Mr.Mind

So, I've seen that EL needs/wants some advertising. What if it was free and written by me? EL may not be as popular as it was when I played, and it may not interest me as much as it once did, but it is the most fun I have ever had while playing a video game, and I plan on telling anyone who wants to listen. So I'm going to finish my book about EL. The reason behind all of this isn't just because I want to show off RICH. I want to explain how video games can be used to teach and to inspire. My own experience with EL just happens to be a wonderful demonstration on how it is possible. I can describe what happened (hopefully in an interesting way), and what I learned through the process. Then, I can prove how everything that I saw and did in EL translated directly into the real world. I did find some interesting things about economics, and I hope that what I discovered is clearly explained through the use of a story, but that is only a smaller part of a larger goal. The real purpose is to defend video games (especially MMOs) as places where people are free to explore and make mistakes without any real world consequences. Places where people can get relevant real world experience that would never be available in any other way. And of course, also show how powerfully this experience can reinforce other methods of teaching. The story is mostly finished, but there are a few things I would like to use for enhancing the picture - perhaps a few screen shots, maybe a map, and probably some forum posts - and I would like Entropy's blessing. I can make a compelling case without any of these extras, and I probably don't need permission for all of it, but I want to be fair and open. If this book is well done, then it will definitely attract new people to the game. The overall message is very positive. I've benefited enormously from the game, and I think this might give something back. By the way, who would actually be interested in reading it when it's done?

Awesome! The only thing I am missing right now that might be useful to add would be a sort of "birth of EL" back story on how the game started, and a map of Serdia and Irillion that has each individual region labeled. Otherwise, I am pretty sure I can grab the forum posts I need. I have not decided how many screenshots I will use. Personally, I never buy ebooks, so I plan on making a printed version available. I have not yet looked for a publisher, and I can easily self publish if everyone says no. I probably won't make any money from it, but I don't really care about that.

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How about a decent donation? In fact my examples are being used to demonstrate how video games aren't all bad. Except I probably spent an unhealthy amount of time playing EL, especially in the summer. I'll never donate any money though. I think I have better uses for it.

Someday I will re-write everything (because honestly, it's not well written) and try to get it published as a book. Right now I have other projects that need fewer revisions and I need more time/money.

It might be a few years before the story is finished because I have other projects closer to being publishable quality (and I need more money). I can't post the paper because I didn't bother publishing it in a journal and I want to keep that option open the future. I would also like to keep myself anonymous in EL as long as possible.

I think this graph correlates pretty well with EL's popularity. First impressions have a lot to do with it. EL is a game that requires more patience than the average MMO players have... http://www.google.com/trends?q=Eternal+Lands

About every 6 months or so, the EL forums has another complaint by some manufacturer/crafter that they can't seem to make any money within the game. For years, I've understood intuitively that the people who make these complaints are fooling themselves. Now, after so much time trying to translate this understanding into terms that make sense to everybody else, I have finally found an analogy that works. The cost calculations that people have been using are actually correct. But, as some of you may remember, I preferred to count my costs as zero. Why? Well, in reality, those costs, which are counted as the gold coins you are giving up by not selling the raw materials, are actually being used to pay for xp. What this means is that the "cost" is what you are paying to level up. It is the same thing as what you pay to go to college. You aren't getting anything necessarily tangible out of it, but you're paying to "level up." Assuming you're making all of the ingredients yourself, the monetary terms of the transaction are irrelevant - every sale produces a profit. Here is a small sample of how the xp can be translated into the value of a gold coin. Using the same cost calculations that everyone else uses, and calculating the total amount of xp that you would get in every skill by doing it all yourself, I took cost over xp to show how much 1 xp is worth in gc for each of these items. These numbers might seem a little out of date, but that's because they are from 2006. However, the idea is the same. Item | Cost to Make Per Unit | Total XP Per Unit | Cost of XP in GC Iron Shield | 265.22 | 2510 | 0.11 Steel Shield | 486.48 | 5291.5 | 0.09 Iron helm | 146.7 | 2334 | 0.06 Iron chain mail | 367.02 | 5991.5 | 0.06 Item | Cost to Make Per Unit | Total XP Per Unit | Cost of XP in GC Fire Essence | 1.37 | 42.5 | 0.03 Magic Essence | 5.29 | 122 | 0.04 Health Essence | 4.83 | 120.25 | 0.04 Life Essence | 3.92 | 104 | 0.04 Iron Bar | 22.73 | 403 | 0.06 Steel Bar | 28.1 | 522 | 0.05 Titanium Bar | 38.61 | 755 | 0.05 Item | Cost to Make Per Unit | Total XP Per Unit | Cost of XP in GC Unicorn Medallion | 87.33 | 2530.5 | 0.03 Sun Medallion | 135.65 | 2898.5 | 0.05 Moon Medallion | 94.64 | 1918.5 | 0.05 Stars Medallion | 93.29 | 1904.5 | 0.05 I will admit, the XP values are slightly inflated because it is assuming you manage to get all of the harvesting XP from the item you're making, but with the harvesting cap that is not feasible (may be taken out later). Even so, xp seems to be pretty cheap (at about 1 xp per .05 gc in the medallions, or 1 gc will "buy" you 20 xp). But where is that xp going? Let's do a breakdown of the unicorn medallion. Alc XP = 896 Craft XP = 132 Harvest XP = 1502.5 Total XP = 2530.5 Crafting XP is only 5% of the total! In fact, most of it (59%) goes to harvesting. In terms of the amount of time you spend doing each skill, that sounds about right. So, lets say you decide to buy the stuff to make the Unicorn Medallion. At a cost of 87.33, then 1 gc will only "buy" 1.5 xp (or conversely, each xp point is worth .66 gc)! It shows the obvious; that crafting is relatively expensive to level up in. But what is less obvious is that anything above zero is what you are being paid just for making the item. The cost is covered by xp. The point is that all of these complaints about the economy are really a misunderstanding of the value of xp. What is happening here is that people are focusing on what they are giving up, but ignoring what they're getting. You're not making any money based on the monetary costs. Yes, there are costs, but they are completely and reasonably covered by xp. If they weren't, a lot of items wouldn't be manufactured at all. But this is all the theoretical ramblings of a madman. What actual physical evidence is there that a strategy based on this evaluation would be successful? It has already been done. Do not underestimate the value of xp. -Martholomew Mind

ROFL enemies over a chat in forums......that would be sooooooo petty. It has happened before.

I didn't say that I haven't been around. I just haven't actually played for awhile. If you will re-read the topic, you will see that I was commenting on past conditions, not necessarily current. What I found interesting is that, over time, the main complaints about the game keep coming up every few months, and the argument for those complaints has remained exactly the same: if you sell ingredients for an item you will get more money than selling the item itself. That does lead me to wonder - has the fundamental structure of the game changed? If the same complaints are being made, then it seems likely that there has been no significant changes (minor fixes perhaps), but you are right, there is no way to tell without playing. However, the focus here is not the specifics of what item is better to make or what is EL's economy like, ect., but just a thought on how to make the decision whether to focus on going for money or going for xp, or whether you can have the best of both at the same time. I'm not demanding that people take my ideas seriously (other producers rarely do), but simply asking people to consider the fact that there are different ways of looking at it, and it is quite obvious that the request is extremely uncomfortable. This is about the process of decision-making within the economy, not the status of the economy.

For the same reason that people play the game. It is entertaining.

Yes, that's right. And yes, that's also right. I haven't played this game for years. At this point I'm merely an impartial observer.

Clearly you're not wrong - you are getting sales. But that doesn't necessarily make me wrong. What we're talking about here is simply a different level of demand. In danger of getting too technical, I will keep this simple. If you want more sales, lower the price (my strategy) or try to influence the demand to reach your price (nathanstenzel's idea). It is much easier to lower the price than to convince people that your higher price is somehow better, especially when there are two identical items (as in EL, nobody makes higher quality health essenes than anyone else). You have to find reasons for charging a higher price other than one being inherently better than another, because they are all the same. What I have been trying to explain here is that even though everyone makes identical items, the quality of the same type of items as a whole is not set by the players. So, while I am willing to admit that players do have some control over it, they are bound within a general range of prices based upon one item group's quality in relation to other items, NPC prices, usefulness, ect. Players who believe they have control over those features are deceiving themselves and they need to quit whining about it. And I think everyone already knew that I like to push buttons. I have to see what they all do. [EDIT] For a summary of what I just said, read my signature.

I'm sorry, but that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of. Just because something won't change does not mean it does not matter. To clarify: complaints about it do not matter. I sense hints of unabashed idealism. A fair, unemotional evaluation of the economic situation would allow you to see that players' attempts to control the situation are guaranteed to fail (as they always have), particularly when every aspect of the economy is under a central command. Directing your attitude towards "fair" pricing is misguided and futile when you clearly do not have the power or the voice to change it. It does nothing but bring about endless debates over relatively insignificant details where any conclusions (good or bad) are nearly guaranteed to be ignored (entropy will do what he wants, not what you tell him to do). Please tell me why, other than as an intellectual exercise, does it matter when you have no power or voice to change the outcome? And, if there is any reasonable explanation, why there is such an emotional charge over the issue?

We, as players, are in no position to change that, which makes this discussion irrelevant. You may want to take that issue to someone who is in a position to change it, which would probably also be pointless if they are inept, corrupt, or some combination of the two. We don't make money in EL doing what we want to do, and it doesn't matter because that won't change.

Including "fun" in the equation, which can't be reliably measured, still wouldn't change the basic idea, which is don't do it if it isn't worth doing. However, since this game is a level-grind, you would expect each skill to get less fun over time until you've exhausted your enthusiasm for every skill (I'm sure everyone has a different level limit in each skill). Then it is no longer worth playing the game at all. That isn't necessarily Entropy's fault, because every level-grind game is like that. It's just a basic observation.

Thats by far the biggest problem with this. There just aren't enough players who are both separated enough from the game to make objective choices and close enough to the game to understand the dynamics of it and the dynamics of its players. ...and also knowledgeable enough to come up with ideas that actually help the game as a whole. - You know, instead of focusing on one thing at a time, maybe thinking about the overall consequences of each game addition so that it can be balanced out. Definitely hard to even find one person who can do all of that. [EDIT - fail on my part, this is an old topic]

I used Flinto's spreadsheet to come up with those numbers. It is outdated but for what I am doing with it, that's not too important. http://www.eternal-lands.com/forum/index.p...st&p=237736 The .5 came out because the spreadsheet discounts for failure rates, so it is really more of an average than an actual amount.

No, I didn't include time spent, even though it is an important factor. But the same idea would hold. If you're not getting enough xp to cover the cost of the materials and the time you're giving up, then either do something else or find a faster way to do it! As a general rule, I always avoided manufacturing items that required rare objects. It is too difficult to mass produce them, and the xp is not worth the attempt. Of course, that might be different from when I played 3 years ago. To clarify my original post a bit: if you want to make money, find the fastest way to do it, and if you want to level up, find the fastest way to do it. You cannot reasonably expect to have the best of both at the same time. Even further, if you want to make money but what you're doing isn't working, why are you doing it? If xp has no value to you and the item sells for a loss, then you are running a loss and should do something else, but if the xp is worth more than the cost of the item (including the time spent), then you should make the item even if you can't "profit" from it (and that's what most people do). My calculations are really just a benchmark. If you think of buying the materials and crafting xp is worth more to you than 1.5 gc per xp (maybe a little different with time included), then your costs are covered and it doesn't matter what you sell for because you are paying to leveling up. If the xp is worth less than 1.5 and you can't sell for a "profit" then don't make the moon medallion. If you make it anyway, then blame yourself, not the market. I'm simply calling for people to stop underestimating the value of xp. Even if it unconscious, everyone values it.

Setting prices for items that have rare ingredients is a bad idea. Setting prices in general is a bad idea, but the result of letting the market expose the true value of everything would be quite embarrassing, and we can't have that happen.

This would be trivial to implement by setting the NPC buy/sell prices to the min/max of each item's range. Few would sell for less than what they could get from the NPC, and few would buy for more than what the NPC charges. The hard part is figuring out just what that range should be for each item in the game. For example we've already seen pages of debate on the true cost of an item: (1) it's "free" because you can harvest everything needed vs (2) it's "Xgc" because that's what it costs to buy all the ingredients to mix one. But if he wanted, Entropy could define the market value of every item in the game by simply adjusting the NPC prices. I'll let someone else debate if that's the best solution or not. Pretty impossible to do tbh for anything that requires rares, do you base the npc price on what rares used to cost ?, what they cost now ? or what they will cost in the future ? Unless people expect Radu to change the prices with every server update If entropy sets the prices of finished products above the (perceived) costs that he set with npcs, then this entire thread's argument disappears. It's really easy for Entropy to stop this complaining. He must not have had time to do it in the past 4 years.

Indeed, you've discovered the key to why my strategy works. Produce your own ingredients! And why do you make more money selling ingredients? The xp you get from making finished products has an implicit value. This value is subtracted from the selling price of the product. As long as people ignore this value, there will be a perceived loss. In fact, I would argue that you could reduce prices further and still be making a profit if you are willing to include the true value of xp. - This is why I'm considered a villain.

the funny thing about that it's based on the Nash equilibrium. in tests it was discovered that the only people that behaved according to that were sociopaths and the economists themselves. Nash dismissed his own theory... that it was based on schizophrenic delusions which he suffered from. The simple truth is that it pays more for a player to not participate when everyone else is trying to fix prices. I discovered this empirically a few years ago. If you want to make a very nice profit, I encourage you to support this manufacturing "strike" and then take advantage of the higher prices before the strike ends. It served me well in the past.

I can't believe that there are still people around who think a "manu strike" will have any effect. Anyone who is not participating will soon find that it is much more profitable for them. If you know anything about economics, you know that this won't work. Long-term unsustainability of cartels.

Then you'll need to make a note of it in your report. It may skew the results. More so with some players than others...