Psilon
Erudite
What the hell are you talking about here? I'd argue in more detail, but I have absolutely no clue what your thesis is. "Having a character handed to you?"ANDS! said:
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Investing in stores in Oblivion
- Thread starter Lumpy
- Start date
First, on topic, the investment is just laughably stupid.
It is also broken in most senses. Broken means broken ANDS! - nothing else. A system can be broken without having any bearing on exploitability. If attacking with a mace opened a dialogue window half the time, then the combat would be "broken".
With the economy, it is broken in the following ways:
It is an unstable world economy - money flows in and not out in an uncontrolled manner.
Yet merchants are static - how much you trade with them makes no difference. ["investing" aside]
The player can easily get almost unlimited cash.
The method of stopping this is to bore the player until he stops waiting for money to respawn magically.
It is totally unconvincing.
I had hoped to see improvements in this area after hearing about RAI. Strangely, when I read something like:
When an NPC is hungry, he'll usually go and buy food.
I actually thought that meant he'd buy it - i.e. that he'd give the merchant concerned money. This made me think there might be a real economy.
As it is there is no economy worthy of the name. It's the same nonsense, with the player being limited only by his capacity to cope with boredom as he waits for merchants' money to respawn. Morrowind's "economy" was ludicrous - why price so many things so highly, when the player will never be buying them, only selling? The price had no basis in good sense either - if most merchants could afford about 2000, then items which are relatively common should not cost 10000 each. It was just insane.
Given that the only reason for such items to cost so much was to be sold, why make the only barrier to selling, the avoidance of boring, monotonous gameplay?
As to "immersion", what makes an economy immersive is for it to make sense. Not for it to be unexploitable (which this very possibly isn't in any case). Morrowind's economy was total nonsense. Oblivion's looks to be too. That doesn't immerse me. It makes me think "What the hell were they thinking?....Were they thinking??".
EDIT: You're right about skills increasing at different rates though. At a given skill level a major specialised skill will increase over twice as fast as a minor, non-specialised. That should make a significant difference, so long as the rates aren't all too fast.
Here's a pretty picture estimated from MSFD's numbers: http://uk.geocities.com/galsiah/Oblivion_Skill_Chart2.gif
This alone does not fix the problem.
If the above is the only change (and I really hope that it isn't), it just makes the problem less likely to occur when a player is not thinking. The thinking player is still screwed, however - the above does not remove the exploit, it just makes it harder.
All a player needs to do is to hold off getting 10 major skill increases until he's gained enough minor increases to achieve the modifiers he wants. He can then focus on doing the same for the next level. He can't just wait for the "You must rest and meditate on what you've learned" message - he actually has to count his skill increases, or check his level-up progress bar (presuming there is one, and God knows there will be
).
The same problems are still there:
A player can do much better by gaining the "right" amount of minor increases for each 10 major increases.
A player will do much better if he focuses on two or three attributes per level, than if he gains a variety of skills each level - even if at the end he has the same skill set.
The uniform 100 skill and attribute caps are still there of course - so it doesn't matter that one player will gain attributes faster than another: everyone will have 100 in everything soon enough. Wonderful.
What says "character" more than: 100 100 100 100 100 100 100?
Perhaps the attribute modifier has been fixed through other changes - the level up screen we saw gives me some hope. What MSFD has said so far does not mean it has been fixed though.
Well that's not quite right:
If you're an unthinking player who increases seven levels without sleeping, then it has been fixed.
If you intelligently try to gain the best stats for your character, it's still broken (as far as we know).
If you want it to make sense it's still broken.
It is also broken in most senses. Broken means broken ANDS! - nothing else. A system can be broken without having any bearing on exploitability. If attacking with a mace opened a dialogue window half the time, then the combat would be "broken".
With the economy, it is broken in the following ways:
It is an unstable world economy - money flows in and not out in an uncontrolled manner.
Yet merchants are static - how much you trade with them makes no difference. ["investing" aside]
The player can easily get almost unlimited cash.
The method of stopping this is to bore the player until he stops waiting for money to respawn magically.
It is totally unconvincing.
I had hoped to see improvements in this area after hearing about RAI. Strangely, when I read something like:
When an NPC is hungry, he'll usually go and buy food.
I actually thought that meant he'd buy it - i.e. that he'd give the merchant concerned money. This made me think there might be a real economy.
As it is there is no economy worthy of the name. It's the same nonsense, with the player being limited only by his capacity to cope with boredom as he waits for merchants' money to respawn. Morrowind's "economy" was ludicrous - why price so many things so highly, when the player will never be buying them, only selling? The price had no basis in good sense either - if most merchants could afford about 2000, then items which are relatively common should not cost 10000 each. It was just insane.
Given that the only reason for such items to cost so much was to be sold, why make the only barrier to selling, the avoidance of boring, monotonous gameplay?
As to "immersion", what makes an economy immersive is for it to make sense. Not for it to be unexploitable (which this very possibly isn't in any case). Morrowind's economy was total nonsense. Oblivion's looks to be too. That doesn't immerse me. It makes me think "What the hell were they thinking?....Were they thinking??".
That doesn't fix the main problem.Solik said:
EDIT: You're right about skills increasing at different rates though. At a given skill level a major specialised skill will increase over twice as fast as a minor, non-specialised. That should make a significant difference, so long as the rates aren't all too fast.
Here's a pretty picture estimated from MSFD's numbers: http://uk.geocities.com/galsiah/Oblivion_Skill_Chart2.gif
Minor skills do give stat bonuses (though perhaps more slowly than majors). MSFD said that the queuing system was based on when the player's level increased. There is no equivalent of "level increase" for minor skills so I very much doubt they'll have their own system. From MSFD's explanation it seemed that they would go into the same queue.
This alone does not fix the problem.
If the above is the only change (and I really hope that it isn't), it just makes the problem less likely to occur when a player is not thinking. The thinking player is still screwed, however - the above does not remove the exploit, it just makes it harder.
All a player needs to do is to hold off getting 10 major skill increases until he's gained enough minor increases to achieve the modifiers he wants. He can then focus on doing the same for the next level. He can't just wait for the "You must rest and meditate on what you've learned" message - he actually has to count his skill increases, or check his level-up progress bar (presuming there is one, and God knows there will be
).The same problems are still there:
A player can do much better by gaining the "right" amount of minor increases for each 10 major increases.
A player will do much better if he focuses on two or three attributes per level, than if he gains a variety of skills each level - even if at the end he has the same skill set.
The uniform 100 skill and attribute caps are still there of course - so it doesn't matter that one player will gain attributes faster than another: everyone will have 100 in everything soon enough. Wonderful.
What says "character" more than: 100 100 100 100 100 100 100?
Perhaps the attribute modifier has been fixed through other changes - the level up screen we saw gives me some hope. What MSFD has said so far does not mean it has been fixed though.
Well that's not quite right:
If you're an unthinking player who increases seven levels without sleeping, then it has been fixed.
If you intelligently try to gain the best stats for your character, it's still broken (as far as we know).
If you want it to make sense it's still broken.
bryce777
Erudite
ANDS! said:
All I did was skim,a nd all I can say is - you are a goddamned idiot. Youa re the target demographic for this idiotic game. Rejoice that you can be so easily amused and take some pity on the people with triple digit IQs and fuck off back to the tes forums.
bryce777
Erudite
Psilon said:
Especially since you can multiclass wizardry characters nine ways to sunday.
By evolve he means a wizzard with a sword and who can cast spells and who can pick a lock and wouldn't it be cool if he was a vampire too?!?!?! And to dual wield two greatswords and wear plate armor and and and...!
Section8
Cipher
You could always save the random seed, so the auction gives an identical result even when it's reloaded. That would make it slightly harder for the player to exploit the system, but really, it's a problem that spans most RPG game elements. Jammed a lock? Reload. Failed a pickpocket attempt? Reload. Etc.
A simple solution is to have an optional game mode where the player can't manually save the game, and consequences are final.
It's great on paper, but all evidence points to the RAI system being nerfed to the point of 95% predictability. It will make the NPCs seem far less static, but the real strengths of the system and the emergent situations it can theoretically create have been tightly reigned in order to keep it from impacting on the very specific conditions required by the many explicitly scripted quests and situations.
Most of the criticism of RAI stems from the view that it is wasted potential, and it's overkill for the problem it addresses.
True, Fallout isn't a definitive sandbox, but it has a lot in common with the Elder Scrolls games. The player has a lot of freedom in character creation and development, and they're then thrown into an enormous world they can navigate according to their own whims. Most characters will be able to find a variety of quests suited to their skill sets, which may or may not be related to the central storyline.
A storyline which is not "tight" in any way whatsoever. It's essentially given to the player through threads of foreshadowing information they can pursue at will. The big advantage Fallout has over Morrowind and Oblivion, is the fact that it doesn't utilise methods of delivering narrative that conflict with the open-ended nature of the world.
The Crazy Frog was insanely popular too. That doesn't make it good in any way. Or to use an obscenely extreme analogy. "Hitler wouldn't have killed 6 million Jews if he wasn't on to something." Popularity just isn't an argument.
Not having an easy fix just doesn't cut it when you're talking about a multimillion dollar project spanning some 3-4 years. Also, most of the "barely broke - barely fixed" elements are those which are pretty essential to making a sandbox style game interesting.
A solid economy is pretty essential, otherwise money, and all gameplay elements that revolve around it are pretty pointless. Why bother with thievery if you have essentially unlimited funds? Why bother with Speechcraft or Mercantile? Why bother collecting and selling loot? Why bother doing quests for monetary gain? If the economy is broken, then anything financial becomes little more than striving to break your wallet's high score.
Another aspect that's pretty essential to a sandbox is providing the player with theoretically endless gameplay events. Making a big world might give the player more to do than your average game, but it's not really a sandbox if it's noticeably finite. Oblivion seems focused upon quests and the core storyline, all of which fly in the face of the "endless freedom" and sandbox ought to provide.
Likewise, what good is freedom of choice when coupled with freedom from consequence? One of the great strengths of the sandbox concept, is that the player should be faced with the thought of their journey through this permutation of the world being drastically altered, and therefore, consecutive playthroughs offer something completely different. Playing in a sandbox should mean a seemingly endless supply of "I wonder what happens if I try this..." moments.
Not related to the sandbox style of the game, but if combat is what the player is expected to be doing most of the time, then the combat should really be able to stand on its own merits, isolated from the rest of the game. At the very least it should be able to stand comparison to other similar games. Mount & Blade is another combat-centric Action RPG sandbox, and its combat has a great deal more complexity than what we've seen from Oblivion.
Okay, I think you're maybe getting hung up on a single definition of "broken" rather than it's more colloquial incarnations. But, I do completely agree that it's involving and fun to have a hand in the success of any gameplay action. Interactivity should be the highest goal of a game designer.
But... the persuasion minigame is an unreasonable abstraction. It seems to me that a Speechcraft challenge ought to be reliant on the player's wits (always with regard to the player character's wits) and not the player's reflexes. A combat challenge presents challenges in timing and tactical choice, which are reasonably analogious to the action being abstracted. It would be unreasonable if the game presented the player with mathematical equations to solve as a resolution to combat.
I'd say the persuasion minigame is also poorly integrated. Compare it to combat or stealth, both of which are seamless and require minimal UI elements. Both combat and stealth are extensions of the basic game. Persuasion is an entirely different sub-game.
Why should the player limit themselves? Overcoming the limitations the game imposes upon you is challenge and conflict, and that's exactly what makes a game fun. Would a game be fun if combat resolution depended on what the player decided?
"I'm not going to win this fight, because that's not what my character would do"
Would a game be fun if the player arbitrarily awarded themselves money, loot, accolades, etc? The "Game" bit in Role Playing Game requires conflict and challenges for the player to overcome. Otherwise it's just roleplaying, and you don't need to spend $60 on the latest Xbox 360 game to roleplay.
I don't mean to single you out ANDS!, but there were a few points there I thought I'd give my 2 cents on.
Galsiah said:
Nailed it. Great stuff.
Wait, when NPCs buy stuff they don't pay for it?galsiah said:
I wonder, if there would be less complaints, if intrinsic prices of items were hidden. Currently you know how much the item costs and feel cheated when selling expensive items to merchants with limited gold. If you did not know how much the item should cost, you would only be able to infer approximate prices indirectly by looking at the price merchant asks for the item. Certainly, more balanced prices, artefact collectors, wealthy merchants would be better, but bethesda might have had less complaints, if players did not know how much they are losing.galsiah said:
Anyway, "Investment" in stores idea makes no fucking sense.
franc kaos
Liturgist
I don't think anyone on these boards hates Oblivion, they hate what the series has become.Daggerfall Developers - intro to manual said:
More intricate quests: Everything I've read leads me to believe the Assassins guild is the best - story wise, so there goes their design philosophy 'Be anyone, and do anything you want.' Basically you're gonna have to play an assassin to get the best experience out of the game. Where's the religious factions interesting and varied quest line?
Every computer game under the sun improves in graphics, it's the nature of computers being able to push more and more pixels round the screen - hardly a major selling point. If Daggerfall were released today it would sport the same kind of finery.Excrement said:
NPC Animations: You are joking, right? why no skeletal animations utilising Havok? why no location based damage to go with their more 'kinetic' fighting style? Their NPCs still slide around the game world rather like HL2 / Doom3 / Farcry / Gothic2 creatures don't.
RAI: An interesting concept that they've had to curtail (or butcher) because of unresolved conflicts. They can no longer steal off the player but will steal off other NPCs in plain sight!
Armour restrictions: I'd be more impressed if Unarmoured were actually still in...
Perks: Stolen from Gothic2. Less bugs, well, we'll see. Invest in merchants - is this for real?
So, what have we lost from Daggerfall: A truly huge (albeit fairly empty) world the size of Great Britain* / mounted combat / staves / levitation / interesting skill combinations (climbing, swimming, languages, etc) / the actual freedom to be something other than an armour wearing, death dealing, blade wielding 'Force To Be Reckoned With' / joining diametrically opposing factions / non linear main quest with more than one outcome / actual scary dungeons... and stuff
[/rant]
*imagine what the modders of the world could do with a virtual world that size? But from what I've read, Oblivion is going to suffer the same fate as MW, ie, the further out from 0,0 you go, the less stable the game engine will be.
I'll leave the last word to the Daggerfall designers.
It seems not. If they did pay for it, there would be no need for merchants to "respawn" gold. Merchants would gain gold by selling items that they'd bought from the player / other NPCs. Some of these sales could be abstracted - an NPC could be assumed to sell X amount of stock in a certain time. If this amount of stock weren't sold to specific NPCs, the shortfall could be sold to a central abstract store. Other NPCs could then buy from this store. [you could get a bit more complex by having one abstract store per area / city, then having them trade over time according to local demand...].Drain said:
Basically, if NPCs really did buy things, there wouldn't need to be any respawning. You'd just need a starting count for the number of each item type in the world, and the amount of gold in the world (these might need to depend on number of NPCs in the world / number of buildings / creatures / land area..., to account for modding). Once you'd done that, the items would just get passed around.
When any NPC / creature spawned he'd have a chance to have items / gold etc. based on the amount in the central "store" - or the store for that area... If there were only 2 swords of type X not yet allocated in the world, he'd have a very low chance of appearing with one of them. If there were 3000 swords of type Y not allocated, he'd have a high chance of appearing with one of those (all other factors being equal).
Items would get allocated to spawning NPCs / creatures, and would then circulate in the economy - possibly after the player loots the NPC's corpse - until a merchant sold them back to a central store, at which point they'd be available for reallocation.
A simple model of a realistic economy is not rocket science. I came up with the above in the time it took me to type it, and it's not too bad. You could design a decent system in a day, and it wouldn't take that long to implement it. The main issue is how much you abstract (central stores etc.) and how much you allow to occur through actual NPCs making purchaces from others / delivering items to other cities etc.
If most of it is kept abstract, but individual NPCs are allowed (but not required for the economy to function) to make actual sales between themselves, it wouldn't have many implications beyond the system itself. The NPCs could get on with things without necessarily needing to form baggage trains to supply far off outposts, or risk attacks from starving bandits...
Having little of the economy abstracted would be more interesting - e.g. the above baggage trains / banditry would happen. However, that's more of a Sim-Oblivion solution.
The abstract version would have been a good idea, I think, and would actually have helped game balance in many ways.
What we've got is a money-from-thin-air "economy", which will never seem real.
I agree with you on hiding the pricing of items too. This wouldn't solve Morrowind's / Oblivion's problems, but it'd help a little.
bryce777
Erudite
Twinfalls said:bryce777 said:
You're on fire today Bryce!
keep it up
There was a time I used to be polite and helpful on BBSes. Sounds like a troll, but it is very true. I think we have all put up with this nonsense for far too long....
It seems that not only merchant's money are replenished every day, but also his stock. Otherwise NPCs, who buy stuff and don't have to pay for it would just rob merchants naked. If NPCs really did buy things, they would need a source of income - either money should be generated in their pockets periodically or they should receive income in-kind that they can convert into money, such as ranger hunting deers and selling meat to merchants.galsiah said:
Actually, I've been thinking for some time about modding in more realistic economy on a very limited scale(in a small town), but I need to get acquainted with CS and RAI capabilities first.
In any case, the economy will need to have some degree of abstraction, such as abstract general stores, supply and demand, production rules to avoid killing FPS with all the scripting as well as to save modding time. I think it was MSFD, who said that RAI operates at different processing levels, depending on proximity to the player. NPCs probably won't be buying and selling stuff when the player is far away, so one would need some rules for stuff and money redistribution to make the player feel that something has been happening in his absence.
Lumpy
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 11, 2005
- Messages
- 8,525
Bryce, minor skills increase much slower than majors:
http://www.rpgcodex.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=10321
http://www.rpgcodex.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=10321
Rendelius
Liturgist
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2003
- Messages
- 164
To my understanding, the investment thing in Oblivion works like this:
A shopkeeper has 100 gold in cash every day.
If your mercantile skill is high enough, you can give him 100 gold - from that day on, he will have 200 gold in cash every day, allowing him to buy more from you.
A one time investment for a continous benefit.
A shopkeeper has 100 gold in cash every day.
If your mercantile skill is high enough, you can give him 100 gold - from that day on, he will have 200 gold in cash every day, allowing him to buy more from you.
A one time investment for a continous benefit.
Lumpy said:
the company decides if it wants to distribute dividends or not. It is not because you are a shareholder that you will get dividends, it's up to the management decision.
I did a post on the official forum about this issue.
so let's do some finance theory :
Equity Value (share values) = Corporate Value (depends on the profitability of the company) - Net Debt (Net Debt = Debt - Cash)
so if you give 200 to a merchant his Net Debt will decrease of 200 so the Equity Value of the merchant shares will increase of 200 without changing the Corporate Value.
So when a company issue new shares for 200$ its equity value increase of 200 and that's investing.
If a company issue shares it is because it needs some cash to invest in new projects (new plant, Buy-Over another company, buy any particular assets, increase manager payroll
....) and in Oblivion the merchant issue share only to be able to purchase you more expensive items For example : imagine a man who wants to create a new watch jewellry store, in order to sell watch to people he needs some equity to be able to puchase these watch jewellry to a manufacturer or a jobber in order to sell it with a margin and make profit otherwise with his poor sparings he will only be able to sell casio or swatch watches and not breguet, vacheron constantin, piaget watches, so what is he doing? he issues shares!
OK now you will tell me what is the interest of the man who invest in the jewellry?
- he can get dividends but it is up to the jewellry manager.(look at the formula above : to distribute dividends doesn't change the equity value at all)
- or he can hope that thanks to this investment the corporate value of the company will increase. so he gave 200$ in order to let the merchant buy items for 200$ and resell them for 500$ and make a 300$ profit so with this 200$ investment he creates 300$ corporate value.
Here we have the flaw of Oblivion, when you invest in a store you don't change the corporate value because we don't have any dynamic economy system.
so if you can't make a possible profit with this investment in Oblivion, what is the interest to invest in a store?
to be able to sell your merchandise!
Does this type of investment exists in real-life?
yeaah and that's what do mobs who want to clean, whitewaste their "money" or "assets".
so this investment is logical but it is very limited and it was an easy way to solve one of the big's morrowind flaws.
it's disapointing, it's quite a piece of shit but it's quite logical.
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