AfterWorld Survival Forum

Nothing new here, just going over the basics for the clarity's sake.


So, why economy? There's lots of games with no ingame economy, ppl come there to have fun, shoot stuff n this works just fine.
If the goal is to make loot desirable and meaningful you have to create a basic economic system.
If the ultimate goal is to create a complex and truthful virtual model of the reality, the more so.


For anything to be desirable it has to have a certain ingame value. If supply surpasses the demand the item value drops to zero. If all you can possibly loot from a mob or mine from the ground is worthless you have failed to create a working economic system and have to rely on other motivators (eg skills) to keep the ppl interested and game going.


Game economy is just another word for a set of balancing mechanisms. Game world's population is always relatively small compared to the real one. Games are relatively small closed systems therefore their economy is never "free" but carefully regulated. Those regulations are not visible for the untrained eye, creating an impression of free market and player-driven economic trends but ultimately it's only a artificially created illusion.


Basics of balancing.
Our goal was to provide (additional) motivation for the players to collect loot (and consume the resources while doing it). To achieve this we have to have some items/resources that have high value. "High" here is relative, it's somewhat higher than the total value of resources spent while trying to get those desirable items/resources. The only reason for this is the (relative) rarity of those items/resources (demand higher than supply).


In the big picture you now have certain resources you want to keep in high demand, regardless of the decisions and actions of any single player at any given moment and the trends of what your whole playerbase tends to do in the game in general.
It is improtant to understand that those actions are highly random, dependent on factors you can't possibly predict or control. Consequently, you can't rely on static loot tables to keep resources at desired level of supply. Static loot tables inevitably lead to oversupply and deficite.


A working balancing mechanism relies on the feedback from the game (could be done manually or could be a script that at certain intervals runs a database query and modifies a certain variable). (Over)simplified example: if the total reserve of a certain resource exceeds a treshold stops dropping from the mobs / can't be found in a mining claim. (In reality it's better not to monitor the total result but the average price paid in trades, and the balancing action works better if it's a gradual decrease not an instant cut-off... for the reasons that are going beyond the topic at hand)

Now we have a situation where certain resource(s) were dropping from a certain mob, but now have stopped dropping to avoid oversupply. The mob should still provide some loot with the total (average) value close to the value of the resources spent to kill that mob (or: find that mining claim).
Apparently we have to have a "filler loot", something that "fills the gap" and has no controlled maximum amount (and therefore relatively worthless).


What to do with filler loot? We create a loot sink for it.
Suppose one of our filler loots is animal blood.
1. We can make it refinable. Either with some other filler loot, or by itself (like wood refining works currently, allowing endless re-refine). To motivate players to do that we provide something relatively cheap and useless for it. Some secondary skill that increases HP in huge amounts, or we make it drop a pnote now and then, etc.
2. We can include it in the crafting recipes. Making HK's would require huge amount of animal blood (or big amount of something refined from a huge amount of animal blood). Or even include it to the really massive crafting recipes like making of ammo or refining stones. Could be an additional measure used with those described in #1.


As a result, we will have mechanisms that keep the whole system recycled and balanced regardless of any players actions. In fact it's so powerful that if u would release this system to the aftereffects of the totally unbalanced economic system like we have it in AW, it would effortlessly eat it all up and not even cough.


If you don't have such an economic system, what good would the manual wipe of certain resources do to you? It will only postpone the next wipe...
I mean, you either have it or you don't. In our case, regretfully, it seems you don't. Maybe it's a good time to start .... think ing about creating one, sometimes in the future... ? 




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[size=78%]Disclaimer: I'm not talking about RCE here. It's the simple working game economy based on ingame currency. If that currency is convertible to real world currency is a whole another question.[/size]

Yes, i agree with Snuffy. LoD was designed as a big deathmatch map where every passage, every path, every incline was placed, measured and balanced with unbelievable accuracy. You could spend years in there and still find something new. Ingenious place, and the actual gravity center for the whole game with all it's activities.

It looks like we will get not one but a whole bunch of similar features in the future.

If the work is still ongoing it's prolly not too late to point out the Group AI.
So far there's only one mob ingame that uses this special AI model - Rudoed. Slow-moving high-dmg mob that when attacked alerts other rudoeds in the close proximity and then attacks as a group. As a result the mob danger level has a special relationship to the spawn density, scaling from fairly easy to extremely deadly even if the maturity stays the same.
This special property has to be taken into account when balancing the mobs.


Also, i think the idea itself is ingenious and well worth further development. If we speak about gameplay and fun factor there's very few features that can be compared to this.
There was a few examples how the similar behaviour could be used for a group of bears and herd of warthogs (using slightly different but at the same time very simple algorithms). Can't access that part of the old forum atm, but i think it's not necessary either - shouldn't be hard to extend the idea using the existing scripts as a starting point.

dev's made skills growing  too "unbalanced" (непродуманно).
the health points depends from close combat skills not from rifle skills.

It's done very well "продуманно". With powerful ranged weapon you can kill the mob before it reaches you, or if it gets close it has much less HP left. With the melee weapon you have to "get close and personal", so the mob can hit you all the time. Which fighting style (profession) requires more HP?
If rifleman would get the same HP as swordsman, then swordsman profession would become obsolete, nobody would use swords. That would be unbalanced and poorly thought out.

Who wouldn't want it all, both ranged damage and great health? We all would like that! This means you have to skill both. Can't afford this? Well, then u simply have to decide what's the right balance for you, what fits your playstyle best.

In PvP the player who has good coordination (aim and movement) and a decent armor doesn't need so much health. Thief's tactic, for example, was to try to take initiative - aggressively suppress the opponent, force him into defense (healing). When you heal you can't shoot... Most of the time this tactic worked pretty well for him.
Another extreme is "the tank" fighting style (or more like immobile turret that stands on one spot). This playstyle requires huge health and very good armor - and even then it might not be enough.

I'm afraid i can't help much in this effort...

Anyway, i'll describe how it looks like for me. 2 considerations, either:
 - there's a specific loot you want to collect, or
 - there's a specific avoidance you want to skill.


Once you have decided what's the goal you open wiki (or your soc's website) and look up what mob and maturity provides what you need.
Next, you select the proper armor for that mob (or craft it, if needed).
Finally, you travel to the area where this mob is located.


There's a third activity - skilling weapons (melee or rifle). This activity itself doesn't depend on any property of the mob, you could shoot the brick wall. As the brick wall doesn't give skills u have to use big warthogs or something. But as weapon skilling itself is "mob-neutral", ppl usually choose the mob according to loot or avoidance.

I don't believe in 'upper' or 'lower' classes. Some players don't like PvP and loves PvE - that's fine, why they are 'bad'? Some will prefer trading to corporation wars, some - vice versa. If someone want to earn AWD via selling pnotes, it's fine. If someone crafting items for sale - it's fine too. And if someone don't care for PvE or craft and can buy pnotes/items from other players for AWD, that's fine too. Our goal is to make the game fun for everyone.

Thanx, that's the best answer possible. The game that succeeds in keeping all play-styles equal (or, in RCE terms: balanced) will have much bigger playerbase, and this is a foundation for everything else.
I know the dream about fully functional corporations (in terms of resource/territory control) has been there for years. Hopefully now it finally becomes a reality. This would add a whole new level to the game. Oh my, that could even bring some brilliant strategists back to the game (older players should remember Mirror ) - and hopefully also many new bright stars.
Just don't forget to implement mechanisms to prevent one Corp. growing too powerful. U know, there has to be something that would prevent ppl like me from taking over the whole world... 



Yeah, despite current confusions, looks like this caravan is on the right track. Keep up the good work!

Indeed. Virtual worlds are the places where we can forget about the problems of the everyday world, relax and have fun.

to prevent being hunted, you can simply add a delay to your video broadcast. someone might figure out where you are and what you're doing from watching what you did 10 minutes ago, but it sure would be harder

Was in a team that tried to take down yoda in PvP4 (in that another game). Yoda was streaming, with a 15 min delay. It ended up with him hunting us - using the delay as a bait...