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This is so spot on. Someone asked me when we would run out of oil, my answer, "Never". "Never?!" they spat out, but look at how quickly we use it, look at how finite a resource it is, Etc. And I replied, as it gets rare, the price will go up, as the price goes up other things will be substituted, as they are substituted the demand will go down. Demand goes down and the time to exhaustion stretches out. Long tail curve, we never hit zero. It just gets so expensive that nobody uses it any more.

Systems do react, and that reaction is why you can never predict system behavior with extrapolation.

Neil Stephenson posits a more rational economic system for WoW (and presumably Diablo 3) in the novel Reamde. What is perhaps most interesting is how he deconstructs the flow of 'value' in the economy, trickling in from gold creation and trickling out with taxes and purchases. To bad Blizzard didn't read that first.

That said the notion of a 'no levels' RPG where everything is trained/earned is more like Everquest (nobody wants to go back to skinning 6,000 rabbits, trust me) but it is the place where the next big breakthrough will be made. And it will make the people who discover the recipe very wealthy indeed.

eve style?

Clearly very much inspired by Eve Online but still in the Fantasy/Roleplaying vein. One of the interesting things was a physical model of the world with actual geology such that ore and such took a lot to mine. Of course SWToR was kind of down that path and it failed miserably so it may not be possible.

I agree with you, but the energy example is flawed in that it assumes we will find alternatives that aren't very expensive. We won't run out of oil, but we may very likely run out of cheap energy.

The statement "cheap energy" is really hard to quantify (like 'largest integer') you can say "Gee Coal is really Cheap and there is tons and tons of it!" Except that coal smoke is killing people, contaminating large swaths of land etc. But at $100 a barrel you can gasify coal and make clean gas power plants cost effectively, but what is the $100 really mean? Its local currency (US Dollars) in a world economy. At a high enough price you can build nuclear plants and fast breeder reactors that eat all their own fuel. And use that energy to make long chain hydrocarbons (aka oil) out of CO2 and electrolisys of water [1]. Politically nonviable but that too is a system, what do people vote for energy and synthesize oil for plastics or a degenerating quality of life? There is some thoughts that you can run F-T reactors using concentrated solar in the desert.

But to you point of 'running out of cheap energy' what does that mean if the economy has adjusted to the cost of that energy? Look at electric cars as a prime example, sure they are expensive today but what happens 10 years from now when they are everywhere? Now $200/barrel oil, converted into electricity at a fossil fuel plant is give you the same miles per $ as burning it as gasoline used to do in your internal combustion engine.

Constant adaptation by the system to the constraints applied to it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch

Over the last 60 years global energy consumption has grown exponentially. There is a strong case to be made that rising living standards globally and global economic growth are dependent on this level of energy growth.

Nothing you said can come close to meeting anything close to this level of growth and I see no reason to believe our system is prepared for anything less than such growth without great pain.

I've read if wind, solar, and/or nuclear were subsidized even a fraction as much as oil is, they would be equally cheap. Is that way off the mark?

I'd argue the difference is how the complex ecosystems handled parasites.

On the one hand, Blizzard enabled balance-breaking monetization, and TF2 enabled costume-breaking monetization. Blizzard could've made just as much (or a lot more really) money just by enabling cosmetic rewards instead of gameplay rewards.

I feel like I quote this once a week [0] but Cory Doctorow makes a ton of great points on this and related subjects in the linked essay.

[0]http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt

It's worth nothing that Blizzard did exactly that in World of Warcraft.

> This is truly one of the gaping holes in human cognition, this idea that a single participant in a larger system can make a change and then model the results of that change without accounting for the reactions of all the other actors

The parent's sentiment may be a tired old theme in the context of a game company that produces a long-awaited sequel to a much-beloved classic, meddles too much with the winning formula, and ends up killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, but I feel that this idea needs more airtime in politics.

The best, surest way to get a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works and make a series of many incremental changes.

This should be a fundamental axiom in politics -- that anything you do, from creating a top-secret surveillance agency, to sweeping healthcare reform, to the war on drugs, to the legalization of gay marriage, is not guaranteed to have the effect its creators intended, at the magnitude they intended, without any other potentially larger effects, some of which may range from undesirable to catastrophic.

Therefore, when possible small and simple changes should be made, and we should think twice before proposing complex changes, and ponder three times again before implementing them. It's the only possible way to avoid getting buried under a relentless onslaught of unexpected consequences.

Not enough people are even talking about this idea. AFAICT it's neither conservative nor liberal nor libertarian; it's literally conservative in the sense of "we don't understand the problem space very well outside the status quo, so let's take care not to get too far away from the familiar in case we fall into a hole we can't climb back out of." Imagine a decades-old project which gets dozens to hundreds of commits a year, but whose authors always reject any commits smaller than 1000 lines of code. What's surprising isn't that it contains bugs, what's surprising is that the end result does anything resembling what it's supposed to.

> The best, surest way to get a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works and make a series of many incremental changes.

Shades of Gall's Law from Systemantics:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. – John Gall (1975, p.71)

>The lesson, applicable to games, startups, governance, and indeed systems engineering in general, is that systems react.

A great humorous look at how systems react is: http://www.amazon.com/The-Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide/dp/0...

I found it very insightful, and very relevant to software engineering, too.

One has to wonder about the plans for Hearthstone (another F2P game from Blizzard). The recent discontinuation of WoW TCG seems to make it apparent that they may be pushing Hearthstone as a replacement.

Cards Against Humanity is a really popular table-top card game, and Blizzard would be smart to be taking a hard look at emulating it. Attempting to "monetize" Hearthstone could be dangerous.

> F2P

Don't you have to buy card packs with RL money for Hearthstone to be able to play at all?

One way which would work is if you get your initial X cards free and then you have to pay for booster packs. And if you then have no way of trading cards it would work as a F2P game.

You CAN buy card packs with real money. But you can also spend 100 in-game gold (which you earn from playing the game) for a card pack. (the gold cost per pack might be off, since I'm only recalling it from having watched people play it) You also get free cards for each class when the class you're playing as "levels up" from playing matches. And you can disenchant extra cards to get dust which can be used to straight up make any card in the game.

They also monetize the game by offering an "arena" mode where you pick from 3 random heroes, then 30 sets of 3 random cards to make a deck. Lose three times and that deck is gone forever. (you only play against other people who have done the same) You can pay 100 gold to get into that mode, or a couple dollars.

So they're being pretty smart about monetizing the game.

From what I understand, the discontinuation of WoW TCG has more to do with the relationship between Cryptozoic and Blizzard. Blizzard and Cryptozoic are competing in the same space with Hex and Hearthstone, which makes for a complicated relationship.

> There probably is a way to "monetize" the Diablo community more successfully

I think this is a solved problem: Player contributed Hats.

Alas, if only you had read as far as the next sentence....

I did. Was just pointing it out as "THE" solution (rather than "A" solution), for all things. In an attempt to be slightly absurd, and slightly humorous.

Seems I failed at that.

This problem is often seen in politics.