Artifex, My Wallet Expands

Early on in my life in Mabinogi, I was introduced to and joined the Artifex guild. It was nice to belong to a small guild; I grew close to Ashrayne the guild's leader, and there wasn't much I had to do except represent the guild with dignity. The only problem was also a consequence of its size: none of my other friends were in the guild.

That changed rapidly last week as 3 of my good friends signed up: Kazukikun, Wynterrose, and Angellrose. If you go back to my first Mabinogi post, I've known Kazukikun from the start. He introduced me to Ashrayne. I had met Wynterrose and Angellrose through Ash. The 5 of us existed for a while as a loose band of buddies, but perhaps because of Ashrayne's superb leadership skills, she finally convinced them to join the cause. The guild has expanded in player base, and there are plans on the horizon to expand guild operations to include a guild store and guild-sponsored social events. It's an exciting time of growth!

Taking a break in front of our guild stone
When I think of an MMORPG, I picture an online game where people form hunting parties and raid dungeons for loot. Basically, you kill things to earn items that help you kill more things, as Richard Bartle put it. That can be fun in a lot of ways: there is a definite progression of challenges laid out before players to conquer, conductive to obtaining Csikszentmihalyi's flow mental state. However, the consequences of these battles are a bit extreme: life or death. On a number of occasions death has been extremely unfun. Post-death activities include losing a chunk of my experience points, trudging my way back to the enemy that killed me, and possibly getting killed again (repeat).

Instead, I've found that playing the Mabinogi economy is consistently more fun and rewarding. Sure, I have to put some work in obtaining the raw materials to sell, but I rarely get killed and get to enjoy the competition of snaring buyers away from competitors. In a previous post, I didn't know what to call this unofficial market (since it's not selling in the housing sector or flea markets), but I've come to realize this is hustling. As a hustler, I make gold selling whatever I can to other players whenever I want to work. I have no office or shop. Word of mouth (party ads) sustains my business.

Because the game's design violates a couple of Castronova's principles for a healthy player-run economy, hustling is the popular workaround of the game's flaws. For one, Castronova explains that maps should be designed to "naturally" cause players to converge at a central location where shops can flourish. The Mabinogi world doesn't really have a good crossroads area. There are many ways to go from point A to point C without going through point B. Couple this with the second design problem of placing all ingredients for a type of production good (food, armor, clothes) conveniently within it's own town, and players specializing on one craft never have to travel or make deals for someone else's raw materials. Hustling overcomes these hindrances to keep the economy alive. The global party ad feature allows players to be dispersed and isolated from one another but still aware of others' wares from across the map. Hustling also allows players to be mobile shops capable of moving wherever the action is.

Since my last post where I reported sales of 36.2k gold, I've discovered that another channel (ch 4) was the consensus market place of the server. After moving my operations there, I've made 284k selling ore and ingots, with the largest single sale being 66k. The rush of finding a buyer and negotiating prices has gotten me hooked on hustling. The last time I ran a dungeon to kill the boss was about a week ago, and even then I did it as a guild function, not because I felt compelled to kill things.

Because a more casual player like myself can make decent gold doing this, the mining market is inundated with Asian gold farmers. Part of the fun is outwitting them and landing a sale right in front of their eyes. I've found a couple practices help attract players to my goods:
1) start a campfire and sit around it with my ad displayed (invites players over)
2) refine some of my ore with my ad displayed (lets players know I'm a regular player)
3) sell my goods cheaper than the gold farmers
4) dress in a customized outfit so I stand out from the farmers
5) speak English, and be "human"

The gold farmers descend on a player buying ore
Ultimately my goal is to raise enough gold to buy an obscenely expensive armor set that caught my eye. It's priced at 700k, so with my total liquid assets of about 300k, I'm in for another weekend and a half (or more) of hustling to get it. In the meantime, I finally put money back into the market and purchased a helmet from another player. The wings on the helmet match the bird design on the back of the armor I want. It cost me 20k, a relative pittance now, but it's something.

My new Winged Half Helm

Mabi Market

This past week I've gotten more involved in the commodity market in Mabinogi, selling mostly my spare ores and whatever else I come across. I haven't tried purchasing anything through the player markets since I don't need anything yet.

In Mabinogi there are 2 formal routes in which to participate in the economy, either player-run shops (think swap meet gatherings) or selling items out of your house (think an at-home business). Since I don't have the gold to own my own house, and the shop licenses restrict where you can set up your wares, I chose the unofficial third method: party advertising.

Officially, party advertising is meant for gathering people for a dungeon run. Starting such a party puts a dalogue box above your character's head with the party information. At regular intervals, the party opening is also displayed in the chat window. Naturally, this feature can be (and is) used to put the word out that you're buying or selling specific things. The dialogue box is then more like a sandwich board that you wear around Mabinogi advertising your deals. The server-wide chat notices makes sure that anyone anywhere also gets the message. Here's what one of my early ads looked like:


The message "[Dungeon]S>C,S,G/ore (3/8)" is shorthand for "Selling> Copper, Silver, Gold ores," while the dungeon and 3/8 tags are artifacts of the party system. This ad gets the basics across in the constrained space allowed, but my later more effective ads evolved to include the asking prices. A good ad looks more like this: "[Dungeon] S>C,S,G/ores 300-750,1kNOTE." Choppier to read because of the imposed slashes and hyphens of the party system are unavoidable, but all the relevant information is there. My copper is 300 gold, silver 750, and gold ore is 1000 gold. "NOTE" specifies that I should be contacted via the private note system.

My first large sale was 13 copper ores at 300g and 4 silver at 1000g, for a total of 7.9k. I was loitering around the refinery with my party sign up, and a user in a rush needed the goods to finish a piece of armor.


Aside from advertising goods for sale, it is common for users to post buying ads. I pay particular attention to the buyers' posts because they take the work out of finding a customer. Plus, if their buying price is too high, it's to my benefit to oblige them and profit. One user, named DISQUALIFIED, wanted units of Finest Leather at 16k gold each, which is about 6000 gold over market price. As it happened, I received a piece of Finest Leather from a quest and I had no use for it except to sell it. Most buyers' ads request that you mail them the item and they send you the money upon receiving it, like the cash-on-delivery option of the US postal system. I sent DISQUALIFIED the leather and asked for the 16k COD, and was very pleased to see a pile of gold in my mailbox the next day.


Currently I'm reading Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds, which covers the important aspects of what makes virtual world economies tick. One of the scourges of MMO health are the gold farmers who blend the virtual economy with the real world economy (selling virtual items for real cash; real-money trading). They damage the fantasy world in a number of ways, but they seem like a fungus that just can't be erased by the developers:


Unfortunately, I had a momentary lapse in judgement and sold my ores very low to a naked character sporting two pickaxes--a sure sign that the user sold their shirt for whatever gold they could get, and would slave away in the mines to make valuable equipment for sale. Because I had gone for days without selling the abundance of ores that clogged up my inventory, I was quick to liquidate my stock so I could get back to mining. I learned later that I had fed the fungus. NOTICE: DO NOT FEED THE GOLD FARMERS!


By my notes, I've sold about 36.2k in goods since I started playing the market. I will have a more detailed sales history in my individual research paper at the end of the quarter.

I Met Richard Bartle in Another Life

On Wednesday co-creator of MUD1 and the MMO genre in general, Richard Bartle, met my class in Second Life. We've been reading chapters from his textbook Designing Virtual Worlds, so this was an opportunity to meet a very important figure in online gaming "face to face" and pick his mind. He was very nice and was happy to address any questions we had.

However, I was a bit ashamed of how some of my classmates handled themselves in the presence of Mr. Bartle. Normally the class is rowdy and inattentive during lectures. That would have been fine during our virtual class in Second Life, since the noise and apathy would remain in the real world and not interfere with our guest lecture. The Internet's power of anonymity only fueled their disrespectful actions. Students ran around the lecture space with glow sticks, with their clothes off, and shooting toy guns at people. Even the Second Life aficionado of the class took the lecture as an opportunity to show off and "build" something in the middle of the room.

It's sad, really, the way the class threw away this special opportunity. I used to hate how straight-edged the true CSS courses are, but now I'd rather be surrounded by students who are there to learn. Mixed-discipline classes are a recipe for disaster.