QBlog

When Dinosaurs Roamed the Internet

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

This is the basic tariff information for connecting to CompuServe from Europe back in the early 1990s:

Not exactly free-to-play...

Public Eye

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

I woke up this morning with a swollen left eyelid. It feels sore and bruised and makes me look as if I've had plastic surgery gone wrong.

Oh well, it's not as if I'm going to China, Spain and the Czech Republic next month or anything.

Programmer Lunch

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

I was coding so hard this morning that I forgot to have lunch. That's not happened for a while.

I think I may need to upgrade my decrepit Microsoft Visual C++ compiler to a version that doesn't get a stack overflow on 10 mutually-recursive function calls...

Low Tech

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

Hmm. I was about to throw this out, but now I'm wondering if I should keep it in order that my descendents can sell it to a museum 200 years from now.

Reach

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

I've been buying the same toothbrushes for years. They work, they have no gimmicks, I like them. This time, though, there was a difference. This time, there were two in the pack instead of one:

When I say "the same toothbrushes", that means the same colour, too. Augh! Why can't they make packs that have two the same colour in them?! Don't they know there are people who don't like getting their toothbrushes mixed up with those of other people? Don't they know what fury we're capable of?

We are legion, Reach, and we're coming for you.

Or I could be over-reacting, I guess.

Gobbledegoogle Books

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

Hmm, it looks as if the machine used by Google Books isn't completely reliable.

Euro-lack-of-vision

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

After coming a very respectable not-last in the Eurovision Song Contest yesterday, I wonder how we could improve on that? Obviously having a decent song sung by someone a third of my age instead of 9 years older would help.

OK, Adele: what would it take for you to perform our entry in 2014?

Changing Rhetoric

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

The rhetoric justifying the coverage of what you can pay for in otherwise free-to-play MMOs is gradually changing.

When most MMO players were achievers, developers could sell anything that had no tangible, gameplay effect: costmetic-only "vanity" items (such as fancy pets) and services (such as name changes). Since last year (in the West — the Far East got here a while ago), when the tipping point was reached and socialisers asserted their dominance, the floodgates have opened. We're now seeing charges for goods and services across the board, in multiple dimensions. Three of these dimensions seem to be of particular appeal.

The first such dimension is whether what is sold has any gameplay effect or not. There are gradations of this, including:

No gameplay effect whatsoever; for example, an impressive-looking horse that behaves just like the horse you already had.
Deferred gameplay effect; for example, immediate access to new content other people have to wait a month to access.
Inconvenience-unblocking gameplay effects; for example, extra bag slots.
Indirect gameplay effects; for example, experience-point boosts.
Small direct gameplay effects; for example, health potions.
Large direct gameplay effects; for example, invulnerability potions.

The second main dimension is how long the effects last. Popular ones are:

Instant, one-shot consumables; for example, teleportation stones.
Short-term, temporary buffs; for example, a crafting skill increase for next hour.
Long-term, rental-like; for example, housing.
Permanent; for example, a 5%-faster horse.

The third main dimension concerns probabilities:

Prerequisite means you can only have whatever if you already had it through regular gameplay; for example, you can only have the spell-boosting wizard's hat with stars on if you already had the plain version.
Equal probabilities means there's the same chance of getting whatever through regular gameplay; for example, the goblins in the pay-to-enter instance are the same as the ones outside and have the same chance of dropping the same items when killed.
Increased probabilities means there's a small chance of getting whatever through regular gameplay and a (usually much) bigger one of getting it through paid content; for example, you could get a greater transmutation stone by luckily combinging lesser transmutation stones, but you have a 100-times better chance if you use this stone of catalysing transmutations.
There's no chance of getting it through regular gameplay; for example the rideable bear is only in this instance you have to pay to enter.

Achievers are fine with no-gameplay or deferred-gameplay effects, although the deferred-gameplay would have to be relatively short (a month at most). They are agnostic about how long effects last. They're OK with the first two kinds of probability, but would need to be persuaded that the second one genuinely was equal.

The other player types are fine with all the options, at least in terms of playing for fun. They may dislike them for other reasons, such as expense (if they feel they're being nickel-and-dimed), fairness (if they feel their experience is being deliberately crippled to make them pay to uncripple it) or morality (if they feel that a grab-bag mechanism is just plain, simple gambling) however they won't object to any of them for spoiling the game. Achievers will object. Achievers regard anything too far along the gameplay or probability dimensions as being pay-to-win. The only way they would accept it is if the total amount any player could spend on such items per character were capped per month — in other words, if it were a subscription or similar.

Now the shift we've seen of late is in the attitudes of longer-term players who used to be achievers but are now pretty well socialisers (which is what achievers transition to in the main sequence of player type development). They still consider themselves to be achievers, but now find themselves wanting to buy things that previously they wouldn't have done. They accept the argument against pay-to-win in player-versus-player, because that's pretty clear-cut — it has competition. However, the shift lies in their attitudes to player-versus-environment, which is now not seen as being competitive.

Well, PvE is competitive — if you're an achiever. If you're not, well of course you won't see it that way. If you are, though, you'll compare your progress and achievements to those of other players and you'll resent it if those players "cheat" by paying for advantages. If you can easily identify players who are (in your terms) losers, you may be able to stomach it , but only if everyone else doesn't treat them as winners; unfortunately for you, non-achievers will do just that.

So, what we're now seeing with MMOs is the effect of the natural evolution of achievers into socialisers. Most long-term MMO players have made the transition or are making it, so there's lots of money to be made here (at least while they consider their money well-spent). There are two long-term problems with it. though.

The first, which isn't all that great, is that MMOs are losing gamers. People who actually like games aren't going to stick with MMOs. These are mainly individuals who are transitioning from player to designer. They're going to be playing other games (mainly single-player RPGs, I suspect), perhaps coming back to a new MMO as a content locust for a short while before leaving it. These people aren't going to make a dent in MMO numbers because amortised across all MMOs there aren't enough of them; however, they're important because they are the cutting edge. They embody the future of games, because they understand them. Addressing their needs may be expensive in terms of what a developer gets back directly, but the reward lies in what spins off.

The second long-term problem concerns new achievers. If you're a newbie achiever looking for an MMO that suits your needs right now, you're going to have trouble finding one. You'll try one of the big names, find it's "unfair", and after a while give up. You're going to become lost to the MMO industry. You'll get your games kicks elsewhere. All those P2W-uneasy achievers who 5 years from now were eventually going to transform into P2W-accepting socialisers aren't going to do so because today they were put off while they were achievers. MMOs will become things their parents played, but not what they play — rather like how today's players regard MUDs (those of them who have even heard of MUDs, that is).

Oh well, short-term gain always wins over long-term vision, so this comes as no surprise. What I expect will eventually happen is that there'll be a design revolution as the gamers create something for all those would-be achievers who are treading water waiting for something to play. Either that, or MMOs will be developed that are sustainable using non-P2W (in achiever terms) F2P to pick up all those loose achievers.

Yeah, right, like that happened in Korea...

Norwich

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

We went to Norwich today. It's not the same as Colchester.

Swag

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

I had a pleasant surprise yesterday: one of my students gave me an end-of-teaching-year gift. Normally before the exams I'm worried I'll be hunted down by angry mobs, but not this time. I was given four of these:

There are only two in the picture because the other two were eaten yesterday. You boil up a cup of milk then dissolve the chocolate in it. Well, that's the plan: if you're my wife, you just use the milk to melt the chocolate then you lick it like a lollipop.

The best-before dates on them were for 1^st May, but I don't think there was any intention to poison me.

Main Event

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

I had to drive to work through three inches of water this morning:

It was a burst water main at North Station roundabout. I'd have taken a photo of the spectacularly gushing source but there was a police officer there who might have taken exception to it.

Odd One Out

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

Here's today's Daily Brain Games calendar entry:

I got the second one wrong. I thought the odd one out was Fahrenheit because he's the only one who doesn't have an SI unit named after him, but no, it's Faraday as he doesn't have a measurement of temperature named after him.

That's a little unfair, I think.

Crossed Wires

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

I spent a few minutes today looking for a picture of shoes to use in a presentation. Only too late did I realise that I hadn't used an incognito browser window, so I resigned myself to getting scores of advertisements for shoes on any web sites I visit for the next few days.

That's not what's happening, though. Instead, I'm getting ads that seem to have some kind of "true sportsmanship" connection. I've no idea what they're trying to sell because I'm not going to click on them, but they've massed up and come at me out of nowhere.

Oh well, better than shoes, I guess.

Piece of Pi

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

I've been told many times that the digits of pi contain, somewhere within them, every finite sequence of digits. This means that anything that can be encrypted as such a sequence — image files, DNA, digital music — appears somewhere in pi. For example, according to Pi-Search, my favourite number (142,857) occurs at position 335,037 after the decimal point; my phone number is up in the 2,000,000s.

The rationale for this is that pi is infinite and non-repeating, therefore it must be the case that all strings of integers appear in it somewhere. Personally, I don't buy this as a proof: pi with all the 9s removed looks as if it would satisfy the same criterion but it clearly does not contain every finite sequence of numbers. It may be there's an actual proof that pi does contain every sequence, but I haven't come across it if there is.

Let's assume pi does have this property, though. It wouldn't only be pi that had it: there would be an infinite number of real numbers that had it. Pi/10 also has it, for example. The number e is also reputed to have it, using the same argument employed to show pi has it.

Hmm, so that means if you were to choose any finite sequence of numbers it would appear in both e and pi.

The first 6 digits in e are 2.71828 . These appear in pi 33,789 places after the decimal point. This means that if you were to multiply pi by 10^33789 then take the remainder after dividing by 10, the result would be the same as e to five decimal places. Put another way, if you were to shift the digits in pi left 33,789 times and discard anything in the 10s column and beyond, you'd get e correct to five decimal places.

This shift-left works for any finite sequence of integers, assuming that both e and pi do indeed both contain every such sequence. You can shift pi left a finite number of times and it will be congruent with e for as many decimal places as you specify. If you want a longer match, you just shift it left more until you get one. The first 7 digits in e are 2.718281; they occur in pi at position 1,526,800 after the decimal point. The first 8 are 2.7182818 and occur at position 73,154,827. No matter how much of e you want to find in pi, it'll be there: just look further. It's only not going to be there if you want all of e, or perhaps if you're allowed to shift left an infinite number of times.

Yes, since you ask, I am supposed to be composing some slides for a talk I'm giving next month that I've been putting off writing.

Daily Brain Games

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

Here's my Daily Brain Games calendar entry for Friday, which I didn't see until today because I didn't go to my office on Friday:

Frogs, reptiles, yes...