When I was a teenager I used to play World of Warcraft a lot. But I didn't have a credit card or money and so I ended up finding a German private server. Was it WoW version 1.8 to 1.12? The last update was Naxramas... Anyways, the fascinating part about all of this was that the server software had basically been reverse engineered by some game dev hackers just for the purpose of running their own server! Blizzard hadn't intended it of course! And so you could just sign up to the private server's website, change some config files in your WoW directory, and boom you were playing completely for free in this very tightly-knit community of German people. They had a bulletin board, of course and some neat stats displayed on their site. In fact, it's very likely that the community aspect was better there than on Blizz... but I digress Looking back, what's really stunning now judging as a professional software developer is that some of these people from the, I think it was called, MaNGOS team, they had just built and open sourced this WoW backend software that the entire operation was running on. Incredible! But since it all was very basic software, as I only learned much later, a lot of questing mechanics didn't even work on private servers! In fact, most quests that took you to max level 60 were basically these types of "slay 10 beasts" or "collect 7 bottles" kinda quests. So to make playing more enjoyable we would usually hang out on Teamspeak and do these together as when the quester did the last hit, they'd get the quest credit and the same was true for looting items too. Only much later, maybe years later, I found out, however, that WoW had very intricate quest design with NPCs moving through the world, speech bubbles and actual stuff happening! I remember the first time seeing that, I was galvanized as I had only ever seen very basic quest scripting on my private server. Never did I see an NPC speak or screen or run. They were just standing there, waiting to receive the requested items from me. Anyways, yeah my relationship to questing was always kinda tricky. Maybe never my thing. I'm not sure. I loved the social aspect of it though. And I loved the rush of completing a quest that'd actually reward me very much. But quests often felt like work. I loved the end game though, so quests were a stepping stone to get there! That said, I perceived the quests in GTA years later as way more enjoyable. Yet to this day I hate side questing. It always reminds me of my teenage years in WoW, farming silly potions and slaying boring beasts :D I hosted several Minecraft servers with over 100 players during the early days of Minecraft, near 2012~2015, just for fun and to observe players' behaviours. Each time I will design a different theme set and different economic mechanism, but autonomous governance by player guilds (like, civilizations, Romans vs Greek vs Germans | Free market vs. Collective production etc.), to see how they participate in economies, and how systems collapse. (If you search for these kinds of experiments, you can find many fun videos on YouTube, one of them is the server 2b2t, fully free market, no free sandbox with crimes and racism). These economy simulations are entertaining, and I'm wondering if there's anything we can learn or take from them, as I learned a lot about behavioural economics during these campaigns and server runs, just by observing and seeing how things unfolded. I'm wondering if we could use these experiences for onchain governance and economy ... | |
