Not Well
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Posted - 2010.05.07 12:21:00 -
[1]
Your analysis is most interesting and your attentiveness and courtesy in replying to everyone is lauded.
To your analysis, I believe that you have focused too much on the economic and not enough on the psychological and sociological. In my opinion, you have looked only within the game and tried to determine the most effective economic structure. Min/Max thinking as it were. You may well have hit on the best structure, in economic terms, but the issue of if and how it would actually work are overlooked.
The arguments that accuse you of communism are clearly false. (I agree with the poster that the proposed system is very similar to the economic aspects of fascism, but that is another discussion) Those that point out that communism failed are closer to the point. Theoretically, a rational centralization of all the stateÆs resources and logical distribution of the resources should work better than chaotic capitalism. But it doesnÆt, because people and their motivations override ôlogicalö behavior.
In this case, I support those posters who have argued the proposed system wonÆt work because people playing a game wonÆt take part without cheating or ignoring parts of the system. Essentially, it is not a system people will get behind.
Harking back to an earlier poster who comments on burn out among corp administrators, compare the role of an in game economic organizing administrator to a similar role in RL. The equivalent is accountant. Now, accounting is an honorable profession, but most people would admit it has a reputation for being boring. As a RL administrator, I know I would rather work with my Operations department than my Accounting department; they are doing something more fun.
I raise this because Eve is a game about internet spaceships. The large majority of the player base joined to play with those toys. The people you need to run your system need to be full time accountants. Undoubtedly, EveÆs economic model is complex enough to have attracted an unusually high number of economists and accountants, but it is still not ôAccountants in Space.ö This leads to simple economic systems and free markets. The participants are generally not interested in doing more, even though they could make more money with more complex methods.
Putting it in different terms, there is a heavy bureaucratic overhead to the proposed system and I donÆt think you will get enough people who think it is fun to do the bureaucracy. You will find lots of pilots, even pilots who will pay real word money to get their ships, but you wonÆt find enough in game accountants.
I think the poster in your second thread covered things best. People play for intrinsic rewards, like glory and fame. Others play to make others cry or just to see things break. But they are mostly playing and the proposed system looks a lot like hard work! I submit that the proposal needs more consideration of how to get human players to voluntarily support an economic system that provides them with benefits, yet keeps the administration effort as low as possible.
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