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

  • EVE Character report (with titans)
    Quick note: yesterday I met the worst scammer ever, and made an extra post about it which just hit 10K visitors! My first character repor...
  • NETGEAR TECH SUPPORT SETUP SCAM!! WOW $60.00 TO SETUP CONFIGURATION PROBLEMS.
    BEWARE OF NETGEAR SCAM. I PURCHASE A NETGEAR ROUTER ONE YEAR AGO AND TECH SUPPORT WON'T FIX THEIR CONFIGURATION.!!!!! BEWARE     WE SHOU...
  • Bubble-camp survival guide
    So, you want to haul little things in nullsec or just want to scout around. As I posted already, I flied around the map, losing covops only ...
  • The Diablo 3 "game over" issue
    You might noticed that the Diablo 3 related blogs are removed from my bloglist. It's not because of the quality of the individual sites,...
  • Diablo 3 Beta Phishing Season Begins
    The scammers are out in force with the recent Diablo 3 beta opt-in announcement.   Phishing scams are very common around any Blizzard beta ...
  • EVE UI suggestions
    This post is dedicated for the discussion of the EVE UI suggestions permanent page.
  • Goons and TEST are bad at EVE therefore win
    The "Goons and TEST suck at EVE" is a strange statement. It's not a curse told by enemies, it's something they call themse...
  • Highsec POCO ownership
    I usually don't make posts on Weekends, but Rubicon is upon us and the main feature, highsec POCOs need further discussion. I already wr...
  • Tragedy of commons (and non-TC alliances)
    The tragedy of commons is a well-known economical problem, described by the anecdote: "herders sharing a common parcel of land, on whi...
  • A new approach to fight botting
    Botting is a widespread plague of MMOs. A botter can gain insane amount of game resources since it “farms for free”: the time of the bot cos...

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