Week 1: Blog 1 (Detailed Analysis of Economies in MMOs)

This week was quite a hectic week, but I did manage to get a good chunk of content done along with a decent setup for next week. (However, given the fact that my next week will also be hectic, I can only hope that this preparation pays off.)

Main accomplishments:

• Tuesday, tried creating a sample scenario of the game, realized that the scenario that I was planning didn’t really have a good teaching aspect to it just by copying real-life values from the item price of the virtual item. (Context, the Great Potato War in Hypixel Skyblock in 2020.) Interestingly enough, while the item in question (potatoes) did increase in supply, its price also increased due to hype and popular attention towards the item. 
  • Decided to create more of an “attention” level stock market growth – stocks with more attention will create more volatility
  • This does correlate with real-life principles, and that got me thinking to focus on principles and draft events from scratch rather than find real-life events and try to shove them into certain principles
    • Ex. SMCI versus BRK.B. SMCI is a hyped up AI technology company stock, and its value fluctuates rapidly. BRK.B is a real estate company that doesn’t get much attention but does get guaranteed growth.
• Wednesday, had meeting with IA (Mr. Powers), got some valuable insights on a couple of important mechanics I wanted to implement, including:
  • Taxes and how tax brackets work in order to keep the game engaging
  • Play length – how long can a player play before they have to stop? I wanted to decide in what “interval” each day would ideally take place through, and eventually decided on 20 minutes as a rough baseline. On one hand, it can’t be too long, otherwise the casual player won’t be able to stay focused and remember everything. On the other hand, if it’s too short, the player can’t actually learn anything meaningful!
  • Information retention between days. Decided that the player would only get minor context.
  • Storylines for each stock (a series of linked events that occur one after another)
• Thursday, more drafting concepts. Not much to talk about here, mainly working on getting more framework set up.
• Friday, was going to have a meeting with EA (Mr. Orr), unfortunately something came up and we didn’t end up meeting.
  • Ended up continuing on the feedback from Wednesday.
  • Began drafting slight pseudocode for the entire game, mainly considering which variables will control the stocks and how that’s handled.