作者：Ramin Shokrizade

1997年，随着《网络创世纪》的出现，游戏规模变得越来越大。1999年，《无尽的任务》的发行也再次提升了游戏规模。现在，我们能够在虚拟空间里进行更复杂的社交互动，并谋得比“现实世界”中回报更高的虚拟职业。

而在2003年，随着CCP的《星战前夜》以及暴雪的《魔兽世界》的发行，产业中的“大规模”被带到了最顶峰，并且它们也仍在不断扩大着。随后出现了件奇怪的事。

在“大规模”的竞技台上，竞争者们眼前真的是一条万劫不复之路。在损失了几百万美元之后，投资者们开始感到恐慌。但也有些例外，如Cryptic Studio的《英雄之城》以及Square Enix的《最终幻想XI》。而那些认为必须比“大规模还大”的竞争者们总是会在市场上遭遇巨大的打击。

City of Heroes(from gamerzines)

我将在此分享过去几年里所发现的一个秘密。并不是关于大规模。

而是关于权益。

游戏中权益的作用

当你为房子安上了门锁后，它不仅能够保护你的生活，同时也能够保护你的财产。这两者对你来说都具有价值，并且将维系着你的一生。这便是权益。当你寻求警察的保护时，你也是希望他们保护同样的权益，或者其它权益。我们的社会便是建立在这一基础之上，并且关于我们是如何学到“我的”这一词。

在游戏中我们经常将其称为“持久性”，但是在本文的例子中我们将谈论的是权益。当我到达一款游戏的第10个关卡后，退出，并在隔天再次回到第10个关卡，那么我的权益便被保存着。我的一切努力都没有白费。如果我使用100枚硬币退出游戏，并在隔天再次回到其中，那么我的权益便是受到了保护。

这也是为什么“服务器回退”让人如此害怕。这并不是说重新玩游戏中的部分环节会让玩家感到痛苦。《英雄联盟》中的玩家每天都需要反复玩相同的内容。回退中所失去的内容便是权益中所获取的。这才是真正让玩家感到痛苦的地方。

同样地，如果你是虚拟世界中唯一拥有马的人，那么这匹马便会因为这种稀缺性而充满价值。如果你在隔天再次登录游戏并发现因为漏洞等原因，现在已经有500个人拥有马了，那么你的马便会失去所有价值。因此，如果我的资产并未出现任何变化，我便会损失巨大的权益。我将会因此而感到沮丧并最终选择退出游戏！

权益是如何遭到破坏

如果我在游戏中花了3个月时间获得第一匹马，但是在几天后却发现还有500名玩家也拥有马，我会怎么想？但是这并不是归因于自身的漏洞，而是因为游戏主人决定让玩家花钱能够获得马。现在马就变得不再特殊了，而我的权益也遭到了破坏。我为此沮丧不已。更重要的是，我在游戏中的自信心完全被打压掉了，因为我知道它们将不再能够保护我的努力。这就像是叫警察前来帮忙，但是他们到达的时候只是跟你做了个鬼脸！我知道这种情况真正出现于世界中的某个地方，但是你肯定不希望在自己的游戏空间看到它！

因此所有销售游戏内容的微交易都会破坏权益。这适用于游戏中任何“可赚取利益”之处，不管是关卡，道具，还是能力。

当游戏不再新鲜时，开发团队便会进行新的扩展，添加新内容去赚取利益。这是件好事。但是当同样的拓展让之前的内容变得不再有价值时，这便会破坏权益。如果我在游戏中花费了1000个小时才获得最厉害的宝剑，但是新扩展却让玩家能在100个小时内获得更更厉害的宝剑，我的权益便被摧毁了。尽管添加新内容能够有效地改变游戏，但是这种改变却具有危险性，设计师有时候不会意识到，扩展内容可能会彻底扼杀游戏。

权益在游戏中遭到破坏的另一种情况便是将资源置于“层面”上。如果你的“最终游戏”道具只能使用最后层面的组件，你便破坏了所有较低层面资源的权益。这会让玩家感到郁闷。在过去10年，这种设计被反复应用于《无尽的任务》，《魔兽世界》以及《激战2》等游戏中，尽管设计团队中包含经济学家这样的角色。

所以你该如何避免这些错误而创造玩家经济？

成功案例及其原因

在《星战前夜》中，最常见的资源便是氚。它永远不会过时，你只要随着游戏的发展而获得更多氚便可。你的氚永远不会失去价值，所以即使10年过后你的游戏资产也仍然受到保护。在这款游戏中，权益丧失的主要原因是过程的扩展，但这却是最受欢迎的权益丧失方法。这也是为什么《星战前夜》能在过去10年始终深受玩家喜爱。

而关于这款游戏唯一的缺陷则在于玩家很乐意每年在游戏中投入数千美元，但是CCP却从未执行盈利模式去收集这些钱。他们尝试着添加微交易，但是却因为上述所提到的原因而未能有效执行。 PLEX（游戏邦注：《星战前夜》中的物品，可以用于支付游戏时间，代替传统的支付方式）便是CCP在微交易层面中一次不错的尝试，但却是以牺牲其它收益源为代价去添加新的收益源。

另外一款做得不错的游戏便是《魔兽世界》，因为在2003年它是带着疲软的经济而发行。那为什么说它做得不错呢？因为疲软总比缺少经济好，这是那时候的竞争所必要的内容（《星战前夜》则是例外）。游戏中包含了精心设计的拍卖行以及中核玩家锻造系统，推动着MMORPG游戏类型向前迈出了一大步。玩家每天都会坐在拍卖行里，并忽视其它游戏内容，对于他们来说这便是游戏最突出的一部分。

疲软的经济以及暴雪不能完全从玩家的消费需求中盈利都意味着第三方将参与进来，并从《魔兽世界》中获得盈利。就像IGE吸走了本该属于暴雪的上百万资金。看着这些钱就这么白白流走并错失了无数与广告商合作的机会真的让我大受打击，从而让我坚定了找出对抗措施的决心。

而这对于产业的影响却不同。在缺少这些措施的时候，各大公司只会想办法模仿《魔兽世界》（浪费了许多钱），采取微交易盈利模式，或完全停止创造“大规模”游戏。

就像我之前所提到的，微交易将破坏权益并缩短游戏产品的寿命。《魔兽世界》所使用的无限订阅模式将鼓励玩家“尽情地游戏”，从而引起玩家快速耗尽内容而再次缩短了它们的寿命。频繁地添加修补程序或进行扩展并不具有真正的实用性，除非你拥有巨大的玩家基础。因为《魔兽世界》能够在不面对真正竞争的前提下基于多种扩展而进行长时间迭代，所以这将让内容变得更加巨大，并且因为新产品是使用相同的机制所以不会具有多大挑战性。

“大规模”游戏

急于放弃“大规模”游戏并不是源于技术或预算限制。而是因为盈利模式从系统上限制了游戏的规模。但是我却很喜欢大规模游戏。真正大规模游戏总是能够吸引我掏出钱包。并且并不是只有我是这么想的。因此在2005年期间，我一直致力于虚拟经济领域中删除这些系统规模限制。

同时“小规模”游戏也具有一些亮点，它们围绕着订阅和微交易业务模式的限制因素而尝试了各种各样的方法。特别是《坦克世界》和《英雄联盟》都通过创造性杂交而避免了“付钱获胜”的陷阱和危险。

关于这两款游戏，我更支持《坦克世界》所使用的模式，即让用户可以贯穿坦克等级树而创造自己的权益。而《英雄联盟》倒是不担心游戏内容销售会损害权益，因为在这款游戏设计中很少涉及有关权益的内容。尽管《英雄联盟》的游戏设计很简单，并降低了休闲玩家的准入门槛，但它同时限制了盈利深度，并打开了竞争大门。在我看来《坦克世界》设计的最大限制元素之一便是缺少性别中立性。

说道竞争，我不禁想到这周刚发行的《Marvel Heroes》。它从本质上来看很像《暗黑破坏神2》或《暗黑破坏神3》，带有各种各样的超级英雄角色，并使用了与《英雄联盟》类似的盈利模式。这是一款大规模游戏，并允许玩家基于关卡和工具形式去创造权益，虽然从虚拟经济角度来看这是一款很简单的游戏，但却比《英雄联盟》和《坦克世界》有深度多了。它并未依赖于玩家对抗玩家模式（这会赶走某些玩家），但却能够根据玩家的喜好带给他们单人或合作游戏体验。

除了这些游戏，我也很喜欢《激战2》的规模。其游戏玩法非常有趣，但就像我之前所说的，它错误地将权益理念应用于每一个奖励机制中，从而拖累了游戏玩法，生命周期以及最终盈利。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

The Barrier to Big

by Ramin Shokrizade

In 1997 the size of games got much bigger with the introduction of Ultima Online. In 1999 the scope of games increased again dramatically with the release of Everquest. Now it was possible to have complex social interactions in virtual space, and even have virtual careers that paid more than “real world” careers (this is me, “Lee”, in 2000: http://articles.latimes.com/2000/apr/20/news/mn-21581).

Then the top got completely blown off of gaming with the introduction of two games in 2003, CCP’s EVE Online and Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. Both of these games ended up being the pinnacle of “Big” in our industry and they just kept getting bigger. Then a strange thing happened.

Nothing happened.

In the arena of “big”, it became a veritable Damnation Alley with competitors crashing and burning right and left. Millions of dollars were lost and investors became panicked. There were a few standouts that held their own, like Cryptic Studio’s (NCSoft’s) City of Heroes and Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XI. Competitors thinking they had to be “bigger than Big” died horrible and gruesome deaths in the marketplace. I could give names, but I don’t think several pages of literally billions of dollars of lost investments is necessary here.

I’m going to let you in on a secret I have been sitting on for years now. It was never about Big.

It was about Equity.

The Role of Equity in Gaming

When you put a lock on the door to your house, it is not just to protect your life, but to protect your belongings. Both have value to you that has built up over your lifetime. This is equity. When you call the police and they come to help you, it is to protect that same equity and possibly the equity of others. This is how our society is built, and how we are trained from the moment we learn the word “mine”.

We often describe this in games as “persistence”, but what we are always talking about in these cases is equity. When I level up to L10 in a game, log out, and come back the next day at L10, my equity has been preserved. None of my efforts were lost. If I log out with 100 coin, and come back the next day, again my equity is protected.

This is why the dreaded “server rollback” is so feared. It is not that the idea of having to replay part of the game again is so painful to the player. Players in League of Legends play the same content over and over and over again every day. What is lost in a rollback is the equity earned. This is what makes it so painful.

Similarly, if you are the only one that owns a horse in a virtual world, that horse has tremendous value due to its scarcity. If you log in the next day and due to a bug or exploit now 500 people have horses, the value of your horse has now dropped to almost nothing. I explain this in more detail in my 2010 Mona Lisa and the Alchemist paper. Thus, without anything having been done to my assets, I have now experienced a catastrophic loss of equity. I’m going to be upset! I may even rage quit.

How We Undermine Equity

What if I spent three months earning the first horse in a game, and then a few days later I found out that 500 other players now had horses. But this was not due to a bug per se, this was because the game host decided that horses were cool and that players would pay real money for them. Again I describe this in Mona Lisa. Now horses are not cool anymore, and my equity has been destroyed. I’m upset! More importantly, I have now lost confidence in the game world and it’s hosts because I know they will not protect my efforts. This is like calling the cops (the people you pay to protect you) and having them mug you when they arrive! I know this really happens in some parts of the world but you don’t want it happening in your game space.

Thus all microtransactions that sell game content also destroy equity. This applies to anything normally “earned” in a game, whether it is levels, items, abilities or titles.

When a game gets stale and the dev team puts out a new expansion, the addition of new things to earn gives new equity opportunities. This is a good thing. When that same expansion makes previously valuable content worthless, this destroys equity. If it took me 1000 hours to get the top sword in the game, and a new expansion comes out that gives you a better sword in 100 hours, I have just lost equity. While adding new content is usually a welcome change to a game, this dynamic can be treacherous and designers unaware of this can actually kill off their game with expansion content.

Another way we destroy equity in games is by putting resources in “tiers”. If your “end game” craftable items only use last tier components, then you have destroyed the equity of all lower tier resources by design. This makes players upset. This design was copied from Everquest into World of Warcraft and even into Guild Wars 2 ten years later despite the presence of an economist embedded in the design team.

So how do you make a player economy without all these mistakes? I’m glad you asked!

Games That Got it Right, and Why

In EVE Online the lowest and most common resource in the game is tritium. It never becomes obsolete, you just need more of it as the game progresses. Your tritium never loses value, and thus even ten years later your equity in that game is preserved. The expansion process is the primary source of equity loss in that game, but this is generally the most welcome sort of equity loss. This proper game design is the reason why EVE is the only game in the world that can boast that it has just gotten bigger over the last ten years.

It’s all about the equity, baby.

The only sad thing about this game is that the players are so motivated that they will spend thousands of dollars a year on the game, but CCP never implemented a monetization model that would collect those dollars. They tried to add microtransactions, and that did not go over too well due to the aforementioned reasons. PLEX was another attempt to add a microtransaction layer that went over better, but had the effect of adding one revenue source (new players buying PLEX) at the expense of another revenue source (the players most motivated to spend now played for free).

Another game that got it right was World of Warcraft because in 2003 it launched with a weak economy. Why is that good? Because weak was a lot better than no economy, which is essentially what the competition had at the time (EVE being the one exception). The inclusion of an excellently designed auction house, and mediocre player crafting system, was a huge step forward for the MMORPG genre. Players would literally just sit at the auction house every day, ignoring the rest of the game because the AH was, for them, the best part of the game.

The weak economy, and again Blizzard’s inability to fully monetize spending demand, meant that third parties came in and monetized WoW after the fact. IGE in particular created quite a nuisance while extracting billions of dollars that could have went to Blizzard. Seeing all that money go down the drain, and having all of those opportunists in the game environment ruining chat with their advertisements was traumatic enough for me that it caused me to become an applied virtual economist bent on finding countermeasures.

The effect on the industry was a bit different. In the absence of these countermeasures, companies either tried to copy WoW (a total waste of money), or adopted microtransaction monetization models (to cut out the middle man), or just stopped making “Big” games altogether.

Microtransactions, as I’ve already mentioned, destroy equity and thus rapidly reduce the lifespan of game products. Unlimited subscription models, as WoW used, encourage “binge play” which again reduces product lifespan by causing players to run out of content quickly. The solution, frequent patches and expansions, is not very practical unless you already have a big player base. Because WoW was allowed to iterate for so long with multiple expansions without real competition, this made it a content behemoth that new products just could not hope to challenge using the same mechanisms.

“Big” Flight

The rush to abandon “Big” games was not due to technical or even budget constraints. It was due to monetization model constraints that acted as a systemic limit on the size of games. I like BIG games, I can’t deny (Sir Mix-A-Lot reference intended). The thought of a really really BIG game makes me sweat and break out my wallet reflexively. I know I’m not alone in this regard. Thus everything I’ve done since 2005 in the virtual economy space has been focused on removing these systemic size constraints.

In the meantime there have been bright spots in the form of “smaller” games that are experimenting with ways around the limitations of both subscription and microtransaction business models. In particular, World of Tanks and League of Legends have avoided both traps and the perils of “pay to win” through creative hybridization, as described in my Supremacy Goods paper (2012).

Of the two, I favor the model used in World of Tanks because it allows the user to build equity as they progress through the tank tier tree. League of Legends does not worry so much about equity losses in their sales of game content because there is little in the way of equity in the design. While the simplicity of the LoL design lowers the barrier to entry for casual players, it also puts constraints on how deeply it can be monetized and also opens the doorway to competition. One of the biggest limitations of the WoT design, in my eyes, is the lack of gender neutrality in the game.

Speaking of competition, I could not help but notice that Marvel Heroes is coming out this week. The game is essentially Diablo 2/3 with a wide variety of superhero avatars that are sold using an almost direct rip of the LoL monetization model. The game is bigger and allows equity building in the form of both levels and gear, so while still simple from a virtual economy perspective, it is much deeper than either LoL or WoT. It does not rely on PvP, which may turn off some users, but will likely pick up just as many or more that would prefer a single player or cooperative gameplay experience.

Beyond these titles, I did take momentary excitement at the size of Guild Wars 2. The gameplay was amazing, but as I discussed in my brief review of its economy, the concept of equity was poorly applied in almost every reward mechanism, rendering the economy a drag on gameplay, lifespan, and ultimately monetization.(source:gamasutra)