Bob's Perfect World- A wall of text regarding the raid scene on P99

[john_savage1982]

Originally Posted by Dr4z3r [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I lumped you in because you said this:



Put simply, 'socking is the dominant strategy. This is where the prisoner's dilemma becomes relevant: As soon as Guild A chooses Defect, Guild B must choose the same in order to have a chance at anything. You're right that it's not directly analogous to the Prisoner's Dilemma, but the Dilemma still serves as a simplified illustration of the dominant strategy. Given that raid mobs on P99 are all-or-nothing (your guild gets all the loot, or none of it), a decision matrix for a 2-guild standoff would look like this:

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Where the numbers represent the approximate chance to get the mob. So, can 'sock, with a chance of either .5 or 1 to get the mob, or you can not 'sock, and have a chance of either 0 or .5.

Given that the goal is to get the mob's loot, what is the correct strategy?

So, here we have our rational, self-interested decision. Of course, in the long run, everyone involved in 'socking mobs for a long period of time will be unhappy, burn out on the game, or just stop giving a fuck. It will detriment the lives of those players, those guilds, and ultimately the server as a whole. This is, of course, the Tragedy of the Commons.

This analysis deals with a game played once. When a game with these payoffs are played over and over, cooperation can become increasingly likely. However, if all parties are determined and willing to expend the resources (time, energy, etc) necessary to get loot then cooperation may never occur. Further, the problem with socking is that payoff is not 50/50 since the guild that was there first wins the game.

The situation here is that P1999 players will expend ridiculous amounts of energy to increase their chance to get loot...even if that chance is only increased slightly.

Perhaps a more relevant academic subject that you should be examining is elements of learning and conditioning. Everquest, like many addicting games, has a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement, where players are rewarded based on variable level of behavioral compliance. Examples of this includes randomized loot from raid targets, boss spawns, random timer on AC in OOT, and so forth. All of these systems are designed to keep you waiting one more second in hopes your commitment will payoff, which only makes you play more and more. At the high end of Everquest you have players that will devote hours upon hours of their lives to the game. Mind you, this is sitting in front of a computer for hours clicking buttons and looking at graphics on a screen.

The even sicker part is the way the reinforcement of the game substitutes for many players as a form of personal achievement. So instead of playing for fun, they play for the sense of achievement that playing brings them when they get items that are rare or other players don't have.