You say “There is no way to make a guaranteed delivery. This also discourages adults buying multiple accounts just to raid them for their daily thing grants.”

What is to stop the user from using more complex handshakes?
Imagine we have two accounts, GiftedA and DonatingA
1) Collect large list of items over a period on DonatingA to later be gifted to GiftedA.
2) On GiftedA pick 1 item (junk) and offer to trade it for the long list of items held in trust by DonatingA (and of course prior to listing this trade offer ensure there isn’t already an offer in the system matching this.)
3) quickly locate and accept the offer made by GiftedA (which then transfers the items.)

A similar handshake could be used for ebay transactions. It may be a slight discouragement, but I certainly don’t think it defeats this sort of trading (even by kids with their classmates.)

Posted by: Jeff Peil at October 15, 2004 04:03 PM

I think the Big Idea I take away from this is to consider the leverage a designer might get by supporting an anonymous barter exchange while blocking the ability for players to directly transfer objects from one character to another. This is something I’m definitely going to have to think about.

I do have some concerns about whether the basic scheme will actually work as described:

>They all wear out with use, so the kids learn to not abuse their things. This discourages antisocial hoarding behavior.

Is this true? Wouldn’t the fact that things get consumed with use *encourage* hoarding (e.g., I better store some of these so I have backups handy in case the main one gets used up). I have a close relative who has a pathological (real world) hoarding problem, and I see this sort of reasoning acted out all the time.

>The service is presently designed without a currency to discourage hoarding

Wouldn’t the absence of a currency again *encourage* hoarding? In the absence of a medium of exchange, other kinds of goods become de facto currencies and thus get hoarded in order to bank wealth. As a general principle, a fungible asset such as money reduces the need to hold a wide variety of objects because the holder of such an asset can afford to make fewer provisions for unknown future wants or needs.

The fact that customizers can modify things in ways that make them unique and interesting also has the effect of undermining liquidity since the variety of goods on offer is multiplied but the total quantity of goods offered is not. Such unique items could also serve as markers to facilitate transactions that were negotiated and paid externally (e.g., via eBay), albeit at the risk of interference by third parties while the goods pass through the marketplace.

>Each oldest, best trade with a particular set of terms (x for y) is the only one displayed for those terms (trades with duplicate trade terms are not displayed). This massively simplifies the display, removing duplicates and lower-value trades from consideration.

It is unclear to me what phrases like “best trade” or “lower-value” mean in this context. Since all trades are one for one and there is no currency, there would seem to be no basis for comparison of value. For similar reasons, the idea of injecting liquidity into the market by having the system engage in transactions seems problematic, as it is hard to see what grounds the system would use for determining what trading behavior it should engage in.

Good stuff, Randy!

Posted by: Chip at October 17, 2004 12:43 AM

Randy: “The conspirators are just as likely to give their subjectively good thing away for some other kid’s less good thing as to a fellow conspirator.”

Interesting. Am I correct in thinking that one party posts a trade on the market and others respond to that particular trade? If so, I was imagining a way to try to work around this limitation.

Party A offers to trade a “junk” item for a “good” item.
Party B takes Party A up on this trade.

To ensure that B’s good item goes to A, I presume A could choose to offer a trade which is distinct from all other trades available at the moment. If the two parties were keeping a close eye on the state of the market while communicating by telephone, IM, or similar technology, such a plan might enjoy high reliability.

I see this failing only if A created a nondistinct trade by mistake or if someone else coincidentally posted a similar trade at the same time. B could then respond to the wrong trade, giving up the “good” item. Now, if another party were to respond to the trade instead of B, then the pair of A and B are actually up by a good item in exchange for the poor item offered.

Perhaps I fail to understand some feature of the market which would undermine such attempts. Furthermore, I apologize if I have failed to notice a part of the discussion which addresses this issue.
——————–
Do all items eventually decay while in player possession, even if they remain unused? In that case, hoarding might be difficult indeed. Otherwise, one could probably try to hoard a class of items that do not decay unless used.

One probably could not corner the market, especially since one can hardly snap up a super hoardable item by offering one-to-one trades with other items. However, through a combination of some intrinsic appeal of a “cool” item and a social response to its apparent value, would players be more inclined to hoard the item and less inclined to use it? I don’t know. After all, the “coolness” of a usable item would presumably stem from being able to use it. Furthermore, this might not be considered a danger if one could use a manual or automatic economic intervention to restore a reasonable supply to circulation.

I think the prevention of currency by one-to-one trades may inhibit the motivation for an Ebay economy. This might be especially true if the game economy had some response to excessive hoarding of an item, but I don’t know whether such behaviour would be considered desirable. I’m less confident that one can prevent player-to-player trading within the proposed system, but prevention may not even be necessary if hoarding just isn’t practical or profitable.

Posted by: Wayne Grey at October 18, 2004 12:50 AM

I’ve updated the paper and added an appendix to address the primary threats outlined here and on TerraNova. Have a gander.

Randy

Posted by: Randy Farmer at October 20, 2004 01:15 AM

I’m puzzled by the one-to-one transactions. I’m interested to see how this would work.

Aren’t markets are an expression of value? One to one transactions don’t allow for that. The items will certainly have unequal value to the players and I can’t see the Trader’s Market being used very much except as a way to satisfy corresponding temporary valuations such as:

Player A wants to play GameX and needs ThingX for it.

Player B wants to play GameY and needs ThingY for it.

Player A and B exchange ThingX and ThingY. However unless games all have the same utlization of Things there is going to be a great deal of frustration where players are waiting for a Thing they want to play a certain game. New players get the most frustrated. Not a good design.

Why would anyone trade any newly added Thing? Once they have played with it then they might trade it – if it hasn’t already decayed. If the Thing can be combined then it will most likely never be traded and instead turned into a Unique.

Basically your economy comes down to a distributed sorting problem where you are trying to give each item to every player but you hand out the pieces randomly over time and let the players sort it out. You are assuming it will be fun for players to do the sorting themselves. I can see where this type of thinking could lead to fun cooperative gameplay but the current implementation fails by concentrating on anti-eBaying instead of the how to make every player satisfied through cooperation, trading, and sharing.

Mr. Castronova can probably correct me, but I thought that on a certain level economies are designed to distribute scarce goods efficiently. Making things into property that can be traded in a market and having a currency are just ways to improve the efficiency of the distribution. You can think of currency as a mechanism for “time-shifting” and “trade-shifting” bartered goods. So while all the constraints you’ve added may help prevent eBaying they actually just make the distribution of goods more difficult, frustrating and possibly less equal (although some pseudo-random distribution of Things could take care of that – for example – you don’t get copies of things you already have).

Imagine the game world rules shifted to the real world. The government hands out goods randomly to the populace who can then trade them between themselves. The items have varied valuations but can only be traded one-to-one. So while someone may end up with a sports car (even though they already have one) another might get a pair of glasses (even if they didn’t need them). People would riot in the streets – mainly because they would perceive the system as grossly inefficient and unfair. Having an accessible, gobal, electronic market place certainly helps, but it is reduction of transaction costs solution to a fundamentally systematic problem.

What I don’t understand is why no one approaches an anti-eBay approach by accepting the virtuality of the world. Virtual worlds do not suffer from scarcity in the same ways as physical goods and any attempt to create artificial scarcity can be gamed for financial gain. Virtual worlds suffer from the opposite effect – anything can be copied for practically no cost but it’s existence is a continual drain on the resources of the world.

Thus my advice would be to ditch the anti-eBay concept but keep the cooperative distributed sorting problem. Stop trying to create false scarcity and then preventing people from abusing it. That being said, I think it would be an interesting experiment – but perhaps better for an academic study or artwork.

Cheers,
Ryan

Posted by: Ryan Kelln at October 20, 2004 07:46 PM

Cross posted from TN:

Jim> It works for me, but we’ll see what holes Cory can kick in it.

This is great work Randy and significantly tougher to attack. However, I’d feel bad if I let Jim down, so let me try:

Appologies for mentioning this again, but solving the typist problem by deciding not to solve it still feels fishy to me. It would be pretty easy to have a site called “AuctionMyKidTradeKid.com” where accounts with desirable collectables can trade accounts with low friction. By eliminating every other option, the accounts themselves become the coin of the realm.

Now, on to bigger ones. The eBay sale threat:

Randy> What would a HotNewThing most likely trade for? A CruddyOldThing? Probably not as fast as for AnotherPopularThing.

This is exactly the vulernability of the market in the HotNewThing case, right? Given that you can combine stuff, it’s almost certain that you can combine them into pathetically bad combinations, which provide a signalling device for the buyer. Also, by colluding with the buyer using out of band communications, the seller can help to create the rarest possible bad thing for trade.

That approach defeats this problem:

Randy> Any attempt to formulate an offer will be fulfilled first and immediately with standing orders

This allows you break anonymity, right?

Randy> All orders are anonymous
* No one knows which offer will be fulfilled.
* No one knows the number of offers of a formulation that are pending.
* No one knows when an offer will be fulfilled.
* No one knows which offer is their own.
* When your order is fulfilled, you have no idea who you traded with.

The zero deals pending is the weak case. It allows you to know solve all of the above unknowns, because the seller and buyer control the timing of the offer. All of these fall apart if you can add in a unique offer that isn’t currently present. After all, if you could already trade crap for gold, you wouldn’t be on eBay in the first place.

Obviously, if the buyer already had something worth trading for the HotNewThing, she wouldn’t be on eBay, she’d be trading, so the fact that other HotNewThings are up for trade doesn’t actually seem to be a problem to sellers. They won’t collide by only placing items for sale for the crappy things.

So I don’t this statement is completely defensible:
Randy>The seller can not meet eBay Requirement 2, since there is no way to independently confirm the delivery was made to the appropriate party.

Plus, they’ll be on the phone, right? So confirmation is quite possible.

Also, I’m not sure that liquidity control defeats this. After all, if I’m the buyer and I offer my StinkyPileOfBadThings for a ShinyGlobOfCoolness and the eBay-ers, by offering to complete this deal, cause the system to create that deal, the buyer doesn’t care (she still has hers) and the eBay-er gets to sell another one.

Unfortunately, you have a comment later on the page that might be more powerful than all of the other defenses. Since it contradicts the previous “What would a HotNewThing most likely trade for?” line, I want to dig into it a bit.

Now, I think that what this line is saying . . .

Randy> There won�t even be a junk thing for eBay-traders to use for placeholder currency as the largest number of outstanding offers for each widely most-valued object will be in exchange for CruddyOldThings

. . . is that people will just alway offer their junk for everything cool. If every offer is always in place within the trading market, that certainly defeats my attack, however, I wonder if this is realistic or fun? If everything is always listed, the search mechanism will be flooded by the combinatorial explosion — not of A for B but for the many different A’s and B’s that your system allows players to make. Also, it may be frustrating to never be able to put up the interesting, new offer that wasn’t in the market before. However, much like Jim’s “anonymous loaning”, if you’re willing to accept the downsides of the choice then this pretty much kills the exploit.

The Blockbuster attack:

I agree with Jim and Randy that you could break lending in order to save it. However, making it so that you either a) get less fun from sharing (the anonymous market) or b) strongly limit it (share only once) actually applies more pressure to the eBay market attacks above.

The friction argument does depend on how cool the “cool things” are, although I would contend that if they aren’t cool enough to make kids throw temper tantrums if they don’t get them, then this whole discussion is moot anyway, right?

Also, the complexity of your design also incents both the blockbuster and collusion attacks, since the power gamers are likely to find the best combinations before other folks do.

So, the flooded market and broken sharing block my exploits, but I’m not sure that the cure isn’t worse than the desease for both of those options.

Posted by: Cory Ondrejka at October 20, 2004 09:53 PM

What a great article. It’s very interesting to think about how one might disrupt the presumed-to-be-inevitable nature of ending up with an e-bay marketplace where real-life money is traded for virtaul things and prestige.

In reading through the text, appendix and follow up comments I had some ideas that might possibly strengthen the “non-e-bay-ness” of the economy. I’ll be posting them to my personal blog, along with a track back, later today (http://strawberryjamm.blogspot.com/) I’d love to know if you think they’d help, hinder, or have a neutral effect.

Posted by: Jenni Merrifield at October 23, 2004 10:32 AM

This is my last set of responses on this paper for a few weeks, as I am headed to New York for the State of Play conference and a long-overdue vacation.

I continue to be impressed with the feedback on TerraNova and Habitat Chronicles to this paper. It has been unexpectedly popular and is already cross-linked on the web more than 100 blogs and pages. I guess I touched the nerve I’d hoped to. :-)

Cory [TN]>The zero deals pending is the weak case. It allows you to know solve all of the above unknowns, because the seller and buyer control the timing of the offer. All of these fall apart if you can add in a unique offer that isn’t currently present.

The minimum liquidity requirement prevents knowing when there are zero-deals. A formulation is not displayed on the market, or available for fulfillment until it reaches minimum liquidity.

bruce boston [TN]>No reason the system couldn’t include code that gives the ‘House’ first right of refusal on any trade offer.

After preparing the appendix, I’m not sure if this market-maker is required. Let’s keep this idea as an optional mitigation technique, and use it only if needed.

There was a lot of discussion about how a market-maker can complicate things, which I won’t respond to, since I don’t think that feature is required.

magicback [TN]>”Randy what’s your system for being a perfect market maker in providing liquidity? … I’m just trying to understand the method of maintaining perfect faucet-drain, item-distribution, one-to-one trading economy.”

Perfect? No one but a fool claims perfection. Is perfection required?

The design describes the functions you ask for in some detail: Items are randomly distributed so that the total number of instances of each type is relatively equal. The drains are combination and wear-and-tear.

Cory [TN]>…[A] buyer has paid money to get what she wanted. She doesn’t care if the item came from the house or the seller (and if the system doesn’t tell you, the you have no way of knowing).

This “who-cares-who-delivers scenario” is a non-starter. See the appendix for detailed rationale, but I’ll summarize again here: Since neither party can, nor is can be compelled to, guarantee/confirm delivery there are way too many avenues for real-$ scams to support this market.

There are at least two big problems with this scenarios: First – The supposed-seller never even has to put an item in the traders market – he simply guesses that a trade will be fulfilled in a reasonable window and lists that on Ebay gambling that the market will do the work for him. Second – The buyer, even if they receive an item can claim that they didn’t, ruining the eBay reputation of a seller for spite. No one will eBay under conditions like these.

There’s no eBay market if you cant verify delivery at both ends.

magicback [TN]>are open, unfulfilled orders like stock trading limit orders? The item is placed in a virtual warehouse where the decay timer is suspended? Do you plan on adding a mechanism that fulfill kid’s order that have been open too long?

In the design: Banked items do not decay. I have not considered forcing liquidity after a fixed amount of time. That sounds interesting and might increase the number of banked items.

Richard Bartle [TN]>I have X, I want Y, so I go to this black box and insert X. Later, out pops Y. The black box can be a trading system or a simple replicator. What’s it to me either way? I no longer have X, I have Y instead, I’m satisfied. What purpose does requiring that the Y come from another person have? Why can’t I just remodel my X into Y (well, get the software to destroy X and create Y instead)? It costs nothing, it hurts no-one and it gives me what I want.

The machine you describe (I’ll call it the transform-o-matic) could also be the Stock Market: I put in Y dollars bid for X-shares-of-FOO, and eventually X-shares-of-FOO pop out (or I get impatient and decide to bid those Y$ elsewhere.)

The difference between the market and a transform-o-matic machine is the method for determining fulfillment. The Trader’s Market will only fulfill trades that it can. Presumably, the transform-o-matic would do it reliably. I consider those scenarios a significantly different.

Ola Fosheim Gr�stad chimes in> It is also fun to look at trends and finally get that uber-cool item that almost nobody wants to trade. Believing that you are trading on a market is more fun than interacting with a vending machine even if the outcome is the same.

Jeff Cole>Having thought bout it off and on, I think Randy’s approach to ’subjectively’ value items and restrict 1:1 trading is wrong.

That may well be true, at least for adults. But, I’m interested in the rationale for this statement.

Jeff Cole>How about … more objectively to value items in the game currency… through auctions globally seachable … minimum time period (e.g. three days), … [allow] “loan” [of] items for a period …Ultimately, to solve the e-Bay problem and maintain a game economy, it’s less about whether the value is subjective or objective…

This is an interesting model and exactly the sort of thinking I was hoping to encourage in the community. I’d love to see it fleshed out.

bruce boston [TN]>Cory> If the liquidity maker causes users to not get trades fulfilled, then you’re going to have pissed off players in general, right?

>Kids? Oh yeah…

>Personally, I think, in general, the main reason eBay markets formulate is because some markets lack liquidity.

Umm. Kids don’t seem to be pissed that they can’t trade in ToonTown.

Are we arguing both sides of the coin here? It looks like people are trying to back into a statement that an eBay external market is required to keep the customers happy: Kids will be pissed if they can’t use eBay to deal with low liquidity. I don’t buy it for a minute.

>To this point, I think the biggest question that Kids will have is, “How do I get X?” if market penetration is at 40%, even if you have a very good trading system with high liquidity, you still only have 40% market penetration and the kids at 41%-99% will all be bummed…

Dude! You just shot down every MMOG in existence (including ToonTown): It is interesting to consider how long the wait is in the standard MMOG to get that really cool no-drop rare-spawn item.

As for KidTrade – it is an trade economy design ripped out of it’s game design, where most of the issues you commented on are addressed (and I’m not at liberty to disclose.) I will ask you to consider whether 100% penetration is really in the best interests of any game or the goal of a kids game.

>Unfortunately, I think the design may actually encourage hording of [perceived more valuable] items.

The number of things a user owns is exactly their membership-period times the drop-rate minus consumption/composition and decay. How much hording can you really do? Decay tends to push items into the market if they aren’t being used. This is a time-value tradeoff.

>without … currency, and with trades being limited to 1:1, I think we’ll see a fair lack of liquidity, and a fairly low velocity in trading high-end items.

I’d love to find out if this is true.

Estariel proposes an alternative AI-driven market [TN]>

>o removal of player-to-player gifts of money/items

>o inclusion of an anonymous bazaar, which only allows money-for-item and item-for-money trades (no item to item trades)

>o introduction of AI-driven “market-makers” who will buy low and sell high for every item; the limit prices to be continually adjusted to reflect current value as documented by executed trades.

Another taker! It’s working!

Please consider writing this design up in detail and publishing it so that TerraNova picks it up and you’ll get lots of feedback. :-)

Paul “Phinehas” Schwanz [TN]>Perhaps I’m just not understanding the way that decay works, but I can’t figure out how you can have 1:1 trading values if one item can be at 90% while the other is at 10% … I suppose that you could just have every item that goes onto the market get reset to 100% durability, but I’d think that would give you problems with your sink.

Yep. The design acknowledges that decay interacts with the market. There are several solutions, including a modified version of the one you propose: Things may not be traded unless they are in new or good condition, and reset to new when traded. Another option is to require objects to be in new condition and make repair consumables able to restore an item to new condition.

Richard [TN]>If resource-gathering is the game, but you can’t affect the gathering of resources, where’s the game?

Resource-gathering isn’t the primary point of the game at all, just a means to optimize some of the game’s ends. How is this any different than a MMOG?

Ryan Kelln [HC}>Basically your economy comes down to a distributed sorting problem where you are trying to give each item to every player but you hand out the pieces randomly over time and let the players sort it out.

The full game was not described, only the trading economy. It is not at all true that every kid needs every item. Perhaps everyone is thinking that items are given out stingily. This thinking is a hold over from other MMOGs. If critical item liquidity is a significant problem, the faucet production rate can be increased. Closed account items can be reaped, etc.

>So while all the constraints you've added may help prevent eBaying they actually just make the distribution of goods more difficult, frustrating and possibly less equal.

Compared to what? Rare-spawns? Level-based-distribution of opportunity? I'd love to compare this system, up and running, to any MMOG for equal distribution of goods.

>Imagine the game world rules shifted to the real world.

Why on earth would I do that? :-)

>Stop trying to create false scarcity and then preventing people from abusing it.

False scarcity??? Dude. No scarcity. Constantly increasing equalized supply is NOT scarcity.

>That being said, I think it would be an interesting experiment...

Me too.

Cory [HC]> Given that you can combine stuff, it’s almost certain that you can combine them into pathetically bad combinations, which provide a signalling device for the buyer.

Combined items can not be traded, per 1.1.

>The Blockbuster attack:

>So, the flooded market and broken sharing block my exploits, but I’m not sure that the cure isn’t worse than the disease for both of those options.

This is why I listed the mitigation strategies separately. I want to implement the minimum limits. There is only so far such a radical design can go without implementing and testing.

So, that’s it. I’ve produced 15 pages of design and more than 15 pages of argumentation rebuttal. This has been an incredibly successful exchange, far surpassing my goals to engage the developer community, even if KidTrade never gets turned into code.

Posted by: Randy Farmer at October 23, 2004 05:14 PM

Randy: Just in case you actually tried to take a look at my blog earlier, I wanted to let you know I finally got my comments up (took me longer to get up than I’d expected)

Posted by: Jenni Merrifield at October 24, 2004 04:30 AM

Basically my argument is the same as Richard Bartle’s. You seem to want a system for transmuting one item to another – why make it a player driven market? If the point of the items are to enhance the mini-games or provide or customize “collectables” then I would make this comparison:

You are asking the kids to paint a picture but giving out the paints randomly and forcing them to trade for the colors they want to paint with. It costs nothing to give every child all the paints why restrict it? The nice thing about digital painting software is that you can have any color you want. This is the “treadmill” issue all over again. Perhaps the game requires that sort of withholding of content to motivate gameplay.

I’m not saying that you couldn’t make some sort of restricted ownership or collaborative trading entertaining, but that suggests to me something like this:

Every kid has an aquarium that can only support so much life. The kids trade and breed the things living in their aquarium to try and preserve diversity and personalize their aquarium.

It is not at all true that every kid needs every item.

Yes, from your description Things are not needed, only desired. To generalize though, every player will want at least one copy of every item if each item adds in some unique way to the game experience. Only lesser versions of redundant items (such as Sword +1, Sword +2, Sword +3) will not be desirable.

Side note:
If the majority of the items are redundant then you will get an economy that is mainly about finding the way to “trade up” – what series of trades will get you from Sword +1 to Sword +3. In that sort of serial “trading-up” game you would want the players to be “middle-men” where the gameplay involves making the right deals (in real life often involving traveling, shmoozing, having the best contacts/info, etc). The highly automated global market you suggest replaces much of that – you want to focus on replacing the parts that make a bad game and keeping the parts that make a good game. Be careful that eBay-proofing doesn’t remove the parts that make a good game.

Item “decay” and breadth of content will mean that players may have a rotating inventory which I think will help make trading work in your proposed system. What causes decay, changes the rate and how it is handled in trades will be critical to making the system successful. It is possible to make decay into a mini-game itself rather than “use something enough and it breaks” – at the expense of “realism”.

False scarcity??? Dude. No scarcity. Constantly increasing equalized supply is NOT scarcity.

I’m not totally sure what “constantly increasing equalized supply” means. If that means that there are enough items for players to trade for what they want at all times immediately then why have trading? If it means that sometimes they will not be able to get what they want then you have some level scarcity. If the idea is that you want players to try to figure out a small number of sequential one-for-one trades to go from ThingA to ThingB to ThingC, using a player driven market seems unnecessarily complex and uncontrolled. The same challenge could be easily generated by NPC merchants with the guarantee that there would always be a sequence of trades A through to X.

At a more basic level, since players cannot freely copy each others items, even though it is feasible and easy to do so, you have created scarcity. Since players cannot instantiate any item they want, even though that is also feasible, you have created scarcity. Yes, I realize other MMOGs rely on similar unneccessary restrictions of virtual goods often in a much more frustrating and unenjoyable manner.

I’m just pointing out that if you want to eBay-proof your game the simplest way is to acknowledge that the true costs of (creating, copying, etc) virtual goods are so low that even the low transaction costs of eBay are much higher. Only if you artificially inflate the costs (through imposing a scarcity model) will people eBay.

Sorry to go so far offtopic, my comments are more about the underlying design and not this particular implementations abiltity to prevent eBaying. For me the solution is increased freedom (to copy and distribute virtual items) not further restrictions.

Cheers,
Ryan

Posted by: Ryan Kelln at October 25, 2004 12:54 AM

How much effort would a test-drive require? I don’t know a thing about programming; would it be reasonable to make a web-page-based mockup? Maybe a quick and dirty wiki adaptation? We could fiddle with the coolness factor and see if the mockup reveals any emergent behavior.

Posted by: Nick Douglas at October 28, 2004 01:00 PM

“if you want to eBay-proof your game the simplest way is to acknowledge that the true costs of (creating, copying, etc) virtual goods are so low that even the low transaction costs of eBay are much higher. “

The problem with that is, that you make the transactions worthless in game. The only way to make the item’s cost less is to have someway to bypass the time factor. Lets say you had one of these big companys sell there own currency, they would have to undercut to compete with the other virtual seller companys. To do this it makes the currency worthless. If they raise the price’s of the things you buy with that currency, then you are back to the original problem, just with differnt numbers.

Even with NeoPets you could have multiple accounts to gain neopoints. Thus it wouldn’t be hard to run several accounts, and transfer all the money to one charicter. The limitation of time played would have to be universal, which even in theory couldn’t work. There is no way that could stop someone from playing on more then one account. So it’s back to time.

If the aspect of time didn’t exist, then these companys wouldn’t exist. All games are based on time and the model of working for something gains a reward. Even if you play “Pong” it still takes X amount of time to hit the ball. The players just don’t want to play pong for the first few levels. If you take away levels from the game, then you they don’t want to hit the ball back and forth for the first ten times. If you take away the first ten times, Pong doesn’t exist.

The only avenue and the last avenue that i could see changing the sales of items, especially on ebay, is to have the same rewards, but to make the design on the game to be based on skill rather then luck and time. The problem with that, is that then the game itself becomes unbalanced. The best skill not only rules the playingfield, but rules the items and economy. At that point, then you just change the suppliers to the people with the most skill instead of time.

Posted by: Lazlow at December 17, 2004 02:36 PM

Interesting in principle. I’m still not convinced that any game can make itself immune from commerce yet remain fun at the same time. As long as individual players can have non-uniform numbers of “assets” there will always be a market for trading those assets. In this case, it sounds like non-uniformity would occur due to the different amounts of time people spend in the game (I get more items the more time I spend, am I right?), or because I manage to smartly arbitrage “crossed trades” – those exchanges that sell things above or below market rates (or perhaps I’ve misunderstood the trading mechanism). In fact, I’d go one step further and suggest that because you’re tried to build “equality” into this system, any non-uniformity within it is actually _more_ valuable and desirable. That is, if the average person (say this is 98% of people) amasses 10 things , if I manage to acquire 20 things then perhaps my account is not worth twice as much but maybe 10x or 100x as much as average. To exploit the commercial value of this account, all I have to do is auction it to the highest bidder and hand it over to someone else. While certainly you can make real life conversion/trade more difficult, it’s nearly impossible to eliminate it completely. And just like any black market, when you do, the trades that actually do take place will probably drive up the value.

Posted by: Alan Majer at January 27, 2005 01:55 PM

In your notes, you wrote:
“The most primitive form of MMOG item trading was in the original Lucasfilm�s Habitat, in which Avatars gave objects to each other by dropping them on the ground at their feet and walking to the other party�s objects and picking it them up.”

Very early forms of item trading were in the PLATO system’s game Mines Of Moria, in 1980 or earlier. I definitely remember muling and twinking in that game. I don’t recall if the earlier versions of SpaSim also had trading, though Jim Bowery, it’s author, could tell you. Perhaps these would not be classified as MMOG games because they only allowed a few dozen players at once.

Posted by: Mike Huben at January 30, 2005 05:08 AM

Your design for an eBay-immune (resistant) market may work for your specific case, a kid’s game. For any kind of larger game you’ll need more open trading systems. At the very basic level, any normal MMORPG where Player A can’t give player B item X will suffer from it at least as much as it gains from resisting eBay. Trading DOES serve an important function, and is social too. Say I play with two other players – why should I not give them healing potions I have and do not need if it increases the survivability of the group?

You cannot prevent outside sale of in-game items without crippling your game, period. You can just try to reduce the worst consequences (in-game spam and the like).

Posted by: Nils at March 6, 2007 02:11 PM