foster or quash that dynamic.


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I think you're

I think you're misunderstanding me, here, Redlynne. I'm not suggesting creating a system for people to live off a game. I'm suggesting finding ways to take activities which are normally jobs human beings get paid to do, and transform them via narrative artifice and interface design into a game of the sort where people willingly expend hours of their free time engaging in them.

For example, people will spend hours of their free time grinding for dilithium in STO, because they enjoy it or because they want what it can buy for them in game (or both). Imagine if, somehow, the activity players engage in to grind for dilithium could accomplish some task for which a real-world business would pay somebody. The trouble is, the translation is where I always draw a blank. You can't exactly make grinding for dilithium something that writng a technical document (which needs review and approval by another human), nor approving such writings (which need to actually achieve a real goal) something that earns specified amounts of in-game rewards.

You might be able to get away with "code this behavior in C++," though even that would be hard.

Mostly, the best I can come up with is data entry.

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Redlynne
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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

I think you're misunderstanding me, here, Redlynne.

Apparently. Such is the limitations of a pure text format comm channel.

Segev wrote:

I'm suggesting finding ways to take activities which are normally jobs human beings get paid to do, and transform them via narrative artifice and interface design into a game of the sort where people willingly expend hours of their free time engaging in them.

Looking to our predecessor, City of Heroes ... which activities most easily lent themselves to such activities? Off the top of my head, I would suggest:

  • Task Forces/Strike Forces
  • Pickup Groups
  • Supergroup Events (including Costume Contests)
  • Seasonal Events (Winter Lord, Summer Blockbuster, etc.)
  • The Cape Radio Events

If there's a ... theme ... emerging from this listing, it shouldn't be all that surprising. Pretty much every single one of these things involves gathering PCs together to work towards a unified goal/objective, even if that goal is simply to run a Task Force. A lot of what kept people engaged in playing the game was the sense of camraderie that developed so easily (even among strangers), giving a decidedly SOCIAL motivation for playing the game, as opposed to orienting things around "rare drops" or restricted access to resources or whatever.

Segev wrote:

For example, people will spend hours of their free time grinding for dilithium in STO, because they enjoy it or because they want what it can buy for them in game (or both).

I'm hard pressed to say that I ever "enjoyed" grinding for Dilithium. That's because it WAS a grind to do. The biggest source of Dilithium were actual "mines" (one public, one for your Fleet) and they were just a series of minigames where the objective was to "chase the gauges" in order to earn your quota. Each minigame took up to 1 minute, and you'd be given a sequence of 5 of them to complete. I got to the point where I could do 5 in less than 8 minutes (including travel between nodes).

But it was a hassle to do and got VERY boring VERY fast ... especially when you've got more than one captain to run through. I had four. Just running all of my captains through their daily grind for Dilithium quota could take a total of 6-8 HOURS. In the end, I'd earn about 32,000 refined Dilithium ... which at an exchange rate of around 180 Dilithium per Zen was like earning $1.78 for over 6-8 hours ... daily. It got to the point where I didn't even have time to play the rest of the game. All I was doing was grinding for Dilithium.

Suffice it to say ... it got OLD. At that point, I wasn't even really "playing the game" ... I was just playing the Daily Missions and advancing nothing else. The game stopped being a game and turned into a JOB. It was just a bottomless pit of hoops to jump through. Not especially satisfying.

Segev wrote:

Imagine if, somehow, the activity players engage in to grind for dilithium could accomplish some task for which a real-world business would pay somebody. The trouble is, the translation is where I always draw a blank.

It's usually called Gold Farming and typically the "work" of these activities gets offloaded onto Bots because they're too boring (and repetitious) for most Players to put up with them.

Closest I ever came to this myself was discovering a circuitous route through Goldshire in World of Warcraft that let me hit a sequence of Copper Ore nodes to mine. A couple of circuits would yield something like 40+ ore, so I could "farm" resources this way. A few times, other Players negotiated with me in advance to go mine piles of Copper Ore for them and they'd hand me IGC for them. I did it a few times and then moved on. It just wasn't that much fun to *DO*.

Segev wrote:

You can't exactly make grinding for dilithium something that writng a technical document (which needs review and approval by another human), nor approving such writings (which need to actually achieve a real goal) something that earns specified amounts of in-game rewards.

In the context of City of Titans, the closest thing I can think of would be designing a system which permits the "mining" of Clues to assemble into Missions without requiring drops from defeated NPCs. Tie a particular "profession" into a PC's Secret ID and you'd have a mini-game in which combat isn't the objective. Set this up as a reasonably "reliable" way to generate (or "mine" if you prefer) Clues for Mission assembly and you have the beginnings of a resource economy.

Clues would still be dropping from Street Sweeping (or if you want to be stingy, only from Mission Completes, or both), of course, but for reasons various and sundry perhaps the RNG isn't cooperating and won't give you the exact type of Clue you need. So you reach for alternative sources that can much more reliably generate that sort of Clue. Once again, the intent is to create a dynamic equilibrium situation, in which some Clues might be more in demand than others ... but those demand spikes would be temporary rather than permanent.

Does that help you any, Segev?


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I don't think you can take

I don't think you can take the work itself and try to camoflage it into looking like a game (at least not a game anyone would enjoy *flash to the Simpsons "knife goes in, guts come out" scene*). But the people at C.U.N.Y. apparently are looking very closely at "game-ifying" a lot of stuff. One thing I think the game does, for the gamer mentalities that like it, is it gives instant gratification for each and every small task you have to perform as soon as you finish it, and it gives some sense of progress and accomplishment as you go along. That turns "I don't want to read a chapter of Huck Finn tonight, even though the quiz is the day after tomorrow." into "Man, I could be using this time to get to level 4 on Huck Finn and get that sweet upgrade for my toon. I want that."

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

I think you're misunderstanding me, here, Redlynne. I'm not suggesting creating a system for people to live off a game. I'm suggesting finding ways to take activities which are normally jobs human beings get paid to do, and transform them via narrative artifice and interface design into a game of the sort where people willingly expend hours of their free time engaging in them.

I'm sure it's possible. After all, piloting a 727 in MS Flight and piloting an MQ-9 Reaper use fundamentally identical algorithms and controls. Either interface can easily be set up to mimic the other.

But I hope I am long dead and gone before we reach the point where the division between reality and virtual reality disappears. There is already too much delusional thinking in our world. When imagination and reality become so intimately linked that there is no distinction between them then we are going to have social problems of a kind no one now can even imagine.

If every child is virtual, who will raise the next generation? If there is no next generation, what will happen to humanity?

The end result would be a world of immortals who only die by accident who spend all of their time locked into a Matrix like virtual world by choice. Not an optimistic future to my way of thinking.

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Segev wrote:
Segev wrote:

Totally unrelated to anything in CoT, but analyses like Redlynne's always make me wonder, "Is there a way that work that normally would be a paying job for somebody could be 'game-ized' such that people will play the game and generate the work product...and enjoy doing it?"

Not to brag, but Redlynne's analysis is something I rattled off in the car to him a year ago to explain that playing STO all day was a really crappy job no matter how you ground it.

There was a second dimension to my analysis, though, that didn't come up back then. See, dilithium is not created by spending Zen. It's bought from other players who refined it and are looking to obtain Zen for whatever reason not involving ponying up cash themselves.

Also, that dilithium supply's scarcity (or lack thereof) is what set the exchange rate. So, given a (pathetic) $7.25/hr minimum wage, 100 Zen/$, and a production rate of 4k dil/hr, at what price would dil mining break even with a minimum wage job?

4k dil/hr / (7.25 $/hr * 100 Zen/$) = 5.5 dil/Zen

I've never seen it go below 100.

So the thing is, even though I'm fine ponying up Zen and buying dil with it, I have to remember that folks turned cranks for a long time to make that Zen when they could have done up to 14 hours/week of anything else. I've got mixed feelings about that.

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...

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