Slashdot Mirror
EverQuest and the UN
maddugan writes "NewScientiest.com has a
piece on how EverQuest has spawned an economy with a per-captia income comparable to that of a small country. Mostly from profiteering on eBay. If it was indeed a country, it would rank 77th, just behind Russia." It'll be quite interesting to see
what happens as MMORPGs gain popularity and absorb more and more man hours.
"If it was indeed a country, it would rank 77th, just behind Russia."
Must be about time to invade France then. Seems like everyone else does it.
would that be geeks?
Or maybe virgins?
Yes, my girlfriend is a BitchX
Didn't we just hear about this the other day?
This article references the one we already had about the Norrath Economical Report...
My stepfather-in-law has almost ruined his marriage with this. It's all he does when he isn't at work.
Don't know what can/should be done about it. The question is, who is benefiting from sucking money out of so many people's wallets?
but the economy truly is enormous. My ex-roommate played Everquest as a JOB. He made anywhere between $500 to $1,000 per month selling EQ money and items on E-bay. The economy has dropped off somewhat after Sony officially declared selling EQ items through the real world was against their policy; if they catch you now they will ban your account.
This article is quite misleading.
Basically, he calculated the approximate real-world worth of people's items, as sold on eBay, and this figure (GNP of Norrath 77th worldwide) would be correct if everyone sold everything they own on eBay, at these prices.
Quote from the article : However, he notes that not all the assets are converted into real-world cash.
Of course they aren't! If they were, the price for each item would be significantly lower, and the real GNP would be nowhere near what he is quoting. So in reality, if Norrath was a country, the GNP would not be as high as his estimate.
Still an interesting thought though.
The full research paper on this can be found here
I tried to post this article last week but it seems like I did something wrong because it got rejected.
EverQuest makes nothing, too. Or does it?
John
Well, it probably does have more money than a few countries, like say, the one that sould the rights to .tv
On the other hand, the article is about "per-captia" income. So what it really says is that people sink more money on average into Everquest than many people have to spend. It doesn't mean they have more money total--most countries have populations larger than Everquest.
On the other hand, it is kind of sad that you can earn more from playing Everquest all day than the people in a lot of countries earn in a week. I wonder if "virtual sweatshops" could actually come into being--people come into work, log on to computers, and make virtual artifacts all day. Hey--probably beats farming.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
Call me anal retentive, but "per-captia income comparable to that of a small country"?
...
Heck - I've got a per-capita income comparable to a small country: my income devided by one.
Well, I guess it is "New Scientist", and not "New Economist", but still...
Gross income? Net income? Anything
yes, we have no bananas
When the game started out, relatively mundane items were pretty powerful because no one as yet had gotten to the high-level areas with the "phat loot". Early on, a guy running around in simple bronze platemail was a rare sight. Weapons with a damage/delay ratio of 1:3 (or 1:2 for two-handed swords and the like) were godly and commanded godly prices--if they were sold at all.
As time went on there was inflation, as people gained thousands of platinum pieces (the EQ currency) and bid up the prices of those items. But the inflation reversed itself after a while.
Items don't decay in EQ. They don't wear out. The only way they leave the world is if they are destroyed by a player, on a character when it is deleted, or poof when a corpse poofs. So as time went on, more and more of the items entered the economy, and better and better stuff was found. Verant has added three expansions over the past two years, and each one has had better toys and phatter loot. As that stuff enters circulation, the former "godly" stuff becomes less valuable and typically gets passed down to lower-level "twinks" (alternate characters equipped with hand-me-down or purchased loot that's better than what they could get on their own) or sold.
Using an example--there's an EQ weapon called a Short Sword of the Ykesha. It looks like a Ghurka khukri knife, and will occasionally hit a target with a 75-point damage spell. In the early game, it used to be the bad-ass one-handed sword, a rare drop off a tough level 40ish monster in a very tough dungeon (Lower Guk). When they would be sold, which was rare, they would go for 8,000+ plat.
Well, since the Kunark, Velious, and now Luclin expansion packs, there's stuff out there that makes the Ykesha look totally lame--plus, the number of Ykeshas on the server gradually increased over time, as more and more people entered that dungeon and killed that particular monster. The price of the weapon spiked up on my server as people started scoring a lot of money, but once the better weapons entered the picture the price went into freefall. Now "Yaks" go for 1000 plat or even less.
It's an odd combination--people have more plat than ever before, but prices are simultaneously falling. The result is that there are level 5 twinks running around in gear that my warrior didn't have at level 40 18 months ago.
The same thing happens as new servers are brought online, but it happens faster there because people already know exactly where to go to maximize their income and their chance at items.
Verant has tried to introduce money sinks to reduce the amount of money in circulation (horses that cost 110k plat, for example), but that won't solve the deflation. Item decay might, but it's way too late in the game's lifecycle to introduce that. If I end up spending 15 hours of my no-life to camp the Frenzied Wumpus for the Ass-Kicking Widget of Doom, there's no way I want my widget to break or wear out in a couple months.
In short--the deflationary aspect in EQ doesn't seem to have much to do with the money supply, it's got more to do with the supply of items that people want to trade for.
Since Ebay stopped Everquest auctions a while ago under preasure from Sony Playerauctions.com is the main site for Everquest auctions and has been for a while.
You can usually just a search for your server name or use their catagories. Doing a search for "prexus" as an example will show all the auctions on that server.
[Month 1]
Sure Johnnie, we can go pick up your copy of EQ after you clean your room...
[Month 2]
Johnnie, get off the Internet...I'm trying to phone your Aunt Bertha!
[Month 3]
Dinner time! Where is that blasted kid!??!
[Month 4]
Is that a new gameboy game? I see your paper route is finally starting to pay off..Or at least it's keeping you off that computer, we should have never got that high speed access
[Month 5]
What is this XBox thingie?
[Month 6]
Your teacher called...She asked for something called "Mythril Armor +4"..Crazy teachers
[Month 7]
Ok honey, this is getting a bit nuts...but we have to get you your own mailbox
[Month 8]
A new car? Just for US!? Thank you Johnnie! Don't worry about cleaning your room for a whole month!
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
that I could defect from the US and become a citizen of Everquest?
This seems like a good way to get around the DMCA...
:)
Technically, this slashdot article is about the NewScientiest.com article, the previous slashdot article was about the orriginal paper the NewScientiest.com article is about.
-- The Hoss Man
they had resources that respawned daily, too? No more stripmining/deforestation/wildlife preservation, just set a comrade down at the ol' spawn site and wait.
But, at least Russia doesn't have undead. Well, ok, they have muslim separatists, but nobody's perfect.
If you take the hobbies of rich people (and folks, most people posting on this site are generally rich by world standards), you can get a high "per-capita" economy for just about anything. Like:
Economy of California
Economy of luxury goods.
Economy of oversized boats and cars
Trouble is, it's all double counting. Those people's incomes are already counted as part of the US GDP. You don't get to count them again.
The "research" paper this article is based on has been earning some decent discussion in EQ communities the past week or so. In the ones I participate in, some interesting discredits came to light:
1) The survey was self-selecting. Hardly a valid research tool.
2) Poorly worded survey questions. They were geared towards provoking a specific response.
3) Time. This person played the game for an immensely short amount of time. People have been playing this game for two YEARS. The researcher put in around a week.
There's more, like how his favorite city was Qeynos (definetly not a place anyone sticks around to enjoy, Qeynos is at the butt end of Norrath), but you get the point.
I find it appalling that a "reputable" source like new scientist is actually giving this guy's poor research this kind of air time.
As interesting as the talk about the economy of Norrath is, I'm more intrigued by what drives that economy. As a former EQer (although never an addict, per say) and the son of an avid EQ addict, my observations are that the thing that drives the economy of EQ is one of the same things that drives the "luxury" economy of the real world: status.
From a somewhat psychological view, one could argue that one of the primary addictive qualities about EQ is that it allows the player to be represented in a grand, heroic fashion. All the guys are buff and appear strong, all the girls look like a cross between Xena and two coconuts. Riches and adventure are somewhat easy to come by, given that you spend enough time playing the game, so the opportunity to escape one's mundane and unaccomplished life is ample. Given that the rest of the game's world is populated by the avatars of living, breathing human beings, it becomes more than a simple diversion to establish oneself in the society...it becomes a major ambition, just like our normal lives.
Enter the interaction between our real world and Norrath. It is difficult for someone of average income to buy great status. Luxury cars, large homes on prime property...all these things cost tremendous amounts of money. And since most of us did not win the genetic lottery, our appearance will not gain us said status, either (hence, only a tiny portion of the population are models). With the EQ universe, the dynamic is changed. For a mere $100, large sums of game money can be purchased. For your real-world American dollars, you can purchase the most powerful, greatest status symbols of the game. You can walk through the game world boldy, showing off your prized status symbols to other players just as wealthy Americans enjoy going for a drive in their shiny Mercedes.
The ability to re-invent yourself is a major selling point for what is otherwise a chat window with a game around it. Verant, as a business, was very wise to include hard-to-find, rare items that would confer "great champion" status to their owners. It is the same behavior we see in our society, it's just more affordable for the average person.
My sigs always suck.
That'd the GDP, not per capita income. They were referring to GNI per capita; how much money each person in the country makes on average. Not how much money the country makes all together. In other words, Russia may be worth a lot of money, but that's just because they have a lot of people.
What?
First of all, it's the per cap (and not absolute) GNP that was claimed to put Everquest right around Russia. That's pretty meaningless, as it's a self-selected group of people from the richest countries in the world who have a lot of time on their hands. I mean, the per cap GNP of my house is several times higher than that of the richest country in the world. So what?
Secondly, France's GDP in 2000 was $1,448,000,000,000, which is a thousand times greater than the number you posted.
The difference between GNP and GDP in a nutshell is that GNP includes income generated by multinationals based in that country. For instance, Microsoft's worldwide income accrues to the US GNP but only its US income is counted for the GDP.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
> Castronova says that EverQuest's economy can be studied like any normal economy, even though Norrath is a fantasy world. This is because of the social importance attached to the game by its players.
Castronova believes that virtual worlds like Norrath could eventually become more closely linked with the real world. "Virtual worlds may be the future of e-commerce, and perhaps the internet itself," he says. "Ordinary people, who seem to have become bored and frustrated by ordinary web commerce, engage energetically and enthusiastically in avatar-based online markets."
Jesus christ. I feel sick to my stomach. Can be studied like a normal economy? Hello? Can we start killing off the players when they run out of virtual water and food? Can we cut a few of their virtual legs off and then tell them they cant play the part in EQ that they want to?
I mean, does anyone actually believe this? Are we all so wealthy that we can't understand the significance of scarcity, poverty, inequality, yadda yadda in the (earth to Castronova) real world? The idea that when you can't get your next meal, you're unlikely to be fit enough to run the capitast race?
"Old man yells at systemd"
Keep in mind that this is not insinuating that EQ is more valuable than a country, or more viable.
EQ has a virtual economy, we can agree on that.
A fraction of players buy/sell virtual items/money for real world money.
This is wta they base the per-capita income on.
The fact is, if everyone in the game started selling things IRL, the value would probably drop to zero.
It's similar, in a way, to large shareholders of companies. Like.. say, Gates.
You have a value on paper, but you can't just sell it all and get cash.
a) the ops will introduce some kind of in-game "need", or
b) they won't, in which case the economy becomes driven by non-need items/services...but...I'd point out that this has already occurred to a large degree in the real world. Everywhere, even in countries which aren't "rich" by Western standards, people spend a lot of money on things that aren't necessities. Look at how much gets spent on Hollywood, after all. Luxury is capable of sustaining quite an economy by itself. (But then you need things to make the luxury items...)
Another point to keep in mind is that even if food and clothing and shelter rain from the sky, there's always a shortage of something. Most interestingly, there's always a shortage of you. You can't be everywhere, see everything, and do everything, and neither can anyone else - so you better run and see Eric Clapton now, because there are only so many seats, and he and you won't live forever...
Pleasure doesn't necessarily translate to wealth. I like to sing in the shower. My singing, though it gives me pleasure, generates no wealth in any commonly understood sense.
The only pleasure I can see attaching to the item (as opposed to that derived from the gameplay involved in acquiring it, which can't be given away or sold) is that of munchkinism, the idea that an RPG is more fun when your character has a +2 sword rather than a +1. (I don't understand it, but I'm not going to deny its existence.) This needs to be distinguished from both the pleasure derived from creating the item and the impact of the creation on the gameworld economy in any economic analysis.
Correct me (politely, please!) if I'm wrong, but isn't modern economic theory based on the scarcity of goods? If nothing else, the last time this story got posted, we should have realized what a load of bunk this is.
/. oxidant "Eric S Raymond" and poof! Flames.
I don't know the numbers, but I'm sure that if I went and crunched them we would see that assuming growth trends remained the same the per-capita of Norrath would soon (5-10 years) be higher than all real countries. That is, assuming their economic model doesn't implode because they're stuck with surplusses.
Wait a minute! Maybe this isn't so irrelevant to real life after all. All I have to do is, while stating the obvious, use the magic words "Gift culture" and "software paralells" in the same sentence as the magic
On second thought, I kindof prefer having a high karma than a real discussion here. Perhaps some AC will do the honors?
Do you like Japanese imports?
This guy is fat. I know him. Fat.