On trade

I wanted to write something on a different topic, but my mind kept returning to trade, so here we go. Trade has been on my mind a lot lately, because it ties into so many things. Item teleport, information teleport, player teleport, movement speed, resource gathering, crafting, communication, storage, money are just the most screaming topics. There are tons of other ones being influenced by them.

Now two steps back. Trade, what is that? When I talk about trade, I talk about the exchange of information, commodities, services and currency, in any combination possible, between two parties. These parties can include any combination of NPCs and/or players. Me giving a newbie a sword for free, is a trade. A good one for him, a financially not very good one for me, but then again, I might do it to woe the newbie to join my guild. See how those trade things instantly get a bit into everything?

Trade is the under appreciated orphan child of pretty much all games out there. There are exceptions. But few and far in between. The most common one is the item exchange, that happens between two players at the busiest location within the game. The next common one is buying stuff from NPCs. Not very exciting. But trade (especially the player driven kind) can be so much more.

The way of the servers

A teenage me was sitting in the summer of 1996 in an apartment I shared with a friend and mused on the state of games. Master of Orion 2 was just the latest game and besides that my computer sported Ultima VIII and Quake World.

The reason why a teenage me was not busy shooting things or doing other things a teenage me would be up to, was that I was waiting to the awful sounds my 14'400 baud modem made while connecting to the internet so I could shoot some things on quake world. Those crazy sounds shook loose some thoughts in my head. Wouldn't it be nice if I could connect to the internet and then play Ultima VIII with other people online? Quake World did it, it couldn't be that hard, could it?

Well yes it was hard of course. You write a server, clients connect to it and... Wait a second... As my screen avatar got fragged perpetually I was busy scribbling down some notes. Those notes did not survive my subsequent moves (including twice over an ocean) but the ideas did.

Don't listen to your community

I'm not advocating for ignoring them, but I'm advocating for considering the issue a bit more in depth first. What I mean by listen is really the listening part as in "what is said".

Communities have a very special dynamic and it's a though decision when you try to implement changes or try to decide what to do next. Getting priorities from your community is about as pleasant as having your teeth pulled by a 500 pound gorilla on a unicycle during an earth quake.

Now I apply this with such general terms because it's true for many things, be it websites or video games. I came across this topic though for a game, so let's just run with that. The discussion was about a feature, should it be put in or not. One voice was to look at the community, what are they saying. Instantly alarm bells went up in my head and I didn't distinctly know why. I knew it was a bad idea, but why exactly?