Recent content by kaeldragor

Well, I feel foolish for missing that in the release/patch notes, but now I know it isn't a bug.  Thank you both.

Locking.

Thank you for this - I'm another of the folks from "back in the day" and I wasn't aware either.

akuthia said:

And again, that 800 isn't going to support a single developer, as a paycheck, let alone a team.

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But remember, the $800 here is not only hypothetical, it refers to the contributor of the specific entertainment item, per item, per month, assuming a mere 1000 users use the offering 10% of the time they spent being entertained that month.  Popular offerings will gather more than 10% of 1000.  It'll be more like 20-30%, and one would hope a higher number.  And not every offering is by a team.  The more popular ones will likely be group efforts, allowing a natural balance.

Take that a step further and realize that with the proper tools in place, that team could continue providing new and better offerings if their current batch isn't pulling in enough money.

I'm not saying it's perfect, but I'm not sure what you'd suggest changing.  Do you think you could ask for a higher portion of the subscription for the contributors?  Or a higher subscription altogether?  I think $15 is a pretty good mid-range model.

The publisher has their own team, so I don't know that, for example, $5 per subscription is enough to hold up their end, but a lot depends on how many users.


To use the example, let's say ten offerings each pull an equal amount of time from the users.  And let's say there are 10,000 or 100,000 users.  That's $8,000 or $80,000 for the team per month, per offering.  I know: simple math, be look at what that means:

The financial side revolves pretty obviously on how much the subscription is and how much proportionately goes to the contributor and how much to the publisher to keep the user provided with the entertainment and fresh content they want to use.

That formula can be tweaked in any number of ways.  But the influential part is getting more subscriptions.  And the draw there is going to be a model that not only appeals to a wide group of people, but also encourages them to buy into the creative process.  Convince them that they too can make some money.  That pulls them in.  As the "market share" increases, so too will the payout, which leads to larger teams and better offerings, pulling in more money.


*shrug*

I think it is just a matter of getting it going with reasonable amounts to start with so that it can pick up momentum.  If you get the right pieces in place, it will offer the rewards to the contributors on its own, just by growing as a potential earner.


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EDIT:

I re-read that and think I over complicated it.  Maybe also sounded antagonistic.  Didn't mean to.  Sorry for both.

Let me try a simpler method:  Take the obvious subscription example from the MMORPG world.  They have multiple development teams.  Assume for a moment that they only had 1000 users, not 11,000,000.  Big assumption, but let's start small.

Let us then use the analogy of one of the teams being in charge with a particular area and its quests.  See that as a game in and of itself.  They only manage to get people to spend 10% of their time there.  What does that tell you about the time and effort put into that offering?

Maybe they just weren't creative, or couldn't tell what people would spend time on, so they don't make money.  Same is true of any business.  The failing in this scenario isn't the system, it's that they only got 10% of the share.

I think the only issue here is whether you can build a system and community that causes the potential contributor teams less concern about finding their niche.  After all - you aren't only going to have 1000 users.  And a full development team that only gets 10% of someone's entertainment time in a month... well maybe they aren't providing the right kind of content.

In case anyone else is thinking of trying it, the more animations mods seemed to work at first if you like those animations, but then I realized they were screwing up the achievement poses.    Can't have that.  Removing the minimods fixed it retroactively, which I also found interesting.

I think it's possible I'm misunderstanding your question, so I'll be general:

Villages re-enable recruitment every 3 days or so.  The option won't show up if you have negative relations with that village beyond a certain point.  But Village recruits are at the bottom of the ladder generally, until you get a really good relation with them.

What "warriors" in particular do you want to recruit?

akuthia said:

The problem i see with this model that I see is people that "over consume". Your example cited a person playing 2 games equally, but what happens when that $8 gets divded equally among 10 servings (say, playing 10 different games for an hour or two each)? that amounts to just $.80 per developer. What happens if a person doesnt use the service at all for a month? does all of the money go to the publisher?does it get divided amongst the last known data for the person?

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Thing is, if 1000 people played that way, it's still $800 per developer.


Also, if they don't use the service, I think the publisher would of course keep the money, but would be wise spending it (or their time) determining how to coax that user back... $15 would be ignored by some, but not all.  So you have a newsletter highlighting popular games / mods / music videos, etc.

You wouldn't want to spend it based on data more than a full month out of sync, or you wouldn't be able to spot trends, or truly reward the innovators.  And if that user cancels the next month, you just rewarded a developer that wasn't keeping someone entertained.


Lots of systems out there are based on TINY rewards for "eyeballs" / "views" / "plays", etc.  It all adds up.  At one point YouTube offered fractions of a cent to certain accounts per view.  Millions of views obviously added up.  Unfortunately that increased spam.

Which leads to an aspect of this that hasn't really been discussed: how do you maintain an environment of both quality and quantity without discouraging new entries and without making it hard for the diamonds in the rough to be discovered?


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Added note that I forgot in my previous comment:

One thought I had was regarding the rising popularity of console games, and the ... not shallow, but shall we say... more-mass-consumption-friendly style of gaming they tend to specialize in.  PC games won't die, not really ever, despite everyone panicking every few years about it.  PCs will remain versatile, but I do foresee a future in which the only way for them to financially compete with consoles for the hoi polloi's entertainment time is to remain powerful and versatile.

A community-style entertainment offering in my opinion would represent the probable eventual future of that.  People are slowly pushing their companies toward online authentication and Steam-like offerings more and more.  It addresses piracy concerns and offers a portal for interacting with customers and selling them new offerings.


((Side thought: One advantage of a shared-widgets / community-tools structure is that if intelligently done, installs would be skeletal.  They'd be calling many of the same resources, after all.))

Well I came late to the discussion here, but your latest post SD is remarkably similar to the outline I had in my head as you guided and nudged the conversation along to its current point.

I'll pretend for a moment I beat you to the punch:

The Industrial Revolution was about many things, but machining is possibly the most important concept that it... well, didn't create certainly, but validated and proved the power of.  Machining is, for the uninitiated, the ability to swap out parts, either to repair or improve.

I work for a software company.  I worked for a different one before that; you get the idea.  In my current company and position it has been given the term "scalability".  In the context of this discussion it is what both a) keeps costs low and b) improves the speed and reliability with which fresh content can evolve and be offered.

Our NZ office has recently begun focusing on something that frankly isn't as common as it should be in software: machining all the pieces (or widgets) that all the developers and contributors can then use to create ANYTHING THEY WANT.  Map editors and campaign editors and their ilk are fine (but both over-complicated and too limited) examples of this.

I was going to say that if you give 10,000 people all the parts they need to make their own entertainment for free, which you will then rent from them if you think it is cool, most all of them will give it a try.  And that's part of the key - you sell the entertainment of other people's offerings, then give them the tools and basis to craft their own.  Maybe they even end up using their own 40% of the time.  Maybe you even offer them discounts on their next month subscription for hitting certain popularity levels.  After all, you want to encourage them to keep being a part of the success.  (This is an old trick of showbiz of course, giving someone another roll of the dice instead of part of their winnings, but remember if people are having fun this is perfectly acceptable.)

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Interesting thought to base compensation on time invested, but you might consider that some people would spend 1 hour... 50% isn't a huge insight into popularity.  Of course, higher numbers of users and better averages give you a better control and method for divvying up the booty as it were, but you might consider a lower limit for "duds".


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Ichon: Good points, but something occurs to me - based on my experience, people familiar with the engine would also be motivated to offer their own creations - this doesn't circumvent their potential control/distribution concerns, but does give them an edge, and possibly more motivation to keep things rolling and alive.  That may assuage that particular issue.

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To go back to the mention of MMORPGs and the multiplayer side of Warband... I'm sure many of us remember Armagan's initial stance on whether multiplayer would ever be part of Mount and Blade.  The reaction was firm... and then suddenly with Warband (and Paradox) that tune changed... or it seemed sudden.  But as many of you point out, there is a compromise in all success (except lottery or the apocalypse) and I'm sure that the major decision maker was the amount of clamoring for the multiplayer option, more than being truly convinced.  Not saying anyone sold out or caved - just saying the tune changed.

Add to that idea the fact that as SD noted, MMORPGs hire as many consultants and psychologists as they do tech support and you understand that finding that niche market that provides sustainability is the most important factor in bringing in money.

What does the obvious choice for discussion on addictive MMORPGs do to sustain millions of subscribers each month?  They create a grinding system that provides visual rewards, bragging rights, camaraderie, competition and a bit of mindless fun.  People go back because they feel obliged, because they have a task to accomplish.  Because there is a demand from other players for their participation.

The beauty of user-generated content is that if you get the ball rolling and offer a juicy enough carrot, the content will ALWAYS match what the mass market for the entertainment wants.  Within a month or two of reaction time, given powerful and adaptable-enough tools.


And that takes you back to the tools.  In order to "be worth it" it needs to be easy.  So that's somewhere right in the middle of WHAT TO DO and HOW TO DO IT.

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Lastly, Selvhan - you hit possibly the coolest part here: discovery.  Web 2.0 isn't just a gimmick where the company creates an interface and lets the users do the work - it is a new way of sharing what we care about with other people.  And when people gobble it up, the creators of that content should be encouraged to share more.  It's why we tell friends about games, movie, music, books and people that we enjoy.  We, as humans, and in general, crave the shared experience as I've taken to saying it.

We build relationships on shared interests, we tell our friends they "MUST" see that movie we loved, because it binds us closer together.

And any place that offers a magical combination:

*Give people a gathering and sharing place
*show them how to create content
*show them that the content can be ANYTHING THEY WANT
*Reward them for sharing cool stuff that other people enjoyed
*Keep the prices reasonable
*provide tools and training on the content creation (this is the hardest part)
*and then get a few thousand highly vocal people addicted to this awesome place...

...is going to make a killing.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Bravo on a great release folks.  I've not caught up on everything since 2.5, but from the little play I've had I have been having a blast.

Two questions:

Firstly, this is hinted at, but I'm missing something.  I'm a Silvermist addict - what are the new reqs?  Used to be money, gem, Pendor as culture.

Secondly, if another faction hires a special army as a merc force and that force is defeated, how is re-spawning handled?  Oswald was working for Ravenstern and wandered too close to the Three Seers.

Fawzia dokhtar-i-Sanjar said:

We did not put any nasty Easter Eggs like the ones in Oblivion in PoP 3.  If you find them, you will be very happy, not killed, captured or anything like that.  In PoP, you find things like gems, fancy and valuable armor, lovely chests of valuable loot, even sometimes troops, if you crack the right egg.

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Got a Knight of Eventide first night playing with 3.0

That was lovely and a true heartache when he perished in battle.

SnakeStrike10 said:

Surely you mean a Quailis egg, Ms. Sanjar?

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Much better actually.  I've found some INCREDIBLE items as part of treasure maps.  Lordly armors worth 85k+ definitely fund a campaign.

Reverend L. Lamb said:

Also note that the Intelligence Missions and the Nations they target change accordong to who holds the town they mention now.

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Good to know - I'll update the list to indicate those towns next chance I get then.

Maldenic said:

Wow, the irony of that Rolf mission

It is interesting that these objections occur within the optimal companions set-ups (ie. no one hating eachother). Makes things less perfectly calm.

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Yeah, if I wanted to, I could probably come up with a small group with NO conflicts, but it certainly isn't as straightforward as before.

Vladimir_Marduk said:

This should be stickied in the warbands forum.

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I posted it here because of the documentation-like nature of the post.  I can see that it belongs in the Guildhall, but so do most of the other threads currently in the Apprentice Guild, based on game version alone.  If a moderator wants to move it, that's fine, I just want people needing basic information to be able to find it.

Under your Video Options, there is a setting for the Bodies.  Be aware, a couple hundred bodies on the ground during a siege can be a drag on your system.  In the original Mount & Blade it would cause crashes once it got to a certain point.