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Re: Squaring the "Vertical Progression" Circle (maybe)

#16
You still have to model an economy though. The less stuff that happens in that economy, the less stuff there is for the player to do, because it can't come from anywhere else.

I don't quite see what you are saying the difference is between turning development down to 0 and turning "realistic economic simulation" down? One of the reasons I think development is an important thing to get right is because it's such a fundamental lynchpin of what any economic model will look like. Turning it down is, basically, turning the economy down.

What other things would you turn down to try to counterbalance a lack of vertical progression in the background technology?
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Re: Squaring the "Vertical Progression" Circle (maybe)

#17
One of the major problems I see with limiting vertical progression is that eventually every research branch has reached its own soft limit of progression.

Step 1: frigate
Step 2: Heavy frigate
Step 3: Heavy stealth frigate
Step 4: Heavy stealth ECM frigate

Continue this idea along, populating an entire tree worth of technologies and you run out of divergent branches to add. So eventually the entire technology tree reaches a soft limit.

Unlimited vertical progression also has all the problems listed previously in this thread as well, and an amalgamation of limited and unlimited vertically progressive branches has all the downsides of both implementations.

So what about adding modding tools? Unfortunately Josh has already said no. Implementing a modding ability where modders are essentially able to add game mechanics is extremely difficult. Particularly so since most of the underlying engine is already developed.
I don't see any other way that alleviates the stagnation of limited vertical progression and the inherent research or die aspect of unlimited vertical progression. :/
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Re: Squaring the "Vertical Progression" Circle (maybe)

#18
McDuff wrote:
mcsven wrote: Perhaps it's just me. But for some reason I really don't understand where your insistence on a limit or end point comes from. I don't think Josh says anything like there being an end point in that post you link you.

My understanding of what Josh is looking for is a universe in which at any given time there is a spread in the "effective power" of technology from low to high, but that over time this power increase at both ends at a slow rate. The point is that things do improve, as they do in real life and over the course of a few years of in-game play the entire market will have turned over so that the toys you have available top play with are totally different.
Diminishing returns equates to, in real terms, an effective end limit.

Suppose the rate of progression at T=1000 has slowed to the point that 1Bn investment gives me a marginal increase of 1%.

Even though the progress hasn't stopped, it's highly unlikely that any rational actor will consider this to be worth the investment. The cost benefit equation is all out of whack, and I can get a better ROI from purchasing more items at the current technological level than investing in research to try to get myself to that higher level.

Without a significant marginal reward for my investment in research, I have no reason to do it.

Unless every other branch of the research tree is full, my temporal accrual of research points is better invested where it will yield more reward.

If we're talking about making vertical progression slower or faster, we're left with the same problem Hardenberg pointed out. If it's quick enough to be economically efficient for a viable economics sim, it's too fast for people who don't want to be outpaced on an "upgrade or die" treadmill, and vice versa.

"Just slow it down or turn it off" was previously rejected as a solution to this.
I guess I'm just thinking about branches differently. I don't see the possibility of a "full" research tree, since at any point a new branch can be created from a previous node. My thoughts are totally directed by Update 10 here. There's literally an unlimited number of branches. Each branch would have an ultimate potential due to diminishing returns, but the tree itself would have no intrinsic upper limit.

In the branch potential concept I was mulling over in another thread my goal was to force the player to confront the issue of diminishing returns by resorting to earlier research efforts that have higher ultimate potential than the branch they're currently on. Resorting to an earlier tech would mean by definition that a research organisation is no longer at the cutting edge. Getting back to the top of the tree would take a while.

I would say that one potential way in which to limit all of these issues is to impose a "one avenue of research at a time" limit on all research organisations.
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Re: Squaring the "Vertical Progression" Circle (maybe)

#19
Sasha wrote: Step 1: frigate
Step 2: Heavy frigate
Step 3: Heavy stealth frigate
Step 4: Heavy stealth ECM frigate
its not as simple as this, its more like
step 1: frigate
step 2: frigate +20%hp +15%mass
step 3: frigate +15%hp +15%mass -10%emissions
step 4: frigate +15%hp +25%mass -10%emissions +10% effectivity of ECM modules
step 5: frigate (change any modifiers or add new)
step 6: frigate (change the modifiers you got from step 5 or add new)

n=7
loop
step %n: frigate (change modifiers you got from step %n-1 or add new)
n++
goto loop

this makes practically infinite vartiations possible and is not likely to be bound anywhere except where we cap the numbers
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Re: Squaring the "Vertical Progression" Circle (maybe)

#21
CutterJohn wrote:Can someone explain to me what, specifically, is bad about an endpoint to vertical progression? I mean, this is a game, its got to run out of content at some point. Wouldn't several months worth of progression be enough? Must the game be capable of being played for years on end, or longer?

Every game has an end.
I think that's an unnecessarily limited definition of "game." It's certainly not required for "play" (where play is the superset of entertainment activities within which rules-based games are just one form).

James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games took an interesting look at this. By his terminology, finite games are games where you play to beat the other players in order to end the game, and infinite games are games in which you play to keep the other players in the game in order to keep the game going.

He uses that as a metaphor for human behavior generally. But it still works down at the level of play -- a game whose rules are built to reward keeping other players in the game doesn't need to end. That doesn't make it any less a game. It's just a different kind of game.

Certainly it's very different from how a lot of people think about games. "But how do you win?" is a question I expect to see asked a lot more frequently about LT once the general gaming public sees it, as most of them (IMO) are Achievers who are used to games as "things you beat" (preferably as quickly and high-scoringly as possible).

I think there'll be plenty of "win" content in LT for these folks to enjoy, and I support that. I also support LT being fun for other kinds of gamers, including those (including me) who do like the idea of LT as an infinite game, where the object is to continue to play in the same universe for as long as that's fun. I hope LT supports that to whatever extent it can.
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Re: Squaring the "Vertical Progression" Circle (maybe)

#22
Hardenberg wrote:There is yet another aspect not covered here, and that is different functions for certain item types.
[...]
It would be an enormous investment of research time and resources for a single manufacturer/faction to cover ALL of the equipment permutations. As opposed to the market for smartphones, which essentially all do the same thing, there is quite a lot of permutations in the spaceship equipment business here.

Do you want large, tough fighters, or would you settle for cheaper and more flimsy ones, if you could get double the amount of them for same hangar bay mass investment? Do you want your construction drones fast or efficient? (less waste during construction, or faster, but with more material used?) Do you want acceleration or top speed, shield capacity or shield recharge rate? Armor hitpoints or armor damage resistance? More cargo capacity or more module slots in your hull?

There's oodles of "different". Adding vertical progression to that further diversifies the market, but keep in mind that the market is local - TanC Hyperdrives might build lighter and faster engines than Flatfinger Dynamics, but that won't help me if the next outlet of them is 35 jumps away and I need to fit a new transport now.

"Better" might not mean statistically better, but rather "more suitable for the task at hand". It can't always be reduced to a raw "item level" type number.
Well, why do you buy a new car if it doesn't go any faster?
'Cause I've got a green-skinned wife and a pouchful of hatchlings now, and my '67 Mustang isn't big enough for all of us to ride in. ;)
That actually works well for EVE Online, where a player could in theory get blueprints for everything, but the cost would be prohibitive.
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Re: Squaring the "Vertical Progression" Circle (maybe)

#23
Gruh. The EVE economy has managed to be Malthusian in an infinite amount of space, which is an achievement but not a particularly admirable one, and most of the interesting stuff happens offline anyway as people try to metagame to get an advantage. It's not a very good model.

Plus, while it's taken ages (because everything in Eve takes ages), factions are accumulating Titans pretty fast now. Don't think in terms of EVE players. Think in terms of EVE factions. The fact that EVE moves so slowly that most people develop Stockholm Syndrome and mistake their lost subscriptions for a worthwhile investment doesn't mean that the trends within that economy aren't towards the exact problems we're trying to figure out a way to avoid.

Eve's been going, what, 10 years? Run it forward 100 more years and see what happens.
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Re: Squaring the "Vertical Progression" Circle (maybe)

#26
McDuff wrote:Plus, while it's taken ages (because everything in Eve takes ages), factions are accumulating Titans pretty fast now. Don't think in terms of EVE players. Think in terms of EVE factions. The fact that EVE moves so slowly that most people develop Stockholm Syndrome and mistake their lost subscriptions for a worthwhile investment doesn't mean that the trends within that economy aren't towards the exact problems we're trying to figure out a way to avoid.

Eve's been going, what, 10 years? Run it forward 100 more years and see what happens.
So what? Pretty much every game I've played so far runs into some kind of end game. In some (like X3) hardcore players may get a few hundred hours out of a game start, but eventually the player runs into the limitations of the game universe. Or in case of X, the game software.

Limit Theory has some interesting ideas to avoid that, but even so I'd consider it normal if any particular game (start) leaves the scope of what Josh designed after a few 100 hours, thus needing a reset.

A game that can run for thousands of hours before it hits end game problems would be pure luxury, and that's what we're talking about with EVE.
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Re: Squaring the "Vertical Progression" Circle (maybe)

#27
Well:

A) the game universe is going to run for quite a few years before you even get there, so that there's things already established in the game universe, and it would be nice to minimise the amount of cheating Josh has to do in order to leave things for the player to do.

B) If these problems are insoluble, fair enough. If they're not insoluble, it is rather a rubbish approach to anything to say "well other people didn't solve the problems so let's not bother."
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Re: Squaring the "Vertical Progression" Circle (maybe)

#28
McDuff wrote:Well:

A) the game universe is going to run for quite a few years before you even get there, so that there's things already established in the game universe, and it would be nice to minimise the amount of cheating Josh has to do in order to leave things for the player to do.
If Josh finds a solution to making the game "playable" after a history generation period of effectively several years, decades, centuries or whatever, then it ought to be straightforward to make the game continue to be playable and fun after several real-life years, decades, centuries, etc.
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Re: Squaring the "Vertical Progression" Circle (maybe)

#29
Off-topic, but I was just reading about Malthus' personal life for the first time, and I don't get something. Malthus claimed "that the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence" and "that the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice". Believing this, why did he then have a son and a daughter? :|

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