Comment by princeb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by princeb | Hacker News Reader

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interesting post. having never played minecraft before i don't know much about its multiplayer - i've always assumed it is a single player (or has a single player component) where resources are essentially infinite. this appears to me like the server admin incorporated scarcity in order to allow an economy to develop. or perhaps scarcity existed in terms of time it took to procure materials.

the other economy that appears to be fairly interesting to understand (but not necessarily to partake in) could be EVE Online. Because I only have a few unscheduled hours of free time a week to play video games, I haven't been able to get into it. Eve is one of the rare MMOs to allow two-way markets which presents plenty of opportunities for traditional market making. As far as I can tell, pure arb is hard to come by given all the fees and most mkt mkrs make money taking a combination of inventory, production and transport risk. now if Eve standardizes chartering freight the economy will get closer to how commerce works in the real world, but as of now these activities feel a little disjointed.

as for the other MMOs, i feel they are a little bit on rails. games like WoW and PoE allow all kinds of low-risk "arbitrage" because of the lack of a two-way market. i played wow for a while and i found it's not much of a rush to snipe ignorant listings as acquiring 1000s of g in raid materials to craft raid level gear that sell for multiples, just from the tremendous risk being undertaken. the best guild traders were not merely trading on the auction house, they had Top-of-Orderbook relationships with "Chinese farmers" and they'd craft discounted raid level materials into equipment and potions to sell to new guilds getting into the heavily-gated raid scene (this was back in 2004-2008 when i was active), so that these new guilds may one day have their best tanks poached by the very same guild that got them started in the first place.

i played wow just before my college days when i was all ready to make an education and career choice for the rest of my life. i was all set on EEE but at the last minute switched out (to math/econs) when i realized i hadn't been merely playing video games in the same way this person hadn't just been playing minecraft.

>or perhaps scarcity existed in terms of time it took to procure materials.

I would say this is pretty much the case.

Even the simplest most abundant resources takes time to harvest. And that rare resources take much longer to fine, and can be much more dangerous to gather (requiring people to suit up with a set of expensive gear that they could lose in the process).

What makes different servers so diverse is that mods can drastically change the underlying cost and risks of gathering material. There is a turtle mod that allows you to program a turtle to mine resources for you. While it is kinda slow, it runs steadily without intervention and can quickly strip mine an area to provide you with plenty of resources. But it can't farm animal items like wool, so it significantly lowers the time investment of ores while not at all impacting animal product costs.

As an (erstwhile) Eve player, most of your assessments ring true. I, too, was thinking "I'd love to see what this author would accomplish in Eve's sandbox!" :)

You sound like you've done quite a bit of reading, but in case you haven't seen it and for anyone else who is interested, this a great write-up of an economic scheme the Goons (players from the SomethingAwful forums) pulled off to the tune of ~4 trillion ISK (between $80k-$120k US at 2012 prices): https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/message/1512212/

A couple of thoughts I had on your comment:

>As far as I can tell, pure arb is hard to come by given all the fees and most mkt mkrs make money taking a combination of inventory, production and transport risk. now if Eve standardizes chartering freight...

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by pure arbitrage, but certainly it's impossible to buy something from a sell order and immediately turn around and sell it to a buy order in the same station for a profit (if someone tried to post a sell order with a price lower than the price of the highest buy order, the sale would immediately take place, filling the topmost buy order(s) automatically)

Transport risk wasn't very large for the regional trading I was doing. The player-run freighting groups have excellent coverage and reliability in high-sec, and because freight contracts use a collateral system, they were the ones shouldering the transport risk, not me. All I had to do was find goods selling in one trade hub for less than people were buying them for in another trade hub, buy up some, have them shipped, and put them up for sale. Of course, I was shouldering the inventory risk you mentioned, but my strategy was to invest as widely as I could and only keep a couple items of any given commodity in my hands at one time. This worked for the items I was selling (i.e. relatively small numbers of high-value and low-mass manufactured goods) but you'd definitely need a different approach for selling, say, minerals (huge amounts of low-value and high-mass raw materials).

Also, there are definitely ways to make transporting goods (even in dangerous space) nearly foolproof - if one is willing to put in the legwork. A lot of the loss of goods that occurs is due to player ignorance of game mechanics and/or laziness "well, I know I should [scout this gate|use an instadock bookmark|switch to my armor implants] but what are the odds of [bad thing] happening this one time and besides, it's almost downtime, I'll be fine." Of course I'm not complaining! This sort of thing keeps the prices high for the rest of us. :)

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