Quote from: MPOE-PR on June 15, 2013, 11:17:54 AM

This is completely false, for the record. It is impossible to control the cashflow of fiat gold in a game even if you are exceptionally gifted in the field [of finance]. Absolutely nobody ever involved in game production to date was, and consequently this impression that "it's easy" and a solved problem simply belies a lot of Dunning-Kruger effect (ie, people are too clueless to even realize how clueless they are).

It's called education; those without it often berate those with. You and Mr. Popescu are no different. You will attack someone for not having an education or not being a success; all the while not having an education and not being responsible for your own success as well.

Quote from: MPOE-PR on June 15, 2013, 11:17:54 AM

So, first off: a BAD design requires grinding. That's all. It has nothing to do with RPGs; a bad marriage design requires marriage grinding, a badly organized job requires job grinding, a badly designed RPG requires RPG grinding.

Second: farming is the act of playing half the game. If the flow of gameplay can be divided into two portions, portion A and portion B, where A is perceived by players as extraneous to their enjoyment of the game, then A will be outsourced (to Chinese businesses, of course) and the game is broken. This is exactly what farming proves (to the hardheaded idiots who think "they solved currency" above): the game is badly designed.

Having actually played nearly every RPG game in existence, I can at least say something about what keeps me coming back to the genre. It's precisely the opposite of CSR racing. In CSR racing, you have a 10-15 second car race, and you spend about the same time upgrading your car between races if you're quick. And once the game is over, it's really over -- there is no "endgame", and you didn't really earn anything, because you have no skin in the game. Part of the appeal of a RPG is in fact farming and grinding. The journey -- not the destination. And in a MMORPG it's doing that together with (and at times against) others you meet online. This is something that you appear not to get. The problem is not the economy or the gold flow, which is just something you tune to the progression. The problem is that you want to make money from all this. You want to charge a subscription, or have a real money economy, or whatever. And that brings out the farmers. Because as soon as you make people pay for their success one way or another, they will find a way to pay someone else to have that success for them.

Kind of like how Mr. Popescu pays you to argue on his behalf. Or how he paid people to write MPEX (he didn't write it himself).

The same problem exists in a different form in games like Tomb Raider. People will go look up a walkthrough to the game instead of sitting there trying to figure it out themselves. Not all the time mind you -- just on the 5% of the game they don't enjoy. There is pretty much nothing you can do to prevent this from happening to your game. People will not play your game if they can not be entertained and get a sense of achievement from it, and nothing you can do to give a player a sense of achievement can be made non-transferable. In days gone past this means people would often not finish games. Nowadays, everyone finishes every game. If they can't finish it, they just open up a walkthough-FAQ for the game. You can see this in how games like Half-life have changed over the years. Half-life contained many jump and platform puzzles that Half-life 2 did not contain. It's not because the puzzles were too difficult. It's because some people found them tedious or boring. So the game was made easier, and as a result the story had to be a lot stronger and more involving. The puzzles had to be more cranial and less in-game-physical. But you do not have this luxury with a RPG, if that is really what you are attempting to design. Screwing with the genre will just make you turn out a shitty game. We know this now. Being honest I don't know what your plan is for your in-game-economy but I am pretty sure you will not be reinventing the genre any time soon ;-)

Quote from: MPOE-PR on June 15, 2013, 11:17:54 AM

Third: farming always inflates the economy. It makes no difference if it is or if it isn't combined with mass sell-offs of anything, this is clueless voodooman blaming one of the symptoms, much akin to medieval minds thinking that the coughing is what makes phthisic patients lose weight and there's no such thing as Koch's bacillus. The presence of meaningless crap that's money in name only is the problem, and the game designer trying to apply Western welfarism to "make the game better" (or moreover, just because he's culturally immersed in welfarism and can't quite think outside of Weber for lack of any exposure to actual culture, or even to first hand Weber crap for that matter) fails for the same reason the same nonsense fails when applied by politicians (who often seem children who aspired to design games but never got anywhere, much like our friend usagi). IRL they tend to blame "speculators" (look at Venezuela) for the IRL equivalent of "massive sell-offs". Nonsense & poppycock, they broke it, not the Chinese businessmen providing the very valuable and very respectable service of making it plain how stupid Mr. Designerman was.

You're being an idiot again. Based on what you've said (i.e. "Farming always inflates the economy") can't we conclude you don't really understand progression or economy? In any RPG game there is a progression, not an economy. An 'economy' is just a means to control progression. It means that certain people who have reached a certain level no longer need to look for certain items or go to certain areas anymore.

Other means of controlling progression are level caps, item levels, skill points/skills which unlock at a certain level, time-based controls (such as the pulleys in Act III of Diablo III) and so forth. It's just a method of controlling how long players need to spend in a certain level before they can progress to the next area. Metering content. That is all. I find it so telling how you are discussing the gold and economy of a RPG in place of progression, when discussing problems like "Chinese farmers". You need to understand game design before you can start talking about a revenue model, or you get trainwrecks like trying to put me down by comparing me to a politician immersed in welfarism (another one of the "MPOE-PR talks game design" wtf moments, I suppose?)

I really can't wait to see what you guys are going to come up with. I'll be honest, I never once thought anything connected to MPEX would ever fail, and I was really surprised when MPOE bond had back to back double digit losses. But this is the first project associated with Mr. Popescu that I am sure will fail. It's the way you spurn advice. Let me clue you in. You're the cheezball who thinks they have a new concept for a social network. You know, the marketing genius or fresh MBA grad that thinks they're going to hire their way into running the next twitter. It's just not going to happen. It's your attitude -- not enough that you succeed but that others fail sort of thing -- combined with trying to break into game design it makes you look and sound like a total douche. You guys are clearly in way over your head on this one. I cannot possibly imagine you guys coming up with any sort of MMORPG at all.