Extra Credits

I'd love to see a episode about Artemesia. She's a awesome figure.

I was wondering that we should work on the Recap page. The show has been going on for like 7 seasons, and despite having a recap page. It looks almost bare. So I was wondering that we should work on the page. Anything would do. Thank you.

edited 12th Sep '14 7:08:36 AM by Polisi25

Truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes.

edited 13th Sep '14 8:57:11 AM by IrishZombie

And a real tragedy. Ferdinand seems like an alright guy, offering to visit the injured, marrying for love, and having good dodging skills.

The moral of World War I is 'Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.

So apparently James is going to start an on-camera segment where he addresses mistakes, inconsistencies and inaccuracies in Extra History, because he doesn't actually see the finished episode a lot of the time and wants to make sure he clarifies the points that slip by him to the viewer. Supposedly the sandwich part might not have happened exactly that way.

As for that poll, I'll just say that Alexander didn't win...

Today: why a game full of money spiders has trouble when it actually forms the basis of an economy.

At the heart of the problem is the lack of scarcity when it comes to resources. Your players will always be trading their in-game time for more resources. The standard economic models we're used to tend to break down pretty quickly because of this.

Could it be remotely possible to design an MMO with a finite amount of resources available in the game world, where more only spawns when a new player enters the scene, and most exchanges are conducted between players?

edited 17th Sep '14 3:28:28 PM by KylerThatch

I can imagine that sort of system giving rise to a clan of players who make it their job to snap up newly-spawned resources every time a new account is made, effectively freezing out the newbies.

Pooooossibly... World of Warcraft's phasing technology^note "phasing" is a trick World Of Warcraft uses to layer different versions of the world on top of one another so that players in the same physical location see different things. It's mostly used for story progression over the course of questing, such as turning a scorched wasteland into a verdant field after completing a series of quests. could probably be adapted to accomplish that, but I'm not sure it's a good idea. The world would get very empty and thus very boring very fast if mobs were gone forever once you killed them for the first time, not to mention it would dramatically upset the economy in a different way by turning random world drops into an incredibly rare resource if not removing them from the picture completely. For that matter, what would happen if a player killed the mobs required for a quest before acquiring the quest? Would they have screwed themself forever?

So yes, it's probably possible, but it creates a whoooole lot of new, much bigger problems.

I have to disagree with their idea for a potion of raiding, too. To me, that harkens back to the bad old days of Vanilla World Of Warcraft when 80% of "raiding" was hours upon hours of grinding for mats instead of actually fighting the raid. To be sure, there's a vocal number of players who say they want to go back to that version of raiding, but I'm pretty sure the majority disagrees pretty strongly. It also creates another barrier to entering the raiding scene: not only must you be this leveled, this geared, and this specced to raid, you must now also be this rich. That's not to mention the fact that such a potion effectively creates a time limit on how long players can attempt the raid before their potion runs out (heaven help them if the potion expires upon death).

edited 17th Sep '14 4:39:57 PM by Wryte

Well, all those problems come when you try to adapt the current models to the new idea. Since that apparently would be disastrous, maybe you would have to scrap the existing model entirely and build a completely new system to accommodate the concept.

Say the game was focused on PVP and/or crafting systems. Players barter for things they want in exchange for things they don't need, and resources change form as a result of player action. Items that are no longer wanted and otherwise end up stockpiled in someone's personal stash could be re-crafted or recycled into another form (say, Puzzle Pirates style, with some sort of minigame).

A Pv P-focused game, maybe (and that's a big maybe), but that would be utterly disastrous for a game focused on crafting. How can I craft the thing I want to craft if I've already exhausted the resources that spawned for me? Trade? What am I going to trade? My completed projects?

Before long, you end up with a world where raw resources have been totally exhausted, and everyone's just trading the same completed items around... for what? If the game is focused on crafting, what is there left to do once no one can craft anything else because there aren't any more materials to craft with?

The inherent problem with any finite resource system is that a game using that system is going to be totally dependent upon a constant influx of new players spawning new resources, most of whom are just going to end up getting taken advantage of by older, more experienced players who are reliant upon exploiting the new players to advance beyond the brick wall laid down by the personal raw resource limits, thus rendering those new players even more dependent upon exploiting the players who come after them, and so on.

edited 17th Sep '14 4:56:47 PM by Wryte

Recycle? Some crafting systems have reverse-crafting recipes, or have a system that allows you to break down an item into basic components.

Re: ninja edit: ...good point. Sounds like a pyramid scheme, when you put it that way.

edited 17th Sep '14 5:00:40 PM by KylerThatch

That occurred to me, too, but there only are two ways it can go: either you get 100% of your materials back from recycling, which renders trading with other players moot, or you get less that 100% of your resource back from recycling, which just prolongs the time before the game still runs out of raw resources anyway. Either way, the economy eventually stagnates without a constant influx of new players.

The only other alternative is for players to constantly create new alts for the sole purpose of harvesting freshly spawned materials and sending them to their mains, deleting the alt, and then repeating, at which point you've basically just got the old infinitely spawning resources system, just with an extra hoop to jump through.

edited 17th Sep '14 5:06:43 PM by Wryte

What I took away from this episode: Ties.

You know, I was going to compare this whole discussion to the way the real world operates, then I realized that we still dig things up out of the ground all the time. Which is kind of a similar deal, adding new resources to an economy, even though there's a finite amount of stuff on the planet.

Seconded.

Being someone who plays on a 3DS, I sigh everytime I see one of these pop up on the release timetable.

But I have no clue about the mobile market at all so...I didn't realize that it was that big of a problem there.

Apparently part 3 of the WW 1 serious should be out tomorrow.

I felt that we should work on the Recap page. As I think it deserves to be more better than it was. Thank you.

Also, we have a new Dan.

That makes a totally of 3 Dans so far. Extra Credits, we will find your Dan's in gaming and have them work for us.

Also, HA at the Tom Nook thing.

I will miss Leels. I liked her visual gags. I hope the best for other other Dan, though.

Anyway, interesting topic, but I feel nothing much was said this week. They only presented a concept and then concluded the industry was already doing fine there, so it almost feel like a wasted episode. But I guess it serves as an introduction for next week, which allow them to skip right into the relevant stuff without presenting the concept (as they already did here).