30-50,000 Feral Hogs
November 18, 2019 4:43 AM   Subscribe

Planet Zoo is, temporarily, a game about mass-producing knackered warthogs (Rock Paper Shotgun). “As the mass-produced offspring of the grindhouses flooded the market, [conservation credit values] for those species plummeted still further ... [for new players] it turned out “low prestige”, “unendangered” and “fast-breeding” boiled down to three creatures: the Indian peafowl, arguably the crappest animal in the game, plus ostriches and warthogs, which had the added bonus of being happy to cohabit, for more efficient mass breeding.”
posted by adrianhon (22 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
This seems to have gone exactly as well as anybody who was paying the slightest attention to video games during the Diablo 3 auction house fiasco would have expected.
posted by Sequence at 5:42 AM on November 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


Simple market emulation = Stupid market emulation

When designing a market emulation it might behoove you to consult an economist. It might also work to build a market the looks like it reflects the barest hint of physical limits. Life is not code.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 5:44 AM on November 18, 2019 [6 favorites]


Crisis on Infinite Planet Zoos
posted by nubs at 5:57 AM on November 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


I've been pressing my nose up against the wall of my (tragically not quite GPU-capable) laptop watching Planet Zoo go. It looks so fun and I've played Zoo Tycoon on and off for over a decade--if I had the hardware for it right now, Planet Zoo would already be mine. I just need a machine that can run the damn thing.

This is both kind of hilarious and just makes me want to play with it more.
posted by sciatrix at 6:38 AM on November 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


Yes, I agree, this is incredibly hilarious. Scrooge McDuck swimming through his vault of *checks notes* pandas.

It is strange that you can't naturally get these things, but I knew nothing about the game and didn't know it was a... zoo... MMO....? huh, ok.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 6:48 AM on November 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


This problem exists only in the online game mode. There is also an offline mode where this problem *obviously* doesn't occur.
posted by Pendragon at 7:27 AM on November 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


This seems to have gone exactly as well as anybody who was paying the slightest attention to video games during the Diablo 3 auction house fiasco would have expected.

It's almost as though there's a lesson to be learned about offering multiple types of in-game currency, and then not providing fungibility between them. Nobody wants to deal in $ if they're hyper-inflating against special currency.

Actually, maybe it's a problem of providing multiple in-game currencies, full stop. The only successful implementation I've seen of it is in Eve Online, and those are exchangeable on the in-game open market, and it STILL took them three years to balance it right.
posted by Mayor West at 7:55 AM on November 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


Anyway I'll be back next week to read the wailing and gnashing of teeth by panda-hoarders when the devs overcorrect things with a rushed patch, and titans of animal trafficking are brought low by the economic shock introduced by putting game developers in charge of macroeconomic policy.
posted by Mayor West at 7:57 AM on November 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


Just about every third sentence in this is a potential MetaFilter tagline, but I'm going to go with
MetaFilter: ravaged by plague, starvation and injuries due to brutal peckfights
and
MetaFilter: swarm of bastards doing the same thing
posted by Wolfdog at 7:58 AM on November 18, 2019 [6 favorites]


It's almost as though there's a lesson to be learned about offering multiple types of in-game currency, and then not providing fungibility between them. Nobody wants to deal in $ if they're hyper-inflating against special currency.

gresham's law! sort of.
posted by dismas at 8:02 AM on November 18, 2019


Silver fish and Gold fish are tradable at a 50% discount in Neko Atsume so I dunno what THIS nonesense is. I need some damn tuna. And sashimi.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:29 AM on November 18, 2019


I would totally go to a zoo that was all peacocks, ostriches and warthogs
posted by oulipian at 10:20 AM on November 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


This problem exists only in the online game mode. There is also an offline mode where this problem *obviously* doesn't occur.

As stated in the linked article.
posted by tobascodagama at 10:21 AM on November 18, 2019


When designing a market emulation it might behoove you to consult an economist.

Which will tell you exactly what not to do, given economist's "success" in the real world. (The game situation seems to have the fingerprints of economists all over it, warthogs instead of spherical cows.)
posted by maxwelton at 10:32 AM on November 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


Game economies are almost always subject to inflation because they fail to put drains into the economy, because drains are boring and tedious. Repairing equipment sucks. Having to spend gold to do it makes people angry.

If gold (or whatever) isn't destroyed at approximately the same rate as it's produced, that's inflation.

Smart games with a lot of history (WoW, for example) find ways to keep players wanting to spend that gold by way of cosmetics and consumable items, but it's a hard balance, especially if there's a level system, and higher-level enemies produce more gold.
posted by explosion at 10:58 AM on November 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


Are the screenshots in that article screwy somehow, or does the guy writing it really have his gamma screwed up that badly? Or is the game really nothing but ugly muddy bleah graphics?
posted by caution live frogs at 11:12 AM on November 18, 2019


Compare with IGN's video review. Seems to be a mixed bag, scenes around midday look much less muddy but scenes in twilight or cloudy weather look just as ugly at the screenshots from RPS.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:07 PM on November 18, 2019


I will give them credit that at least with the other mode available, it's not nearly as game-ruining as the D3 auction house. It's just... almost exactly the same in other respects. The stuff people really want is impossibly expensive while the bottom is falling out of the market for what players actually have to sell. Even if you didn't know anything at all about how economics is supposed to work, there's this huge relatively-recent example to look at and go, "whatever we do, it should probably not be... exactly that."

But despite that, what with having modes that are just fine, I'm probably still going to put off getting this until it goes on sale, but I almost certainly will buy it even if they never really fix the multiplayer market.
posted by Sequence at 12:44 PM on November 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


Which will tell you exactly what not to do, given economist's "success" in the real world. (The game situation seems to have the fingerprints of economists all over it, warthogs instead of spherical cows.)

Working with simplified models is what a lot of economists love, though - it's the real world that's a thornier problem.
posted by atoxyl at 1:15 PM on November 18, 2019


Has their model actually failed, or has it produced an exaggerated version of what does happen in the real world: zoos overproducing common species to build up the reputation to get rarer ones, leading to situations like when that Danish zoo killed a healthy giraffe simply because European zoos had too many giraffes and they wanted room for something else.
posted by Pyry at 1:56 PM on November 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


"I solved the Black-Scholes equation in exact terms and it turns out the answer is one billion emaciated, furious boars. Get to work, zookeepers."
posted by Wolfdog at 2:03 PM on November 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


Just about every third sentence in this is a potential MetaFilter tagline

Oh indeed.

MetaFilter: wheezing, hapsburgian puddles of imminent genetic collapse.
posted by ZaphodB at 9:22 PM on November 18, 2019


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