We Can Fix That with Data

Over two years ago, Raph Koster published some Star Wars Galaxies economic metrics on the game’s official website. The post disappeared some time ago, and I was pleased to find it online today.

I’m always interested in learning about other MMO developers’ use of metrics, considering that most everybody I talk to just looks at me funny when I ask what they’re tracking. Back then, SOE was at the forefront of innovation. (A year later, I developed a system for Shadowbane, and while it was pretty cool, it was just a designer hack. It’s an unfortunate commentary on our industry that it was probably the best thing going at its time.)

Even though SWG’s metrics system was the best thing going at its own time, Jeff Freeman revealed that it wasn’t perfect in a comment at Terra Nova. When Ed Castronova noted that “300 accounts (out of 5,000 or so, I am guessing) have 95 percent of the wealth,” Jeff told us that “we continue to track money in cancelled and inactive accounts.” That’s a really basic, easily avoidable mistake.

Their metrics don’t seem to account for the value of goods to players, either. I don’t know that anybody’s tracking that right now, outside of the World of Warcraft Auctioneer mod. (Go read that Auctioneer link; it’s a Wiki article written by somebody who actually knows what he’s talking about. Very cool.)

If you have basic trade logs (and you should, because they’re really important for verifying customer service claims), it’s not hard to track the value of goods. Let’s assume that you have a basic item game, where items don’t really have unique stats. A Vorpal Sword of Bunny-Smashing is just like every other Vorpal Sword of Bunny-Smashing and so on.

Do a query on your logs database (if your logs aren’t in a database, do whatever it takes to get them into one — they’re only about a million times easier to use that way). Select trade transactions and group by item received, and print whatever was traded for them. Stick it into Excel and have some fun.

Of course, players often trade items for items, rather than items for cash. Items for cash is easy. Items for other items means that you need to know what the relative cash value for that item is, and you can’t rely on the item’s “value” stat. In some cases, you can — Shadowbane players would use a high-cash-value item to stand in for cash during trades to avoid a gold limit, for example. In other cases, I might trade my Vorpal Sword of Bunny-Smashing for an Uber Mace of Crab Destruction, and we need to determine the player value for the Uber Mace of Crab Destruction first. We can’t programmatically distinguish between the two.

To make our first iteration easier, let’s filter our query for cases where items were exchanged solely for cash. Graph it. It’s probably a bell curve. Save your median as the average value of that item, and do the query again without that where clause. Substitute the items-traded-for with the cash values we just determined.

Now you know how much items are worth to players. Hooray! Save that data and track it over time. There are probably some surprises — hey, that item has a typo in its stats, so it’s worth a lot more than it should be. Fix your bugs. Have fun. Enjoy being more informed than any of your contemporaries.