by Elirian » Wed Apr 28, 2010 8:20 pm Potjeh wrote:For someone who invokes psychology so often, you sure don't post a lot of peer-reviewed studies supporting your point.
Anyway, here's a thought: maybe chantrelle picking isn't a competitive job?
To draw an analogy to RL, let's say we have two farmers. Farmer A uses a tractor and makes 100 tons of a crop a year, working 8 hours a day. Farmer B uses a shovel and a hoe, and makes 2 tons of the same crop a year. Should the market cater to farmer B, and reward him with 50x what farmer A gets per ton? If yes, who is the poor sap that has to buy farmer B's crops and bear the weight of this inefficiency?
Fact is, chantrelles aren't in particularly high demand. Higher rewards on chantrelle picking would encourage more people to pursue an unneeded occupation, and those labours that are actually needed would suffer for it. Final result is that you have a decrease in global wealth, which results in everyone being poorer.
There are things that are in demand, and they generally give good returns on time investment. Silk, for example, actually nets you more wealth per hour than metalmaking, and everyone can do it.
You're still making real world analogies! The difference is that the objective of a free market is not to ensure that everyone is having as much fun as possible. H&H is not the free market, it's a game, a good game is one that people have fun playing. Very few people enjoy playing games where there are no losers, but very few people enjoy playing games where they lose all the time. So it's a good idea if the game provides everyone with an equal chance to be a winner. Like I keep saying, it's not about 'everyone being equal' or some bullshit, it's about people getting equal rewards for what they invest in the game, which is time. The person who works harder still pulls ahead, but he doesn't suddenly curve upwards astronomically as soon as he starts producing metal. Most games with reward systems do the opposite in fact, and have the reward system curve downwards. This game is one. It costs more LPs to go from skill level 1 to 2 than it does from 2 to 3. A lot of the systems in the game use square root in fact. As far as I can tell there aren't many systems in the game that provide increasing, rather than diminishing, returns on investment. There's a reason for that, as you know ;p
Oh, and btw, google skinnerbox if you're worried about whether the stuff in that post is legitimate. It's pretty well known stuff, which is why I didn't think I needed to post any studies
