Ivo Jahrumble
Dominant
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2007
- Posts
- 383
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- Porto, Portugal
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- The Great Pretenders
- Avatar Name
- Ivo Jahrumble Rocha
On the follow up of this poll, https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/...ou-think-of-current-state-of-the-game.295690/, as promised I wil lay down the suggestion and rationale behind it.
With a poll with high participation number and somewhat clear results of 60%/40% in favour that the economy is running too low it only fair I keep up with what I said.
This will be a wall of text, so get your coffee ready if interested
"EL Plan" is a pratical plan of how to achieve a higher level of Entropy in the economy of a game that is called Entropia Universe.
In order to understand "El Plan" you will need first to understand what is Entropia and how can we apply that law to the game.
Entropia:
"Entropy is a measure of chaos in a system. Because it is much more dynamic than other more rigid metrics like accuracy or even mean squared error, using flavors of entropy to optimize algorithms from decision trees to deep neural networks has shown to increase speed and performance." - So we can use flavours of Entropy to tune a decision tree.
"High entropy means that the data are spread out as much as possible while low entropy means that the data are nearly all concentrated on one value. If the entropy is low, therefore, we have high information content and are most likely to come up with a strong rule." - Ok, so when looking at Entropia Universe it seems to be flowing in a low Entropy state.
"A closed system can only reach maximum entropy at equilibrium" -Awesome! Equilibrium is great for a competitive enviornment.
"At equilibrium a closed system can still continuously undergo sub-microscopic changes no matter how long the system is in equilibrium." - Mindblown!! There will still be change in prices at maximum equilibium.
"So think of ‘entropy’ as a number that is related to the ‘number of possible ways in which we can arrange a particular configuration’" -Yeah I know. Its in the developers hands to tune the game as they feel better
History lesson:
Running the system on High or Low entropy is in the fingertips of the developers. How? By connecting OR disconnecting the economy.
A quick re run of how Entropy flowed in the economy through times and how far it was connected and has been disconnected almost completely with the changes over time.
2006 - 2011 - As soon as L items came to life surpassing stats of the basic unL models we were given at the beginning of times by the developers, The Universe went into a High Entropy state where demand was huge because all options and needs where connected to crafting. There was a major flaw in this system. hunting loot was not well balanced to keep the flow going so the economic cycle ended there. The obvious displeasure of hunters after a few years of this, along with the FOMA lvl13 amps exploit, some shady behaviours of some guys exploiting the desire to gamble of some and a world economical crisis killed this model. - This is still an example of a High entropy state. Already at the time I was asking why the hell there is survey probes in amps bps. To keep prices down they said. Ok, why not blau, copp iron etc? Humm...Already here you could see the managment of Entropy by devs..
2012- to present - The answer to the issues at hand the answer was Explosive Projectiles blueprints and loot 2.0. MindArk delivered exactly what the players requested. Cheaper guns and cheaper craft for gamblers. And put in a system that returns to the players on average 95%back. All this came at the cost of disconnecting a very, very big part of the economys turnovers. Now there is no demand of resources for guns or for crafters to gamble. Everyone can use TT/repair to hunt/craft. They promoted tiering up as an economy. But that is an optional path. Not a path of need. - And what we live in is a Low Entropy state. Everything is so well defined that most if not all players are on the same bag of unL as the only viable META. This obviously create a decaying economy over time and we are where we are.
2023 - Nanos change - The Nanos change was the first step to correcting the low Entropy state the game runs on at the moment. It tied up the big turnover of EP crafters with the generic loot production of the other two activities, hunting and mining. But this still leaves one way for player to play only against the TT/repair and not engage in the economy. And thats where all the players are at the moment. Can´t blame them. But can´t also blame MA if the playerbase does not request for this change if they don´t do anything. The way it is setup is better for them as there is harldy any markup production due to no paths of need. Only options and one way to play from tt/repair.
A small mythbust:
Demand comes in many shapes and colors but for simplicity sake lets use only the 2 main differences in demand:
- Demand can come from a need. It becomes fundamental to move forward. Food, water, a weapon to hunt a finder to mine.
- Demand also comes from desire. It becomes optional. I want a better watch. I want a quicker car. I want to tier up my weapon.
These two are as different as day and night as far as making the game move forward and we preety much only have options at the moment. Not fundamental needs.
Finally "El Plan", the execution:
Removing completly unL from game is unthinkable for many reasons. Way to many to even name a few.
However it is undiniable that this creates an issue on the economy when all or most of the players use the same option. The game becomes unbalanced.
The main things to adress would then be:
This is the big one and most meaningfull change:
- Repair of unL items comes from Explosive Projectiles. Use a repair terminal and pay with EPs. I was thinking about a BP for a repair coin. Could be. But at this stage it seems like a perfect solution right in front of our eyes. Links the two biggest turnovers in game in a cyclical game.
What this aims to achieve:
- Control the population of unL. Meaning if all players go unL it will create an inbalance in price of EP, that the ones with the least efficiency items will be motivated to use L gear.
- Sets a universal price for usage of unL gear making the stats more relevant. This price is what will motivate others to buy L gear setting the wheels in motion of the whole economy.
- Ubadupaubers will still use they ubadupa 90%effi guns at the lowest price in market to play the game. So no harm done there either.
Other stuff to take care is:
- Change all the BPs that still have TT contribution to use nanocubes instead. Talking about survey probes in mining amp bps, empty enhancer comps and such stuff.
- Create a path of upgrade for the old lower efficiency gear so those users that get priced out of using the t7 items they currently own receive fair treatment from this change and can maintain the value of their investments.
- Edit all the blades as in this economy they become obsolete if they only use decay and dont use ammo
Possible ways of doing this:
- At T10 one last tier upgrade fo the the gun to go from 55% to 60% effi.
- A set of bps that requires several of the old items to craft the adj/modified version of it.
To sum it all up.
This plan comes from this belief.
"In a game that returns 95% back, perfect equilibrium should return more examples of 107% in items/resources that are needed in high demand."
I belileve that equilibrium is not possible as the game runs in a low Entropy state decided by the developers and as such players are being skimmed of potential markup from their peds cycled under current conditions.
With this change there is only ammo burn coming from TT. It should achieve the middle ground of Entropy we are looking for.
No player can use an item or craft a BP bypassing the economic game. And this is fundamental as I see it.
Equilibrium and High entropy will bring the METAs into murky waters making the game much more fun. not just mine pyrite and hunt outputs.
We can all agree that the base prices are to low. We know the developers can disconnect or connect the economy as they please.
The math behind this is really simple: If price of loot goes up, item price goes up.
It is on our side to say if we want something different or not. MA is confortable as it is..
I think we have a good 2 or 3 years until UE5 comes out. So it will be a desert of ideas already until then. As someone who was around when we the 1st engine migration was done, UE5 will be no more that a bugged reskin for a couple more years after launch with no new features. This is what I expect but I would love to be surprised.
With a poll with high participation number and somewhat clear results of 60%/40% in favour that the economy is running too low it only fair I keep up with what I said.
This will be a wall of text, so get your coffee ready if interested
"EL Plan" is a pratical plan of how to achieve a higher level of Entropy in the economy of a game that is called Entropia Universe.
In order to understand "El Plan" you will need first to understand what is Entropia and how can we apply that law to the game.
Entropia:
"Entropy is a measure of chaos in a system. Because it is much more dynamic than other more rigid metrics like accuracy or even mean squared error, using flavors of entropy to optimize algorithms from decision trees to deep neural networks has shown to increase speed and performance." - So we can use flavours of Entropy to tune a decision tree.
"High entropy means that the data are spread out as much as possible while low entropy means that the data are nearly all concentrated on one value. If the entropy is low, therefore, we have high information content and are most likely to come up with a strong rule." - Ok, so when looking at Entropia Universe it seems to be flowing in a low Entropy state.
"A closed system can only reach maximum entropy at equilibrium" -Awesome! Equilibrium is great for a competitive enviornment.
"At equilibrium a closed system can still continuously undergo sub-microscopic changes no matter how long the system is in equilibrium." - Mindblown!! There will still be change in prices at maximum equilibium.
"So think of ‘entropy’ as a number that is related to the ‘number of possible ways in which we can arrange a particular configuration’" -Yeah I know. Its in the developers hands to tune the game as they feel better
History lesson:
Running the system on High or Low entropy is in the fingertips of the developers. How? By connecting OR disconnecting the economy.
A quick re run of how Entropy flowed in the economy through times and how far it was connected and has been disconnected almost completely with the changes over time.
2006 - 2011 - As soon as L items came to life surpassing stats of the basic unL models we were given at the beginning of times by the developers, The Universe went into a High Entropy state where demand was huge because all options and needs where connected to crafting. There was a major flaw in this system. hunting loot was not well balanced to keep the flow going so the economic cycle ended there. The obvious displeasure of hunters after a few years of this, along with the FOMA lvl13 amps exploit, some shady behaviours of some guys exploiting the desire to gamble of some and a world economical crisis killed this model. - This is still an example of a High entropy state. Already at the time I was asking why the hell there is survey probes in amps bps. To keep prices down they said. Ok, why not blau, copp iron etc? Humm...Already here you could see the managment of Entropy by devs..
2012- to present - The answer to the issues at hand the answer was Explosive Projectiles blueprints and loot 2.0. MindArk delivered exactly what the players requested. Cheaper guns and cheaper craft for gamblers. And put in a system that returns to the players on average 95%back. All this came at the cost of disconnecting a very, very big part of the economys turnovers. Now there is no demand of resources for guns or for crafters to gamble. Everyone can use TT/repair to hunt/craft. They promoted tiering up as an economy. But that is an optional path. Not a path of need. - And what we live in is a Low Entropy state. Everything is so well defined that most if not all players are on the same bag of unL as the only viable META. This obviously create a decaying economy over time and we are where we are.
2023 - Nanos change - The Nanos change was the first step to correcting the low Entropy state the game runs on at the moment. It tied up the big turnover of EP crafters with the generic loot production of the other two activities, hunting and mining. But this still leaves one way for player to play only against the TT/repair and not engage in the economy. And thats where all the players are at the moment. Can´t blame them. But can´t also blame MA if the playerbase does not request for this change if they don´t do anything. The way it is setup is better for them as there is harldy any markup production due to no paths of need. Only options and one way to play from tt/repair.
A small mythbust:
Demand comes in many shapes and colors but for simplicity sake lets use only the 2 main differences in demand:
- Demand can come from a need. It becomes fundamental to move forward. Food, water, a weapon to hunt a finder to mine.
- Demand also comes from desire. It becomes optional. I want a better watch. I want a quicker car. I want to tier up my weapon.
These two are as different as day and night as far as making the game move forward and we preety much only have options at the moment. Not fundamental needs.
Finally "El Plan", the execution:
Removing completly unL from game is unthinkable for many reasons. Way to many to even name a few.
However it is undiniable that this creates an issue on the economy when all or most of the players use the same option. The game becomes unbalanced.
The main things to adress would then be:
This is the big one and most meaningfull change:
- Repair of unL items comes from Explosive Projectiles. Use a repair terminal and pay with EPs. I was thinking about a BP for a repair coin. Could be. But at this stage it seems like a perfect solution right in front of our eyes. Links the two biggest turnovers in game in a cyclical game.
What this aims to achieve:
- Control the population of unL. Meaning if all players go unL it will create an inbalance in price of EP, that the ones with the least efficiency items will be motivated to use L gear.
- Sets a universal price for usage of unL gear making the stats more relevant. This price is what will motivate others to buy L gear setting the wheels in motion of the whole economy.
- Ubadupaubers will still use they ubadupa 90%effi guns at the lowest price in market to play the game. So no harm done there either.
Other stuff to take care is:
- Change all the BPs that still have TT contribution to use nanocubes instead. Talking about survey probes in mining amp bps, empty enhancer comps and such stuff.
- Create a path of upgrade for the old lower efficiency gear so those users that get priced out of using the t7 items they currently own receive fair treatment from this change and can maintain the value of their investments.
- Edit all the blades as in this economy they become obsolete if they only use decay and dont use ammo
Possible ways of doing this:
- At T10 one last tier upgrade fo the the gun to go from 55% to 60% effi.
- A set of bps that requires several of the old items to craft the adj/modified version of it.
To sum it all up.
This plan comes from this belief.
"In a game that returns 95% back, perfect equilibrium should return more examples of 107% in items/resources that are needed in high demand."
I belileve that equilibrium is not possible as the game runs in a low Entropy state decided by the developers and as such players are being skimmed of potential markup from their peds cycled under current conditions.
With this change there is only ammo burn coming from TT. It should achieve the middle ground of Entropy we are looking for.
No player can use an item or craft a BP bypassing the economic game. And this is fundamental as I see it.
Equilibrium and High entropy will bring the METAs into murky waters making the game much more fun. not just mine pyrite and hunt outputs.
We can all agree that the base prices are to low. We know the developers can disconnect or connect the economy as they please.
The math behind this is really simple: If price of loot goes up, item price goes up.
It is on our side to say if we want something different or not. MA is confortable as it is..
I think we have a good 2 or 3 years until UE5 comes out. So it will be a desert of ideas already until then. As someone who was around when we the 1st engine migration was done, UE5 will be no more that a bugged reskin for a couple more years after launch with no new features. This is what I expect but I would love to be surprised.
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