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Inflation is a useful tactic to make RPG style games addictive. I worked with someone who built a popular facebook RPG game, and part of what made it popular w
by dstein 16y ago
Inflation is a useful tactic to make RPG style games addictive.
I worked with someone who built a popular facebook RPG game, and part of what made it popular was that as you became an established player the amount earned per day rose exponentially. As the game became more and more popular the virtual economy started to hyperinflate almost out of control, and the established players started hitting the MySQL integer limits. The author never expected that would ever be possible, but the exponential rate of inflation plus the exponential rate of new players joining created a giant pyramid scheme.
- limist 16y agoGood story, reminds me of a favorite quotation: The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. — Albert Bartlett
- Natsu 16y agoFrom what I've seen, I think that we don't understand S-curves, either. No matter which side of it we're on. They can look exponential... until they hit the limit.
- ricardo_sdl 16y agoThis reminds me of this: http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part4.php http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part4.ph... Because of a bug in the game, everybody could duplicate items with no cost and everybody became extremely rich in the game.