Competition in form of Auction.

Fallen London
1

&quotMake end-game players poor again!&quot
Feducci, during the Election Campaign

Why:

  1. Problems: end-game people going mad because of boredom; there is almost no competition between the players; there is huge cost gap between Ubergoat and Cider. And Cider is not very interesting anyway.

  2. I suggest a solution to these problems. Its cheap to produce and easy to monetize.

Core concept:

  1. Competition in form of Auction.

  2. Timeline.
    Entrance: 1-7 days of current month.
    1st stage: 8-14 days of current month.
    2nd stage: 15-21 days of current month.
    Final stage: 22 to the end of current month.
    Prizes release: 1-7 days of next month.

1.1 Entrance.
Players with <Token>s = 0 allowed to pay <Fee> to enter Auction. There are few parallel Auctions with different <Prize>s, every player allowed to choose only one to participate.
Participants in Auctions allowed to buy <Token>s.

1.2 1st stage.
Players allowed to convert <Tokens> and Echos into <Score>
Formula for that stage: 1*<Token> + 3 * <Echos> = 3 * <Echos> points of <Score>

1.3 2nd stage.
Players allowed to convert <Tokens> and Echos into <Score>
Formula for that stage: 1*<Token> + 2 * <Echos> = 2 * <Echos> points of <Score>

1.4 Final stage.
Players allowed to convert <Tokens> and Echos into <Score>
Formula for that stage: 1*<Token> + 1 * <Echos> = 1 * <Echos> points of <Score>

1.5 Prizes release.
<Prize>s awarded to players with highest <Score>
Players allowed to exchange unused <Token>s to <Things>

  1. Variables.

2.1 <Echo> some amount of ingame currency. I suggest <Echo> = 25 Echos. One of the main parameters to tweak the model.

2.2 Players stake in auction is separeted on three parts:

2.2.1 <Fee> is the same for every player. I suggest <Fee> price = 10 to 20 <Echo>s. Might be different for different Auctions.

2.2.2 <Token>s are second part of stake. Unlimited quantity, but limited time to buy. I suggest <Token> price = 2 * <Echo>

2.2.3 Third part of the stake is the decision when to convert your <Token>s into <Score>. Player can get maximum of his <Token>s during 1st stage. But it involves risk of overpaying. Every week amount of <Score> by <Token> drops (see Formulas for stages), but risk of overpaying drops too.

2.3 <Prize>s are valuable end-game items or qualites available only though winning Auctions. I suggest items like Ship, Affiliation, Transport and useful quilites (for example, &quotNotable&quot = TtH does not change Making Waves). Assuming the high price of winning (1500 Echos and up to infinity) and scarcity (only 12 winners per year per prize) prizes should be slightly better than current best in slot items.

2.4 <Things> are common items or qualites. There must be some loss in money, difference between <Token> cost and <Things> you can get for it.

Business:

  1. Production cost.

1.0 Disclamer. I am not a game developer. I have no idea how much it costs to do these things in general or in FBG’s case. All my &quotcalculations&quot here are comparative, not absolute.

1.1 Content. There is not much of it. Minimum looks like 1/3 or 1/2 of Exceptional Story.

1.2 Programming. Main problem is the Leaderboard. Players must have capability to see a list of all participants in Auction, amount of unused <Token>s and <Score> for each participant. It is essential to make informed decisions in the competition. I have a feeling that game engine have no instruments to display Leaderboard. That problem can be sidestepped by creating completely separated web-page for Leaderboard. Parsing the database and displaying results on the web page in real time should not be a hard or long task.

  1. Monetization.

2.1 No Fate to win. So no <Token>s or <Score> for Fate.
2.2 I suggest option to pay <Fee> with Fate. And one of Auctions is completely Fate-locked.

Examples for clarification:

  1. Disclamer. All numbers are easy to tweak.

  2. Oh, i am so good, so end-game! And Cider is so far away… Its time to participate in Auction. What do we have here? That ship looks gorgeous! Entering price is 1000 Echos, mkay, take my money. How many tokens should i buy? I probably can afford 50 (5050=2500 Echos). Its last day of first week and looks like some people have more tokens. Should i buy more? Ehh, maybe i could grab 20 more (1000 Echos).
    Here it comes, 1st stage. Crowd is not so small, but only two fellows matter. One player bought 80 tokens and i have only 70! Second, other guy got 70 tokens and already converted half of them into Score (35    75 = 2625 Echos, 2625 Score). So i must convert at least the same amount of tokens in that stage or it would be too easy for him to defeat me, because in later stages there is less Score per token. Should i convert? Or should i stop here and minimize my losses?
    Etc.
    edited by Waterpls on 11/2/2017

2

Edit: Thank you for your edit. :)

You seem to be repeating yourself.
edited by Passionario on 11/3/2017

3

Fixed. You mean contradict myself? Maybe a little.

4
  1. Some of the best financial grinds are fate locked/easily enhanced by fate, so in a competitive setting like this would still be Pay to Win.
  2. In order to remain enticing, prizes would have to be cycled, requiring either commissioning new art and power creep or devaluing earlier restricted items.
  3. Would still primarily lock players in repetitive financial grind, and in fact delay Ubergoat, so wouldn’t solve the problem.
  4. Anecdotal evidence only, but except for K&C, there always seems to be a lot of push back on increasing competition on the forums. Seems a fairly divisive issue, and it I don’t think many people would consider the lack of competition a ‘problem’, as it isn’t really what draws players to this game.
5

No, he meant repeating yourself. It was a snide comment on your naivety.

Realtime anything is pretty damn hard. Realtime over the slow, fallible, asynchronous internet with adversarial users is one of the most difficult engineering challenges of the current decade. It’s also very different from how FBG’s current infrastructure is set up.

6

Nothing will ever free players from repetitive financial grind. Because its only thing left when you finished all the content. Target of the Auctions is to provide additional financial goals. With competition and scarcity to make them even more valuable.

[quote=Amsfield]
[color=rgb(194, 194, 194)]2. In order to remain enticing, prizes would have to be cycled, requiring either commissioning new art and power creep or devaluing earlier restricted items.[/color]
[/quote]
Not really. After one year there would be only 12 owners for each prize. Compare to Ubergoat. Everybody have Ubergoat after one year of playing.

[quote=Amsfield]
[color=rgb(194, 194, 194)]4. Anecdotal evidence only, but except for K&C, there always seems to be a lot of push back on increasing competition on the forums. Seems a fairly divisive issue, and it I don’t think many people would consider the lack of competition a ‘problem’, as it isn’t really what draws players to this game.[/color]
[/quote]
This is very true. I am just trying to suggest an alternative to traditional end-game goals. Which is more fun - Auction or Poet-Laureate (which is basically &quotwrite song 150 times&quot)? Some people prefer steady garanteed goals. Others like calculated risk and glory of winning.
edited by Waterpls on 11/2/2017
edited by Waterpls on 11/2/2017

7

Hi,

YDS student here. Please don’t disgrace our ignoble profession further.

kthx
bai

8

I do like the concept of competing for unique items with other late-game players. At a certain point you’re really only in it for the holiday events anyways, so might as well have something to grind for monthly, right?

Something I’d change is the items giving higher than otherwise obtainable stat boosts, though. Just making them unique seems better.

9

what you describe is totally a way to make Money, without really being interesting in the Content of the game. there a lots of games out there working that way. I guess Fallen London is not really for you if you want to Change it so deeply. And now in the last weeks, since all convertions are finished, we saw a lot more content coming for endgame, for example Laureat Poet.
What you describe would have a repulsive effect on a lot of new potential Players, if you ask me.

10

Well regardless of how feasible it is, I think it’s nice that you came up with an idea and obviously put some effort into it. It’s easy to complain (I should know, I do it all the time :P ), but far less easy to come up with suggestions and ideas and then put them out there for everyone to rip apart. Maybe this is a good idea or maybe it isn’t, but I appreciate you coming up with and sharing it either way.

11

We already had something vaguely like this once: the Apple of Discord, awarded to the top hundred K&C players. Trying to do something similar with fewer winners, higher costs, higher stakes (if rewards are actually useful), and far less accessibility seems like a terrible idea, especially when doing it outside an explicitly-competitive divorced-from-main-game framework like K&C.

Even if some people like high risk high reward gameplay, a lot of people don’t. There’s no way to target something like this such that only people who would actually enjoy it would enter. Especially if there’s a unique reward, especially especially if that unique reward does something.

[quote=Waterpls][quote=PSGarak]
Realtime anything is pretty damn hard. Realtime over the slow, fallible, asynchronous internet with adversarial users is one of the most difficult engineering challenges of the current decade.[/quote]Game is already doing it. Every time it loads player’s qualities from database to assemble web-page full of storylets. Only difference, we need a page that generated with qualities of many players. For modern databases there is no difference. Its not a rocket science.
Update: actually game is already loading multiple players qualities in the send <something> form (social actions).[/quote]
We don’t actually know that the game is recalculating available storylets every page load. For all we know the list is cached and changing a quality recalculates any storylet with that unlock. Same with cards.

In any case, trying to keep the server and client synced in real time is very difficult. Card and action refresh timers are fairly simple; the client only needs to check the last time an action/card was gained on page load, when running out of cards/actions, and when the client-side refresh timer hits 0. Yet we’ve still had many issues over the years with the client-side timer display not matching the server’s timer. Right this moment FL says I have 11 minutes to go until my next action, though I know for a fact I have 5.5 minutes left.

(Now imagine if the time remaining for my next card was dependent on other players’ actions. My browser only knows when I run out of cards; it has no way to know when another player might do something to affect that. Generating a client-side leaderboard from different characters’ qualities is challenging; having that leaderboard actually stay accurate as other players change the data is far, far harder.)

The game does indeed check multiple players’ qualities for social actions. What that means is that, every time I attempt a social action, the game has to check if each of my 340 contacts can receive the action in question. Most days that takes a good ten seconds to load, and if I try to view the list of ineligible contacts it’s far longer.

Fallen London has far more than 340 characters. Checking the entire database would take ages; checking only the characters active recently enough to be participants would still take a long time. Failbetter can get away with a single large-scale database query halfway through the election to gauge progress. Doing that for many users, many times each, at unpredictable intervals? Having to keep that information up to date? Not at all realistic.

[quote=Waterpls][quote=Amsfield]
[color=rgb(194, 194, 194)]4. Anecdotal evidence only, but except for K&C, there always seems to be a lot of push back on increasing competition on the forums. Seems a fairly divisive issue, and it I don’t think many people would consider the lack of competition a ‘problem’, as it isn’t really what draws players to this game.[/color]
[/quote]
This is very true. I am just trying to suggest an alternative to traditional end-game goals. Which is more fun - Auction or Poet-Laureate (which is basically &quotwrite song 150 times&quot)? Some people prefer steady garanteed goals. Others like calculated risk and glory of winning.[/quote]

Yeah, I’m definitely going to have to say &quotwrite song 150 times&quot is more fun than &quotgrind money 150 times and probably have nothing to show for it&quot. The way FL is structured, end-game goals inevitably involve doing something lengthy and repetitive until you get a virtual prize that has some kind of value to you. Keeping the lengthy and repetitive bit but removing the virtual prize seems pretty pointless to me. This idea just feels like the grindy bits of the Election with higher costs, less accessibility, less narrative justification, and less sense of satisfaction afterwards.

12

I want to stress this ^.

I don’t think anything like this is possible, or even good for this particular game. At all.

But I would like to compliment the level of thought and effort that went into it. Not all ideas can be golden, but I suggest you save it. Perhaps you can find a game this would suit better.

I am quite disappointed and confused at the level of downvoting of he original post. We’re priding ourselves with being one of the most accepting and encompassing communities on the internet. We can do better than that.

13

Just popping in to say that technology-wise, that’s not at all unrealistic. Well-optimised queries in a database of a few hundred thousand (or a few million) records, run on an appropriately powerful machine, can well take less than a second. A high-volume system will be built to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second. And with the auction phases running for a week each, true real-time updates aren’t even necessary - a refresh every, say, 10 or 30 seconds would be absolutely plenty.

That said, systems like that do require specialised infrastructure, which FBG absolutely does not seem to have, given the slowness you described (and which we have all experienced). Which works well enough for their normal game - with a few exceptions (like pulling in a list of all eligible contacts), most operations are simple queries and updates on the user’s own datastore, and throttled to an maximum of 1 every 10 minutes on average, to boot. So your point still stands - I just wanted to clarify that it’s not necessarily unrealistic to propose in the general case, just impractical for Fallen London.

14

[quote]What that means is that, every time I attempt a social action, the game has to check if each of my 340 contacts can receive the action in question. Most days that takes a good ten seconds to load, and if I try to view the list of ineligible contacts it’s far longer.[/quote]I did not realize that FL is so bad in backend.

[quote]
Even if some people like high risk high reward gameplay, a lot of people don’t. There’s no way to target something like this such that only people who would actually enjoy it would enter. Especially if there’s a unique reward, especially especially if that unique reward does something.[/quote]If you dont like it, you do not participate. B-but i want to collect everything in the game, expecially rare and valuable things! So swallow you pride and participate. Or not. Nobody is forced to. As simple as that.
There is a bit of game design philosophy in it. Why SMEN is great? Great text and riddles of course. But there are many great stories in FL. What makes SMEN special? That it went opposite to main current of the game. In SMEN you dont build character and hoard riches. You destroy it(him/her?) and throw things away. Auctions are also opposite to main flow of the game, but in different way. Is diversity a bad thing?
edited by Waterpls on 11/3/2017

15

I see where you are coming from, but I always thought the end-game of FL is built entirely on an off-key, lightly encouraged and highly unorganized blend of tedium, tenacity and vanity.

The auction seems better suited to a game with an actual player-to-player economy and the resulting inflation, though.

16

[quote=Waterpls]If you dont like it, you do not participate. B-but i want to collect everything in the game, expecially rare and valuable things! So swallow you pride and participate. Or not. Nobody is forced to. As simple as that.
There is a bit of game design philosophy in it. Why SMEN is great? Great text and riddles of course. But there are many great stories in FL. What makes SMEN special? That it went opposite to main current of the game. In SMEN you dont build character and hoard riches. You destroy it(him/her?) and throw things away. Auctions are also opposite to main flow of the game, but in different way. Is diversity a bad thing?[/quote]
It’s certainly easy to say &quotdon’t like it, don’t play it&quot in a theoretical discussion. In reality it’s always far more messy. Some people would expect to like it but end up frustrated when the time actually comes. Others would know they don’t like it from the start but do it anyway, whether to see all the content or for the special rewards. There’s no external force making people do things they don’t enjoy, but there are internal ones. There’s a reason offering the Seven-Fold Knock is a far more powerful incentive to stop Seeking than offering Fate. Give something a unique reward and collectionists become compelled to play it; make that reward highly unlikely and they’ll still play it, just very unhappily.

SMEN is successful content because it’s inherently destructive. You have to hurt your character over and over, give up everything you have. The game presents every bit of SMEN as a negative action focused on loss. There can be a potential reward at the end, in the form of the Knock, but it’s never presented as an incentive. SMEN’s presentation is, to some degree, the inverse of your proposal. Both have high costs and give a unique reward that’s uniquely useful, but where SMEN uses that reward as an incentive to stop sacrificing, the Auction uses it as an incentive to start.

I should say that while I may not like your idea, I do very much respect the effort you’ve put in and the detail to which you’ve thought it out. This idea could be highly effective in the context of a different game; I just think it doesn’t work in the context of this one.
edited by Optimatum on 11/4/2017