Average Pieces of Eight earned per hour of Puzzle Pirates voyaging: ~1,000*
Exchange rate in Pieces of Eight for Doubloons on our newest Ocean, Malachite, as of 8:12 PM, June 26th: 832
Average hourly ‘wage’ of a Puzzle Pirates player: USD$0.30
Minimum hourly wage, San Francisco, CA: USD$9.36
Amount of time required to earn the equivalent of one hour of San Francisco minimum wage playing Puzzle Pirates: 31.2 hours
California Lottery Mega Millions jackpot for 6/27/2008: $34,000,000
Number of new Mounted Tigershark items winning the Mega Millions jackpot could get you: 2,045,728**

Percentage of all players’ total playtime spent as Pyro class in Team Fortress 2 since Pyro Pack update on 6/19/2008: 26.4%
Percentage of all players’ total playtime spent as extraordinarily flammable Spy class in Team Fortress 2 since Pyro Pack update on 6/19/2008: 5.2%***

Total number of downloadable Rock Band songs available as of June 24th: 152
Total cost to download all available Rock Band songs as of June 24th onto your Xbox 360: $268.50****

More sources and explanation after the break.

* — Your average pillage can mow through 4 battles an hour, making 100-500 Pieces of Eight per pirate per win. Four battles at 300 PoE minus a 15% restocking cut is equal to 1,020 PoE, or ~1,000 PoE for an average hour of ‘work’.

** — Best current price found on Viridian Ocean for a Mounted Tigershark at 8:33 PM, June 26th was 68,462. Combined with the Doubloon delivery fee of 25 and the exchange rate of 1,178 Pieces of Eight per Doubloon, we get 83.12 Doubloons per shark. Why 83.12? So we can multiply it out by the bulk discount Doubloon cost: USD$0.20. This gets us our answer: $16.62 per shark!

*** — Source

**** — Complete breakdown is 1 free song, 7 $1 songs, 55 $2 songs, 15 $5.50 packs, 2 $10 long packs, 2 $15 albums and 1 $19 album.

Instead, this happened.

Touché, Nexon. Touché.

For starters, we need to settle on some proper Goddamn terminology for the purposes of discussion. A ‘microtransaction’ does not necessarily occur when a player purchases an item in your virtual world, though the term’s certainly bandied about with that usage. As we all know, and as Raph Koster told us here…

The microtransaction, the common business definition is a system where… there are two flavors. One is: you actually pay a macrotransaction that converts into some point system and you eat away at the points. It’s like buying a block of cell phone minutes or a block of time, or something like that. And then the other method is: you buy something that’s really small and cheap, and then periodically the service aggregator, instead of billing you constantly, which gets expensive because they pay per transaction — they pay this fixed fee. Instead of doing it then, they let them pile up for a month and then they bill you all at once. And that is how pay-per-view works. That’s the definition of microtransaction. Notice the whole question of whether you handed your pay-per-view movie to him did not come into the equation! That’s a separate issue altogether, it has nothing to do with the billing model. Microtransaction’s just a billing model.

So stop using ‘microtransaction’ as an umbrella term, you heathens! You’re going to make Erik Bethke cry! Ahem. Now that we’ve straightened that out, let’s look at another term that gets tossed around in these sorts of discussions: ‘RMT’ (real money trade/trading). Now, strictly speaking, ‘RMT’ could probably describe the kinds of transactions that are occuring between players and developers that people are trying to describe when referring to ‘microtransactions’, but there’s a problem. The term ‘RMT’ has a lot of negative baggage associated with it, as described by the following snippet I found after Googling, well… RMT…

In Final Fantasy XI Online… reaching the maximum level (75) can take a [long time]. But leveling is only part of the game. Along the way, players have a chance to deck out their characters; they upgrade armor, weapons, and spells in order to maximize their abilities. Typically, the higher the level and the better the gear, the more expensive it is in the terms of the game’s economy. Taking the time to earn the necessary money often means a break from leveling… and in order to skip this process, some gamers out there are turning to companies like IGE or auctions on eBay to solve their gaming woes. For real money, they can purchase virtual game money — often known as “gold” (or in the case of FFXI, gil, the long-used term for money in the Final Fantasy franchise), which is then used in-game to gear up their characters. This system of buying virtual goods and/or money with real money is known as Real Money Trade, or RMT — and it is a bannable offense on most MMORPGs.

The emphasis is mine, and I feel sums up why we can’t just use RMT to describe ‘developer-direct item purchases’: RMT is most often used to refer to cash trades occuring between players, or between players and third parties. These are a whole other ball of wax and have a really bad rap amongst the developer community, which may be something I discuss in a future post. For now, though, it looks like we’re gonna have to come up with something else.

To digress a bit (with an ulterior motive), I attended a one-day conference back in June called the Virtual Goods Summit, and it covered the sorts of practices and issues we’re attempting to describe here. I’d actually never heard the term ‘virtual goods’ used with any regularity before that summit, and while ‘virtual good sales’ isn’t a bad term, I’d personally like to see something with a catchier acronym. How about ‘digital item purchases’ or ‘DIPS’? Since this is a monologue, and there’s no one here to disagree with me, I’m going to go ahead and make this my de facto jargon in future for referring to the practice of a MMOG or virtual space taking in at least part of its revenue from the rental or sale of items accessible only within the boundaries of its game world. Phew. Glad that’s settled. What an abrupt and ultimately unsatisfying conclusion! Serves you right for thinking I was going somewhere deep with this after two years of not writing a damn thing.

In future installments of this series, I’d like to actually, uh, discuss aspects of DIPS that aren’t purely semantic, such as whether they could be utilized in an existing subscription-based world, and whether the hand-waving freakoutery (HWFO, another fun acronym) regarding the acceleration of DIPS as a business model in the West is altogether deserved.

As a homework question, how do you, dear reader, feel about the term ‘digital item purchases’? Do you have a better alternative? Also, can you think of any ways you’d like to expand on the definitions I’ve given of microtransactions, RMT or DIPS?

Anyone with kids knows that it can be a struggle to get them to eat vegetables, especially ones that aren’t potatoes. Anyone with half a brain, however, can tell you that vegetables are an important part of a growing human’s diet; without them, after the final throes of puberty we’d all end up with the physique of… of… well, a computer programmer, but that’s neither here nor there. So what are we do to balance our future world leaders’ diets if they won’t even try just one bite of something that’s actually good for them?

We bake it into a muffin.

Specifically, a chocolate muffin. One trick that my mother swears by (but promises she never was heartless enough to pull on me when I was young) is getting additional vitamins and nutrients into a kid’s diet by baking them chocolate muffins with grated zucchini in them. The kid gets the delicious chocolate taste, the parents get the vegetables down their gullet, everybody wins.

And this is something most games have been missing from their PvP, and something that Scott adeptly caught on to when he suggested that ‘whatever you can do to “NPC-alize” enemy players, do so’. Puzzle Pirates (and I apologize for my bias) does this beautifully. The way battles at sea in our game are structured makes it nigh impossible for a new player to actually realize that they are participating in a PvP battle until it’s almost over. This is very good. If a player isn’t rudely jolted out of the style of gameplay they are already very comfortable with whenever they encounter another player to fight, they are definitely less likely to be pissed off that their opponent is now Joe from San Jose rather than angry_badger_76 or the dread NPC ship, the ‘Hot Cod’. We’ve effectively baked some PvP zucchini into their PvE muffin.

Note that PvPers can still communicate with each other in Y!PP, and I feel this sort of social interaction is not something that you necessarily have to curb; as more qualified gentlemen than myself have already posted to death, the emotion that can come from such communication can make PvP mean more the participating players and hey, if anyone ever gets out of line with the smack talk, there’s always the /ignore command.

So, we can see that baking the zucchini into the muffin is important to get everyone participating and content. But what about, as Psychochild went over repeatedly on his blog, incentive? No matter how well you bake the zucchini into the muffin, the kids still aren’t going to eat it if it tastes like boiled shit.

And this is where, I’m sorry to say, Puzzle Pirates fails its PvP audience. Victorious ships in PvP pillage a portion of the opposing ship’s booty, which can amount to anywhere from a significant sum if the loser was on a lengthy pillage prior to the engagement to, much more frequently, sweet scupper all. This is where the kids realize that we’ve tricked them with our enticing muffins. They expectthe run-of-the-mill, gold fountain Piece of Eight reward they always get from NPC ships, but generally end up disappointed and feeling like the encounter was a waste of time. Not only that, but the times when the victors do reap the spoils, the losers get horribly shafted, generally losing one or more hours of in-game work. Needless to say, this is bad, and has led a lot of our playerbase to equate PvP with griefing, completely invalidating all the good and hard work we did getting the damn zucchini into the muffin in the first place.

I don’t think I’d be going out on a limb here by saying that making the muffins taste good is probably the toughest part of making a viable PvP system for your game. A few solutions have been tossed around for Y!PP, but most of the obvious ideas for balancing PvP and PvE payouts are highly exploitable. Start using magic money fountain rewards for PvP, for example? They’ll get a friend with a ship and trade kills. Ain’t gonna work.

I fear I don’t have an answer to this global dilemma, but some other games out there have made admirable attempts at both baking the muffins AND making them taste good (EVE Online is probably the best at this so far, even if their finished product is a bit difficult to eat), and I have hope that some of the more enlightened folks out there will be able to incentivize PvP to the point where even unintentional carebears like myself and Y!PP’s player base will be more than happy to slit some PvP throats now and again (I have my eyes on you, Warhammer Online).

That said, I’ve already done my part to fight the good fight: I’ve given you the recipe.

Go forth, my friends, and bake the muffins.
And for the love of God, make sure they don’t taste like ass.

Since she actually asked for input from community management types on a recent blog post, I don’t mind mentioning a few things here about the official public Wiki we maintain for Puzzle Pirates, the YPPedia.

First off, since its release, the YPPedia has made customer support a lot easier. Previously we would have to keep a .txt file or something similiar filled with personal canned responses to FAQs sent in via the support petition system, but now a lot of the easier lobs from the playerbase can be knocked out of the park by freeforming a quick one-line overview of the solution or answer to their question, followed by a link to the corresponding YPPedia page. So, a newbie question on what swords do can be easily responded to with something like…

Swords, mugs and bludgeons are all special items which are bought and wielded to increase your pirate’s effectiveness in the Swordfighting, Drinking and Rumble puzzles. For more information on the different types of swords in the game, please check out this page on the YPPedia.

As far as the player involvement in the Wiki, most of the original content was migrated over from a now-defunct unofficial Wiki, and pretty much all of the current content, save the numerous protected ‘Official’ pages that we mirror off the YPPedia onto our website as the game’s documentation, is written and updated by players. The YPPedia itself only has one employee, a customer support rep (an ‘OceanMaster’), assigned to oversee it at a time, and the position is theoretically supposed to rotate (though it generally only does so through several OMs). We don’t have a major problem with vandalism on the YPPedia site, as most of the really important pages are protected, and any small-scale edit wars or graffiti are generally picked up very quickly by a cadre of dedicated player volunteers. In fact, the YPPedia is mostly a labor of love for a portion of our playerbase, who probably equate documenting the game’s history and features to a sort of ‘high-level game’. Many players also follow YPPedia pages regarding game ‘secrets’ and the like with some fervor. A good example of this is the Trophy page, which is fairly frequently edited as the triggers for various displayable in-game Trophies (which we as a company have sworn never to publically reveal) are discovered.

The only major issue we’ve had with the official Wiki is on the topic of player pages. Originally, the loose policy was that pages regarding individual players would be reserved for those players who were sufficiently interesting or ‘important’. Since this is a pretty subjective criterion for whether or not a player deserves a page, it was eventually overturned in favor of the current policy that anyone can have a YPPedia page for their character, provided they can actually fill it with more than stub level content. Though this has led to inactive morons like this guy getting their own Wiki page, it seems to be working fairly well so far, and indeed, may even be giving some players incentive to learn how to edit the Wiki and write with the proper NPOV just so they can get their own page in the history books. This problem could probably be avoided with other official MMOG wikis, of course, simply by enforcing the rule that every player/character’s Wiki page is simply their ‘User:’ page, giving players a free hand in detailing their characters’ history therein, and swiftly deleting or migrating any external pages in contravention to that rule.

That all said, Puzzle Pirates is not a massive WoW-like conglomerate. What has so far worked for us may not work for a larger AAA title without significant support time being sunk to keep things running smoothly. I definitely commend Turbine for making the effort, however, and will anxiously await seeing how it goes for them. Hell, if the ‘personal blogs’ thing goes over well, it could perhaps spell doom for the official forum as we know it. If that’s the case, I’ll buy the beer and pretzels for the wake.

Hope that helped and/or was entertaining, Sara!