Information Anniversary Event 2021 Balance Changes [Explained]

I don't disagree with Nise's assessment of the situation, but I do disagree with the decision to go with the option that impacts all players instead of trying to find a more targeted solution.

A meso sink that specifically impacts the largest generator of mesos (mages) should be considered, imo.

 

Well, I certainly do agree with you, but politically speaking I think that the solution to make looting changes would probably be better received than something along the lines of:
-repeated map nerfs as multimage players migrate from 1 place to another
-flat out drop rate reduction on mage ultimates (like the summon farm nerfs)

The loot change i think impacts players overall the least of the above options, i view it as a lesser evil in some sense. Its also possible that this loot change does absolutely nothing in terms of curving inflation, in which case a revert will be required and a more unpopular solution needs to be looked into.

 

Before making changes regarding inflation and item demand/supply, I think staff should first calculate the inflation in order to estimate the current inflation rate, which items are outpacing inflation, and by how much.

It wouldn't be hard to just calculate inflation using a CPI basket. Basically, you curate a "basket" of items that the typical player would buy during a time frame, say 3 months; things like apples, INT scrolls/gear, zak helm, HTP, 30% weapon scrolls, come to mind (you also need to include quantities). Then you calculate the total cost of that basket, and 3 months later, you calculate it again and the estimated inflation rate is the % change in the basket's price.

There are some drawbacks in this, such as how the basket is defined and whether the typical goods purchased changes over time. I don't think the latter is much of an issue, but I think a lot of thought should go into the former.

Word of caution: this is not estimating supply and demand curves. doing so would be impossible for almost every item, for reasons beyond the scope of this course

Edit: just had a thought--you could create two separate baskets, one for casual/newer players and one for sweaty/older players and then take a weighted average between the two based on their proportions of the population. This would require estimating that proportion, which in itself would be a useful exercise, and would also allow for incorporating population changes and the effects of aging (provided the method for estimating proportions remains constant across time periods). The hardest part of this exercise would be figuring out how to measure the population proportions.

 

Can someone formally invite jesscapades to the balance team? Lord knows the server could use the insight and expertise of a legitimate economist.

 

I appreciate the thought, but even if they did want my toxic ass I would respectfully decline due to reasons that seem to cause the high turnover rate of balance team members.

 

The turnover rate is only high because when a new member joins, one of the old members gets Thanos-snapped into retirement. Balance in all things.

 

I think a lot of the difficulty with quantifying the amount of inflation or supply/demand is that either there is no historical database of all user's items or there is, but staff don't have access to it. And it's reasonable, this is a private server with limited resources, and I doubt they keep an entire history of all free market prices of every item, or the total item inventory of every user at any timestamp.

The problem with all this speculation of supply/demand and inflation is that the # of active users wildly fluctuates throughout the year and the market is way more volatile when there are less people. Sure the number of quad-mage farmers was not large in absolute terms (probably larger than most people realize), but by percentage of active people in the month before the event, it was probably a large part of the server.

So if historical data is simply unavailable (which is why I assume geospiza is just using scraped data, despite being on staff), then they can do as jess suggests and keep track of current *sold* prices of a basket of items every day, the total # of new items of those types being generated/used, including the # of unique ip addresses, along with daily meso generation.

 

RIP, solo mage/bishop players.

 

I wouldn't fault staff at all for me leaving/whatever implications are being made about turnover rate. They're all fine people and I left without disliking anyone.

I left mostly because large parts of the community is toxic and have a negative effect on me, as it's impossible to go more than a couple days without someone asking you to leak stuff or folks DMing you demanding explanations and reasoning around patch times.

 

It would actually be great to see a higher turnover rate.

Where's Nise's length?

I think the ML community would do well with young new faces who come up with new and innovative balance changes instead of having a few minds putting out every balance change.

 

I disagree, if akashsky was in charge of all balance decisions all our problems would be solved and ML would be a utopia.

 

(reposting this because I forgot to make this a reply)

I think I over-emphasized the "turnover rate" part of my post, which was poor wording on my part. Though I don't see a lot of positives for the turnover given that there is a negative time trend.

Anyways, what I really meant to say was that being on the BT seems stressful, time-consuming, and annoying, and a lot of people don't want to deal with that--especially the people who oppose balance changes, who are often the direct targets of those changes. I think we all know how toxic people are towards BT, however I wouldn't fault anyone in the community for that. I honestly think in some scenarios it's warranted--sometimes people just say shit worthy of being meme'd or replied to with a pic of a face palm. That being said, in many other scenarios it's not warranted, and I think it's because the BT members are (1) closer to the community than other staff and (2) a very small group. That makes them feel more like our representatives--a few select people who we can confide in and trust to represent our thoughts and opinions. So when we feel that staff is making changes against our interest, it's easiest to blame the BT because we know them better than GMs and expect better from them. And then all the blame goes onto the only 1 or 2 people that make up the entire BT, which is incredibly shitty for them (especially if they disagreed with the change, or lack of change).

I agree with not having a few people putting out every balance change, and I think a better solution to that would be to consult a larger group of people, particularly those who actually sell leech or boss (though having some people who don't is important too). Then it'd be harder to scapegoat one person, you'd get more thoughtful discussions, and under the rare scenario where one person on BT posts something ridiculous, people wouldn't feel as disappointed.

 

Sounds good, but we probably need a trained economist to do this actually.
In which you also need really thorough access to the database for all the data mining, however from my little knowledge that is the balance doesn't really have such deep access.
Just want to point out to others that such task is normally handled by teams of trained specialist, it is unfair to expect ML to just do this because it sounds cool and legit.

A quarterly townhall of X number of people with the staffs inside ML discord?

 

Found your singular cause.

Spoiler

 

is multi mage/sair here to stay? need some directions before i commit to making them.