Possibly a Cabbage's Flamebate Posts

Do we really need twitter updates about itembuildr?

quangntenemy Posted:

I think it’s automatically published there.

But it’s spammy and it makes the ForumWarz twitter less fun to read. I look at the twitter to find out things I wouldn’t find out by clicking the “multiplayer” tab.

MasterBall-gate

Really, a virtual economy where items only become less valuable over time (like .moar files) or remain at a fixed price (like all of the items in NPC shops), is really, terribly stale and uninteresting. Things have to be able to change in price, both positively and negatively, in order to really call it an economy. When formerly rare and expensive things can become widely available and inexpensive and formerly commonplace items become rare and valuable, that’s what makes virtual economies interesting.

If nothing other than headsets and the falcon plaque are ever “luxury items that not everybody can get” there’s really no point to having kyoubai in the game. And those are items that exist in quantities of less than a dozen. It would be nice to have a few desirable luxury items that there are a few hundred of, so even new players could have a reasonable expectation of acquiring a few of them if things break their way.

item buildr making FWZ look unprofessional?

Fran Posted:

Yet another Emo item.

You really need to look that coding, ET.

Do emos actually use any of these items? They seem to get a ridiculous number of them.

UNFAN BINGERZ

MC Banhammer Posted:

haha people got banned and nobody noticed

no loss, then

People get banned here?

MasterBall-gate

EVECHARM Posted:

now whats even a bigger Log in to see images!

It is an investment. The problem with the forumwarz economy in the kyoubai era is that there really weren’t any investments, so prices for everything on kyoubai just went down until they hit one floor or another. It may be the first time an item was a good investment, but that’s not a reason that it’s bad. That’s a reason that it’s good, and that we need more things like this. The problem is that there just aren’t *enough* things that work as investments.

Personally, I would like to see ET put in place the following framework:

-Any Itembuildr item that “better” than the best item in its clbum available from an NPC shop or a quest everybody can do, will be considered closely as to whether or not it’s worthy of inclusion in the game outside of itembuildr (at the risk of power creep).

-If an item that is “better” than the previous best item in its clbum is not considered worthy of inclusion in an NPC shop, that item can be removed from the consumer’s co-op at any point after, say, two weeks with no warning.

Remember, people who stocked up on master balls aren’t clearly winners here. If you’ve got 50, you might be able to sell one for 5 million flezz, but are you going to be able to sell all 50 for that? As the people most desperate to get one get theirs, the price is probably going to go down (as demand does). Plus, if a better item comes along (entirely possible), they may not be able to recoup what they spent. I mean, people who stocked up on Dragon Balls in order to resell them later at a profit probably weren’t feeling too good when the Master Ball showed up.

I personally could care less about the flezz leaderboard peen, but I think that “using the economy to turn x [currency] into y [currency] where y>>x” is a really fun, and interesting aspect of virtual economies and fun sub-game in any multiplayer game that features an economy. From my perspective, the primary weakness of forumwarz to this point was that it lacked such an economy, and what happened with master balls is simply a step in the right direction. I mean, I would like to play the “turn x flezz into 10x flezz” game, you might not, but what’s your reason for arguing that people who like that sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed to play that game? The problem with flezz piling up was more “I have nothing to do with it”, and “playing the economy in order to make more flezz” is absolutely something to do with it.

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MasterBall-gate

EVECHARM Posted:

Why in the world should the shops be risk based? That’s not getting flezz moving in the economy thats just letting rich people abuse the system unfairly

Why should someone be able to get 2000% worth of a item they bought just because it suddenly went away with barely any warning. I mean heck there is one master ball going for 6 million + right now.

Deciding when to sell a moar file that you spend your visits to earn to get the most for it should be risk based, not just buying a item in a shop.

Just buying items isn’t risk, even if they lower the stats or items a bit, there’s no way the item is sudden;y going to absolutely plummet making the investor poor. Removing the item just create a absolut insane and unfair demand then there ever was for the item and basically abusing the system.

What I’m asking for is the creation of something that qualifies as an “investment” in the game. A .moar file will never be an investment, as forums are not removed and .moar files only become less rare as time goes on and more people get them (and people who already extracted them get extras).

In order for something to work as an investment, it has to have limited availability. Either there were few of them created in the first place, or it was available for a time and now it is gone. The best way to do this is “remove luxury items from shops after a time.” Nobody needs a master ball to do anything of significance in this game, so you’re not hurting anybody if you make them not available anymore. The alternative would be “making certain .moar files stop dropping” which would be more of a problem. As long as everything is always available from NPC shops, there will be a ceiling on the prices for those items, i.e. “however much you can get them for with max frugality, plus a small markup”. But to really make the player economy interesting, there has to be issues of scarcity. Pink Floyds and Earbleeders will never be scarce. Headphones are, hopefully some day Master Balls will be.

Also, you talk about “the rich abusing the system”? How are they abusing anything? From the description of itembuildr from the onset it was clear that items would be in the co-op for a limited time and only the best would make it into the game via permanent NPC stores. People, having read and informed themselves thought that “well, there’s no store for special items, so they don’t have anywhere to go” and then reading ET saying “I’m going to be rolling out changes for itembuildr tomorrow” put one and one and one together and thought “hey, maybe I should buy some master balls”. It’s not abusing anything, it’s just “being informed” and “anticipating something happening.” Informed people who correctly anticipate things happening should be able to cash in from this.

Plus, what are they abusing? For this to be considered “abuse” someone or something has to be hurt by it. It’s no great tragedy if people spend too much flezz on anything or if there are certain items that people can’t get (as these are things that are already happening, that have nothing to do with itembuildr.) It’s not even risk-free, since if itembuildr kicks out a special item better than the master ball, people may not be able to get “what they paid for them in the first place” for their piles of master balls. Plus, it’s not really a problem when the rich get richer. Beyond the point where “you have all the items you want”, flezz is pretty meaningless. The only use for it is “getting more flezz”. If people who had everything they wanted used their flezz to make more flezz, I’d say that’s entirely a good thing.

There is no scandal here. ET has done everything he should do as concerns master balls. If he does anything along the lines of “refund people” or “warn people that certain items would be returning/leaving”, that would be absolutely the wrong thing to do. It would punish people who took initiative and reward people for whining. Terrible precedent to set.

Remember, not everybody should be able to get everything. Sometimes the only thing that makes something special or worth acquiring/holding onto is “Not everybody can get one of these.” “I was there for that!” limited edition stuff is an entirely fair way to reward your long tenured characters. And “I got this item that most people will never have!” is a great milestone with a really rewarding sense of accomplishment. Not only should ET not “fix” what happened here, ForumWarz really needs more things like “MasterBall-gate”.

MasterBall-gate

I think things should actually be left exactly the way they are, as concerns itembuildr. One of the major points of itembuildr in the first place was to create a sort of speculative market for secondary sales for discontinued items. If the master ball turns out to be a hugely profitable item to sell on the secondary market, that will only fuel encourage more people to buy more and more of the next itembuildr item that will probably disappear in a month or so.

People buying way, way more of an item than they need from the Itembuildr store? That can be an significant flezz sink. Particularly if those people are so happy at the results of doing so, that they do it even more the next time. People buying master balls for 1,000,000   in kyoubai doesn’t add or remove any flezz from the economy (it just takes it from player A and gives it to player B), but somebody buying master balls from the Co-Op is sinking flezz. Somebody buying a lot of master balls is sinking a lot of flezz.

Why do we care if player A ends up with all of the flezz from players B, C, D, and E? It’s not like players B,C, D, and E don’t have a say in the matter, and it’s not like it’s hard for anybody playing this game to get tens of millions of flezz in addition to the best items in the game for every slot (except the headset). It’s not like there’s any value in flezz for endgame players other than “making the number go up”, so a speculative “invest in itembuildr items” game is a great gameplay vector for people interested in making the number go up.

Honestly, we need more things in the game that are awesome, expensive to buy from NPCs, and are only there for a limited time. We need more things in this game for endgame people to play with, and “playing around with virtual economies” is a lot of fun for some people.

Limit Emoticons

Celerysteve Posted:

There’s no reason anybody needs to use more than 10 or 20 emoticons in a post.

I agree entirely. If you feel like spamming, with emoticons, you could just alternate “emoticon” with “carriage return” which will still cause people to have to scroll, if you feel like being a male reproductive organ in the RP forums.

do you like goatse?

Log in to see images! (view post)

Itembuildr Images and Copyrights -- should I ignore this rule too?

scullyangel Posted:

This is the same for all the clbum stores.

Not the hacker one! It is entirely devoid of copyrighted images from itembuildr!

Personally, I would deal with copyrighted images in the following manner:

1) Put a “report copyrighted images” link on the voting page for itembuildr images, and allow a mod to verify the copyright on the image and, on doing so, remove the image from competition.

2) If an item makes it through and the image is later found to be copyrighted, remove the image from the item, remove the item from all NPC stores, and strip the winner of his or her peen from getting the winning image (even if they got the peen from a legitimate image win, be careful people.) Just replace the copyrighted image with a generic placeholder image, and if ET thinks that the item really is neat, add some bonus rounds to itembuildr wherein people submit and vote images for things that had their images removed. It’s not really a tragedy if an item goes through life without an image, most of the items people equip (.moar files) don’t have a unique image.

I think that would solve a lot of the problems.