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And you most definitely can only allow advancement via expenditure of cash. That’s effectively what M:tG does. You can only marginally improve your skills via the expenditure of time, and if it were a less complicated game, even that’d disappear. You can run a game where you have certain activities that you can perform, and you have to buy the ability to do anything else, and I’d argue that with the right activities, you can actually make that compelling gameplay that has no advancement component at all. It’d be harder maybe, because there’s very little example of it being done, but I think it’s a very surmountable problem. I’m not entirely sure it’s *worth* doing though, but it’s very possible *to* do.

I think you think I disagree with you more than I do. I’m positing that, in general, 1) money and time are not identical in effect when spent within an MMO setting, and that 2) the differences betwen them can (not necessarily will) raise questions about fairness. In any specific case, well, it depends on how it’s handled.

It’s not impossible, difficult or in and of itself wrong to build for the wallet not the watch. Where I disagree is with the statement that no new or different issues are raised. Novel and distinct issues are raised, but they can certainly be addressed. As you said, you just have to make sure the gameplay system is built a certain way.

(For the record, with the M:TG reference I was restating that I am not going to buy into that sort of game as a purely personal choice, making precisely the point that I do not object to such games and that I would simply abstain myself without thinking of them as somehow morally bad or offensive.)

I guess my overall point is something we do both agree on: games that accept cash have to be built slightly differently than games that don’t. I say simply that it is because there are different (similar perhaps but not identical) issues raised in that context. I did discuss at length how things might be done wrong (or might simply go wrong), but that doesn’t mean I don’t think they could be done right.

Oh, and on philosophical principle of not leaving a raised point unresolved (can you tell I enjoy debate? ), I stand by my statement that you cannot solely spend cash. Someone can certainly buy or collect Magic cards but never open or use them – this person is not playing Magic: The Gathering (and yeah, I knew a couple folks that were investing in the cards just to resell them). That would be the distinction.

Because spending cash alone *is* perfectly feasible in terms of advancement. You don’t get to dismiss that Understand that advancement in every single game we play currently is 9 parts filler and 1 part actual content. Replacing the filler of need to spend more time with the filler of need to spend more money isn’t in anyway impossible. It may cater to a smaller audience, but it’s by no means difficult or wrong to implement. You simply cannot advance without spending money, and the only time you spend is on consuming real content instead of filler.

And buying in in a competitive environment seems to work out okay (for the most part) for TCGs, so I don’t think you can even posit that. You just have to make sure the gameplay system is built around consistency and is structured to work with your metric. Because having your competition be based on who can sink the most hours into the game isn’t any better than who can sink the most money into the game. If you need to spend 20 hours a week to remain competitive in a game, there’s no substantial difference between spending half a year’s salary. Having *any* advancement metric beyond the player’s skill inherently breaks a competitive environment though, so it’s not even really worth talking about. Character advancement is anti-competition, it’s an inherent unleveling of the playing field.

@Yukon Sam,

The difference between money-based and time-based advancement is that in a time-based system, everybody can eventually max out a character.

This is not true. In a money-based system everyone can also max out a character even just spending a few dollars a month, provided that the ceiling doesn’t keep moving. It’s rarely in the developer’s best interest to have a static ceiling in a game world though, so the ceiling is always moving, and even in time based situations, you cannot max out a character unless you put a certain, typically very high, amount of time into the game. Thinking that you are even remotely competitive in time based games simply because they’re time based is just not true. You’re not.

To use WoW as an example: Less than 10% of WoW’s playerbase will *ever* finish the high end raid content in the game, and by the time they’re getting close to being able to even participate, the game will move on and adjust the ceiling upward while in the process devaluing all of the previous raid instances, meaning that they never even get to experience that content due to lack of player interest. The number of people that ever have maxed raid equipment is a tiny fraction of the playerbase, and there’s no real growth in that size as a percentage except when content gets delayed. As long as the ceiling keeps moving, the players outside of the hardcore raid elite remain safely out of reach of the top.

The only way you can catch up is to put more time into the game than most people are capable or willing to spend… just like the money situation.

Game players by definition have some surplus of time, which they spend playing games. They may not have a surplus of money (that is, time surplus is always > 0, money surplus can be = 0).

A game is designed for time to be spent playing. Spending time is required irrespective of spending money. Put another way, if you spend only money and not time, you are not playing the game. (time cost is always > 0, money cost can be = 0)

In the types of MMOs we are discussing, players are rewarded for time spent playing. An hour of time spent “purchases” both the immediate reward of an hour of entertainment and the cumulative reward of character advancement.

In games that allow (or illicitly have) cash transactions, for which those transactions have a material effect on the game, a unit of money spent purchases some unit of character advancement. This advancement is usually, but is not required to be, fungible with the character advancement purchased with time. On its face, though, one is tempted to say that cash and time are equivalent, since the same rewards are available to both.

Purchasing character advancement with cash creates an odd synergy, though. Like cheat codes in single player games (and I beg you, I am NOT making a comparison of cash = cheating), it allows the value of the game to be extracted more quickly. Put another way, for someone able to spend cash, each hour then spent buys more, both in terms of greater (more “condensed”) immediate enjoyment and in terms of more rapid time-purchased character advancement.

This effect is what underlies the fairness issue. The hour of someone able to spend cash is worth more (it buys more) than the hour of someone unable to spend cash. When people talk about fairness, it’s often in the context that it’s “fair” for someone who spent the hours to have cooler stuff; essentially, as long as their hour is worth the same as everyone else’s, they don’t mind having fewer hours to spend.

Ergo, the common complaint, “all that time I spent is made worthless by RMT,” is actually somewhat true. The disparity between the relative values of the hours is at the root of this, exacerbated by the feelings of someone who would have spent some amount of cash to increase the value of their own hours, but understood it to be against the rules (and thus feels punished for good behavior). (Also note that this applies to most circumstances that mess with the relative value of the hour, but cash transactions have by far the largest potential for disparity.)

I would first conclude, then, that spending cash and time has a synergy that spending either alone does not. Since spending cash alone is not logically possible, it can safely be discarded from consideration. Since some time must be spent, the question becomes one of how big of a “multiplier” units of money can become on those hours, and how may “standard hours” a person actually has when considering both their cash-surplus and time-surplus. I’d say that there is a very real gap between a cash-surplus and an equivalent time-surplus due to synergy, and that spending money simply isn’t one-to-one equivalent with spending time.

Put another way, you’re not just buying the hours you would have spent gaining your character traits, or waiting on random chance for powerful loot. To use WoW for this example, you’re also able to then turn around and run that high-level raid dungeon for the first time, but with all of the advantages that normally come from having seen it before, making it quicker, easier and more enjoyable (above and beyond the prior hours bought/skipped by the purchase). “Quicker, easier, and more enjoyable” are extremely subjective, but it is a way of stating that the demand for cash transactions is not solely a desire to “skip the boring parts” as some state. It also makes the fun parts more fun, in a general sense.

I would secondarily raise the point I alluded to about fungibility. If cash can acquire some form of character advancement that is both unavailable to and better than what can be acquired with time, suddenly that “multiplier” becomes locked in. Either you’ve bought it or you haven’t. This is not functionally different than having a tiered subscription model where an extra amount per month enables 2X Gold, XP and Loot, Plus Higher Drop Chances (or such), except that it obfuscates the mechanic. Arguably, this obfuscation, particularly in regards to minors, is potentially a deceptive business practice (it would have to be a severe case, of course, but they are out there).

Third, the above point of fungibility as it relates to competitive player interactions, where a separate, better “tier” ends up existing for those able to spend the cash (and man, I hadn’t heard the term Mr. Suitcase in years ), raises its own set of issues. But, those are pretty clear and this is long enough as it is.

But, in parting, I’d also agree with the point that discussing “shoehorning” cash transactions into a game not designed for them is very different from a game designed to include them, and I think it’s the former that has bigger issues (both objective and emotional) than the latter.

Oh, but as a side note, requiring a purchase to be competitive or to get comparable enjoyment or advancement out of an hour of time is not, in the abstract, different than requiring some other behavior that has an opportunity cost. There are comparisons to be made to gameplay issues such as the power Haste in old City of Heroes or to social issues such as those that have existed around the Ninja class in Final Fantasy Online since its introduction. So yeah, there’s a lot to discuss here.

As Entropia is still afloat, I’d have to concede that it’s a viable model. But from a player perspective? Unless you’ve got more disposable income than common sense, fuggitaboutit. It’ll never be more than a niche product, subsisting only because it caters to a well-heeled niche.

The difference between money-based and time-based advancement is that in a time-based system, everybody can eventually max out a character. It may take me a couple years to achieve what a twinked-out powergamer can accomplish in three weeks, but with patience, it is attainable. In a money-based game, on the other hand, I know I can never compete at the same level as the guy who can buy his own island and personalized nano-armor. What incentive could exist for me to play in the same game (unless I’m being paid good money to be second-banana)?

Peter’s comparison to Magic: The Gathering is spot on, and is the reason that the only competitive format I play in M:TG is sealed-deck… where Mr. Suitcase is forced to face me on roughly equal terms. And I confess to a certain dark relish when confronted with a Mr. Suitcase who is less than familiar with the format…

What? “Time is money”, no longer true?

Still, to give you an answer (and I do have one ) is going to take a bit of formulation, so it’ll have to wait until I’m home from work.

It’s simply that from a global context, looking objectively at game worlds, there’s no substantial difference between one limited resource or another in terms of how your advancement scheme works. Time isn’t inherently more fair of a metric than money is. It’s simply *a* metric, and while consistency is important for maintaining fairness, that’s only useful from the specific context of a single game world. Until you’ve got a stable playerbase, the concept of one being more fair than the other is pretty much irrelevant; there’s no difference except in how the players view them.

That being said, I don’t think a game should necessarily try to mix the two without being very careful about it. The culture of the gamer is one that values money a lot more than time, at least in general. Any sort of shortcuts in a game that allows advancement over time will tend to be looked down on, regardless of how they’re structured.