Speculation: How Anticipation Drives Economic Highs

Hello everyone,

Before I dive into this blog, I would stop for a moment and say thank you to all of my readers. Our last blog post reached over 250 people - and as we've only been working on the project again for about a month now, that's incredibly encouraging. You've all been unbelievably supportive in our efforts and it's truly driving me to press onward.

Today, we're going to take some time to talk about the concept of anticipation and how it affects our economy through factors such as player migration and deposits. I thought it would be important to step away from the topic of trade for a while and focus on some other, equally relevant things.

So, let's get started!

Anticipation In Its Many Different Forms

Entropia Universe is, as we know by now (if you've been keeping up with my blog or if you've played for longer than a few weeks) an RCE - a real cash economy. This obviously changes the nature of the game dramatically, and does so in a number of different ways.

Many of these changes, though, aren't really thought about by your average player. Sure, we know that everything has value, and we know that ammo burn and decay can be felt both by the number on your shot counter and the number in your bank account. But, the RCE aspect also plays a big role in other things, such as how people approach events, and the impact that new game mechanics have on the economy. It's these less apparent things that will be the focus of our post today. 

In our RCE, there are three major types of anticipation: anticipation of added content, anticipation of changed mechanics and anticipation of announced events. I want to go over each of these today, tell you how they impact our economy, and discuss the overall balance of these three and the subsequent effect that this balance has on our economy as a whole. 

Anticipation of Added Content

In case you were all unaware, Entropia Universe currently holds the world record for most expensive purchase in a virtual world for $335,000. That sounds insane, but when you view it as the investment that it was, makes a whole lot of sense. 

Content in Entropia Universe is almost always added for the purpose of increasing revenue and supporting player retention by allowing players to have the opportunity to invest in EU and in themselves through a virtual purchase. These major content additions, in my opinion, are fantastic. Content pushes like this add depth to the game, and drive movement in game. 

When Medusa came out on Calypso, the movement around that area was enormous - and because of that Medusa's head still has an aire of importance in the game. 

Content releases do a number of things for our economy. They drive player movement (which increases time on world, PED expenditure and trade, etc) - it adds depth to the game in a (hopefully) meaningful way, and provides marketing and advertising opportunities for MindArk while providing players with more ways to invest in the game and make their living.

Anticipation of Change

Change is always disruptive, and this fact remains true even in a digital world. Change represents a deconstruction of old ways - and consequently the deconstruction of any systems and processes that were built on those old ways. Change requires forced adaption, redevelopment and evolution. 

It is because of all of these things that MindArk loves surprising, disruptive changes to the environment. 

Frequently on the forums I see people upset with MindArk's inability to fix issues and announce changes - and I'm not saying those people are off-base with their complaints. However, I would like to put forward an idea that is seldom discussed: 

MindArk doesn't tell you anything on purpose. 

Why? It would essentially be like insider trading. 

Changes that are planned for are changes with minimal adaptation required. However, it would then be as though those who were paying attention had some sort of advantage over those who didn't - and that is both unfair and not profitable, for anyone. Instead, MindArk would rather take a quieter approach. 

What do I mean by "quieter approach"?

MindArk wants to keep you interested in what's going to happen and guessing without telling you - and they want to do this so that you'll continue to deposit and wait for your big break in the game, without preparing for that change. In this way, the role change (and how it is communicated) plays in our community is one of customer retention - as backwards as that sounds. Essentially, this is how it works: 

1. MindArk tells us about their plans by telling us only of the existence of their plan without telling us the time frame, scope of work, or any real details.
2. MindArk intentionally takes longer than they told us to make us periodically log back in and check the game.
3. MindArk releases the change without any warning, disrupting the status quo and increasing deposits (made necessary by the forced and unplanned adaption you were required to undertake) and keeping you on world for long periods of time while you learn about the new change.
4. MindArk profits on the change. 

So, I see why MindArk does it. It helps on-world numbers and lands MindArk a bigger profit. That doesn't mean we have to like it, but I think we should acknowledge that this is at least a planned process and not incompetence on the behalf of MindArk. 

Anticipation of Announced Events

If changes to the game mechanics exist to drive player retention through speculation, Announced Events are the antithesis of that. Events (such as the Eomon migration and periodic robot invasion) are often blown up on ever channel of media at Calypso's disposal. These events are designed to drive player interaction through a promise of reward - these events are often the opportunities that higher-end players are waiting for each year. Everyone who participates hopes for that "big break" and as a result, people flock to these events. 

The outcome of this is pretty straightforward - more immersion, more interaction, more chances for loot... and more deposits from people trying to take advantage of that. 

The Point

So what does this all mean for us? 

It means that MindArk has Anticipation down to a science. 

MindArk (and Calypso as a result) do a very good job of manipulation our anticipatory responses to maximize our time on world and the money we spend by utilizing a series of different types of speculative formats, so that everyone has that "one thing" they want to pay attention to. The result is that those of us interested the game get really, really hooked. 

The real question is: how can we, the player, use this to our advantage? 

The answer to that is simple: Encourage new players to look into these things. One of the biggest problems we have in Entropia as a community is a lack of documentation on... well... anything. A lot of the most interesting parts of our history are lost to the dust because of the decay of user-driven documentation. I mention that for a reason: by encouraging new players to look into the things that keep us veterans playing, we can win on two fronts. 

At the end of the day, encouraging players to look into the things that have the long-time depositors  addicted drives growth of the player base. This, in turn, will put more bodies to work on doing things like growing our economy, and increasing our documentation, which will go a long way in helping everyone. 

The way I see it, everything we do on world makes a difference. That's why last week's post came about, and this one was written for the same reason. The moral of the story here is that, although buying sweat for my suggested 4 PED / K is difficult, even if you can't do that, there are a lot of things that you, the player, can do to help grow the game, and one of those things is to give new players a reason to get hooked. It will help the economy, help our documentation, and help your trade. 

Well, that's it for this week. I hope this has been informative for everyone. Next week, I'll be focusing on (as I made an allusion to above) player-based documentation and the effect this has on our community - and, as an added bonus, I will be doing an off-schedule post about the effect of vehicles on the economy this upcoming Thursday (as it was the winner of my poll recently). You can also look forward to the next ERP Update on Wednesday - just like last week, I have some very exciting things to announce. 

Good Luck Out There everyone. 

-Faucon