TIL Land in Virtual Games
POSTED ON:
TAGS: mmo videogames economy
I was playing V Rising, and in that game, you can 'claim' a chunk of land to set up your castle. The servers are small, roughly 40 people. That means, roughly 40 vampire castles.
In V Rising, you simply accept that land is scarce, and either make a new server or troll people enough that they never return back and then you steal their land.
But what about a MMO? A game like World of Warcraft would quickly fall apart if everyone shared the same server, and had thousands of players demanding virtual land.
And that's where I landed on this hilarious tidbit:
Here’s a practical example witnessed by Raph Koster, lead designer of Star Wars Galaxies:
“in [Star Wars] Galaxies … there was ample room for everyone to own a house if they chose – but people did things like build player cities atop the entrances to dungeons to monopolize access to resources.”
The above example is pretty similar to the behavior of the medieval Robber Barons, who famously stretched chains across the Rhine so they could extract tolls from passing ships.
via Land value tax in online games and virtual worlds: A how-to guide
Related TILs
Tagged: mmo