Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective.
> we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops;
My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
I would guess that the revenue generated from keys (and cases, from the market cut) eclipses the potential market cut revenue from limiting the value of items to the marketplace limit (now $2k I believe), as the consequence of that is significantly less demand in keys and skins as a whole.
Without the prospect of extremely expensive chase items, the $2.50 + ${case} slot machine pull loses its jackpot. With a knife being dropped once every 400~ unboxes, the EV of a knife would be $1000 + 400*${case}. Obviously the actual EV would be lower in practice, but the point I'm trying to understand is how the monetization model works if skins are any less expensive than they were.
> My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
Yes. The Valve philosophy on the cosmetics marketplace (we called it "the economy") is that you distribute random rewards to players and they can trade and sell and discover the value of those goods for themselves. Obviously, this was done to make money for Valve but, in theory, it's also good for the players. It allows people who have things they don't want to sell them to people who want them. And all this buying and selling happens between Steam wallets (and there is no off-ramp) so at the end of the day, it's all just profit for Valve.
But above all we wanted people to play CS:GO because it was a fun game. We didn't want to turn it into some kind of grim pachinko parlor, with players grinding out matches just to get random loot box drops. So you have to balance the potentially real dollar random rewards so that they're a fun surprise but not economically attractive enough to become a job.
It’s just a weird side effect that’s surprisingly difficult to prevent - online games have had gold farmers for pretty much as long as there have been online games with gold.
I’ve run into idle bot accounts several times while playing and it’s infuriating. Mainly in the arms race mode.
Players can leave and join that mode at any time. So the bots will constantly be joining and leaving. if the bots manage to become 50% of the game they will vote kick all the remaining players. I’ve had several in progress matches interrupted because a few of the actual players bailed and the bots managed to take over the lobby.
I'm curious to know the layoffs by game. It would be surprising if League of Legends retains all of its game design/balance team, and it'd also be surprising if Valorant lays off any employees.
The proof is in the results. When it'll be obvious climate change "action" (taxes) don't change anything the focus will switch to something like Inbound Asteroid Protection or similar.
Not immediately, no, but there's no forward secrecy, so unless users take extensive steps to obfuscate their activities, as soon as they make one transaction with a counterparty who knows who they are (such as an exchange with KYC) they are at risk of de-anonymisation.
Well why are they writing a blog and posting the link on HN? We’re not directly your customers. Did you apologise individually to the customers you ignored? You don’t have to apologise to anyone here.
Not a fan of "this"-like comments, but I find your analogy very elegant in explaining the impact of money.
The concept of money mapping 1:1 to value/produced utility (note that I haven't defined what a unit of this is) is a difficult concept to grasp.
It's very common for people to trivialise money as a printed piece of paper and miss the higher level value as a currency that "benchmarks" the value of one's impact to another.
Society pedestalizes healthcare workers for their immediate, physical and observable impact to the lives of individuals; and it is understandably justified. However, this often raises questions to why nurses only make marginally above average salaries. Unfortunately the semantics of the supply-vs-demand economy is often lost here - any individual nurse is generally not difficult to replace should they leave (of course, depending on the market). On the other end of the spectrum, people making significantly above the market financial trading are commonly seen as negative-value producers when most do generate a significant amount of positive value, simply because it's hard to reason with a non-physical form of value. (I don't work in a field related to financial trading)
It's unsurprising why there's communities formed to demonise the concept of currency, trade and markets; and why some of them advance further and push for the breakdown of modern society.
While I don't mean to be pushing the message that "Capitalism is perfect and the utopia of reality" - I can't imagine alternative systems not involving a free market, that would achieve similar or better levels of quality of life and advancement in society (at least in current modern? times), while balancing around the imperfections of humans.
> people making significantly above the market financial trading are commonly seen as negative-value producers when most do generate a significant amount of positive value
They generate a significant amount of money - not value, money. They concentrate wealth in the hands of those who can afford to pay them to do it, a process which begets itself. That's why traders are commonly seen as negative-value producers by society as a whole - they contribute to decreased social equality.
Your argument here is circular - financial traders can only be said to be generating value if you assume that money and value are in some way equivalent. The former doesn't prove the latter.
As for nurses - if they're so easily replaced, why are so many rich societies dependent on immigrant health workers? And I'm sure you're not telling me that, if you were dying, you'd rather be attended by a stockbroker? Or could it be that "value" is a nebulous concept that is highly situational and varies from person to person?
Capitalism is very successful in certain arenas but it doesn't universally improve quality of life, and if you want an example then look no further than healthcare, and consider the difference between the US and any country with a nationalised healthcare system.
I think the "Facebook bad" horse has been beaten down to Earth's inner core.
Yes, Facebook has its downsides just as any other social platform would. Yes, you can live without it. But I don't believe that the negatives Facebook has enabled comes close to the utility it has provided to society.
It is "bad" only because the right people cannot control it as easily, it was "good" 8-9 years ago when the good people (or the countries that they controlled/lead at the time) were using Facebook against "bad" people (i.e. Arab Spring).
If by utility, you mean enriching the pockets of their shareholders, then sure. But that is not a net positive for society. People got along in the world before Facebook just fine.
The only utility Facebook gives me is Messenger, which I have to use because several family members use it. The only utility it offers over other messaging platforms is slightly better support for media and GIFs (maybe?) And network effects. I would really prefer they join me where I am, on Discord, which is where my local friends, neighbors and online friends go to exchange messages. (It doesn't support video sharing as well/easily as Messenger.)
I stopped using Messenger once they started with the ads. Signal is a great replacement. The chat heads on Android were cool but I don’t find I really miss them.
I'm glad you were able to move all of your contacts to Signal! That hasn't worked for me, though many people have joined me on Discord. My siblings are sort of straddling between Messenger and Discord, just like me, but they tend to be more responsive on Messenger. Perhaps they only use Discord to appease me.
I've never enjoyed the chat heads and always disabled them right away. I don't notice ads in Messenger, though I mostly use it from a desktop browser with uBlock Origin enabled!
But as a I said, I only use Messenger because I have to, as it is the primary messaging service family members tend to stick to.
You seem to suggest that Facebook itself is to blame for that, and not the people interacting on it.
Previously, mass manipulation was only available to really rich and powerful, or states versed in it. Now it's available to much smaller and less sophisticated actors.
But I don't think that's an issue, the issue is that manipulation is acceptable at all, and how we can draw the new, better line there? (Looking at you too, Marketing)
In that case, why not blame Hillary Clinton for normalizing relations with the genocidal state, so that American corporations could have access to a new market?
> we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops;
My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
I would guess that the revenue generated from keys (and cases, from the market cut) eclipses the potential market cut revenue from limiting the value of items to the marketplace limit (now $2k I believe), as the consequence of that is significantly less demand in keys and skins as a whole.
Without the prospect of extremely expensive chase items, the $2.50 + ${case} slot machine pull loses its jackpot. With a knife being dropped once every 400~ unboxes, the EV of a knife would be $1000 + 400*${case}. Obviously the actual EV would be lower in practice, but the point I'm trying to understand is how the monetization model works if skins are any less expensive than they were.