SOE whitepaper on Station Exchange

 Posted by (Visited 26768 times)  Game talk
Feb 072007
 

SOE has released a whitepaper covering how the Station Exchange service has gone. Lots and lots of good detailed info in here. Edit: there’s an interview and summary on Gamasutra, along with a link to the full whitepaper in .doc format.

    • One piece of platinum trades for $7.35 when averaged for the year.
    • 34-year-olds spent the most money on virtual goods, accounting for nearly $39,000 in purchases.
    • The zip codes with the biggest buyers and sellers are both in Levittown, PA.
    • A high level character in EverQuest II is worth as much as $2,000.
    • A single seller made $37,435 from 351 auctions in the first year.

But those are just the fun stats. The really interesting stuff is in the analysis.
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Why MUD-Dev was so good

 Posted by (Visited 5858 times)  Game talk
Feb 072007
 

This is a blast from the past: a 1998 thread on MUD-Dev that I clicked to randomly that is ostensibly about room descriptions, but goes on to discuss simulation versus stagecraft, worlds that impose worldviews as opposed to games which let the player decide how to see things, whether players come to the world understanding the need for empathy for other players, and a whole hsot of other topics. Many of the proposed technical approaches make most of today’s MMORPGs look simplistic (check out the design for berserking that’s buried in there…). Lots to mine here for inspiration, and a clear sign that our ideas vastly outstripped our ability to implement.

There’s also some truly hilarious analysis of the current state of the market (“Diablo’s mostly done now…” “Wonder how EverQuest will do?” and so on)…

OK, now I need to actually do work instead of reading old threads. 🙂