Players affecting worlds

Once upon a time the internet and MMORPG didn't exist yet, and I was playing play-by-mail (PBM) games. That is basically the same as a MMORPG, only that you play by sending a series of commands to the game company by mail (normal mail, not e-mail), and every 2 weeks or so the game company enters all the commands of all the players into their computer, produces a printout for everybody, and mails it back. Very slow, but you planned every move very carefully, because you didn't get all that many moves per year. And just like MMORPG there were many different games, from simple to complex, with many different approaches to the influence that players could have on the game worlds. This is the story of a game which had a "player-run economy", and how I personally ruined the game.

The game was called Trangrad, and was a very complex simulation of a medieval world. It mixed a political game with a military game and an economic game. As trader, the job I chose, you could buy and equip a medieval craftsman's workshop, hire worker, buy resources, transform them into goods, and try to sell those goods. And the market was supposedly fully dynamic, so if you bought lots of resources which other players weren't providing at the same speed, the prices would go up. And if you produced lots of goods that few people bought, the prices would go down. You only had a limited amount of commands per play period, and doing just about anything was so complex that it took up lots of commands, so progress was very slow. And as not everything was always well explained, I could try out some things only by trial and error, and some of those errors further threw me back in my quest for virtual riches.

One of these errors was that for pulling a cart you needed horses, and somehow I ended up with a horse too much. Not wanting to keep that horse around, and finding that horse prices for some reason were so low that reselling it wasn't an option, I decided to try an obscure command I had found to slaughter the horse. The next printout came back and I had successfully slaughtered the horse, and produced 10 units of meat out of it. That was insofar strange as all other methods to create anything needed a lot more resources and commands. What was also strange was that at current market prices one unit of meat sold for more than the cost of one horse, so getting 10 meat out of one horse was a huge profit.

Now I got creative. Instead of giving my normal orders for my workshop, I dedicated all the commands of my next move to a repeating series of three commands: Buy horses with all my money, slaughter all horses, and sell all meat. I thought that this way I could make a good amount of money, while driving the horse prices up and the meat prices down to more normal levels. What I didn't know was that while prices were calculated from the amounts that people bought and sold, that calculation wasn't done dynamically, but only at the end of the turn. Thus I bought lots of cheap horses, slaughtered them all, sold 10 times more of expensive meat, and repeated that several times on the same order form without the market reacting. When I got my printout back, I was rich beyond my wildest dreams, I was a virtual millionaire.

A day later I got an angry letter from the gamemasters, who after sending out the results had noticed what happened. They basically accused me of being an evil exploiter bent to destroy their world. They had programmed in a limited supply of money for the non-player characters, and my move had got me a full quarter of the worlds money supply, with catastrophic consequences for many parts of the player-run economy. They didn't quite kick me out of the game, but I left voluntarily, part for being angry about the gamemasters, part for the career as trader having become pointless now I was so rich.

Since then, whenever I hear of player demanding to be able to to affect game-worlds more, I think of Trangrad. Software is never fool-proof. Lots of online games were found to have duping bugs or other exploitable bugs, and there will always be players who either are searching for exploits, or are just wanting to know what happens if they use a creative unusual series of commands. The more the players are able to affect the world, the higher are the chances that they will manage to break it.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:32 PM Permanent Link