<story><title>“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs</title><url>https://paulbutler.org/2021/play-to-earn-and-bullshit-jobs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>58x14</author><text>In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we&amp;#x27;re talking several hundred hours minimum.&lt;p&gt;At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in-game currency, gold pieces or GP. It was something like $10 to 1M GP. I could chop enough magic logs in about 4-6 hours to make $10.&lt;p&gt;I had a breakthrough. What if I wrote a macro to record my cursor and clicks during my route from the &amp;#x27;bank&amp;#x27; (where you can deposit any amount of any material) to the nearby respawning magic tree forest?&lt;p&gt;Weeks went by and I had passive income. Runescape eventually introduced the Grand Exchange, a literal in-game stock market that allowed power users like me to sell much larger quantities of certain items instantly, across all Runescape servers (referred to as Worlds) simultaneously. This required a standardized pricing mechanism, like an order book, where prices of any item would fluctuate based on buy and sell orders.&lt;p&gt;Suddenly, I now could see a +-10% change on the value of my digital assets, on which my passive income was built.&lt;p&gt;I could go on; Runescape in fact taught me much about economics. What&amp;#x27;s extraordinary is selling Runescape gold led me to Bitcoin, and I&amp;#x27;ve watched cryptocurrency for nearly a decade, seeing trends from a MMO propagate throughout the world. It seems human nature to innovate and stagnate, and the more immediate our collective feedback loops, the quicker these cycles are.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danShumway</author><text>I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of Runescape was bad; people were willing to pay $10 of real money to remove 4-6 hours of gameplay from the game.&lt;p&gt;Well frankly, that&amp;#x27;s 4-6 hours of gameplay should never have been in the game in the first place. Players should not feel bored playing your game for that long, certainly not bored enough to pay money to get out of it.&lt;p&gt;I have no doubt that learning how to exploit these systems was really fun for people, because learning how to exploit systems and build macros and read economic signals and avoid detection from a company is genuinely really interesting, fascinating work. It&amp;#x27;s just a shame that the only way Runescape could (inadvertently) enable that experience for people was to make a crappy grind process for an even larger portion of their playerbase.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape&amp;#x27;s designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase.&lt;p&gt;And I think that perspective is worth keeping when we look at play-to-earn games. These are boring games, and some people are doing some fun economics stuff on top of them. That doesn&amp;#x27;t make the core gameplay any less boring though, and the fun economics stuff only works because a lot of other players are having a miserable time with the intended mechanics. I don&amp;#x27;t like praising a design ethos that says that a nontrivial portion of your players will be bored and will pay someone else to play the game for them.</text></comment>
<story><title>“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs</title><url>https://paulbutler.org/2021/play-to-earn-and-bullshit-jobs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>58x14</author><text>In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we&amp;#x27;re talking several hundred hours minimum.&lt;p&gt;At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in-game currency, gold pieces or GP. It was something like $10 to 1M GP. I could chop enough magic logs in about 4-6 hours to make $10.&lt;p&gt;I had a breakthrough. What if I wrote a macro to record my cursor and clicks during my route from the &amp;#x27;bank&amp;#x27; (where you can deposit any amount of any material) to the nearby respawning magic tree forest?&lt;p&gt;Weeks went by and I had passive income. Runescape eventually introduced the Grand Exchange, a literal in-game stock market that allowed power users like me to sell much larger quantities of certain items instantly, across all Runescape servers (referred to as Worlds) simultaneously. This required a standardized pricing mechanism, like an order book, where prices of any item would fluctuate based on buy and sell orders.&lt;p&gt;Suddenly, I now could see a +-10% change on the value of my digital assets, on which my passive income was built.&lt;p&gt;I could go on; Runescape in fact taught me much about economics. What&amp;#x27;s extraordinary is selling Runescape gold led me to Bitcoin, and I&amp;#x27;ve watched cryptocurrency for nearly a decade, seeing trends from a MMO propagate throughout the world. It seems human nature to innovate and stagnate, and the more immediate our collective feedback loops, the quicker these cycles are.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rapind</author><text>In my early 20s I played an MMO called Asherons Call. I discovered a vendor in one high level area that would sell bows for less than a specific vendor in a low level area would buy them, netting you a small margin per bow.&lt;p&gt;Being a programmer I wrote a script that used two different teleport skills (lifestone and portal recall I think?) and a bit of movement and clicking based on pixel (Color) matching to deal with latency, tweaking it over time, and started printing in game money. I would come home from work to a backpack full of D notes (unit of currency I adapted my script to convert).&lt;p&gt;Then I would sell these D notes on eBay. Did this for a few months. First month I made over 7k USD (I shit you not). 2nd month about 3.5k, maybe 1k third month, so basically the market collapsed and I moved on (to other fun exploits… once you’ve been bitten by the exploit bug…).&lt;p&gt;In retrospect I regret it.&lt;p&gt;I’m a total hypocrite saying this, but I think this sort of crap has ruined MMOs, and gotten far more advanced and efficient over the years.&lt;p&gt;The fun I had in AC before I started doing this stuff is something I wish more people could experience, but I suspect has been lost.</text></comment>