Wow Tech Support

  • Subscribe to our RSS feed.
  • Twitter
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Facebook
  • Digg

Tuesday, 12 June 2012

The importance of world persistence in MMOs

Posted on 22:00 by Unknown
The corp and especially the faction standing affect broker fee, I wrote it several times: BrokerFee% = (1 – 0.05*BrokerRelationsLevel)/ exp(0.1 *FactionStanding + 0.04*CorporationStanding). But elevating standing isn't a trivial job. If you double-click on a faction, corporation or agent in your standings page, you see the list of missions and their rewards in % form. A good mission gives around 5%. That is either a once-a-lifetime COSMOS or datacenter mission, or a lucky storyline you got after 16 normal mission. An average one gives around 3%. You might assume that to raise it to 100%, you need 33 missions (or actually 33*17 = 561), but it's not true. The standing change is not equal to this value. The standing change has diminishing returns: change = base_change * (1 - current_standing/10). So the actual % to accumulate for a certain standing is:

The broker fee (calculated with zero broker relations here) has an own diminishing return against standing. The combination of the two: the fee vs missions done is really-really diminished:
It's safe to say that there is no reason to decrease it more after 200% collected. Don't forget that all the "cheap" ways to get standings (datacenter, cosmos, career agents) are all included, the further steps are laborious collection of 16 missions for a storyline.

Yet when I had nothing better to do and realized what I'm doing, I did some missions for standing. My last action was doing the Sisters of EVE epic arc with the Hek station trader alt. It provided 8.4% faction standing at the end, after 46 missions. Not really stellar. Gave some lore (that I could read on some site) and it was definitely more fun than another 16 distribution missions. But what was the point? I mean the opportunity cost on these missions probably larger than the gain on the broker fees over years. Yet I did it. OK, I was bored, but I could have started a WoW alt, or join faction warfare or RvB.

I was thinking why I choose this way of spending time, instead of some farming activity (I can't trade more than I do, I'm limited by capital and the lack of Orcas, the time demand of my process isn't high). Then I realized that the faction standing and the broker fees will stay with me forever. I mean the guy who got the same standings when the servers came up 10 years ago can still use them. They did not go obsolete, unless he choose a different path (turned pirate for example). The "progressing characters in a persistent world" was a basic idea among MMOs. It surprisingly worked on even me. Did not make me OCD about maxing it out (9.996 is rounded to 10.00), did not made me to care about it when I had something better to do, but when I was bored and open to random ideas, I was drawn to gain faction standings.

Surprisingly EVE remained the most true to the "progressing characters in a persistent world". You constantly gather skill points and your standings can't be lost either. You can lose ships and even implants but they are consumables anyway. Vanilla WoW had it and people swarmed to play it. Then they made a reset with Burning Crusade and people kept coming slower. Then they decided to make a reset every content patch in WotLK and the people stopped coming. Finally they introduced between-patches nerfs creating a "you'll get something better in a week if you wait" feeling and the people were leaving in masses.

After running after those silly standing percentages I'm not sure that the downfall of WoW had anything to do with content difficulty or even the dances. Maybe it was just taking away character progression.

I think "streamlining" the EVE skillpoint system allowing carriers to be learned without faction battleship 5 would be a similar mistake. You can be sure I really believe it as I'm training for carriers and I don't have Amarr BS 5. I would gain several weeks by the change. I still tell CCP: don't! Messing with anything that mean character progression can break the magic. I can't tell where it breaks. The Burning Crusade did not break it for Blizzard. But finally it will break.


Wednesday morning report: 49.8B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
Join the goblinworks channel for trading, hauling, crafting discussions.
Support the life in highsec by supporting our lobby organization
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to XShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest
Posted in Ideas | No comments
Newer Post Older Post Home

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Popular Posts

  • Suffer mortals, as your pathetic password betrays you!
    One of the things we often don't put much thought into is password selection. Usually it is a loved-one's name or an easily remembe...
  • (I'm not) defining lowsec
    This is a rather short post, will be one more today, about my very first PvP action. Sugar reminded me of a problem that I read about a l...
  • The big EVE trick
    What is an easy game: where everyone can achieve what he wants easily. What is a hard game: where you can only advance by becoming better an...
  • You must station trade what you haul
    Well, actually you don't if you are fine with hauling for buy orders. This case you lose serious profit. If you are the station trader o...
  • The (total lack of) balance of trade of highsec
    The fact that you can be much more rich in highsec than in the competitive areas of EVE (low, null, WH) is one of my main messages. It can b...
  • Thinking about highsec POCOs
    In the next EVE patch, Rubicon, highsec customs offices will be capturable by players (actually you destroy and build your own, but it's...
  • What would happen if people could trade?
    The question of mirror-ability of strategies often comes up when I post my trading strategy. The 0.01 strategy is clearly mirror-able. If th...
  • October ganking report
    October was a great month for my corporation , We Gank Because We Care. You can see the results on the killboard but since October was 31 d...
  • The proper profit metric
    Live moron of the weekend post . Did they spent the last month under a rock? People having trouble making ISK with trading. Some rather go m...
  • ur a kid!
    The title is a troll comment I get often. It doesn't make much sense. It's clearly not an argument. While we know that socials don...

Categories

  • account
  • account theft
  • adobe
  • alpha
  • arena tournament
  • authenticator
  • authenticators
  • battle.net
  • beta
  • blizzard
  • brute force
  • cataclysm
  • diablo 3 phishing scam
  • dictionary attack
  • drive-by
  • email
  • fake
  • flash
  • game
  • Gold
  • guild
  • gumblar
  • hacked
  • hacking
  • hacks
  • Ideas
  • ISK
  • keylogger
  • march
  • mmo-champion
  • New
  • password
  • password stealing
  • patching
  • phishing
  • raiding
  • Random
  • ranks
  • remote auction house
  • scam
  • scams
  • security
  • security checklist
  • soccer
  • strong password
  • trojan
  • vulnerability
  • warcraft
  • wow
  • wowarmory
  • wowmatrix

Blog Archive

  • ►  2013 (242)
    • ►  November (15)
    • ►  October (25)
    • ►  September (24)
    • ►  August (21)
    • ►  July (24)
    • ►  June (22)
    • ►  May (22)
    • ►  April (22)
    • ►  March (20)
    • ►  February (21)
    • ►  January (26)
  • ▼  2012 (261)
    • ►  December (24)
    • ►  November (21)
    • ►  October (24)
    • ►  September (21)
    • ►  August (26)
    • ►  July (25)
    • ▼  June (20)
      • June business report
      • The key to riches: high re-investment rate
      • Who won the battle?
      • The character bazaar
      • The expected FW-LP disaster
      • Marie Antoinette
      • EVE Character report
      • Sexist trolls are not sexist (and not trolls)
      • You can't help the M&S
      • The wardec system is/was/will be unfair to Goons!
      • Blogging my profit away #2
      • Spotlight bias and a mining Rokh fleet
      • The importance of world persistence in MMOs
      • The wonderful Orca
      • The voice of highsec
      • Idea: streamlining EVE blueprint market
      • Idea: making EVE-mining interesting
      • Insurance system: welfare for bad PvP-ers
      • Permanent undercutting
      • Where The Mittani is right and wrong
    • ►  May (25)
    • ►  April (23)
    • ►  March (23)
    • ►  February (23)
    • ►  January (6)
  • ►  2011 (4)
    • ►  September (1)
    • ►  April (1)
    • ►  March (1)
    • ►  January (1)
  • ►  2010 (17)
    • ►  November (1)
    • ►  September (2)
    • ►  August (1)
    • ►  July (1)
    • ►  June (2)
    • ►  May (2)
    • ►  April (1)
    • ►  March (2)
    • ►  February (2)
    • ►  January (3)
  • ►  2009 (4)
    • ►  December (1)
    • ►  October (1)
    • ►  September (1)
    • ►  July (1)
Powered by Blogger.

About Me

Unknown
View my complete profile