[gameprogrammer] Re: Catacomb by Henry Melton

You could even use this to coax certain actions in players. Let's say that a
player can gain "MVP" points by creating guilds, helping newbies,
participating in events, etc. This are actions that make the world so much
nicer, and the players who do these become valuable community assets, which
make the game better over all, we want to keep these and promote their
growth. That's why we call them Most Valuable Players and give them MVP
points. You can trade MVP points for real money, or for more months (or
maybe just nice in-game items).
If the giving of MVP points is designed carefully so that you are always
winning something from the actions, even if some people made bots they'd
finish doing useful things (at least in fairy land and/or an environment
where botting and other security issues are hard enough to abuse that it's
controlled at least).

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Alan Wolfe <alan.wolfe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hrm interesting idea!
>
> Well one thing that comes to mind is that since security is about not being
> the low hanging fruit, and making your security be harder to overcome than
> is worthwhile from what you get, if you start putting real money into the
> virtual world, you may have an exponential increase in hacking and cheating
> attempts.
>
> Maybe the increased security needed would cut into the profit too much.
>
> Since people farm and sell items / characters / etc in MMO's these days it
> seems like that problem is already coming up though
>
> It could be a good idea!
>
> "Kings of chaos" is an online text only game that offers money and prizes
> to the top players (there's a ladder and it resets periodically, like every
> 6 months or something like that), I wonder how much tim and money they have
> to spend to make sure security is good enough?
>  On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Chris Nystrom <cnystrom@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>
>> Here is a story a friend of mine wrote in 1985 about a fictional
>> on-line computer game:
>>
>> "Catacomb"
>>
>> http://www.henrymelton.com/0/h10.html
>>
>> It was published in "Dragon" magazine.
>>
>> An interesting thing about this online game as described in the story
>> is the revenue model.  Lets call it the "Easter Egg Hunt" model.
>> Basically take some percentage of the revenue and bury it online in
>> the game for the players to find. In that sense the model is similar
>> to Vegas in that you are motivating the players by returning to them a
>> portion of their own money.
>>
>> I know there are free games when you can take your money and buy in
>> game items. This would be sort of the reverse of that. You would pay
>> to play and obtain items in the game that you could redeem for real
>> cash.
>>
>> I know this has been done in a black market sense ("Buy your Everquest
>> items and characters on E-bay!"), but this has been mostly discouraged
>> by the game owners. What if instead it was embraced and made the
>> official reward for playing?
>>
>> Are there any games that currently do this? If not what do you think
>> about this as a revenue strategy?
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> --
>> E-Mail: Chris Nystrom <cnystrom@xxxxxxxxx>
>> Saving the world from web programming.
>> http://www.newio.org - G-Talk: cnystrom
>>
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>

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