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长篇拆解:以用户体验的方式分析Artifact运行的经济系统

发布时间:2019-03-13 09:02:03 Tags:,,

长篇拆解:以用户体验的方式分析Artifact运行的经济系统

原作者:Lars Doucet 译者:Vivian Xue

最近我在玩Artifact,Valve新出的卡牌游戏,设计师是Richard Garfield,他也是《万智牌》的设计者。玩公测版有一段时间了,我想谈谈我对游戏本身及其饱受争议的经济系统的看法。

总的来说游戏有一些很棒的设计,但也有一些令人担忧的地方。(还有别花钱买卡包,尝试去爱上休闲幻影轮抽,不过这只是我的个人看法)

游戏本身——仅考虑玩法和设计——真的很棒。已经有一堆人写过关于游戏设计、玩法、入门指导等的文章,因此我就不再啰嗦,仅介绍一些基本情况。不同于我玩过的任何一款卡牌游戏,在Artifact中,玩家要打三路牌局,感觉就像在同时玩三个《万智牌》,只不过三条路线的规则各不相同。虽然存在优势卡组和随机性,但游戏玩法的深度使玩家能够靠技术战胜优势卡组(至少逆袭的几率比别的卡牌游戏高)。我只打Draft模式,截止到目前,我可以从输掉的每一场比赛中找出我所犯的明显错误,几乎每一场比赛都充满了刺激的反转。还有游戏的节奏比大部分卡牌游戏要快。

至于游戏的经济系统,它给我的感觉很复杂(不是单纯的消极的感觉)。它有一些很有趣也很棒的地方,但也存在某些重大的缺陷。

-游戏的交易市场令我着迷

-我担心那些容易上瘾和好概率的玩家。

-照目前的情况来看未来单张卡牌可能会变得很便宜。

-我对构筑模式持怀疑态度,因为玩家总得氪金(买门票或者高级卡牌获得优势),不然只能一直输下去。

-我担心会出现机器人和欺诈行为。

-我个人只打休闲幻影轮抽,如果想打构筑模式,我只玩“pauper”或“peasant”。

Valve一向喜欢把“市场经济”融入到游戏里,并在Steam上逐步建设配套的基础设施以支持这一想法——从《军团要塞》里的“hatconomy”和《反恐精英:全球攻势》皮肤,到Steam交易卡。当然,在利益的驱使下,这些年来由此引发的丑闻、机器人和欺诈现象也不少。

与《炉石传说》和《昆特牌》等竞争性的卡牌游戏不同,Artifact的入门费是20美金(炉石和昆特牌都是免费的,但玩家可使用游戏货币购买或合成卡牌)。这20美金包含了10个卡包(每包10张卡),五张入场券和两套入门卡组。

Artifact(from gamasutra.com)

Artifact(from gamasutra.com)

目前游戏有好几种模式,我将它们分成“风险”和“无风险”两类。

“风险”模式需要耗费一张门票,每张1美元(仅以5张/包出售)。“风险”模式指游戏中的专家模式,玩家要用同一套卡组打五场比赛,输掉两场将没收门票,赢三场及以上退还门票,赢四场奖励一个卡包,赢五场奖励两个卡包。专家构筑模式要求玩家使用拥有的卡牌,不过游戏还提供了另外两种专家轮抽模式——幻影和保牌。保牌模式下,玩家可留下抽取的卡牌,但必须付费购买它们,因此这种模式的入场费是5个卡包和一张入场券。幻影模式只消耗一张入场券,但玩家只能在游戏过程中使用抽取的卡牌,不能留下它们。

游戏中也有“无风险”的构筑模式和轮抽模式,此外还有一个单轮定胜负的全球匹配模式,为玩家随机匹配一名能力相当的对手。

那么,哪些地方需要花钱呢?让我们来数数:

-游戏的入门费用(20美元)

-玩构筑模式时(无论是风险类还是无风险类),除非你想一直输

-玩保牌模式时买卡包

-玩任何专家模式时买门票

目前玩家抱怨最多的地方是:

-20美元的入门费用

-只能花钱获得新卡牌

然而,这二者是有充分理由的。请注意,我所说的“有充分理由”并不一定意味着它们是“正确的”或“我认可”它们——我的意思是这些理由逻辑上是成立的,如果你认可它们所基于的假设。这些假设正是Valve的出发点,我猜想是:

-做一个包含市场的游戏,这是基本原则。

-保护市场,遏制欺诈行为

-确保每样东西的价值不跌为零

如果你同意以上,那么你就会对入场费和“不提供免费获得新卡牌的方式”改观。因为若你建立了一个真钱交易市场,却不设置入市门槛,那么该市场很快就会被无数欺诈者和机器人账户摧毁。如果获取新卡牌不需要付出成本,不仅会出现更多的欺诈者,而且普通玩家也会不停地获取和抛弃卡牌,最终导致所有东西变得一文不值。

当然,很多人对这两点没意见——他们批判的是Valve的基本原则——也就是他们觉得Valve根本就不应该建立一个卡牌市场。

无论这么做是好是坏,Valve是铁了心要这么干。因此,我们就顺着他们的想法,看看这样做会导致怎样的结果并探索各个角度。

熟悉我的“四种货币”系列的读者可能知道我接下来打算怎么做。

对新读者们我要解释一下,大多数对经济的讨论焦点都集中于一种“货币”——钱——而无视我们日常生活中所“花费”的其他同样有价值的东西。事实上,这些“货币”的种类是无限的,但我最想强调的四种“货币”是:

-$M(Money dollars):金钱货币。就是我们日常花费的金钱。

-$P(Pain-in-the-butt dollars):痛苦货币。任何使人们烦恼、痛苦或不便的事物都会“花费”这种货币。

-$T(Time dollars):时间货币。时间不是免费的。你拥有的时间是有限的,并且永远挣不回来。

-$I(Integrity dollars):道德货币。对于大多数人来说,当他们做了自认为“错误”的事情时都付出了一种实在、但无形的代价。即使是不道德的人也可能会担心触犯法律。因此,任何行为都有一个“道德成本”,衡量尺度有内疚、忧虑、法律风险等等。这非常主观并且因人而异——但是要知道,金钱、痛苦和时间也一样。

这些文章中最出名的一篇是《盗版游戏与四种货币》(Piracy and the four currencies),我在文章中主张开发者可以通过降低游戏的其它三种货币的价格,与“免费”的盗版游戏竞争,即提供更优质、迅速的服务($P,$T),让至少某些玩家感到下载正版游戏是正确、光荣的行为($I)。不是每个人都在意这些东西(否则盗版游戏就不会存在),但做好它们能够让人们心甘情愿地向开发商/发行商支付$M价格 ,而不是向盗版商支付$P+$T+$I价格。由此我们可以推出,那些像对待罪犯一样对待消费者的开发商/发行商既抬高了 $P+$T+$I 的价格,又收取$M,因此破坏了他们相对盗版商的竞争力。

那么,让我们用相同的方法来看Artifact。

Artifact中实际上有五种货币在起作用。我们需要加上$S,即“Skill dollars”(技术货币)。“花费”$S的事物要求你擅长某样东西。$S和$T是我们在日常工作中卖给老板的两种货币(还有一些$P,取决于你有多讨厌你的工作,以及$I,取决于工作的体面程度)。

我不打算把运气视为第六种货币,因为“花费”运气从理论上是不成立的,运气不在你的控制范围内。

因此,除了花真钱,你在Artifact中的“花钱”方式如下:

1. $S+$T,即靠赢得专家模式比赛

在专家模式中,如果你能三连胜,你将挣回门票。如果表现得更好一点,你可以赚卡包。这是有风险的。如果你出师不利,你的门票就没了。当然,门票很便宜,一张只要1美元。有些人担心公测版的匹配机制有水分,注定让人输。让我们研究一下这种说法,然后估算一下只靠技术和肝,你“免费”玩游戏的机会有多少。

根据官方FAQ,匹配的标准有两个:首先,你匹配到的玩家在专家模式中的当前胜率和你是一样的,其次,这些玩家的类型非常广泛,游戏将根据你的MMR进行匹配。Valve在推特上进一步解释道,这种匹配机制会估计双方玩家的技术水平以避免巨大差异,而不会试图人为地将胜率控制在50/50。在无人核实这点前,我们就姑且相信他们吧。

无论你的对手是什么人,你必须赢得60%的比赛才能不赚不亏,这意味着你必须一直比一般玩家玩得好才能无限地打下去。但即便你赢了60%的比赛,不幸输掉某场比赛还是可能会让你赔本。并且记住,随着你的胜率提高,你遇上的对手赢的场次也更多。因此“60%的胜率”不等于“技术超过60%的玩家”(同样是60%的胜率,对方的经验可能比你丰富)。这意味着你的技术必须高于更多玩家。为了说明这一点,到目前为止,我的幻影轮抽模式胜率大约50%,但我还没有持续地在输掉两场前赢三场以上。也就是我输掉第二场和第三场的次数远超过输掉第一场的次数。

总之,我使用简单的蒙特卡罗模拟法进行了一些测试,结果如下:

以上结果基于以下模型的100,000次迭代:

-以5张门票开始游戏

-重复打五场比赛,以固定的X%的胜率赢每一场比赛,每场花费一张票。

-收集奖励(3胜+1门票,4胜+1卡包,5胜+1卡包)

-继续这个过程,直到门票耗尽或者达到“无限”状态。

这里我为“无限”设置了一个截止点以避免脚本无限循环。我的计算方法是,通过观察过去的20场游戏的滑动平均值——如果进行了至少20场比赛且门票的数量在7张以上且在增加,我就认定在这种情况下玩家将无限赢下去,或者至少在输之前能赚很多。基于这个方法测算出来的平均场次和平均赢得卡包数量(打了星号)被压低了——如果不设置截点,这两个数字大概会高得多。

照这样看,什么条件下你才能无限打下去呢?这取决于你的想法。如果你想“让脚本无限循环”,你需要保持80.6%的胜率,才有50%几率无限打下去。

这是个很高的要求,你的胜率必须比一般的Artifact玩家高30.6%。但你不需要表现得这么好,事实上,就算你的胜率低于平均玩家也有办法一直打下去,不愁没门票。

实现这一点你需要保持至少46%的胜率。没错你输掉的比赛会比你赢的多,但平均来看你能打到第9场,并赚2个卡包。这可能听起来不怎么样,但游戏里20张卡可以换一张门票,每包有10张卡,因此如果你完全不在意卡包的内容,你可以用两包换一张门票。如果你聪明些,你会选择去市场上出售卡包,因为每包必出一张稀有卡。分析表明一个卡包的市场期望价值是2美元,可以买2张门票。因此,如果你从5张门票开始打,胜率是46%,最后能剩1-4张门票,取决于你的卡包在市场值多少钱。根据实验结果,如果你的胜率是62%,你可以把赢的卡包直接换成门票,不用在意它们在市场上能卖多少钱,并且最终你剩下的门票会和刚开始一样多。(再声明一次,这些数据基于长期计算出来的,并且是平均值——很多人可能一次就输光了所有)。

编辑于2018年3月12日上午9:38: 有时普通单卡的价格可能会低至0.03美元/张。因此如果你出售两个卡包,获得了4美元,你可以换133.33张卡,然后可以把它们换成6.67张门票。我想这种价格不会持续很长时间,但偶尔还是会发生的。如果卡的价格是0.04美元/张,你正好可以换5张门票。

并且再次声明,46%胜率和技术超过46%的玩家是完全不一样的概念,因为并不是每一场匹配都是公平的,通常来说第五场比赛要比第一场要难得多。虽然Valve声称游戏的匹配机制更可能让幸运者和其它幸运者对抗,而不是被专业玩家完虐,但大部分匹配仍然是根据玩家的胜率进行的。我不知道游戏应该对这一点做多少调整,但可以确定的是只有不到一半的玩家具备“无限”打下去的条件。

(我做了一些简单的模拟试图解释这一现象的本质,初步结果表明我的观点是正确的。如果你想看我的脚本内容,我已经把它放在GitHub上了。)

2. $T+$P,即变卖Steam交易卡

信不信由你,其实有一种“免费”获得Artifact卡牌的方式,即变卖Steam交易卡!

你在Steam游戏里氪过金吗?你的Steam仓库长得像上面那样吗?你在乎这些东西吗?看来这些东西值点钱。我个人不太在意什么“丰富个人资料页面”、徽章或者点数之类的东西,因此它们统统被我卖掉了。

当然这不是真正意义上的“免费”,因为这些交易卡必须通过花钱购买游戏或在F2P游戏里充钱才能获得,羊毛出在羊身上罢了。

Artifact市场和Steam交易市场的主要区别是,后者简直太难用了。在Artifact市场上,只要你的设备获得了授权,一周后你就可以在市场上批量出售卡牌,只要符合市场价它们几秒内就能被卖掉。第一笔交易需要授权设备,变卖高价值的卡牌需要单独确认,但仅此而已。

而对于Steam交易卡,你一次只能点击一张卡片,等待一个小部件加载完毕,查看市场价格,扣掉一分钱,输入出售金额,点击“确认”,关掉弹出窗口,10秒后手机端出现了一个窗口,再次点击确认。如果手机端出现bug(游戏邦注这是常有的事),你必须重复刷新确认页面。每一笔交易你都要做这件事,哪怕卖的东西只有1分钱。

当然你可以借助一些工具简化这个过程,但如果只在Steam上操作过程会很痛苦,除非你真的无事可做,否则大部分的Steam交易卡和booster packs都不值得你花费时间和金钱。但是如果你真的很想获得Artifact卡牌,这不失为一种方法。

事实上,这正是我担忧的事情之一。Steam交易机器人是“假游戏”危机的主要源头,Valve先后推出了greenlight和Steam Direct计划治理这个问题。所谓“假游戏”即一些 “开发者”在Steam上以超低的价格销售粗制滥造的“游戏”,增加Steam卡功能,然后注册大量机器人账户获得Steam卡,再在市场上售卖它们以赚取利润。正如我前面提到的,Valve已经采取了一定的打击措施,但Artifact市场开启了一个新的“套现”大门。过去,似乎只有少数想要丰富个人资料页面的用户才会去收集和兑换Steam卡,但如今Steam卡和Artifact卡牌可以互换了。建议Valve在这方面提高警惕,打击新式诈骗和利用手段。

3. 美元货币

当然,你依旧可以通过花真钱购买Artifact卡牌。如果你选择了这条路,我强烈建议你购买单张牌而不是卡包。

允许玩家买单张牌正是我喜爱Artifact的地方。比起肝上数十个小时收集合成卡牌(正如很多炉石和昆特牌玩家自豪地说“我一分钱都没花过”),或者以不合理的价格购买卡包以获得我想要的牌,我更愿意直接购买我想要的牌。

到了这个年纪,时间对我来说非常宝贵。收集合成是一种浪费时间的行为,而购买卡包不仅浪费钱,还是一种道德上的负担,因为我的运气一直不太好。也许你的观点和我不一样——我尊重你,每个人想法不一样。

因此当我想玩构筑模式时,我很高兴地发现买卡包不是唯一的氪金方式。在我看来,大部分卡牌会变得很便宜。当然好的稀有卡会贵一些,但它们的价格很有可能会降低。

Reddit网站的Artifact社区创建了一些非常有趣的脚本,请查看:

普通、罕见和稀有卡牌的平均价格,以及卡包的期望价值:

https://repl.it/@rmasurel/RoundedHospitableCode

截至本文撰写之时:

-普通:0.05美元

-罕见:0.14美元

-稀有:1.54美元

-卡包的期望价值:2.37美元

以单张购买的方式买齐所有卡牌的价格:

https://repl.it/repls/KindheartedBrownKeyboardmapping

-截至本文撰写之时的价格:289美元

除了简单的供求外,影响Artifact卡牌价格的因素还有以下四个:

-你可以用任意20张卡片兑换一张门票。

-无论何时你都可以花1.99美元买一个卡包。

-Valve对每笔交易收取手续费(买家付面值,卖方得到的收入低于支付价格)

-通过开卡包&赢得比赛获得的卡牌数量是无限的

20张卡牌兑换一张门票意味着任何一张卡的价格都不应低于0.05美元。考虑到Valve的手续费,单张卡牌的最低出售价格是0.03美元,还能赚0.01美元。如果单张卡的价格是0.03或0.04美元,那么通过购买卡牌兑换门票会比直接购买门票便宜得多,这会使单张卡牌的价格略微上涨。这些廉价卡牌得以保持一定的价格,并且将拉低稀有卡牌的价格,因为它们都能从卡包里被开出来。

另一方面,稀有卡(Axe、Kanna、Drow Ranger等等)的价格不会无限攀升。如果稀有卡的价格永远只升不降,而它们又有一定几率从卡包里被开出来,那么卡包的期望价值就会升高。这意味着鲸鱼玩家和投机者会开始大量开卡包——只要稀有卡价格一直那么高,根据平均法则他们最终总会开出稀有卡并从中获利。当然,市场不会长期保持稳定,所以每当我们看到稀有卡的价格上涨,我们应该意识到新的供应会紧随其后,从而拉低它们的价值。一旦卡包的期望价值低于1.99美元,买卖它们就没意义了。稀有卡牌供应降低,需求又会再次上升。

我强烈反对人们以投机为目的买卡包,即便你发现了一个期望价值峰值,你也有可能受到以下因素的影响:

1. Valve的交易手续费。它可能会完全抵消你的利润,即便在大幅降低的情况下。

2. 这会使人上瘾,难以停下来。无论你认为自己是多么“理性”,你都很有可能被套进去。这也是游戏让我最不喜欢的地方——变卖库存和购买卡包太容易。

3. 市场波动。当你发现期望价值峰值时,别人也发现了,并很快通过构建高频交易算法让steam账户进行自动买卖。因此如果真能赚钱,也早被那些专业的人赚走了,大概轮不到你。

4. 局部变差(Local variance)。即便期望价值很高,并且你也愿意做长线的买卖。局部变差有可能会使你最终耗尽Steam账户资金并要求你重新投入。

5. Steam Credit。一旦你的钱进了Steam钱包,它就永远出不来了。如果你计划用它购买游戏什么的话,没问题,但要知道它不是真正的钱。如果你往Steam账户充了15美元,它升到了50美元,从实际意义上看,你并不是赚了35美元,而是支出了15美元。但你可以用它给自己买点好东西?

总之,我预计卡牌价格最终会缓慢而稳定地下跌,因为无限的供应会打破期望价值的平衡。并且,我不认为每个交易者都能保持经济学上狭义的“理性”——有些人就是想打Meepo卡组,无论它有多弱,有些人直接按市场价出售卡牌并且永远打幻影轮抽,有些人无缘无故地报一些奇葩的价格。不同玩家的组合决定了市场的格局,强大的稀有卡牌的价格与想要玩顶级构筑卡牌的玩家的比例有很大关系。

4. 不花钱

你知道你还能做什么吗?不要在游戏里买任何东西,不要投入任何一个单位的时间、金钱、痛苦、道德或技术。我很幸运地从公测版开始玩这个游戏,但我必须得说,这个游戏的“无风险”模式让我很乐意花20美金入门。

我个人最喜欢的模式是休闲幻影轮抽。由于不玩构筑模式,我不必面对那些拥有超强卡组的氪金战士,而是在一个总体公平的竞争环境中游戏,通过抽卡牌组卡组,游戏也就取决于运气+技术。

如果轮抽和构筑对你来说太复杂,你可以试试新模式——武装号召(Call to Arms),从系统预设的卡组中选择一套,对手用的也是其中一套。这些卡组的强弱都差不多,因此输赢完全取决于技术。

当然,这些模式没有进阶系统或排名(不过Valve说他们有计划加入这些)。我知道它们对一些人来说很重要。但我不是这些人。对我来说,游戏的乐趣在于游戏本身,并且不谈经济系统,Artifact这个游戏本身设计真的非常好。我不需要用数字反映自己有多强,也不需要花钱向别人证明自己。20美元买这种制作的游戏真的很值得,并且休闲幻影轮抽模式足以让我一直愉快地打下去。

不过,希望Valve能在休闲幻影轮抽里添加1v1组队功能,这样我就可以和朋友而不是陌生人一起打游戏。

本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Earlier today I tried playing the market a little. You can read about that in this twitter thread if you want. The TL;DR is that there’s both fascinating stuff, and causes for concern. (Also don’t buy packs and learn to love casual phantom draft, but that’s just me)

So I was in the Artifact beta, so I decided to use my base 10 packs as an experiment in playing the Artifact market. My limitation: no putting in any of my own money, see how far it gets me.

— Lars Doucet (@larsiusprime) November 30, 2018

The game itself — just considering the gameplay and design — is great. A whole bunch of articles have been written about the game design, how it plays, how to get started, etc, so I won’t rehash that beyond basics: unlike every other card game I’ve played, it has three “lanes” of play at once — kinda like three simultaneous games of Magic: The Gathering, albeit with different rules. Even considering deck advantage and lots of small-scale RNG, the general consensus is the game has a higher skill ceiling, so good play can overcome a superior deck (at least more than you’d expect from other card games). I exclusively play draft, and every game I’ve lost so far came down to a clear mistake on my part, with most games being very close with lots of exciting reversals. It’s also faster-paced than most card games.

As for the economy, I have mixed feelings (and I don’t mean “actually just negative feelings,” as in common usage). There’s both interesting and good things here as well as major concerns and pitfalls.

Academically, I’m fascinated by the market dynamics.
Socially, I’m worried about people with addictive personalities and compulsive gambling disorders.
Economically, the current model will probably lead to pretty cheap singles in the long run.
Cynically, I’m skeptical of constructed CCG formats b/c you always have to shell out one way or another just to not lose all the time.
Cheapskately, there’s great game modes you can play free for ever.
Nervously, I worry about scamming and botting incentives.
Personally, I just play phantom draft casual, if I want constructed I’ll play the pauper or peasant formats (only commons, and only commons/uncommons, respectively).

Valve has always been fascinated by market economies, and they’ve steadily been building out infrastructure on Steam to support it — starting with the “hatconomy” in Team Fortress and CS:GO skins, to Steam Trading Cards. And of course, we’ve seen a fair share of scandals, bot farmers, and other scams over the years, drawn by the lure of financial incentive.

Unlike competing card games like Hearthstone and Gwent, Artifact costs $20 to play at all. (Hearthsone and Gwent are both free, but you can buy or grind for cards using in-game currency). This $20 buy in gets you 10 booster packs (each containing 10 cards each), five event tickets, and two preconstructed starter decks.

There are several game modes currently, which I will classify as “stakes” and “no stakes”.

“Stakes” requires spending one event ticket, which costs $1 each (you must buy them in packs of five). Typically this is for an “expert gauntlet” where you try to win up to five games with the same deck. Losing two will end the gauntlet and forfeit your ticket. Winning three gets your ticket back, four nets you that and a free pack, and five nets you your ticket and two packs. Playing expert constructed obviously requires that you own cards, but there’s also two draft modes — phantom and keeper. Keeper lets you keep the cards you draft, but you have to pay for them, so it costs 5 packs and a ticket to enter. Phantom draft just loans you the cards for the duration of the gauntlet, so it only costs a ticket.

There’s also “no stakes” versions of constructed gauntlet and phantom draft, as well as just a one-off casual constructed battle against a random matchmaking opponent at your skill level.

So, under what circumstances do you need to buy stuff to play Artifact? Let us count the ways:

To play the game at all ($20)
To play constructed (stakes or no stakes), unless you like losing a lot
To play keeper draft after you’ve run out of packs
To play any expert mode after you’ve run out of tickets

The two most common complaints about Artifact right now are:

There’s a $20 entrance fee
There should be a free way to “grind” for cards like in other card games

There’s valid arguments for the entrance fee and no grinding option, however. Note that by “valid arguments” I don’t necessarily mean “correct”, or “I agree” — I mean, arguments that are logically correct if you grant the assumptions they depend on. Those assumptions are Valve’s own goals and motivations, which I imagine are these:

Make a game with a marketplace because we want to do that as a first principle
Protect the market from scams
Make sure the value for everything doesn’t go to literally zero

Granted these assumptions, an entrance fee and “no free grinding” necessarily follow. Because if you have a real money market place with no entrance fee to gatekeep, that market will be instantly destroyed by bots and scams spinning up new accounts. And if it’s possible to grind for cards without putting stakes up, not only does that further incentivize scammers, but also just regular players will grind and dump cards until everything becomes worthless.

Plenty of people are okay with that, of course — their true criticism is aimed at Valve’s foundational assumption — ie, that there should even be a market for cards at all.

But for better and/or for worse, Valve is committed to a marketplace and they’re going to see this through. So let’s follow this through to it’s natural conclusions and explore all the angles.

Those of you familiar with my four currencies series can see where I’m going with this.

For those new to my blog, I get frustrated with how most economic discussions zero in myopically on just one “currency” — money — and neglect all the other equally valuable things we’re “spending” in our day to day lives. In truth there are an infinite number of these “currencies”, but the four I like to highlight most often are:

$M : Money dollars. Just regular money.
$P : Pain-in-the-butt dollars. Anything that’s annoying, painful, or inconvenient “costs” these.
$T : Time dollars. Minutes and hours, these aren’t free. You’re gifted a finite, unknown amount and you never get them back.
$I : Integrity dollars. There’s a real but intangible cost to most people for doing things they consider “wrong.” And even people with unconventional moral compasses might still worry about getting in trouble with the law. Therefore, actions may have an “integrity cost” measured in guilt/concern/legal-risk/etc. This is highly subjective and varies from person to person — but hey, so does the value of time, money, and pain tolerance.

The most famous of these articles is Piracy and the four currencies, where I assert that developers can compete with the “free” cost of piracy, by “selling” their game for lower amounts of the other three currencies, namely better and faster service ($P, $T), and at least for certain customers, not having the taint (or legal risk) or piracy ($I). Not everyone cares about those (or pirates wouldn’t exist), but enough do that they’ll gladly pay the developer/publisher’s $M price rather than the pirate’s $P+$T+$I price. It naturally follows that developers/publishers that treat customers like criminals are ratcheting up their $P+$T+$I price while also charging $M, destroying their competitiveness with pirates.

So let’s apply the same principles to Artifact.

Artifact actually has five currencies in play. We need to add $S, or Skill dollars. Something that “costs” $S requires you to be good at something. This, along with $T, is what we typically sell to our bosses when we’re working a day job (along with some $P depending on how much you hate your job, and $I, depending on how degrading it is).

For now I’m going to treat luck as its own thing rather than a sixth “currency” as you can’t really “spend” luck in any meaningful sense — it’s out of your control.

Anyways, here’s all the ways you can pay for stuff in Artifact, besides just money:

Skill dollars + Time dollars: Win gauntlets

If you can win thrice before losing twice in expert gauntlets, you break even on ticket costs. If you do better, you start earning packs. This is risky. If you start slipping, you burn tickets. Granted, tickets are pretty cheap at $1 apiece. There was some concern during the beta that Valve was juicing the match making so that you’re doomed to lose. Let’s investigate those claims, then evaluate what your chances actually are of paying your way with nothing but skill and time.

According to the FAQ match making is done based on two criteria: first, you are matched against opponents with the same win rate in their current gauntlet as you (so if you’re 2 for 3, you’ll face someone else who also has two wins and one loss), and within that pool of players you’ll face someone of “loosely” matched skill. Subsequent clarification on twitter has Valve attesting that this matchmaking simply rejects wild differences in measured skill, rather than trying to artifically nudge win rates towards 50/50. For now we’ll just have to take their word on that unless someone has an independent means of verification.

Regardless of who you play, you’ll need to win 60% of your gauntlet games to break even, which means you’re going to have to be a consistently better than average player to “go infinite.” But even if you can win 60% of the time, a bad run can still cut you short. And keep in mind that as you go further in the gauntlet, you’re facing people who have won more games, so “60% gauntlet game win rate” does not mean you have to be at the “60% skill percentile.” Likely it means you have to be much higher. To give this a little context, I’ve won about 50% of my casual phantom draft gauntlet games so far, but I’ve yet to consistently win more than three times before losing twice. IE, I’ve lost far more of my second and third matches than I have my first.

In any case, I ran some tests using a simple monte carlo simulation that you can try yourself here:

This is based on 100,000 iterations of the following program:

Start with 5 tickets
Repeatedly play gauntlets of five games each, win each game at a flat X% win rate, spend 1 ticket for each gauntlet
Collect rewards (+1 ticket at 3 wins, +1 pack at 4 wins, +1 pack at 5 wins)
Keep going until we’re out of tickets or we hit “infinite”.

“Infinite” here marks a hard cutoff just so the script doesn’t crash from infinite loops. I calculate it by looking at the rolling average of the last twenty gauntlets — if we have gone for at least twenty gauntlets and the number of tickets is increasing and we have more than 7 tickets, I cut it off there and assume you’ll either keep winning forever, or at least have a big haul before eventually going bust. This means that the average gauntlets played / average packs won are depressed for the figures marked with an asterisk — if I had no cutoff they would probably be much higher.

So how good do you really have to be to “go infinite?” Well it depends on what you mean. If you mean “make my script crash from an infinite loop”, you need to have an 80.6% flat win rate to have at least a 50% chance of it happening.

That’s a tall order — you need a 30.6% better flat winrate than everyone else playing Artifact to pull that off, adjusted for the matchmaking ramp. But you don’t have to be quite that good. In fact, you can be worse than average in terms of flat win rate and, in the long run, keep playing expert gauntlets without running out of tickets.

The minimum threshold is probably a 46% flat winrate. You’ll lose more games than you win, but on average you’ll break even or better long enough to play 9 gauntlets on average, and net about 2 packs. That doesn’t sound great, but Artifact lets you recycle cards for tickets at a rate of 20 cards per ticket. There’s 10 cards in each pack, so if you completely ignore the contents, you can dust 2 packs for a ticket. You’d probably be smarter to sell them on the market as you’re guaranteed a rare in each pack, and analysis suggests the expected value of a pack should hover around two bucks, and a ticket only costs one. So at 46% flat winrate you can start with 5 tickets, and end up with between 1 and 4 from your packs, depending on market value. At 62% flat winrate the model suggests you can dust your winnings regardless of market value and always end up with as many tickets as you started with. (Again, this is the long run, and it’s an average — local variance probably means plenty of people will just go bust off a single attempt to run until their tickets go out).

EDIT 12/3/2018 9:38 AM: Looks like commodity commons sometimes get as low as $0.03 to purchase. So if you can get $4.00 for selling 2 packs, at $0.03/card you can convert that to 133.33 “ticket fodder” cards which can be recycled for 6.67 tickets. I don’t expect such price dips to last particularly long, but they seem to happen now and then. At $0.04/card you can get exactly 5 tickets worth of cards.

And again, there’s a world of difference between a flat 46% winrate and the 46th skill percentile, because not all matches are created equal — the fifth battle in a gauntlet is going to be way tougher than the first, on average. Even though Valve claims that the MMR will make it slightly more likely for lucky schlubs to face off against other lucky schlubs rather than being exclusively stomped by experts, the selection effect of pitting people with the same gauntlet win rate against each other will dominate. I don’t know how much to adjust things by there, but it seems safe to assume less than half the players have what it takes to “go infinite.”

(I did some fancier simulations that try to account for the inherent matchmaking ramp of gauntlets, and got some preliminary results that suggest my intuition here was correct. If you want a look at my scripts, I’ve put them up on Github.)

Time dollars + Pain-in-the-butt dollars: Liquidate your steam trading cards

Believe it or not, there is actually a “”"free”"” way to “”"grind”"” for Artifact cards!

Have you put any money into Steam games ever? Does your Steam inventory look like this? Do you care about any of this stuff? Turns out I had several bucks worth of stuff in here. I don’t care about “leveling up my steam profile” or badges or points or whatever, so off to the market it goes.

Granted it’s not exactly “”"free”"” because only paid games, and F2P games you’ve spent money in, will drop trading cards. So money has to have entered the equation somewhere in your history.

The chief difference between the Artifact market and the generic Steam trading card market is that the latter is a tremendous pain to use. With the Artifact market, as long as you’ve had your mobile authenticator authorized for seven days, you can list cards on the market in bulk, at the market rate most likely to sell them immediately, and they’re liquidated in seconds. You need one mobile authentication for the first sale, as well as individual confirmations for high value cards, but that’s it.

For Steam Trading cards, you need to click on each one individually, wait for the little widget popup to load, inspect the market price, subtract one cent from it, punch in the number, hit “confirm”, dismiss a popup, and then go to your mobile authenticator and hit “confirm” for that transaction when it pops up 10 seconds later. Unless the mobile app bugs out, which it does all the time, and you have to refresh the confirmation page. You have to do this for every transaction, even to sell something worth $0.01.

Apparently there’s some tools that make this stuff easier, but just using the Steam interface itself it’s a pain, and unless you have literally nothing better to do with your time, most steam trading cards and booster packs aren’t worth enough to make it worth your time and money. But, if you have a backlog of cards, and you really feel the urge to “grind” for Artifact cards, you can totally do this.

In fact, this is one of my points of concern. Steam trading card bots were a major exploit vector behind the “fake games” crisis with greenlight and Steam Direct. Basically, fly-by-night “developers” would put super low-effort “games” on Steam, price them as low as possible, add trading cards, then mass-buy them with bot accounts to grind for cards, which they then sold on the market at a profit. Valve has clamped down on this practice now as I mentioned earlier, but the Artifact market opens a new financial incentive for “cashing out.” Before, the only thing that gave trading cards inherent value was the few random people on Steam who seem to care about blinging out their Steam profile by collecting and redeeming them. But now that economy is connected, however indirectly, to Artifact cards, because both are fungible commodities. Valve would be advised to be on high alert for new and exotic scams and exploits here.

Money dollars

Of course, you can still just buy your Artifact cards using plain old fashioned money. If you go this route, I highly recommend you do it by purchasing singles rather than opening packs (you can see the twitter thread for a deep dive on that — see if you can catch the part where I accidentally overestimate the EV of a booster pack by linking the wrong script!).

This is the part I actually kind of like about Artifact. If given the choice of grinding for hours and hours and hours (as many are proud to proclaim about Gwent and Hearthstone — “I never paid a cent!”) to earn your cards, or buying booster packs at inflated prices and hoping to get the cards I want, I would much rather just buy exactly the cards I want.

At this stage of my life, my time is super valuable. Grinding is a waste of my precious time, and opening packs is a waste of my money and an assault on my integrity because I’ve got a bad compulsive streak. Maybe you’re in a different place — I respect that, to each their own.

So as disturbed as I am by booster packs in Artifact, I love that they aren’t the only way to spend money if I ever want to play constructed. And for what it’s worth, it looks like most cards are going to be pretty cheap. Granted, the good rares are a bit pricey, but there’s good reason to expect those prices to come down.

The reddit.com/r/artifact community has put together some really interesting scripts, check these out:

Average price of common, uncommon, and rares, and expected value of a booster pack

As of this writing:
Common: $0.05
Uncommon: $0.14
Rare: $1.54
EV of a pack: $2.37
Cost to buy a full set of every card as singles

As of this writing: $289

There are four “hard” forces beyond simple supply and demand that control the evolution of Artifact card prices.

You can dust any 20 cards for an event ticket
You can buy a booster pack at any time for $1.99
Valve charges a fee for every transaction (buyer pays face value, seller gets less than the purchase price)
There is no limit to how many cards can enter the market through opening booster packs & winning gauntlets

Dusting cards for tickets implies that no card should ever be worth much less than $0.05 to buy. Because of Valve’s fee, the lowest you can practically list for and still make $0.01 is $0.03. If commodity cards are available for $0.03 or $0.04, it becomes cheaper to buy these up and dust them for tickets than to buy tickets themselves, so this should tug the price slighly up from the bottom. Cheap cards holding some value serves to depress the ceiling of rare prices because both are found in a booster pack.

On the other end, there’s a limit to how expensive good rare cards (Axe, Kanna, Drow Ranger, etc) can get. If Axe & Kanna were to climb in price forever, for instance, there’s some chance of spawning those cards in a pack, which brings up the average expected value of a pack. This means that it becomes profitable for whales and speculators to start mass-opening packs — as long as good rare cards stay expensive, the law of averages means they’ll eventually draw those big cards and they’ll make a profit on their openings. Of course, the market doesn’t stay stable for long, so as soon as we see rare prices climb, we should expect a rush of new supply to follow, depressing the value of these big cards. Once the EV of a pack goes below the $1.99 purchase price, it no longer makes sense to buy them just to play the market, supply dries up, and demand starts to rise again.

I strongly advise against opening packs in an attempt to “play the market” because even if you spot a spike in EV, you’re likely to be bitten by a few things:

Valve’s trading fee. This can eliminate your profit margin entirely, even if you hit the big drops.
It’s pretty addictive and compulsive. It’s easy to get sucked in no matter how “rational” you think you’re being. This is the part of it I honestly like the least. It’s so easy and frictionless to liquidate your inventory and buy packs over and over.
Market fluctuation. If you saw an EV spike, all the other folks did too, and it won’t take long until people rig up high-frequency trading algorithms that autopilot their steam accounts for them. If there’s real money to be made here, it’s going to be made by the professionals, and that’s probably not you.
Local variance. Even if you have a high EV, and you’re willing to play the long game, local variation in random outcomes is probably going to eventually deplete your Steam credit and require you to put new money into your wallet.
Steam Credit. Once money enters the Steam ecosystem, it can never leave. So if you’re already planning on buying games or whatever with that money, fine, but you should not treat Steam credit as actual money. If you spin $15 into $50 of Steam credit, but you temporarily bottomed out enough to have to put $15 of new money into Steam to get there, in terms of real money out of your pocket you’re not up $35, you’re down $15. But enjoy the Steam credit and buy yourself something nice?

All said, I would expect a slow but steady drop in card prices as the tug of infinite potential supply outweighs the balance of EV. Also, I doubt every trader is going to be “rational” in the economically narrow sense of the term — somebody wants to run a Meepo deck no matter how underpowered he is in the meta, some people will instantly sell all their cards at market rate and play phantom draft forever, some people will make baffling and terrible market offers for no good reason. The exact mix of players is what determines the shape of the market, with the price of powerful rare cards most closely tied to what % of players want to play top tier constructed decks.

NO dollars

You know what else you can do? NOT buy anything, and don’t shell out a single unit of time, money, pain-in-the-butt, integrity, OR skill. I happened to luck into getting the game from the beta, but I have to say I’d gladly pay $20 just for the base “no stakes” modes.

My personal favorite is casual phantom draft. Not playing constructed means I’m not going up against super powerful decks played by the most obsessive players, and I’m on a more or less level playing field just trying to put together a deck out of whatever I draw, with the game coming down to my drafting + playing skills.

Or if drafting / deck construction is too much, play the current featured gauntlet — “Call to Arms”, and just pick a preconstructed deck. You’re guaranteed to go against one of the other preconstructed decks, and they’re all at about the same power level. So here the winner is totally down to skill.

Of course, there’s no progression system or rankings or whatever (yet, Valve says they plan on adding some as their top priority). I get this is very important for some people. I am not one of them. For me the joy of a game is in the game itself, and I find Artifact — economy aside — to be very well designed indeed. I don’t need a number to tell me how good I am, and I don’t need to drop a lot of money to prove myself to anyone, either. $20 is pretty cheap for a game with this kind of production values, and I’m happy to just play casual phantom draft forever.

Please, though, Valve. Add a casual 1v1 phantom draft option. So I can play my friends rather than strangers.(source:Gamasutra

 


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