Saturday, April 4, 2009

Harvesting Safely

Getting ganked happens in darkfall, it happens a lot.

My character has progressed a little bit now, I can make banded armor and have made myself a full set, I have a mount (and was about to trade for another when server went down). Plenty of arrows and a lot of cheap backup weapons should I need them.

Since I got the mount I haven't been ganked yet, though thats partially due to luck and me getting wiser about my actions it is also because a mount is a great escape tool. The biggest survival tip I can give in darkfall is to have a couple mounts with you. This of course raises your risk level (I wear my best stuff pretty much all the time now), but greatly reduces the frustration of trying to play the game naked.

I'm still working on getting my character 'pvp ready', yes I know you can pvp right out of the gate and do ok, but it is smart to tip the odds in your favor as much as possible, ergo I'm working on a lot of pve stuff right now with the goal of eventually being strong enough not just to pvp but to be able to sustain myself from it.

Other than having a mount, the 'strategies' I've developed so far are mostly about how to survive while harvesting or hunting, the obvious stuff is to keep your health/stamina up so you can't be taken by surprise. I also have found the hard way, that when harvesting around town (safest option) and everything runs out but you need more. If you are going to risk leaving the 'safety' of the guard towers, you are much much better off finding somewhere out of the way to harvest at than doing it nearby.

In the orc area at least, if I take the time to go to a spot thats a ways out of town, and not by a popular mob spawn, I can harvest in peace fairly regularly.

When you first start out, you are likely to see nodes just a little ways outside the guard towers reach, and you may think it's safe because you can run to the towers if you are in trouble, WRONG. Do not harvest from nodes near town but outside guard tower range, you are asking to be ganked when you do this.

I also find it useful when in those out of the way spots, to turn my speakers up, and pay very close attention to any unusual noises, this combined with a mount will steer you clear of a lot of hassle.

All of this is just risk minimizing though, to do well at this game you have to plan for and accept setbacks, they will happen.

On a final note, my alignment is still at 10, I really want to build this up so I have the option to gank my own race when needed, but no luck yet.

(edit) speaking of setbacks, there was a short rollback when the server came up, so even though I had dismounted a couple minutes before the server went down (and so thought I was safe) my mount was gone. I finished the trade for my second mount, which is now again my only mount :) easy come easy go.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Predator and Prey

Actually, right now I'm about 90% prey.

Got the game yesterday (woot!), and have been having the time of my life so far. Even something as simple as fishing turns out to be a nerve wracking experience looking around constantly worrying someone is going to come along and gank me for my fishing pole :)

I started as an elf, thinking I'd go bow and daggers to max my dex gains, but it honestly was too rough for me. The elf area was covered with people and aside from getting ganked by alfar a few times I also got it from other elves here and there (I don't think it helped that I designed my elf to look like an alfar, blue skin white hair etc).

Not the most illustrious start for a wanna be solo pk'er. But right now I am focusing on pve efforts to build my character up before engaging in hunting people. So, after a few hours of elf, I rerolled as an orc. Mostly because I've read the orc's are the race with the fewest people playing, and also because I liked their stat distribution.

I've been doing much better as orc, it really is a less populated area, I've been ganked a few times by roving human/dwarf gangs but they are few and far between right now, and I haven't been attacked by another orc yet, the population seems to stick together a little bit more because of their low numbers, which is good for me.

I haven't been macro'ing at all, and my orc is at around 25 lesser magic, a decent amount of 1h and 2h blunt, mana missle and heal self also are around 25. I've bought armorsmith and started making armor for myself and also picked up bowyer and am going to work on making arrows next. After that I plan on taking the next 500 gold I get to buy taming so I can harvest my own mounts,

I'm looking to be as self-sufficient as possible so working on a lot more crafting stuff than I do in most games (usually I do little to none). I am concerned about whether a soft-cap will eventually give me troubles for being so jack-of-all trades though. I want to do alchemy as well to make my own potions etc etc.

Not a well written post, just an update of my progress that I'm spitting out during the server downtime :)

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Everyone Likes Item Loot

Did you enjoy the movie Oceans Eleven? Resevoir Dogs? (insert any crime/gangster movie here)

Then you enjoy item loot pvp, I can see you are disagreeing with me already, so let me explain.

First, yes I am being a bit misleading with the title, many people do not like item loot, but you do like it at least at the vicarious level. Everyone enjoys a good movie with item loot, and if you have read about the Eve scams you probably found them interesting.

Second, you are already playing an item loot game, it's called 'Life', Life is the most hardcore game imaginable, item loot, scamming, permadeath, Life has it all.

It is my position that people enjoy movies, and games like poker (and DF) because it allows them to try out tactics that are generally too risky in the real world.

I'll start again with poker, a common strategy in poker is to go 'all in' meaning to bet everything you have at the table. This is an extremely rare tactic in real life. How often would you say that you have gone 'all in' in your actual life, betting everything you have that you are right about something?

Movies (crime movies in particular) do the same thing only without personal risk, you get to see 'what if' scenarios, where people are executing betrayal tactics that you would probably never try yourself.

In life, the majority of people (in civilized/developed countries) use tat-good as their strategy (infomercials/corporations and such not included, I'm talking about interpersonal relationships). You don't steal from your friends when you go to their house, and you don't gank strangers so you can take their stuff (well, some people do, but again the minority, and they are pretty much always desperate/poor so it is a necessary tactic for them).

The reason that so many people use tat-good in life, is because the consequences for being 'evil' are pretty damn severe. The harsh environment is an incentive to be nice.

People enjoy movies and games, so they can see/try alternate strategies that they would be too afraid to try in their real lives.

If at this point you are still thinking 'bullshit', then I would ask, what do you play games for? Have you ever played a game, and then gotten bored of it once you figured out all the strategies possible in that game? I'll use a War Games reference here and bring up Tic-Tac-Toe, an interesting game for children, until they figure out that there is ONE undefeatable strategy that will either result in a win or a draw every time.

There are more game situations than just the PD (prisoners dilemma), darkfall is very heavy in PD possibilities, but WoW is not, WoW however still has other strategies for you to test, but like in Tic-Tac-Toe they are strategies that have no stakes involved (other than your time), and once you've 'seen it all' in WoW you are pretty damn likely to get bored of it.

The biggest problem with a game like DF, is not that people don't like item loot, it is that they don't like losing. Other games have much milder penalties for losing, so it doesn't sting nearly as bad when it happens, WoW will even reward you for losing (bg's).

So, if you join DF, but get ganked several times in your early game, and feel you don't have the skill to compete in the system, you are likely to think it's 'cheap' or 'unfair'. This is really a problem with you not having adequate strategies or skill level for this game environment.

So, in summary, all games are strategy testing environments, item loot games are simply simulations that are one step closer to the 'real world' than others.

You eventually got bored of Tic-Tac-Toe, There is more than a single strategy to test in WoW, but when you are ready to step up to the next level of simulation we'll be waiting for you :)

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Zero Sum Games

I see more and more posts like this on DF's forums

Its too bad your visions will fall to the might of human nature. None of what you want will ever come to light. Consider that the internet is like beer; the more you drink the more your real personality is let loose. Put a young adult behind a keyboard, make him anonymous so that he does not have to 'see' other people, and suddenly everything changes. They become rude, they cause grief for the sheer fun of it, they stop caring about other feelings. In essence, their true nature comes out to play. Oh, there are many who dont fit that role, being that their true nature is not that of an asshat. But the sad reality is that when your immature, you have not yet found who you are, so your more guided by instinct than reason.I know i sound cynical, and maybe I am, but the gist is true. People are simply jerks when they dont have to directly interact with others.

*sigh*, this person obviously does not understand what a stakes game (or human nature) is about.

Imagine someone writing a post like that about poker. Poker is a Zero Sum Game, in order for you to win your opponent HAS TO LOSE. You have absolutely no incentive to cooperate with other players, and will be as much of a 'jerk' to them as you possibly can.

DF (and life) is not zero sum, you can benefit by cooperating with people, however many interactions in DF certainly can be zero sum. This poster fails to realize that people aren't being 'jerks' when they gank him, they are optimizing their own strategy.

And posts likes this:

REALLY TRAV?????? How original. I guess you didn't read the part where I stated that I am not a crafter. I actually am the one looking to gank you crafters and I just wanted to get a bead on how you guys feel about the exploit of being ganked in town.Anyway Trav Warcraft is actually a much better game than this. Ganking people anywhere is largely overated. The novelty wore off after 5 minutes. Maybe if you ever played a "REAL" FPS game then you would understand the concept.I know you think your edgy and cool because this is your first experience with actually being able to kill a real player but your still and MMO geek living in your moms basement jacking off to your daddys porn mags and listening to Radiohead.

In (real money) poker. the only thing to do is gank, thats it, no crafting, no 'pve', no social interaction at all, you JUST GANK. Yet it is popular, the novelty does not wear off after 5 minutes. (the novelty of a no-money game certainly does wear off quickly though).

It is such an invalid argument and I see it constantly, obviously my 'In Defense of Item Loot' post is a more detailed rebuttal to this stuff, but I wanted to post a couple of examples.

Whenver you see these arguments, understand that the poster is just a dumb scrub that doesn't understand human nature nearly as well as he thinks he does.

Going Solo

Darkfall is talked about as being an extremely difficult game to solo in, this article for example lays out the case that darkfall is designed for groups/clans and not solo players.

The first line of that article is:

If you’ve been keeping up with DarkFall impressions you might have noticed a trend. Solo players hate it; people in active guilds love it.

I intend to put this assertion to the test. I would like to say that I do agree with all of the points in the article, I just think that there is an exception to the rule, which is a player that enjoys extreme difficulty.

I am going to solo in Darkfall (when I get it), and we'll see how far I get, and how much I enjoy it. I'm hoping and expecting that I will enjoy it a lot, but I am not the typical soloer, I'm not completely ruling out the possibility of joining a clan, as tactics do need to be flexible, but I'm not going to actively seek one out and am going to see how well I can do alone.

First, it is important to recognize the limitations of playing solo, you are never going to win on the same scale that a clan can, a solo player will never control (or even seige) a city, and as I've outlined in a previous post clans can betray (pk) you at will and usually suffer no consequences for it (but not always, the resourceful soloer sometimes has teeth).

So, rather than approaching the game as a clan will, trying to gather power and influence, a soloer instead needs to play more like an animal, both predator and prey, with the simple goal of surviving till your next meal.

The main reason I think I'll do ok, is that I have done it before, in EQ, I solo'd on Tallon Zek quite a lot, including things like raiding crushbone to attack groups of dwarves by myself and take items from them, the mechanics favored that a bit more though. I was a wizard so I could do quick damage to take someone down, loot him, duck in the river and gate before they even realized what was going on. Stuff like that will obviously be a lot harder in this game.

I also played on Sullon Zek when it opened (a short lived 'hardcore' server with if I remember correctly full item loot). I solo'd there and did pretty well despite the harsh environment. I'm something of an outlier but even in a game as unforgiving as DF there should be a fair amount of people going solo (at least part-time if nothing else).

My final thought on this is, that although clans do offer increased benefits, they also are nearly universally alpha-male systems, where a concentrated few people at the top of the organization reap most of the benefits. Being a 'cog' in a clan may offer you safety in numbers, and your clan itself may go on to great heights giving you a reputation just for being a part of it, but unless you are one of the alpha's you are probably just one of the herd.

I think this article sums up what I am trying to say on that point. Bonedead definetly knows the feeling of being a cog hehe (relevant quote below).

The point is, strength in numbers ftw in DF. Even though I wish I had uber combat skills, unlimited suits of plate, unlimited mounts, and not having to deal with lazy fucking failures who can't even have some guild pride and defend their fucking city, that isn't happening anytime soon. So I must sit back and wait and hope that strength in numbers remains plausible.

I'm hopeful the game will be released this week so I can start with my 'field work' :)

Prisoners Dilemma

If you still aren't clear on what the prisoners dilemma is (hereafter referred to as PD) watch this gameshow clip.

This was interesting for me (I just watched it for the first time myself) and I have a few comments. When the announcer first starts talking about the rules, and the male player shakes his head, at that moment my thought was 'she should steal'. He clearly signals that he is not going to steal, which could of course be a bluff but still that was my gut reaction as soon as I saw it.

After that (spoiler, she steals) I was surprised at the actual outcome, with the communication between them I thought that superrationality/morality and what I think of as 'the reputation effect' would prompt them both to cooperate.

At the very end in their exit interviews she reveals that he has defected on her before though (I haven't seen the full episode just that clip), which alleviated my confusion at the outcome, she is retaliating against him (tit for tat) so felt justified in the steal. Though you can see that she is hardly celebratory about it and I wouldn't be surprised if she feels guilt over the outcome.

here is another clip it's poor quality, the guy talks over it at points, and the PD part doesn't start until 3:45, but still very interesting.

I notice a similarity with both of them, the person that loses is being obviously sincere in stating that they won't betray, they are too convincing, which puts the other player in the position of knowing almost for certain they can betray and steal the money.

A long time ago, I played one of those text based strategy games that were popular on bbs's, I was in 3rd place in terms of power, the person in 2nd place sent me a private message suggesting that we team up against the most powerful player (he was far more powerful than the #2 guy). I agreed and we started our attacks, this was one of those limited turns per day games, so for the first couple days I sent my forces to attack, and got reports back of their failure over and over again.

After a few days though, his defenses were worn down, my attacks started getting through, I knew that the #2 player was stronger than me, so his attacks were definitely getting through and I knew that #1 was in dire straits.

At that point I switched my strategy, I started attacking #2, he sent me incredulous messages, one part I still specifically remember is that he said 'you've ruined the game, we could have ruled it together for a long time but now it's just going to end'.

That didn't matter to me a bit, with a betrayal played at a key moment of the game, I took the dominant position, an outcome that otherwise would not have been available. If I had not betrayed, the #2 player would have won because I knew that after #1 went down I would be no match for him.

Strategy Breakdown

Here is another excerpt from Wikipedias page on PD. (edited to make it shorter)

Although Tit-for-Tat is considered to be the most robust basic strategy, a team from Southampton University in England introduced a new strategy at the 20th-anniversary Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma competition, which proved to be more successful than Tit-for-Tat.

This strategy relied on cooperation between programs to achieve the highest number of points for a single program. The University submitted 60 programs to the competition, which were designed to recognize each other through a series of five to ten moves at the start. Once this recognition was made, one program would always cooperate and the other would always defect, assuring the maximum number of points for the defector. If the program realized that it was playing a non-Southampton player, it would continuously defect in an attempt to minimize the score of the competing program. As a result, this strategy ended up taking the top three positions in the competition, as well as a number of positions towards the bottom.

This strategy takes advantage of the fact that multiple entries were allowed in this particular competition, and that the performance of a team was measured by that of the highest-scoring player (meaning that the use of self-sacrificing players was a form of minmaxing).

In a competition where one has control of only a single player, Tit-for-Tat is certainly a better strategy.

To me, this has 'clans' and '2 boxing' written all over it, and it explains how although Tit-for-Tat is a strong and stable strategy for an individual, if he is a single agent participating in a system with multiple-agents, the multiple-agents can have an advantage.

This is fairly obvious of course, grouping is better than going solo, you can pool resources, have strength in numbers, and perform min-maxing activities together as described above.

With that in mind, I come to a basic framework of strategies grouped by 'level'. though I'm using the same terms, when applying these to a more advanced situation like Darkfall, they are more like guidelines rather than hard and fast rules, and since this is obviously a more advanced game than the classic PD game, I'm going to split tit for tat into two seperate strategies that are similar but subtly different.

I think the eve scams show that 'Tit-for-Tat, but betray if you see a golden opportunity' is a strategy people use a lot. and similarly many people use 'Tit-for-Tat, and NEVER betray first' as their strategy, hereafter I will refer to them as tat-evil, and tat-good.

Always Defect:
This is the scammer level, a person or clan that betrays at the earliest opportunity. even in single player games with 'evil rewards' this is usually a bad strategy, in mass effect for example, if you betray everyone, you miss a lot of opportunities to do really evil stuff because no one trusts you, in that game the next strategy is better if you are really tring to be 'evil'.

Tat-Evil:
cooperate until you are betrayed, then retaliate. betray if you see a golden opportunity, and betray when you think there will be no retaliation or reputation effect.

Tat-Good:
cooperate until you are betrayed, then retaliate. NEVER betray first, no matter how extreme the payoff on a single interaction.

Tat-good is typically the player with a strict moral code, I think this is again a result of the 'reputation effect', some players decide that any short term gain will ultimately be outweighed by the negative consequences to their future interactions and so resolve to 'avoid temptation' at all costs, even in situations where the payoff is extreme. Note that I do not think this makes them a 'better person' for never betraying, it's just the strategy they have settled on as optimal for them. (and indeed it is optimal for superrational players).





Solo

Always defect:
a fun, but ultimately weak strategy, if you play solo, and attack everyone you see, gank or try to scam people all the time, exploit the system etc, then things will be extremely difficult.

Tat-Evil:
A strong strategy for solo play, in addition to betraying on a golden opportunity, the 'evil' would also include being ruthless on most opportunities, and generally trying to maximise your gains while minimizing (but accepting a small amount of) negative effect on your reputation, examples would include price gouging, heavy pk of enemy races (not even considered 'evil' by most people but rather a game mechanic, and easily explained away if it comes to that), probably 'ninja looting' (a minor offense in this game and again can be explained away as an 'everyone does it' type of thing). and ganking at the noob areas, all activities that will help advance your character but probably not attract too much negative attention to you.

Tat-Good:
On the surface this would appear to be a slightly weaker strategy than tat-evil, you would deal fairly in pretty much all interactions, players that res other players instead of looting them are playing tat-good, they are sacrificing short term gains in the hopes of a less tangible future payoff (reputation). You are open to some exploitation because of your tendency to 'give the benefit of the doubt' but for a character looking to join a clan, or build a reputation (a trader or crafter for instance) this is a stronger strategy than it appears on the surface, and with superrational players it is the optimal strategy (but you won't be playing against very many superrational players in DF heh).


Groups and Clans


Always Defect:
Although the weakest of the 3 strategies outlined, once in a group setting, this strategy defeats both tat-good and tat-evil when facing a single player. the single player is very unlikely to be able to properly retaliate,
so you can treat him as badly as you wish, if a single clan becomes completely dominant on a server then they have no incentive to use a strategy other than this (exhibit A: goonfleet on eve), though of course internally they will be using a mix of tat-good and tat-evil when dealing with each other.

Tat-Evil:
For a clan that is 'in the running', i.e. doing well, but not dominant on the server, tat-evil is kindof a mixed bag, if the right opportunity arises using tat-evil could well result in being the 'winner' of the server, and the ruthlessness
inferred by this strategy means you would probably be regularly exploiting any solo/clanless players you can find, as well as picking on weaker guilds that you think will not be able to retaliate properly or have enough influence to tarnish your reputation. It offers a lot of benefits but when a guild acts like this it usually risks 'tipping it's hand' too early, revealing to other powerful clans that it is actually untrustworthy.

Tat-Good:
A solid strategy for
a clan, but one that is probably unlikely to lead to being the 'winner' on the server, usually clans like this will have strict rules, probably even some scrub rules that prevent them from maximising their gains as honor is placed at a high priority, however the reputation benefits will generally pay off, and it is a 'safer' strategy since a clan that betrays before it is immune to retribution may be completely erased.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


One example of the 'scrub rules' I just mentioned, comes from my time in EQ. I led a dark team guild on the team pvp server called Warlords of Zek, at one point we were nearly the dominant guild on the server
(pretty much all regular 'light' guilds stopped trying to fight us and would leave wherever we showed up, was funny gating into the plane of hate with a group, seeing a who list of 60 people and then 2 minutes later seeing it completely empy).

However, there was a guild more powerful than us, and they eventually 'won', their name was Pandemonium, and there was one crucial difference between the 2 guilds, when I created WoZ, I envisioned it as an evil church/army, and I implemented rules in keeping with that, such as 'no crossteaming (teaming with enemy
races)' and even no trading with enemy races.
By the end of our time, the no trading part was still technically in effect, but of course was circumvented by nearly everyone and tacitly approved by me, the no-crossteaming we kept till the end though and that was pretty much our doom.

In EQ, you literally could not attack your own race, you could attack other races, but you could also group with them, and heal/buff them etc. Pandemonium was(is, they still exist on TZ) an ARAC guild (all races), we called them dirty crossteamers etc etc. but the simple truth was that 2 or 3 dark elf clerics along with
them made it a 10 times harder fight for us.

We simply could not kill their dark elf clerics, so when fighting over plane of hate they would just stand there and heal their guildmembers while we were helpless to anything about it. Despite this difficulty we were a strong challenge to them (and eventually evolved into our own PD outcome, we start scheduling
our raids around each other so we wouldn't be fighting all the time). The simple scrub rule of 'no crossteaming' doomed us to 2nd place (others would probably argue this but it's my article, I know that we beat pande in a few of our encounters when no other guilds would challenge them at all, so we get 2nd).

By the time we wanted (at least secretly) to change our position, our reputation was so entrenched in being a 'dark team guild' that it would have felt like a betrayal of our identity to change it.


So, if you are a tat-good clan, you can succeed but beware of scrub rules!

Going back to the 'always defect' option i want to highlight a couple other things, first the guild 'Les Vaindards' that I mentioned in my
previous post is following this strategy, and I'm willing to bet they are never significant on a post like this one.

In that post, you can see the PD relationships evolving between the guilds already, which is what makes this game so fascinating.

Finally, notice
this post (how sweet of them) from Awful Company, if you don't know, Awful Company is a guild from the 'something awful' forums, that plays in many games, in Eve they are Goonfleet, goonfleet is fairly dominant in eve, they openly scam players with 'recruitment drives' and other such stunts and basically feel secure in playing always defect.

In this game however, you can see that at least for now, they will probably not be quite as brutal, at least until they are dominant, it is my opinion that they are currently using tat-evil as their strategy.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Betrayal

In this post I will take a closer look at betrayal and when it works. I apologize in advance for the length of it.

The prisoners dilemma is a good way to look at a lot of game situations when determining what strategy you should use, however in games like mmo's (and life) there are many factors that the prisoners dilemma simply does not cover or allow for, so it is really just a simple framework for understanding these issues.

For example, it doesn't in any way cover what I will call 'varying rewards'. Which I think is the basis of a lot of betrayal and scamming in games (and life). In an iterated prisoners dilemma, the payout terms are exactly the same on every turn, this is obviously not true in real life/more advanced situations. In many situations a player will cooperate until they see a 'payoff', and then will betray at that point, obviously trying to maximise their gains. Usually this effectively ends the game going on between that player and the player he betrayed. Which is another thing the basic concept does not cover, early termination of the game/interaction by one of the players.

The best example I can think of are the famous Eve Online scams

http://www.wirm.net/nightfreeze/part1.html

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Eve-Online-Economy-Suffers-700-billion-ISK-Scam-33737.shtml

These are what I consider fairly classic examples of iterated prisoners dilemma situations bought to an abrupt end by a betrayal of one of the players. Arguments can be made on whether these actions are right or wrong, but these players 'won' their interactions. In both cases they were on the level (cooperating) until they saw an opportunity to make a large profit through betrayal.

Here is a (rather long) thread from the darkfall forums called 'Scamming Stories'.
http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=104818

And this is an except from that post, I have edited it slightly to make it shorter

I think I'll begin, of all places, at the beginning.

Lineage 2 was my very first MMO, so I got my feet wet late, although I had been a fan of RPG games since Dragon Warrior back on the NES in '89. I remember being blown away while playing in the open beta. "Whoa...its...an RPG with a persistant world and thousands of other people! The possibilities are endless!" Of course, I was a complete MMO noob and found out a couple months later that the possibilties really weren't all that endless, and in fact at the time there wasn't a whole lot to do in L2 except slowly, SLOWLY, grind levels.

I had been doing some trade on the side and had a decent bit of adena (L2 money), and I was fascinated by the PvP possibilities, so I decided to try to host a little PvP tournament of my own. There wasn't much interest, but I managed to get a handful of people together and had a little event and gave out some small prizes. The next day, I decided to try to get a bigger event going, but we had had problems with people "signing up" and then not showing, messing up the fight Roster, so I decided to charge a sign up fee. As chance would have it, alot of people happened to be around the human starting area at the time, as there had just been an in-game event run by the devs, so there was alot of interest in my little PvP tournament.

When I said there was a signup fee, of course there were people who thought I was just going to run off with the money, especially since I was on a level 1 alt at the time, but the people who had participated the day before spoke up and let everyone know I was legit. In the end, I had about 40 people sign up, and collected about 250k adena in sign-ups, which was quite a bit of cash at the time. I started the event, and immediately it degenerated into bickering over the rules and chaos ensued, as 40 people tried to lead an event they weren't even in charge of. Everyone was demanding their sign ups back, when that first little evil thought came into my head.... "I have about a week's worth of solo grinding money here... And, these people are being idiots... And...and...I'm on an alt and no one knows its connected to my main, reputable and respected character!"

And with the simple clicking of the logout button, that's how a career scammer was born.

This player executes a betrayal strategy without even intending to at the time, it evolves naturally from his actions and reactions to events. His first small tournament, builds trust with a few players, who vouch for him the next day (second iteration), at that point more people show interest, he winds up holding enough money that it occurs to him that (duh) he could make off with it, so he does.

The above paragraph is pretty much the main point I would like to make with this article, that many players who view themselves as 'good' will actually betray under the right circumstances, if you read the scamming stories listed here and view them with disdain thinking "I would never do something that low" you might want to reconsider that as there is a fairly good chance that you actually could sink to 'something that low' under the right circumstances. Of course you may be legitimately virtuous too but don't take it for granted :)

The last part of the story is also telling, he was on an alt and knew that the betrayal would have no repercussions on his main character. Most (but not all) game betrayals that I have seen follow this pattern, it is much much easier to be a ganker/scammer/noob killer/etc on an alt of some form, that is either a 'throwaway' character or secretly supported by a 'main'.

Darkfall is a game that only allows one character per server, which makes things a bit more interesting as its a little harder to have a throwaway or alt character. It isn't impossible though (2 boxing).

This post shows the first 'scam' in Darkfall, the basic idea being to setup a trade with someone, and then once it has started to proceed to gank him with several naked characters.
http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=165759

Here is the OP (again slightly edited)

I was buying timber in dwarf land and a seller messages me saying he has bulk 1k at 3g each. We come to an agreement for 1k gold, 2 mounts, 120 Iron Ingots. I head out and ride to Idawoll. Arriving at vault, everything is normal, people macroing magic, going about their business, etc. It's not even crowded. The seller comes up to me and opens trade. In literally one second after trade is opened, I start getting hit. I reactively close trade and turn around, unsheathing my sword and shield and mashing Parry. Hitting me are about 8 people, all naked, all with starter weapons. I die in approximately 5 seconds and am instantly ganked. I was boxed in from all directions and the bank itself was blocked from banking anything, leaving me from literally having a chance to do anything at all other than to die.

Total lost:
1k Gold
2x Mounts
120 Ingots
Scale Suit, arrows, r40 weapons, etc. (stuff i was wearing)

The name of the person who orchestrated this is GORMAGON HATE. Please remember this name and see to it that his rep is ruined forever on this server and that no one has business with him. The name of the guild he was"Les Vaindards"

This is an example of a single run of the prisoners dilemma (at least, gormagon hopes it is), which if you've done the required reading. you'll know that betrayal is always the best option for a single iteration. Whether this will actually be a single iteration game is yet to be seen.

Notice that the name of the character and guild are named (and they show up later in the thread to flaunt a little), I will be interested to know their eventual fate. They are getting great payoffs right now, but I hope to see how things unfold for them in the long run.

Right now the risk vs reward factor is heavily skewed in their favor, they risk literally nothing (they are all naked) and reap massive rewards. But are all of these characters throwaways? will gormagon quit after he's had his fun (very possible) or go on to try to have a 'darkfall life'? what will happen if he does? how will other clans view Les Vaindards? (my guess is they will have problems if they ever try to own a city). Since only gormagon is named their best strategy may be to simply change the name of their guild when they are done with their current prank and ready to move on to bigger things.

In this example the 'scammers' are also actively betraying from the start of their interactions, there is no period of building trust, a lot of 'trust' scams are unintentional at first (the player is cooperating until he sees an opportunity, and may not even be aware at first that he's going to eventually betray), where on the other hand this scam is planned in advance, which is a hallmark of a throwaway character scam. gormagon has revealed himself to be untrustworthy in the first few weeks of the game, which probably isn't healthy for his characters future (though I may be wrong, apathy lets people get away with a lot of stuff too).

One last thing I haven't touched so far, if it hasn't come through so far in these stories, is that betrayal is FUN, (it's been a very long time since I participated in any activities like noob killing or scamming, I usually use 'tit for tat' as my basis now, but I can attest that my memories of scamming, getting scammed, and item looting people are some of my fondest).

I'm not sure why it is fun, but I think that it has to do with being able to try strategies that you would not normally employ in your real life (because of the obvious consequences), and that executing those strategies in a game environment allows people to explore their 'evil' side with less repercussions.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Required Reading

What I intend for this blog, is to lay out my thoughts on game theory and how it applies to darkfall, go over the strengths of different strategies to use, and once I've actually got the game use this as a journal of sorts to keep track of what happens in game and how that lines up with what I wrote beforehand. Hopefully I can eventually come to a useful conclusion or two.

In order to understand where I am coming from, it would be helpful if you know a little bit about game theory. So at the bottom of the post are some links that I would like to call 'required reading'.

Assuming that you are somewhat familiar, I would like to highlight what I think is most relevant. In the prisoners dilemma game, the 'Tit for Tat' strategy has been shown to be a stable and robust strategy. It is a stunningly simple strategy, all it does is cooperate on the first turn, then copy its opponents moves after that. despite being simple it has the 4 factors considered necessary for success. Here is an excerpt from wikipedia's page on the prisoners dilemma.

The best deterministic strategy was found to be "Tit for Tat," which Anatol Rapoport developed and entered into the tournament. It was the simplest of any program entered, containing only four lines of BASIC, and won the contest. The strategy is simply to cooperate on the first iteration of the game; after that, the player does what his opponent did on the previous move. Depending on the situation, a slightly better strategy can be "Tit for Tat with forgiveness." When the opponent defects, on the next move, the player sometimes cooperates anyway, with a small probability (around 1%-5%). This allows for occasional recovery from getting trapped in a cycle of defections. The exact probability depends on the line-up of opponents.

By analysing the top-scoring strategies, Axelrod stated several conditions necessary for a strategy to be successful.

Nice
The most important condition is that the strategy must be "nice", that is, it will not defect before its opponent does (this is sometimes referred to as an "optimistic" algorithm). Almost all of the top-scoring strategies were nice; therefore a purely selfish strategy will not "cheat" on its opponent, for purely utilitarian reasons first.

Retaliating
However, Axelrod contended, the successful strategy must not be a blind optimist. It must sometimes retaliate. An example of a non-retaliating strategy is Always Cooperate. This is a very bad choice, as "nasty" strategies will ruthlessly exploit such players.

Forgiving
Successful strategies must also be forgiving. Though players will retaliate, they will once again fall back to cooperating if the opponent does not continue to defect. This stops long runs of revenge and counter-revenge, maximizing points.

Non-envious
The last quality is being non-envious, that is not striving to score more than the opponent (impossible for a ‘nice’ strategy, i.e., a 'nice' strategy can never score more than the opponent).

Therefore, Axelrod reached the oxymoron-sounding conclusion that selfish individuals for their own selfish good will tend to be nice and forgiving and non-envious.


This is wikipedia's page on game theory, I've read it but I don't recommend it as a place to start, use the other links first then maybe check this one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory


This page is more important, it is the page explaining the prisoners dilemma game, a lot of what I will be talking about revolves around prisoners dilemma situations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

This article is absolutely required, especially if you actually play games (plus you should enjoy it, it's a fantastic article). 'Playing to Win' by Sirlin, I have done what he describes in this article myself many times (put artificial limitations on myself) and I will outline one or two in a future post. Even now I still do it sometimes but at least now I am aware of it. Read this and stop being a scrub!
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-1.html

(also read parts 2 and 3)
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-2-mailbag.html
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-3-not-playing-to-win.html

Here is Amazons page for the book "The Evolution of Cooperation" By Robert Axelrod, it was my introduction to this topic and I heartily recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-Axelrod/dp/0465005640/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237754370&sr=8-1


Here is Amazons page for the book "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" By Matt Ridley. I wouldn't call this one 'required' but it's a fascinating read and does apply as his argument is basically that sex itself is a game that men and women compete in, and that the different strategies used by each sex optimize their chances of having offspring.
http://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0060556579/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237788142&sr=8-1

In Defense of Item Loot

This was originally written as a post on the Darkfall forums, someone replied that no-one cares and to go create my own shitty blog instead, I realized thats actually not a bad idea since I have more to say on this subject, so here is my first post, please realize that I wrote it intended for a message board and not a blog.


I'm already seeing threads popping up in the general discussion forum asking for no item loot and/or single item loot, backpack only, etc etc etc. Basically the exact same conversations I saw years ago with EQ. So I am writing this as a rebuttal to those arguments.

The first point, is that this game was designed for item loot, if you do not enjoy item loot, you can go to nearly any other mmo for a playstyle that better suits you. This is what people basically mean (imo) when they say 'go back to wow'. They are really saying 'this is the ONLY game in town with the ruleset I want, don't ruin it'.

Secondly, item loot raises the stakes for the players, for people that like high stakes this is very important.

Allow me to make an analogy.

Poker is a good example of what I mean, real money poker is very much like item loot pvp, you don't 'kill' the other player, but you certainly do do your best to gank him and take his stuff (money), and in fact poker is pvp in its literal sense (player versus player).

This is not to say that playing poker for real money is the only way to play, especially for beginners and people that don't like risk, a beginner to the game will usually play with friends for very low stakes, or against a computer, eventually if they enjoy it they may play at a freeplay site like pogo.com. If they feel they are good at the game AND enjoy the thrill of playing for real money they may try playing at a casino or at a real money site.

comparing the different levels of play:

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Against a Computer: Equivalent to playing a single player game, no risk, no reward, the best thing it has to offer is practice

Against People. No Stakes: here we have the equivalent of the wow player, no risk, possibly some small amount of reward (pogo etc you can win 'points' but if you lose you just get more chips to play with for free). You have the advantage of playing against a human opponent. much like wow pvp'ers who want the challenge of a human opponent, but not the risk of losing your stuff.

Against People. With Stakes: this is the hardcore category, you are playing against real people like the previous level, but now you can actually win or lose money. for many people that is the thrill of the game. For others, the mere prospect is horrifying, neither are right or wrong, and both should be able to play the version they prefer.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

All of the above ways of playing are totally viable, some are more 'carebear' than others but that is what some people like. That is fine, however coming to this game and asking for no item loot, is like a pogo player going to a casino and asking everyone to stop playing for money. The most likely response would be 'go back to pogo, mule' (sound familiar? swap pogo for wow and mule for carebear and there you go).

I have found that real money poker players, generally have a very good 'pvp' outlook. you wipe out their whole stack and the most likely thing you are to hear is 'nh' (nice hand). Some people of course bitch when they lose (especially to a bad beat) but this is the minority.

Tactics also change as you go up in levels, versus a comp you are going to mainly just find out what the comp tends to do, then exploit that as much as you can. versus players with no stakes games tend to be very heavy betting (all in on first good hand, lots of raising, etc). even at the low stakes tournament level you will see a lot of play that mirrors that tactic (because the tournament setup allows for this to be viable). when just sitting at a table playing for real money, people are much more cautious. The gameplay literaly is at a higher level because of the risk and reward involved.

When I played EQ and item loot went away, I saw many of the same arguments being made then as are being made now. Including 'you people are all griefers and gankers and will drive each other off in a couple months' and 'there's no market for what you want' etc etc.This is plainly false, the interest shown in this game proves that. There is a market for a full item loot pvp game (it's why I'm here) and if ganking drove people away real money poker would not be successful.

If this game succeeds it will be mostly because of item loot pvp. If it fails it's going to be mostly some other reason (poor support, patching, rebalancing, whatever). People LIKE item loot pvp, not all and maybe not you, but there is a market for it, the interest in this game has amply demonstrated that regardless of whether it actually succeeds or fails.

I am here because I like the thrill associated with the high level of risk and reward this system offers, without that I could get everything this game offers either from other mmo's or from playing an fps.

Speaking of FPS's, that is another example of the warcraft level of play, you play against other human opponents (more fun than playing against a computer) but you play for no stakes.

Being a person that plays poker for money, the idea of going to a site like pogo and playing is completely laughable to me. 'boring' would be my one word description. I feel the same way about pretty much all mmo's, 'boring' encompasses 90% of the mmo experiences I've had, the best memories I have from mmo's involve some type of risk/reward. Getting scammed in the realm, item loot pvp in EQ, 'epic quest pvp' (after item loot was gone) in EQ came close since again there were stakes involved. having the fire elemental part of our cleric epic stolen from us and then killing the lights that did it and camping them for so long their bodies were literaly in danger of expiring, then fighting over solusek for months to prevent those lights from getting a cleric epic. good times.

My 2 years in wow? nothing sticks out. Again you may not be the type of player that enjoys risk, but if that is true then this simply is not the game for you, you're trying to play pogo style in a casino. 'go back to wow' may be the short and rude version but there is a reason people say it. The common rebuttal to 'go back to wow' is that you will just drive people away with that attitude, but the truth is that players who do not like risk should go play another game, this one is not for them in the same way that a casino is not for someone that hates gambling (but enjoys playing cards).