(No, this isn't going to be a what-if featuring Jane Austen playing D&D. -ed) (Hey, that's not a bad idea! -B) (No! -ed) (C'mon! -B) (Dammit, I said no! -ed)
Warning: This post will contain links to game wikis. If you are worried about spoilers, I suggest not following those links through.
So yeah, this issue's been bugging me for a while, and if I can't get a suitable discussion out of it, I can at least get some content in here. First of all, what makes a game re-playable? Using some of our standard examples, in Kingdom of Loathing, once you beat the final boss, you are given the option to ascend and start at level 1, keeping one or more skills from your previous run, and doing the new run in a variety of different ways. In Fallout: New Vegas, and the other Fallout games to varying extents, you can play through using different skills and/or make different choices, leading to other endings. Another option used in New Vegas is that of achievements, giving you some sort of boost to your fragile ego by giving you awards for things that you either might normally not do, or for doing a lot of the things you would usually do. If you have a couple spare hours, you might ask Zerg_Rush how he got the title "The Insane" for one of his WoW characters. I'm sure you've run across these tactics to squeeze more playtime from other games, I'm just using the examples I've run most recently. Some, of course, are more effective than others.
The more philosophical question is what actually causes one to replay a game? Havoc Jack just spent at least one post talking about how he's restarted Diablo II, but I can't normally seem to muster up that much desire to replay a lot of games, especially after I just finished it, whereas I've seen him finish a Starcraft I campaign and immediately start replaying the same campaign. Every once in a while, I will go back into the vaults and work up some game I haven't played in a while, but for the most part I don't replay games that much. Starcraft II was pretty awesome, but after playing it once I haven't really gone back to it at all, except for running a few missions trying to get achievements. I haven't actually finished Fallout: New Vegas yet, but I don't really plan on playing through again once all the DLC comes out and I actually do finish the game. I ran though Fallout 3 twice, although that was primarily because I got DLC for that and decided it would be simpler to play through again. On the other hand I play KoL all the time, and am constantly ascending. Perhaps it's just that easier accessibility to a wiki and easier character optimization makes me want to play it more, although according to Steam I have played New Vegas for 62 hours, so I guess that's a decent amount of time spent on it. And of course, I did end up reading a lot of the wiki, and sometimes I find that reduces my desire to actually play the game.
I'm not sure why this single-play tendency only applies to video games, though. I've played any number of board games any number of times, I've watched many movies as much as I could stand, and nearly all the books on my bookshelf have been read dozens of times.
Insofar as no one else can answer the question for me, perhaps if anyone actually reads this blog instead of it being a vanity project for us they can attempt to answer the question for themselves.
Showing posts with label Kingdom of Loathing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kingdom of Loathing. Show all posts
Friday, September 16, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
MMO Arbitrage
So today I'm going to talk about an idea I had back in the day, possibly even while still in high school. As the title says, it's MMO arbitrage. I'll assume here that anyone reading this blog knows what an MMO (or MMORPG if you want the full acronym) is, but arbitrage may not be, so if you're too lazy to click that link, it's the process of making profits by trading something (usually currencies) at different rates. How does this work? Let's say I can buy euros with dollars at a 1:1 ratio in Lisbon. I can then sell the euros for $2 in Prague, then return to Lisbon and purchase twice as many euros, and repeat the cycle. The really good arbitrage is going to go through three or four currencies along the way and won't make near as much money per unit. (Ideally you'd also cash out with dollars and head to the States to spend them up, or find another arbitrage cycle to play with)
Anyway, how does this relate to games you may ask? Again, I'm assuming you did, because that's the question that's about to get answered. My plan was to create a stable of characters in several different MMOs, each of which had a certain amount of ingame cash. (The amount? Large) This would allow players who'd accumulated a large amount of cash in one game to trade it for cash in another game, so they could enjoy the wealth they had accumulated. Of course, most people could see several problems with this, such as:
1. Wouldn't it take a lot of time to accumulate that much wealth on that many games? Yes, it would. Unless of course I were able to recruit already rich players or buy them off. I suppose buying resources would be reasonable, given that most businesses expect to start off with a certain amount of investment.
2. How would you determine the cash value of the ingame currencies? The only one I can give a good accounting for is Kingdom of Loathing. As has been previously discussed, the game's currency is Meat, and there's no subscription fee. You can however donate $10 and receive a Mr. Accessory, which in addition to being pretty useful its own dang self can be traded in for monthly Items which do even more nifty things, and more importantly be sold to other players, making for a decent currency conversion. Currently they're selling for 8 million meat, making the conversion roughly 800,000 meat/dollar. So there's one.
3. How would you make money? Besides taking a commission on trading currency from one game to another, there would presumably be personal arbitrage trading and other deals going on the side, assuming the time and wherewithal to do so.
4. What would cause people to trust you? If my word of honor isn't enough, I shall demand satisfaction! Really, though, there's not much of a way, although I'm not familiar enough with PayPal to be sure that there's not a way to enforce a deal if it goes south.
5. How would you know what games to work with to actually get profits? Again, I've no real idea. My guess would be it would require one character in pretty much all MMOs that had a decent fanbase.
6. What about games that don't allow reselling of currency or items via third-party vendors? What about them? This is probably the biggest hurdle, but not the one that actually stopped me. (It was laziness more than anything) If I thought I could actually make a decent profit off this thing, I'd be willing to see if I could work around this. Unfortunately, I think it's just a decent idea. Still worth blathering about though.
Anyway, how does this relate to games you may ask? Again, I'm assuming you did, because that's the question that's about to get answered. My plan was to create a stable of characters in several different MMOs, each of which had a certain amount of ingame cash. (The amount? Large) This would allow players who'd accumulated a large amount of cash in one game to trade it for cash in another game, so they could enjoy the wealth they had accumulated. Of course, most people could see several problems with this, such as:
1. Wouldn't it take a lot of time to accumulate that much wealth on that many games? Yes, it would. Unless of course I were able to recruit already rich players or buy them off. I suppose buying resources would be reasonable, given that most businesses expect to start off with a certain amount of investment.
2. How would you determine the cash value of the ingame currencies? The only one I can give a good accounting for is Kingdom of Loathing. As has been previously discussed, the game's currency is Meat, and there's no subscription fee. You can however donate $10 and receive a Mr. Accessory, which in addition to being pretty useful its own dang self can be traded in for monthly Items which do even more nifty things, and more importantly be sold to other players, making for a decent currency conversion. Currently they're selling for 8 million meat, making the conversion roughly 800,000 meat/dollar. So there's one.
3. How would you make money? Besides taking a commission on trading currency from one game to another, there would presumably be personal arbitrage trading and other deals going on the side, assuming the time and wherewithal to do so.
4. What would cause people to trust you? If my word of honor isn't enough, I shall demand satisfaction! Really, though, there's not much of a way, although I'm not familiar enough with PayPal to be sure that there's not a way to enforce a deal if it goes south.
5. How would you know what games to work with to actually get profits? Again, I've no real idea. My guess would be it would require one character in pretty much all MMOs that had a decent fanbase.
6. What about games that don't allow reselling of currency or items via third-party vendors? What about them? This is probably the biggest hurdle, but not the one that actually stopped me. (It was laziness more than anything) If I thought I could actually make a decent profit off this thing, I'd be willing to see if I could work around this. Unfortunately, I think it's just a decent idea. Still worth blathering about though.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
'sploitable mechanics
Continuing on my theme from last night, we're talking about exploitable mechanics. Tonight I'm going to cover the difference in power of exploits.
Here's your classic example. In Super Mario Bros. you could jump on koopas against a wall in such a way to generate as many extra lives as you please. (So long as it's less than 99, that is.) By Mario 3 they realized that that's a feature, not a bug, so they implemented more loops to allow you to get lives. Broadly, these fall into two categories.
Coin loops; if you run around the same terrain twice coins don't regenerate but bricks do. If there's a Pow block in the area you can jump on it, turn the blocks into coins, go down a tube and repeat.
Life cycles: In a couple levels (1-2, for example) you can jump on regenerating enemies, and so long as you don't touch the ground you can generate extra lives like in Mario 1.
So what's the difference? Magnitude. 100 coins buy you one extra life. Even though you're sweeping up twenty or thirty coins in a particular coin loop, it takes significantly more effort to gain the lives than if you're jumping on the goombas. (Assuming you've got the mad skillz to pull of the goomba jumps. It ain't easy to keep it up for any length of time.)
Broadly speaking, if I want to bolster my life total, which exploit do I use? A life cycle; it takes me a lot less time. In general an exploit is more or less worthwhile depending on how much effort it takes to use it versus how much reward you can get.
Let's go with a classic Kingdom of Loathing example; Boozerbear's Salty Dogs.
Boozerbear, or so the story goes, found a bug in the code that let him turn any item in the game into a Salty Dog. This is a low output exploit; while it's always good to have booze on hand, salty dogs aren't that special of a drink. The real bonanza came when Pimonkey suggested that you could turn store items into Salty Dogs
Buy any amount of chewing gum on a string, for 24 meat each.
Convert into Salty Dogs.
Autosell Salty Dogs for 65 meat each
Gives you 42 meat profit per unit. Meat being the currency in the game. Infinite money is a whole lot better to have. While some of their hordes of booze and meat were nuked by the game admin they were still left very wealthy. Boozerbear's stores of salty dogs haven't run out yet.
He used to put salty dogs up for sale at 66 meat each; for a while he tried selling them at 33 meat each, but a player named Qrrbrbbrl (you'll excuse me if I misspell that) pulled the same stunt on him; buying the salty dogs, autoselling them and buying more. He's still got about 500,000 for sale at 130 meat per.
I'll go one simpler. There's an item in the game called a meat vortex. If you use it on yourself you lose your item and some meat. So you quickly learn not to do that. But someone figured out that if you had no meat, instead of going into the negatives you would roll over to the high end of the scale; about four billion meat. The secret got out, and the economy went up in smoke. Delicious grill smoke. (There was also an item duplication bug running rampant at the time, and no recent server backups that could be rolled back to. I gotta say, it was pretty entertaining.)
On the flip side you can get exploits that are too unwieldy to use properly. Take Project X. Project X was a Magic deck, a tournament deck from the Ravnica/Time Spiral standard season. Let me walk you through the combo.
Start with Saffi Eriksdotter in play.
Play Crypt Champion, without paying the red mana.
Since you didn't use any red mana, crypt champion hits play with a "sacrifice this creature" trigger on the stack.
Sacrifice Saffi, targeting crypt champion. Saffi goes to the graveyard.
Crypt champion's trigger resolves, sending it to the graveyard.
Saffi's ability goes off, returning Crypt Champion to play.
Crypt Champion's second ability goes off, returning Saffi to play as well.
Since you didn't spend the red mana (0r any mana) this time either Crypt champion has another sacrifice trigger. Sacrifice Saffi to save it again...
It's a stable loop of two creatures entering and leaving play. There are ways you can convert this to other useful resources; if you also have an Essence Warden in play you can gain an arbitrary amount of life. (Thus the name "Project X", since it allows you to gain X life.)
Now, if you're playing the game with physical cards, you can demonstrate the loop to your opponent and say "Ok, run this loop a million billion times." The rules allow for it, even the finicky tournament rules. It's a different story in the digital game.
On MTGO (Magic: the Gathering Online) there's no way to specify that a loop is happening. So you have to run through each cycle individually. Furthermore, you have to go through each trigger and priority pass individually to make sure that you've got them all correctly. So while it's still technically possible to play the game online it involves oh so many clicks and it's really just not worth it.
This produced an interesting disparity; there's a certain class of tournament players who use MTGO tournaments to predict the metagame for real life tournaments. But with a strong disincentive to play Project X online the data is necessarily warped. Since Project X was never really a dominant deck it didn't make that much of a difference.
There's another factor that makes one infinite exploit better than another; versitility.
Take the potion exploit from Morrowind I mentioned earlier. It's not the only infinite money bug in the game. Shopkeeper prices depend on your reputation with the shopkeeper. At least in some cases, you can max out your reputation by bribing them, to the point where they buy things at a higher price from you than they ask when they sell that same thing to you. So you can keep buying and selling it and make your money that way. But the potion bug is more interesting, since in addition to arbitrarily large sources of wealth it allows you to raise your stats to stupid heights. (It also requires less starting capital than the bribery exploit.)
Again, Magic provides plenty of examples. In a highly competitive game that encourages innovation, in a game with a bazillion interlocking pieces it should come as no surprise that many different combos exist. Furthermore, they can be generally ranked in terms of power level.
Infinite mana is good, but won't win you the game unless you also happen to have some way to use that mana.
Infinite life can sometimes just win you the game, but your opponent might be able to deck you, or just go even more infinite with something else.
Infinite creatures is good, but they usually take a turn to kill your opponent.
Infinite card draw will usually win you the game right there, since if you have your entire deck in your hand you presumably planned out this scenario and have some combination of cards that you can use to kill your opponent.
Infinite direct damage usually does the trick.
And of course there are other infinities (Project X is essentially infinite creatures coming into play. You need more pieces to turn that into a useful sort of infinity.)
At this point we could go into another constraint; the resources required to get your exploit going. But by and large, this doesn't come up in most contexts. Magic is directly competitive, you only have so much time and so many cards with which to win the game before you lose it. In terms of an infinite gold bug on WoW, or item duplication or some such, you aren't so directly competing against people, so it doesn't much matter if it takes too many resources to start it off. You can gather the resources at your leisure. While I like talking about magic, I think I've spoken on this topic enough for now.
Here's your classic example. In Super Mario Bros. you could jump on koopas against a wall in such a way to generate as many extra lives as you please. (So long as it's less than 99, that is.) By Mario 3 they realized that that's a feature, not a bug, so they implemented more loops to allow you to get lives. Broadly, these fall into two categories.
Coin loops; if you run around the same terrain twice coins don't regenerate but bricks do. If there's a Pow block in the area you can jump on it, turn the blocks into coins, go down a tube and repeat.
Life cycles: In a couple levels (1-2, for example) you can jump on regenerating enemies, and so long as you don't touch the ground you can generate extra lives like in Mario 1.
So what's the difference? Magnitude. 100 coins buy you one extra life. Even though you're sweeping up twenty or thirty coins in a particular coin loop, it takes significantly more effort to gain the lives than if you're jumping on the goombas. (Assuming you've got the mad skillz to pull of the goomba jumps. It ain't easy to keep it up for any length of time.)
Broadly speaking, if I want to bolster my life total, which exploit do I use? A life cycle; it takes me a lot less time. In general an exploit is more or less worthwhile depending on how much effort it takes to use it versus how much reward you can get.
Let's go with a classic Kingdom of Loathing example; Boozerbear's Salty Dogs.
Boozerbear, or so the story goes, found a bug in the code that let him turn any item in the game into a Salty Dog. This is a low output exploit; while it's always good to have booze on hand, salty dogs aren't that special of a drink. The real bonanza came when Pimonkey suggested that you could turn store items into Salty Dogs
Buy any amount of chewing gum on a string, for 24 meat each.
Convert into Salty Dogs.
Autosell Salty Dogs for 65 meat each
Gives you 42 meat profit per unit. Meat being the currency in the game. Infinite money is a whole lot better to have. While some of their hordes of booze and meat were nuked by the game admin they were still left very wealthy. Boozerbear's stores of salty dogs haven't run out yet.
He used to put salty dogs up for sale at 66 meat each; for a while he tried selling them at 33 meat each, but a player named Qrrbrbbrl (you'll excuse me if I misspell that) pulled the same stunt on him; buying the salty dogs, autoselling them and buying more. He's still got about 500,000 for sale at 130 meat per.
I'll go one simpler. There's an item in the game called a meat vortex. If you use it on yourself you lose your item and some meat. So you quickly learn not to do that. But someone figured out that if you had no meat, instead of going into the negatives you would roll over to the high end of the scale; about four billion meat. The secret got out, and the economy went up in smoke. Delicious grill smoke. (There was also an item duplication bug running rampant at the time, and no recent server backups that could be rolled back to. I gotta say, it was pretty entertaining.)
On the flip side you can get exploits that are too unwieldy to use properly. Take Project X. Project X was a Magic deck, a tournament deck from the Ravnica/Time Spiral standard season. Let me walk you through the combo.
Start with Saffi Eriksdotter in play.
Play Crypt Champion, without paying the red mana.
Since you didn't use any red mana, crypt champion hits play with a "sacrifice this creature" trigger on the stack.
Sacrifice Saffi, targeting crypt champion. Saffi goes to the graveyard.
Crypt champion's trigger resolves, sending it to the graveyard.
Saffi's ability goes off, returning Crypt Champion to play.
Crypt Champion's second ability goes off, returning Saffi to play as well.
Since you didn't spend the red mana (0r any mana) this time either Crypt champion has another sacrifice trigger. Sacrifice Saffi to save it again...
It's a stable loop of two creatures entering and leaving play. There are ways you can convert this to other useful resources; if you also have an Essence Warden in play you can gain an arbitrary amount of life. (Thus the name "Project X", since it allows you to gain X life.)
Now, if you're playing the game with physical cards, you can demonstrate the loop to your opponent and say "Ok, run this loop a million billion times." The rules allow for it, even the finicky tournament rules. It's a different story in the digital game.
On MTGO (Magic: the Gathering Online) there's no way to specify that a loop is happening. So you have to run through each cycle individually. Furthermore, you have to go through each trigger and priority pass individually to make sure that you've got them all correctly. So while it's still technically possible to play the game online it involves oh so many clicks and it's really just not worth it.
This produced an interesting disparity; there's a certain class of tournament players who use MTGO tournaments to predict the metagame for real life tournaments. But with a strong disincentive to play Project X online the data is necessarily warped. Since Project X was never really a dominant deck it didn't make that much of a difference.
There's another factor that makes one infinite exploit better than another; versitility.
Take the potion exploit from Morrowind I mentioned earlier. It's not the only infinite money bug in the game. Shopkeeper prices depend on your reputation with the shopkeeper. At least in some cases, you can max out your reputation by bribing them, to the point where they buy things at a higher price from you than they ask when they sell that same thing to you. So you can keep buying and selling it and make your money that way. But the potion bug is more interesting, since in addition to arbitrarily large sources of wealth it allows you to raise your stats to stupid heights. (It also requires less starting capital than the bribery exploit.)
Again, Magic provides plenty of examples. In a highly competitive game that encourages innovation, in a game with a bazillion interlocking pieces it should come as no surprise that many different combos exist. Furthermore, they can be generally ranked in terms of power level.
Infinite mana is good, but won't win you the game unless you also happen to have some way to use that mana.
Infinite life can sometimes just win you the game, but your opponent might be able to deck you, or just go even more infinite with something else.
Infinite creatures is good, but they usually take a turn to kill your opponent.
Infinite card draw will usually win you the game right there, since if you have your entire deck in your hand you presumably planned out this scenario and have some combination of cards that you can use to kill your opponent.
Infinite direct damage usually does the trick.
And of course there are other infinities (Project X is essentially infinite creatures coming into play. You need more pieces to turn that into a useful sort of infinity.)
At this point we could go into another constraint; the resources required to get your exploit going. But by and large, this doesn't come up in most contexts. Magic is directly competitive, you only have so much time and so many cards with which to win the game before you lose it. In terms of an infinite gold bug on WoW, or item duplication or some such, you aren't so directly competing against people, so it doesn't much matter if it takes too many resources to start it off. You can gather the resources at your leisure. While I like talking about magic, I think I've spoken on this topic enough for now.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The decline and fall of the Church of Reset
When I was a freshman in College I got hooked pretty hard on an MMO called Kingdom of Loathing. It's really an excellent game. At the time the actual plot wasn't very extensive, the game relied on an excellent endgame to keep people playing. It consists largely of a robust economy and an a vibrant online community. I chronicle below my failed forays into this endgame.
I'm a voracious devourer of content. When I hit level 60 in classic World of Warcraft one of the things I did right away was visit all the zones I had skipped and do the quests that I missed. I did the same thing with the Kingdom of Loathing; I did every quest, visited every zone and read the descriptions of every item. It wasn't all that hard, the game was being produced by a guy who was doing it part time. There's always a gap between how much effort it is to produce content and how much time it takes to experience it. In his defense the game was in beta anyway.
That's actually a key plot point; on the login page there was an announcement you could read (if you cared to; very few people do) that clearly stated the game was in beta, and at some point in the future there would be a reset. The Reset would take away everybody's items, reduce everybody to level one again and proceed on into version 1.0 with everyone on an equal footing.
So now I enter stage left. The game had recently gone through a massive bugging spree called "Black Sunday". An infinite currency bug and an item duplication bug surfaced fairly close together, and the information got out. When the dust settled and while the game economy was going through massive deflation, I had managed to amass a decent amount of capital. But I had started to get bored with constantly poring over the markets, and gravitated towards the other major endgame: the online community.
I was already an active forum poster, which worked about the same as my social life in high school; I'd dart into conversations here and there, leave a devastatingly witty comment (in my mind) and then wait for the offers of eternal friendship to come rolling in. Well, perhaps not quite that desperate (in either example). I was a respected member of the community, but I was still a nobody. I wanted to be somebody. So I started my own online religion.
"The Church of Reset" I called it. Borrowing a page from the street corner evangelist who gets his inspiration from the Gospel according to Jose Cuervo, I used an apocalyptic religion because it allowed me some very entertaining rants. The belief system of the church, once you got past the doomsaying, was based on spoilers. You see, if you skipped over parts of the game then you could never go back and do them yourself. And so, I argued that quest items should be made non tradeable, and I attempted to buy them out of the economy. There was a market for em, you see.
I'd place bounties on items, so that people would sell them to me. I figured if I made it cost prohibitive to buy the items, then people who looked up the spolier would at least decide to go find the items themselves, and therefor be forced to enjoy the content.
Can you see where this is going? I couldn't. I bought up massive amounts of useless junk, paid out a fortune in bounties, convinced a few people to join my church and eventually gave up the game, having managed to convince not a single person to my point of view, having spent myself down several tax brackets (if the game had taxes, which it doesn't) and having not at all managed to achieve a place for myself in the community as I had originally desired.
So now I'm going to discuss at length (do I discuss anything any other way?) why.
First lesson: Be yourself
You can get this lesson from practically any book targeting seventh graders. I'm just going to say that you can't get a position in any community by forcing yourself in.
Second lesson: People want to play the game how they want, not how you want.
Then there's the projection of morality problem. You see, I decided I knew how to play the game best, and that if people played the game my way they'd be happier, so I tried to force them into playing the game my way. (I hasten to add that I didn't even live up to my own standards; I looked up the spoilers on my first run through too). You can't force any sort of morality on people externally; even made up play-the-game-better moral principles. People will only do the things that you tell them to if they already believe that it's the right thing to do. Telling people to do stuff doesn't give them that belief, and they rightly resent you for it.
Third lesson: Price floors don't work.
I did manage to raise the price of quest items. Take bridges, my main focus. Where before they were selling for a thousand or so meat, (meat is currency in that game. Yeah, it's awesome, and yeah, that's the sort of offbeat humor that permeates it.) At the height of my bounties I raised the price to about 100,000, which makes for a significant deterrent for someone who'd just go and buy one to get the quest done.
The trouble is, to raise the price that high I had to pay for any bridges selling lower than that. My best estimate is that I spent about a billion and a half meat on the scheme before I finally couldn't support it any more. Once I ran out, there was nobody else to take up the cause, and the prices fell back to their starting levels fairly soon thereafter.
One more problem with it; people saw that someone was paying a hundred k for an otherwise worthless item, so they started farming them. The end result was that a lot more bridges were put onto the market than I had taken off with all my buying out.
You can't fight supply and demand.
Fourth Lesson: People don't like making fun of religion.
For some of you, that will be obviously untrue, so let me qualify it a bit. You've got three kinds of people who will make fun of religion; the atheists and so forth who actively are trying to break it up, the comedians who are going for shock value, and occasionally people who are comfortable with their religion and have a strong sense of humor. And not even everybody in those three categories; people in the latter category are a lot more careful with the joke other people make; they won't laugh along unless they're sure that you don't mean it.
Most people just get uncomfortable. Here's a pro tip kids; if you want to make yourself popular then avoid doing things that make your audience uncomfortable. The handful of people I did recruit were largely pastafarians.
For the record, I'm in the third group of people. I'm solidly Christian, and as I think back I don't think even I would have laughed had someone else did the exact thing I was doing.
So, that's the hows and the whys of the Church of Reset. But before I send this one out the door I'd be doing the game a disservice if I didn't recommend it. The game has progressed markedly since my heyday; it's got several times more content, it's got other, interesting types of endgame content and it's got a full development team so the updates come often and well produced. It's really an awesome game, if not one that I made myself.
I'm a voracious devourer of content. When I hit level 60 in classic World of Warcraft one of the things I did right away was visit all the zones I had skipped and do the quests that I missed. I did the same thing with the Kingdom of Loathing; I did every quest, visited every zone and read the descriptions of every item. It wasn't all that hard, the game was being produced by a guy who was doing it part time. There's always a gap between how much effort it is to produce content and how much time it takes to experience it. In his defense the game was in beta anyway.
That's actually a key plot point; on the login page there was an announcement you could read (if you cared to; very few people do) that clearly stated the game was in beta, and at some point in the future there would be a reset. The Reset would take away everybody's items, reduce everybody to level one again and proceed on into version 1.0 with everyone on an equal footing.
So now I enter stage left. The game had recently gone through a massive bugging spree called "Black Sunday". An infinite currency bug and an item duplication bug surfaced fairly close together, and the information got out. When the dust settled and while the game economy was going through massive deflation, I had managed to amass a decent amount of capital. But I had started to get bored with constantly poring over the markets, and gravitated towards the other major endgame: the online community.
I was already an active forum poster, which worked about the same as my social life in high school; I'd dart into conversations here and there, leave a devastatingly witty comment (in my mind) and then wait for the offers of eternal friendship to come rolling in. Well, perhaps not quite that desperate (in either example). I was a respected member of the community, but I was still a nobody. I wanted to be somebody. So I started my own online religion.
"The Church of Reset" I called it. Borrowing a page from the street corner evangelist who gets his inspiration from the Gospel according to Jose Cuervo, I used an apocalyptic religion because it allowed me some very entertaining rants. The belief system of the church, once you got past the doomsaying, was based on spoilers. You see, if you skipped over parts of the game then you could never go back and do them yourself. And so, I argued that quest items should be made non tradeable, and I attempted to buy them out of the economy. There was a market for em, you see.
I'd place bounties on items, so that people would sell them to me. I figured if I made it cost prohibitive to buy the items, then people who looked up the spolier would at least decide to go find the items themselves, and therefor be forced to enjoy the content.
Can you see where this is going? I couldn't. I bought up massive amounts of useless junk, paid out a fortune in bounties, convinced a few people to join my church and eventually gave up the game, having managed to convince not a single person to my point of view, having spent myself down several tax brackets (if the game had taxes, which it doesn't) and having not at all managed to achieve a place for myself in the community as I had originally desired.
So now I'm going to discuss at length (do I discuss anything any other way?) why.
First lesson: Be yourself
You can get this lesson from practically any book targeting seventh graders. I'm just going to say that you can't get a position in any community by forcing yourself in.
Second lesson: People want to play the game how they want, not how you want.
Then there's the projection of morality problem. You see, I decided I knew how to play the game best, and that if people played the game my way they'd be happier, so I tried to force them into playing the game my way. (I hasten to add that I didn't even live up to my own standards; I looked up the spoilers on my first run through too). You can't force any sort of morality on people externally; even made up play-the-game-better moral principles. People will only do the things that you tell them to if they already believe that it's the right thing to do. Telling people to do stuff doesn't give them that belief, and they rightly resent you for it.
Third lesson: Price floors don't work.
I did manage to raise the price of quest items. Take bridges, my main focus. Where before they were selling for a thousand or so meat, (meat is currency in that game. Yeah, it's awesome, and yeah, that's the sort of offbeat humor that permeates it.) At the height of my bounties I raised the price to about 100,000, which makes for a significant deterrent for someone who'd just go and buy one to get the quest done.
The trouble is, to raise the price that high I had to pay for any bridges selling lower than that. My best estimate is that I spent about a billion and a half meat on the scheme before I finally couldn't support it any more. Once I ran out, there was nobody else to take up the cause, and the prices fell back to their starting levels fairly soon thereafter.
One more problem with it; people saw that someone was paying a hundred k for an otherwise worthless item, so they started farming them. The end result was that a lot more bridges were put onto the market than I had taken off with all my buying out.
You can't fight supply and demand.
Fourth Lesson: People don't like making fun of religion.
For some of you, that will be obviously untrue, so let me qualify it a bit. You've got three kinds of people who will make fun of religion; the atheists and so forth who actively are trying to break it up, the comedians who are going for shock value, and occasionally people who are comfortable with their religion and have a strong sense of humor. And not even everybody in those three categories; people in the latter category are a lot more careful with the joke other people make; they won't laugh along unless they're sure that you don't mean it.
Most people just get uncomfortable. Here's a pro tip kids; if you want to make yourself popular then avoid doing things that make your audience uncomfortable. The handful of people I did recruit were largely pastafarians.
For the record, I'm in the third group of people. I'm solidly Christian, and as I think back I don't think even I would have laughed had someone else did the exact thing I was doing.
So, that's the hows and the whys of the Church of Reset. But before I send this one out the door I'd be doing the game a disservice if I didn't recommend it. The game has progressed markedly since my heyday; it's got several times more content, it's got other, interesting types of endgame content and it's got a full development team so the updates come often and well produced. It's really an awesome game, if not one that I made myself.
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