Greedy Goblin

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Weekend minipost: more grinding is done

The About page is updated again, as I finished with the "new" posts gathering since 2016 June, classifying them into Ideas or Random. Now only the posts younger than 30 days are New, as they should be.

PS: I deleted 10 Albion posts in various stages of preparation. Some were just a title with "aaa" as text, some were fully written. Sad.

PS2: But unlike after EVE, I will be playing a new game soon, because I just pick one candidate and try. I will announce my new game on Tuesday, no matter what. I've checked Cameloth Unchained, Crowfall, Life is Feudal but all are Alpha, so not even playable beta like Albion was. Though LiF has a limited local server mode (LiF:YO) and if no better is found, I test that, though it has a big negative of being sold on Steam (so far I evaded having a Steam Client). Feel free to suggest more World MMOs.

Update: Archeage is out of question for the same reason as Albion: APEX speculation

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

Screeps ? I'm playing right now and it has good gameplay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edBMmOAfJ-Q

Anonymous said...

I would say CU, CF and LiF, probably in that order, would be worth trying out, someday.

After your week in LiF, you could try Conan Exiles or a private server of that. I don't see a MMO working out. A MMO with your criteria is going to be old and fading or a small kickstarter that is vanity publishing (CU & CF) or from devs not smart enough to do market research and see what sells.

nightgerbil said...

Im hiding out in multiplayer hoi4 land. Try the strat games?

Anonymous said...

Archeage has open world PVP with territory control and non instanced land ownership. You might want to wait till 4.0 fresh start though.

Darkfall rise of agon releases may 5th. It will probably have a low population within 6 months though.

Mortal Online is similar to the above but it already has low population.

MMOs where you can make an impact on the world just dont seem to be popular for some reason.

Gevlon said...

Archeage also has APEX speculation (APEX is their PLEX)

Anonymous said...

Yes it has but it is not the best way to make money. Eve also has plex speculation if you go that way. Apex gain value at a steady and slow path as it should with inflation caused by more gold in the economy. But yu can get much more gold byt trading/fishing/crafting/whatervering than by buying and waiting for the value to go up. You said you left albion because gold speculation was better than anything else, now you are saying any rl currency speculation is a nogo, but you played eve for years ?

Gevlon said...

I was dumb to play EVE for years. Won't make the same mistake again.

I have no doubt that casual APEX speculation isn't too profitable. Or that not many people will make a fortune in Albion Gold trading. Just the "right" people.

What you need to understand is that unless there is a central price smoothing method, there will always be micro-spikes. If there are 10 micro spikes a day, each just 0.2% of the total price, barely visible, if someone predicts them all, he doubles his wealth in 30 days. Of course it's impossible to do without inside information, but with access to the dev marketing information (that holds all payment metrics and in-game purchase metrics), it's possible. These spikes aren't random. They are caused by the purchase patterns of players. For example when a bunch of Eastern County people get to play, the demand for premium currency goes up a bit, as these people are more likely to farm than to pay. When Western, employed people often play prices go down. Again, we are talking about 0.1-0.5% changes that are invisible and unpredictable without proper information and computer assisted trading.

So the only way to get money from this is getting inside info and using bots, both that are common among goldsellers.
Again:
- There is no legitimate reason for a game dev to allow real money coupon speculation
- There are simple industry standards to handle this problem

So tolerating this practice is either being corrupt, or being a useful idiot in the hands of corrupt ones.

Unknown said...

Lif... is it this game:http://www.gamevial.com/playgames.php?game=lif

According to the Steam page they are shutting down as of April 19th.

Gevlon said...

@S Riojas: no. Just a coincidence, I mean Life Is Feudal

Anonymous said...

Maybe you should reconsider the browser-garbage games you so hatefully discarded. Many of them seem to be alot more economy focused. I grant you that they seem to be (and mostly are) heavy on the p2w aspects. They however often seem to have some quite heavy world affecting mechanics too. Many of them also employ the 'wait game play' which is how you mainly play your econ game anywyas.

Anonymous said...

Maybe it could be true in a world where the quantity of apex bought and sold would be huge, instant and not taxed. But that simply not the case here. You are overthinking this. There is an AH taxe of 10% where you sell something so you wouldn't get any profit by buying even thousands of apex (which would be impossible due to the limitation of the offer), with your microspikes of 0,2%, you would loose thousands of gold. The prices are rising slowly so yes investing all your currencies in those kind of goods will protect your wealth from deflation but only if you can wait for the inflation to overcome the taxes so at the current speed it would take between 6 months and a year before you could sell the goods back to cash out. And that would be for minimal profit, and spending the same money trading/farming or crafting would have net you a much greater income.
There is a central price smoothing method to keep people from profiting from the micro spikes you're talking about, that's called ah cut. Of course we're not talking about huge rises/drops in prices that occures when big events happens in the game like new expansions but those events are rares, oneshots and wellknowed to everyone long before it happens and usually making profit from those is considered good goblinish gameplay.

Anonymous said...

Are you saying you wouldnt go back to EVE now even if ownership of the game changed from CCP to someone more professional because of plex speculation?

Smokeman said...

Anonymous 8:10:
"MMOs where you can make an impact on the world just dont seem to be popular for some reason."

They're popular with what seems to be a tiny, very passionate and vocal subset of the market, and at the same time they just don't work. So what happens is people in that tiny, vocal subset get together to make their "Dream Game" and it fails under it's own weight. People need a serious incentive to be "community minded." Look at Albion with the tax rates in town... What's the worst thing that can happen to people doing this? They utterly fail and lose their shop? So what? In their mind, a shop that can't abuse it's customers isn't worth having. It's not like they'll be broke, homeless, and living under a bridge in real life because of it.

Anonymous at 10:18:
"Yes it has but it is not the best way to make money. Eve also has plex speculation if you go that way. Apex gain value at a steady and slow path as it should with inflation caused by more gold in the economy. But yu can get much more gold byt trading/fishing/crafting/whatervering than by buying and waiting for the value to go up. You said you left albion because gold speculation was better than anything else, now you are saying any rl currency speculation is a nogo, but you played eve for years?"

You're missing the big picture. One Gevlon probably realized too late, and that is that speculating allows a "safe haven" to store your in game currency hoard as a "hedge against inflation." This creates an ever expanding value bubble of the premium currency. The effect of that bubble, before it eventually collapses, is that it will inevitably overtake all other "investment options" in game.

Smokeman said...

@S Riojas:

Heh, No. as Gevlon indicated, "LiF" (Note the caps placement.) is an acronym for "Life is Feudal. "Lïf" (With the double dots over the i.) is a cutesy way of spelling "life."

Totally different games.

Anonymous said...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardew_Valley

Hanura H'arasch said...

What's your beef with the Steam client?

Gevlon said...

@Anon: browser garbage is garbage for a reason. They can be developed from a couple thousand dollars (that's why there are thousands of them on kongregate), so the dev is interested in rippoing of the customers and run, develop new game. There is simply no reason for him to build on return customers.

@Anon: you mean there is a serious AH tax on APEX sales in Archeage? Still, "hedging against inflation" is bad enough.

@Next anon: if any professional company would take over, their first move would be removing markets from citadels in highsec, and making PLEX speculation impossible. This is why I left on the first place!

@Anon: Stardew Valley isn't multiplayer

@Hanura: I've never used it and don't see why should buying a game need a client. I'd guess once I've installed it, they would gather info (for better service of course). I simply see no valid reason of its existence, therefore I'm suspicious.

Hanura H'arasch said...

@Gevlon: well, the reason why steam exists is because it makes a number of things easier for game developers. You don't have to care about credit card stuff, update servers, DRM and such.

Armarren said...

Steam client is not needed for buying games so much as for downloading and running the games you bought, and not letting you download and run games you did not, acting as a package manager/DRM platform. One can imagine the package manager part being optional, but since the DRM is generally not Valve has no reason to implement and maintain the client-less game download interface.

The package manager part is the benefit for the user, as it acts as an unified interface for downloading and updating your games. The DRM part, as well as handling payment processing is the benefit for the developer. Although MMOs tend to both have their own separate update mechanism and payment processing independent from Steam, so I am not clear what is the point there, Steam storefront publicity I guess?

Steam is among other things a DRM platform, so there are obviously reasons to not like it, but the reason why it has a client are quite clear.

Anonymous said...

@smokeman : no i didn't miss the big picture because the picture you're talking about isn't real. I'm not talking about Albion here because I know nothing about it, but i played Archeage a few times (I play for a few months just to play the gold game and be richer then i was when i reactivated and then leave), and each time i leave i transfer all my gold to apex (so my gold don't loose to much value if something in the game happens that makes it loose a lot). The 2 first times i got quite a nice return (talking about between 30% and 50% for more than 6 months of sleep here) and the third i lost about 3k gold because the apex actually went down for a few months (not counting the 5k gold lost in taxes after selling them).
I understand that in Albion if there are no limits to your buyings and sellings, no taxes on sellings and knowing the prices of RL currencies usually always go up during the first years of a mmo, it is indeed a too much competitive way to make money.
But in archeage and other games like it, where the rl currencies are big items worth a lot and where the offer is limited by the number of items put up for sale by the players, investing is not safe (because the game is old enough for the economy to have stabilized and for the value to go up or down), and it is not a good way to make money, investing your money in trader house, armorer house, gem crafting materials, regrading boat parts, farming etc all rewards you with a much better roi and some a those are safer.
You're basically saying that IRL the best way to make money is to put all your money in a 1% savings account, when yes it is quite safe, will get you money, but there are much better ways.

Anonymous said...

@Next anon: if any professional company would take over, their first move would be removing markets from citadels in highsec, and making PLEX speculation impossible. This is why I left on the first place!


Plex speculation was in game when you started playing, and your "Don't Play Eve" is not a page about PLEX speculation.

Gevlon said...

@Anon: I had no problem with PLEX speculation because I didn't realize the corruption problem. Without corruption, the PLEX speculation isn't overpowered, as all players use the same info, so they can compete, and this drive profits down to the point of blind gamble. Corruption allows some players to make informed decisions or run bots without being bothered by devs.

The Don't Play EVE is about evidences of corruption, these are alone enough to not play EVE and they are much more obvious and understandable.

Albion got its Don't Play page because the extreme "PLEX" price swings and the no tax made speculation too easy and profitable with even the slightest corruption.

Anonymous said...

"What you need to understand is that unless there is a central price smoothing method, there will always be micro-spikes. If there are 10 micro spikes a day, each just 0.2% of the total price, barely visible, if someone predicts them all, he doubles his wealth in 30 days. Of course it's impossible to do without inside information, but with access to the dev marketing information (that holds all payment metrics and in-game purchase metrics), it's possible. These spikes aren't random. They are caused by the purchase patterns of players. For example when a bunch of Eastern County people get to play, the demand for premium currency goes up a bit, as these people are more likely to farm than to pay. When Western, employed people often play prices go down. Again, we are talking about 0.1-0.5% changes that are invisible and unpredictable without proper information and computer assisted trading."

This seem very far-fetched, at that scale at least, because the of the fees to sell items are a minimum of 1%, and more likely to be around 3% because most PLEX are sold in Jita 4-4 still, the fact that you'd need to babysit your orders, and absolutely no chance you'd be able to turnover a decent amount of ISK ten times per day without burning out. I have traded PLEX before, without inside information, by buying at around 0200 UTC and selling during peak time, but this was before citadels. You definitely don't need inside information since you can pull the market every 5 minutes with CREST, though I just noticed the trend on the market through normal, in-game play.

What I do now is a lot more passive, I buy during sales, then sell when I feel like the price has peaked before the next sale. I guess you wouldn't appreciate this either. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/276850999245668353/305668131551182849/2017-04-23_123359.png

Just to make it clear, this isn't my standard monthly profit from this as I don't always catch the sales, put in the effort to buy PLEX (competition is very high), and sometimes there just isn't a good opportunity to do it. This time did take about a month and half from buying to selling, though. I have been burnt too, like when citadels were released and PLEX crashed hard, but I doubled down and waited long, eventually making a profit.