De Valve economist meets captain obvious
edit :(Dit is trouwens een dropbox link vreemd genoeg staat deze post van
29 nov niet op zijn Valve blog. Hoax? of iets anders? is inderdaad een hoax van iemand op Facepunch. Er zit wel een kern van waarheid in. Dus een grappig stukje satire/persiflage)
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/...Economics%20%20Valve.htmlThe State Of My Faith In Humanity?
You have read Valve's survival manual for new employees. You have read Michael Abrash's wonderful account of working at Valve. Now read my less-than-wonderful political economy analysis of Valve's management model; one in which there are no bosses, no delegation, no commands, no attempt by anyone to tell someone what to do. A world which as it turns out has become extremely depressing to study.
I Think I'm Going To End It All
What started out as an exciting opportunity to study a real virtual economy has become my own personal nightmare. I thought that the Greek economy was in a bad shape but I evidently did not count on seeing a barter system so depressing that it made me have physical pain every time I opened up a webpage or a database to study it.
I guess I should elaborate on the matter.
Short version: There's no hope for anyone involved in trading anything through steam.
Long version: Over the past year I've learned more about human nature than I ever intended to. The way that Team Fortress 2 can sell virtual items is incredibly clever but unfortunately flawed. Virtual items should not lead to scamming, hacking, money laundering, "sharking" or being an asshole but in every case that I have studied, they do.
There was once a time when I thought I knew the limits of human greed, not anymore. When we released the three glowing tophats early this year they were meant to be an incentive for players to help each other advance in the game's economy but within two weeks of being released they were deemed as a failure. At first we thought that players were trading items to friends starting out. A sweet and encouraging development but there was already a clear pattern emerging; all but a few (78%) of the gifts were returning to the accounts that had gifted them. It was still slightly encouraging to see some items going into new player backpacks until suddenly the number of gifts returning to players jumped to 98.9% because one of the item servers came out of its downtime, enabling the remaining players to trade their items back to their normal accounts.
The TF2 Economy is so terrible it's literally criminal. When one community member came to us with some interesting statistics about earbuds we discovered an enormous Russian mafia money laundering operation. Using the in-game payment and trading system they were able to steal enormous amounts of money from credit and debit cards worldwide. We quickly had to create some more restrictions on trading or face the risk of letting even more users ruin each others' lives daily than usual. By the way, trust me when I say that this is only the very tip of the iceberg; I won't go into any detail about it, only mentioning the prostitution, drug and crime rings solely revolving around the game.
In Conclusion There's nothing good or decent to be found inside the game and there's certainly no innate good in (I estimate) at least 93% of the worldwide population. I know that valve can't put the monster it's created back in it's box ($2.50 to open it) but I know that the monster is only visible in the game's economy. It's actually in all of us.
I'm going to try to break the game's economy completely come morning; too bad I won't be around to see the effect in a week.
<rant mode>
Dat er iets niet lekker zit in de TF
2 economy is geen nieuws. TF
2raffle is in die zin nog een van de lichtpuntjes al kan je soms vragen stellen bij de achterliggende motivatie van sommige bigtime rafflers.
Hoe dan ook, onze Griekse academicus weet de helft nog niet. Ook al is dit een persiflage ik ben benieuwd waar hij zelf in de toekomst mee gaat komen. In de tussentijd
"Welcome to a world run by greedy 12 year olds (with mommy's and daddy's credit card)"
Zelf kan ik er nog veel meer over vertellen. Tip: nooit zomaar s
teamgames gaan traden met wildvreemden vooral niet als de deal die ze bieden te mooi is om waar te zijn.
Ik ben wel verbaasd dat Valve blijkbaar (echt) niet op de hoogte was van witwas transacties. Ze hebben een gigantische database en er worden al sinds vorig jaar tradebans uitgegeven. Dus er is wel een werkend systeem.
Vielen die transacties bij met name Russische accounts dan echt niet op!?

Blijkbaar lopen er maar weinig database analisten rond bij Valve of wat waarschijnlijker is: niemand heeft er zin in, want data analyse is saai werk.
< /rant mode>
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Voor 16% gewijzigd door
CapTVK op 01-12-2012 12:18
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