How the Witcher 3’s economy was saved by polynomial least squares | Hacker News Reader

How the Witcher 3’s economy was saved by polynomial least squares

arstechnica.com

Hm. So I'd view the economy of Witcher 3 as mostly broken, exactly for the reasons that they claim to have solved here. The idea of an economy feels poor is not there at all, the player will be swimming in money 10 hours into a 100 hour game. It's almost impossible to run out of money unless you're insisting on buying out every single alchemy recipe from every vendor.

And the pricing of the rare items (e.g. the relics) makes them seem completely irrelevant. You'll get a cutscene before getting a quest reward talking about how you're getting an amazing sword that has been in the family for centuries etc. And then it's slightly worse than what you already have, and the only use is to sell this legendary weapon for a price that'll allow you to buy 10 loaves of bread.

Though getting the economy balance right is really hard due to different play styles, so it's understandable.

> And the pricing of the rare items (e.g. the relics) makes them seem completely irrelevant. You'll get a cutscene before getting a quest reward talking about how you're getting an amazing sword that has been in the family for centuries etc. And then it's slightly worse than what you already have, and the only use is to sell this legendary weapon for a price that'll allow you to buy 10 loaves of bread.

That's a serious story/gameplay disconnect. People often talk about "too good to use" issues, where they get amazing items but never want to use them. This seems like the reverse problem, where for story purposes they're priceless but for gameplay purposes they're useless.

I can think of a mechanic that would solve that problem, and I'm wondering if there's any obvious reason it wouldn't work:

1) "Legendary" equipment/artifacts mostly can't be sold (because there's no market for it). Avert the trope of the shopkeepers that will buy and sell anything, and instead assume the world isn't oriented around catering to adventurers. If you start out with some basic equipment, you can skip the idea of shops selling any equipment at all, and always make the acquisition of such items story-based.

2) Don't have fixed stats for every piece of equipment. Instead, have the stats for any given "legendary" reward always be slightly better than what you have, with strengths and weaknesses based on the nature of the item. So the more quests you do, the better equipment you have. (And as a bonus, you mess with all the people who would normally document the stats of every item in the game.) And no matter what, a quest reward always matters.

1) If shopkeepers buy and sell armor, for example, it makes no sense for them to refuse to buy legendary armor. Even if they're only willing to pay a price similar to their normal best equipment, that's way better than an armful of bread.

2) Scaling it to your current level/equipment is even more of a story/mechanics disconnect, and 90% of the time that should still be worth a big chunk of money, if equipment is one of the main cost centers of the game.

Giving good rewards while keeping the player poor is hard to do in a way that doesn't involve screwing them over.

1) That's a good reason to not have shopkeepers buy and sell equipment at all. But even if they do, I've seen classic games where the "selling price" of anything you can't buy in a shop is 1 gold (less than the cheapest consumable). I've also seen games where you can't sell to shops, period, which is even more justifiable.

2) It's only a story/mechanics disconnect if you expect continuity between multiple playthroughs, and "story" doesn't typically have any explanation for that to begin with. Otherwise, it's not hard to suspend disbelief and just say "OK, the sword handed down through this family is a bit more powerful than the previous sword I found in a volcano".

> If shopkeepers buy and sell armor, for example, it makes no sense for them to refuse to buy legendary armor.

The game does (to an extent) give shopkeepers a limited pool of money to "buy" from you with. You could address this by making 'normal' shopkeepers buy things up to what they can afford. The game could indicate this limit clearly.

"Special" (artisan/expert) shopkeepers in city (who may have more money) could buy things for 'more', but obviously those shopkeepers (in a world like The Witcher's) are few and far apart.

This means that you have the option of "quick, cheap reward now" or "slower, bigger reward" later when you need to sell things.

Obviously not a perfect solution (what is?).

I definitely felt way too "rich" early on and discarded a lot of artifact items that were useless. Dynamically scaling items would go a long way towards solving that problem too.

System Shock 2 managed that fairly well. You were always short on something. But it created a very hard game.

If you play on the default difficulty, money won't be a problem. But anything higher will have you buying herbs and consumables on a regular basis.

I play on the third difficulty level, and while my financial situation has gradually improved, I wouldn't exactly say that I'm swimming in money. I need to upgrade gear on a regular basis to stay on par with mob levels, and also craft gear. That stuff is pretty expensive.

Don't think that's it. I played on Blood & Broken Bones (2nd hardest) until level 12 or so, and then switched to Death March for the rest of the game since I was outleveling the main quests way too quickly. There's really no need to spend money on anything except repairs and Gwent cards. There's more than enough food / alcohest around even before you get infinite free healing through the use of Quen alternate.

But fair enough, just goes to show the point about the difficulty of balancing the economy.

You will out level the main quests if you do too many side quests. That's not related to difficulty or the economy.

Of course, they could have made the main quest scale in difficulty according to your level, but the last RPG that did that was Oblivion and it basically broke the game for most people.

Hm, I played on the highest difficulty, as an alchemy spec, but I never had an issue with money. Alcohol is expensive, but you can loot enough Dwarven Spirits on our adventures that you only need to buy it to craft new potions. I never had to buy loot, since the witcher gear is usually good enough. I guess if I spammed bombs, it might be different, but with potions I was fine.

Yeah, I've never been the type to obsessively loot every single container while adventuring, so I was always short on supplies. The economy is probably not optimized for the frugal packrat. :)

Most alchemy specs are broken compared to other builds, from what I've seen.

I'm in the same boat, mostly from weapon repairs. My income is pretty good, but I usually need to repair things after a quest, and the cost of repairing really puts a dent in my accumulated cash.

Playing on the highest difficulty. Had no issues with buying anything I wanted before leaving white orchard (tutorial area).

> You'll get a cutscene before getting a quest reward talking about how you're getting an amazing sword that has been in the family for centuries etc. And then it's slightly worse than what you already have, and the only use is to sell this legendary weapon for a price that'll allow you to buy 10 loaves of bread.

This disconnect seems to be prevalent, and someone even made a comic.

http://i.imgur.com/Fv4NkB6.jpg

Very prevalent.

http://dumbledoreshotfirst.blogspot.com/2013/08/words-of-day...

Wait you can buy stuff? I'm at level 10 and have not bought anything since I just steal from every chest or sack I find and no one seems to care that I'm taking their stuff 95% of the time.

But where do you get your gwent cards?!

All open-world RPGs seem to have this issue.

One of the things I did to mod Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim was to make the acquisition of money a lot more difficult by limiting the price you could sell things for and significantly increasing the cost of things like weapons, armour, equipment and room renting.

Game was a lot more fun and balanced this way.

I do not understand how the prices are set for buying food (at least in my games). some items can be 20 or 30 each, whilst others are 2 or 3 but are just as good. curiously, bread and water seem to be the most expensive food to buy and raspberry juice is dirt cheap.

It must be hard in these types of games to have an economy which for the player involves anything other than kill-loot-sell-repeat.

Did anyone else find the title as a little cringey? The name of the GDC talk was "Witchcraft: The Alchemy of a Crafting-Based Economy", but I guess that didn't sound as high tech as "polynomial least squares".

Saying "polynomial least squares" to refer to a class of model fitting techniques that...

1) basically dominates the entire space of statistical analysis

2) was almost entirely irrelevant to the article

...struck me as pretty artificial to me too.

Yes, it came across as bragging about using a basic curve fitting technique and dressing it up with jargon. There's probably more interesting work done there that didn't make it to the article though.

Witcher 1 provided a more faithful to the settings environment. Witchers aren't rich. They struggle to pay for their special equipment and potions and their incomes usually barely cover their expenses. When you get a new armor jacket it's a time for celebration.

That's how it was in TW1, and to some degree in TW2 as well. I didn't play TW3 yet (still waiting for the Linux release), but I've heard that this feeling from the previous games I described above is gone. Money is too easy to get and there is too much epic loot lying around and etc.

When you think about it, though, the idea that Witchers would be poor is kind of a dumb concept. With the powers they have, and the services they provide to people, there is zero believable reason for them to be poor.

True, this bothers me in most games to be honest... I mean in Mass Effect I was basically on a mission to same the universe, and was employed as a freaking spectre, an elite unit of super soldiers who are above the law. Now the game's universe has many species and many hundreds of billions of intelligent lifeforms, yet there are only 10 known spectres.

In other words, these are comparatively fewer of these guys than the US president, millions of times fewer than elite navy seal units or army generals or joint fight strikers, fewer than aircraft carriers that cost billions of dollars each and can house a hundred aircraft each worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and all military more significant, each and every one of them, after all you as one of the spectres is about to same the freaking universe.

Yet the player has to buy freaking omni-gel with scarce credits. Meanwhile you're flying across the universe in one of the most technologically advanced, trillion dollar spaceships, saving that very universe. In fact you employ said spaceship to go on missions to

That's like a carrier with joint strike fighters and nuclear bombs and the general of the navy, has to freaking sail across the oceans in search for somalian pirates that they can arrest, so they can make some money on their bounty, so they can buy some freaking bandages and rations, while simultaneously being on a mission to save the planet from impending doom lol.

There's not a lot of games that get this right. Tons of games get it right because the character isn't as important. Like in Pokemon, you're just a kid from a little village with ambition. But if you're the most important character in the universe, please don't have him pay for his bandages and ammo. And even in a convoluted 'everyone thinks I'm the bad guy, so nobody funds me, but I'm actually trying to save the universe', if you have universe-saving skills, just rob a freaking bank or something, it can't be that hard in comparison.

It made sense in books - the monsters were becoming rare as civilization spreaded, the people that had monster problems were usually poor, and the alternative for them was "move on to big city or less wild region".

Witchers were relicts of different times and had to compete on price or pivot to assasin/bodyguard industry :)

In games for gameplay reason they made monsters very common again (explaining it away by wars and plague decivilizing big regions again) - so it make sense for witchers to be more wealthy again.

I think you're spot-on here (personally I'm currently reading the books and playing through the Witcher 3 slowly).

The world of the Witcher 3 is a lot more monster-riddled than what's presented in the books, with a board full of witcher contracts at every little settlement. It wouldn't make sense for witchers to be poor in the context of the game, especially in a world where witchers are a dying breed and monsters are on the rise again.

Not sure about that. Usually even for difficult monsters witchers aren't paid a lot simply because people are too poor, and in the country riddled by war it's even more so.

It's not clear from the game story and contents, but monsters are now oftentimes taken care of by royal huntsmen and contracted mercenaries. As a result, witchers are considered old school practitioners of a dying field and the majority of the population is so poor that witchers are paid infrequently or sometimes not at all (they get scammed too!).

Remember that entire villages pooled their money together to pay for a witcher's fees. Also, monsters are not as frequent as they were a long time ago, so contracts are rarer and lower in payout, especially during a horrific war.

You'd guess so, but the books picture a different story. As Geralt himself explains, Witchers are relics of the past and they basically undermine their own livelihood (i.e. by hunting monsters they leave less work for them to find). In the portrayed world, monsters are becoming extinct, same as witchers themselves.

And despite what service they do to people, they are viewed as freaks (since they are mutants) and are marginalized by the society. So earning a living is not an easy thing for a witcher.

Graphical illustration of that concept: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/merely-tolerated

The power they wield is not that big, although the games arguably aren't great at conveying that. A witcher is a glorified rat catcher and is treated accordingly by the society.

IF you read the books you would understand. Sure, they provide services no one else can. But the towns they serve are exceedingly poor - people often suggest paying the witcher with room and board, rather than money, because they rarely have any. People with actual money, like kings and prices in that universe employ their own magi so they don't need help from witchers - so they are limited to helping poor people.

Vow of poverty?

I think the main problem are all the treasures and caches. It's incredibly easy to get a ton of gold by clearing all these and most of the time it doesn't even involve any fighting.

>for particularly wealthy players, merchants would always sell for more and buy for less

Well that's obnoxious. Better throw your money on the floor so merchants don't screw you?

Or does your reputation precede you as a super-powerful warrior that's really gullible? Most games have you get better at making deals over time, not worse.

This happens in the real world too. Imagine travelling to a poor country as someone easily identified as wealthy, for instance. It happens on a microscale within a given country too, if anyone identifies your wealth, you'll find prices creep upwards, especially for work of a contracting variety.

To really confirm this, try bringing two watches to a watchmaker at different times, one a $5,000 watch and one a $500 watch. Ask what a service costs. The gap tends to exist even if the movements are the same!

Interestingly, here in China I am currently editing and shooting a documentary on a foreign community and just yesterday hit on an interviewee's comment specifically to the effect that this does not occur, ie. locals treat everyone equally. The way this was explained was that, if you ask the price for something in a market, wait 10 seconds and eavesdrop on a local requesting the price for the same, it never differs. This is also my experience (after 15 years). I wonder if perhaps this area (China's most ethnically and linguistically diverse) simply has a fair treatment norm based in pluralistic history.

That is the exact opposite of my experience of Chinese markets (Beijing/Xian). Asking in English is quoted at a markedly higher price than asking in Chinese. Not to mention that it is haggling-based, and final price was even more dramatic when using Chinese vs English.

Even if it's a Chinese person asking in Chinese, the results can differ dramatically merely if they're seen to be accompanied by a non-Chinese person. If you want the best deal, not only have a native ask for you, but hide before they do!

Same thing with getting spicey food.

Sounds like Yunnan > Beijing. The comments were about food markets and normal things, not for luxuries or tourism-style purchases. Also, after you have been here awhile you can tell the accent - a Beijinger asking with a local accent probably gets significantly different treatment. Luckily people here don't seem to engage in such games, though always appreciate those who put the effort in to reproducing the local accent.

The economy in Arkham Knight is interesting in comparison. Bruce Wayne rewards himself with waynepoints for beating people effectively, then spends these points on things he already owns but decided not to bring out with him, so that he can get even more points for laying out even more effective beatings.

I think it's a psychopath simulator.

Sound like a virtuous cycle.

It makes more sense when you remember that it's a video game.

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