Cantr II Discussion Forum

Or: How a failed assumption locked an online society simulator into a permanent barter economy.

Cantr has been analyzed extensively over the years by the intelligent and trolls alike. There are many mechanistic reasons why Cantr has failed as a society simulator, but what I want to talk about is not mechanistic in nature, quite the opposite. It is the assumption that was made at Cantr's inception that prevented mechanisms from being put into place to support advanced economics. What was this critical assumption, and how has it kept Cantr in a perpetual tribalistic-barter economy?

Economics down through the centuries has been primarily driven by greed - the desire to obtain more. Many of us can summon Gordon Gekko's "greed is good" philosophy from the movie Wall Street. Greed permeates nearly all aspects of life besides economics. It can be argued that greed for control and power is what doomed the communist experiments in the early 20th century. If you can rely on one thing, it's human greed, right? Wrong. Apparently, greed doesn't translate well into an online society simulator. The anonymizing power of the internet, which is supposed to strip us of our inhibitions and turn us into base creatures, has instead done the opposite by bringing out our better, altruistic qualities when it comes to Cantr II.

The essential and fundamental element to a profit economy is ownership. The creators of Cantr II, assuming that characters in Cantr would behave the same as they do in real life, believed that characters would form governments, and then use those governments to "own," or stake monopolies on the local resources. With resource gathering restricted, these governments could then pay laborers much less than what they could get if they had worked on their own, and hence a profit economy would develop. Difficult jobs could pay more, basic jobs less. The product of one day's labor could support wages for multiple laborers. Unfortunately, this assumption proved extremely false, and no economy like this has ever developed. Even if it had, it would be quickly destroyed by a mass-migration away from that region to another controlled by the altruist/communist character majority.

With large land areas to migrate into, and no hard-coded mechanisms to support ownership (of land, machines, etc.), Cantr failed right out of the gate as an accurate society simulator. This is why Cantr is, was, and always will be a simple barter-based economy, and why characters seeking to work for payment are so often met with town leaders that instead, expect them to work for ideological reasons.

With the invention of machines that make higher tech materials, such as iron, steel, and manufactured goods, another opportunity was created to form a profit-economy. While this was practiced on a very low level by some entrepreneurs, on the whole this never took off. People still expect to buy items at cost, and traders are willing to sell at cost, simply because given infinite time and the lack of resource gathering restriction, the customer can make it themselves. Had Cantr from the start encouraged ownership with hard-coded game mechanisms, instead of assuming that ownership was a natural state that human nature pulls us to, I believe that the Cantr II society would be very different and much more advanced than we have today.

I know many would strongly object to this, but I think limited resources would help. Resources cannot be depleted and it's somewhat difficult for towns to enforce strict gathering laws. Like you mentioned, if a char doesn't like gov't X, they can walk down the road and chances are good the resource will be found with a more laid back attitude about gathering it. Since a newspawn can jump right in and start gathering resources, there's more of an independence than if people were forced to work/trade for everything. Traders get fed up with towns expecting an even exchange rate, which equals a loss for them both in time and fuel, and end up just gathering what they need instead of trading for it. Stockpiles decrease the value of items and need, which creates stagnation rather than regions fighting or negotiating over resources. etc etc etc.

I'm sure there are many other factors that influence economy, those issues just popped into my head first.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVkmr8wk ... re=related

This is it right here! LMFAO

You'll get no argument from me, Sumbum. Wells run dry. Mines get depleted. Even crops from time to time are subject to failure. Without any uncertainty/scarcity, there is no price fluctuation, no hoarding, no need for migration or trading, etc. People can happily harvest their blueberries from the same patch of ground that their great-great-grandcantry did, without having to worry about soil depletion, flash floods, etc. At worse, they have to worry about feeding an overpopulated town.

I think Doug's right that it's been a player assumption since the start that's gotten us so accustomed to not having property ownership of resources and land. Things shouldn't always have to be mended by mechanics... It's an RP game, and we really should be able create and maintain and live under such things in the game simply by the way we play. This, like many problems in cantr, is a mindset thing. Players realize now that they crave playful RP, and they've realized that having the absolute simplest form of law seems to attract the playful RP crowd. Strategic and progressive RPers who want that extra bit of context, that realistic backdrop of governance, etc are usually hung out to dry because the playful RPers seem to think they're mutually exclusive player ideologies. Or it just takes a little extra effort that some of our lifetime food fighters don't want to have to commit to.

A bit of a counter to Doug's post is that naturally altruistic communities are not solely to blame. Over extension of greed in the wrong hands has also managed to kill off governance and land/property ownership. I'm referring to the cliché sleepy leader. I didn't pluralize that, because the problem is when there's only the one greedy guy with any authority. When places did have taxes set up on resources, things became a little stagnant in the regions where the boss had a sleeping problem, and no trusted aides to handle things while he was asleep. It's infuriating to have to wait 5 to 10 days to work out a trade deal because Sole Bossman's only awake for an hour each day. Then again, it's not only his fault that many of our MMO sociopaths couldn't be trusted not to Bossman blind on a player whim (all OOC mentalities, I'll add).


All in all, I like the post Doug. Maybe people will realize this, and things will turn around here and there. Time will tell. Take the leap, folks.

If characters could own slots or machines, in that any product gained using those slots or machines went into the owner's inventory instead of the worker's, it would be a major step in the right direction. As it is now, it doesn't fit with a slow-paced game to have to micromanage every aspect of life just to ensure that people aren't walking off with resources.

Doug R. wrote:The anonymizing power of the internet, which is supposed to strip us of our inhibitions and turn us into base creatures, has instead done the opposite by bringing out our better, altruistic qualities when it comes to Cantr II.

Not so. We see a large range of behavior and motivation, from care bears to slavers. There is some gift-giving, but there is also work-for-pay, trade, theft, and salvaging.

Doug R. wrote:With resource gathering restricted, these governments could then pay laborers much less than what they could get if they had worked on their own, and hence a profit economy would develop. Difficult jobs could pay more, basic jobs less. The product of one day's labor could support wages for multiple laborers. Unfortunately, this assumption proved extremely false, and no economy like this has ever developed. Even if it had, it would be quickly destroyed by a mass-migration away from that region to another controlled by the altruist/communist character majority.

This was common in the past and still is common now, at least with my characters. Iron and steel isn't really worth 20 to 50 grams per day; that's one way profit has been made at least. One thing I've noticed though is how this rate seems to have gone up. 20 or 25 is a low rate now. My characters have been a part of it, too; I had one character who would raise the iron and steel rate by 5 grams per day every decade.

SumBum wrote:I know many would strongly object to this, but I think limited resources would help. Resources cannot be depleted and it's somewhat difficult for towns to enforce strict gathering laws.

I agree completely.... with the exception of food resources...(carrots can always be harvested from the same patch.) Although fertilizer wouldn`t be such a bad idea to keep the topsoil productive.

This is a thought provoking thread Doug, and brings me flashbacks of years of arguing...

Generally, resources should deplete overtime. Likewise new discoveries of resources should be made. I just want to add what The Sociologist essay on motivation pointed out so long ago, what really limits the economy is the fact every resource is divisible down to the gram. This is something that is painstaking to fix, if even possible. With no real advantage to coinage and no serious bankers, and no true multi-location empires, a more complex economy just doesn`t seem possible. Besides, between sleeping and care-bearing who has the time????

I`ve been on enough diatribes about this, but to state it simply and repeat....

1.The world needs to be scaled back, way back. A large society is the first requisite.(new players would be a big help. I for one am starting to get really bored but I`m trying to stick it out.)

2.Conflict needs to not only be allowed, but encouraged.(Hopefully the new combat system helps.)

3. Proper balancing of the exploitation of commodities and time is a must. (i.e. repair rate,rot rates.)

4. Something needs to be done about the divisible to a gram problem. (And if not, weightless coins might provide the proper incentive.)

5. I`ll promise to play a few care-bears if everyone else will make an egomaniac hell-bent on domination.

6. Speeding up everything by a factor of 2 just might make this game more attractive to the noobs and vets alike. At least doubling the output and halving the distance between things.(it`s a slow game, a very slow game and can get boring quick.)

7.Everything and I mean everything should be able to be disassembled.

8. And this one I`m sure there will be large problems with, but once and if the world is brought down to a managable size, cooperation if RP`d correctly between characters of the same player should not be banned.

I`m sure I have more ideas and I`m sure there is many around these forums, if I think of any I`ll drop back in. Great OP Doug. I`m glad someone else notices it.

Another problem I`ve notcied that goes hand in hand with the sparse population around is, that the government if it can be called that. I`ve seen very few things that qualify as government...Is the chief economic player, if not sole economic player.

If there were towns large enough, it`d be best if the government got it hands out of everything, and did what government does best. Enforcing contracts monopoly on legal violence and legalized theft.

Legalized theft better known as taxation, is the second biggest reason currency exist, next to a common rate of exchange. The way colonial pennsylvania introduced script and got people to accept it, was by only allowing taxes to be paid in it. Colonial America was largely a barter economy due to the lack of gold and silver coins...

I don`t see barter coming to an end without a large population and a strong government enforcing regulations. The way I see it, the economy is permanently barter unless dozens of new characters show up in any given town, stay active, and try to make it happen.

We need dense population, empire, and scarcity to make a more sophisticated economy.

I like all of these ideas.
Once I read an article that (in general) online game population is composed of 4 kinds of players {names dont have to be correct}:
- roleplayers
- player killers
- achievers (economists in our reality)
- "researchers" (people looking for new things in game, making formulas etc., in our reality e.g. mapmakers)
It would be nice to keep the balance between these 4 kinds of people.

kaloryfer wrote:I like all of these ideas.
Once I read an article that (in general) online game population is composed of 4 kinds of players {names dont have to be correct}:
- roleplayers
- player killers
- achievers (economists in our reality)
- "researchers" (people looking for new things in game, making formulas etc., in our reality e.g. mapmakers)
It would be nice to keep the balance between these 4 kinds of people.

I play all of these, do you?

Mojo, I think kaloryfer was describing players, not characters. ;)
Though if I applied this to my own characters:

I have one that's half-mapmaker half-achiever, one that's half-mapmaker half-roleplayer, and the rest are pretty much pure roleplayers.....except for my Spanish character, who is, in fact, a sleeper. :P

I'm definitely an achiever. It's why I find it so hard to keep my characters awake when there's nothing to achieve.

I believe the creators of Cantr made the mistake of not recognizing that the initial period of expansion, tool use to machines, expansion in player base, expansion of the world to accommodate would not continue indefinitely.

Given what I know of the state of online persistent gaming at the time, they would have to be freaky wierd geniuses to have picked that.

Given they created a fairly state of the art internet application and largely gave it away. I believe at heart they might have been intellectual left wingers anyway, and wouldn't have encountered the current utopia as a philosophical problem.

Practically,

We have some fairly pure role players who interact with complex charters against the back drop the world provides.
Some gorden Gecko types out to make as many bits in the database as they can, link to their player ID's.
PK,s (which Cantr generally especially in the current radio,drag, and combat environment either gives far too much or absolutely no power.)
And researchers (maps laying everywhere and the wiki sort of limits these)

To the general typography above I'ld add

A huge mob of people trying to work out what is going on.
Cybersex.

Only two of my charters have become sexually active, one quite despite her expectations. I have heard that romance at least, if not graphic (hopefully erotica) is quite prevalent.

Obviously these groups overlap, I am looking forward to the next charismatic, Gorden Gecko, RP, PK'er. I do believe that the character will have to be played by an established player, the sort of OOC knowledge that is required to raise one would indicate a level of commitment that might get them to raise a mob that kills us all.

Trade does exist, but the DOW system which seems generally accepted, breaks it badly.

If one of my characters gets off it's ass, gets a vehicle, tools, gathers a resource, takes it to somewhere else and gets offered what they could pick it up off the ground for, trading is a lifestyle not a job. (can we burn down the house of anyone who uses the wiki or ooc knowledge to do DOW trades?)

Drowning in food, hopefully, just took a big step towards no longer being a threat to having any sort of economy.

Decay, decay of stockpiles, decay of tools in storage, removing the ability of a tool to be eternal with routine maintenance, these are all being considered and could lead to some demand.



The worlds economy is broken at the moment, because expansion is not occurring, Instead mild contraction with a long history of it, providing excess land and a spread in the newspawn.

Newspawn being directed to perform a task, that with little reflection would indicate is likely to take longer than the expected life of the character, is quite profitable for the directing player's character, the next player I see direct their character into expressing sorrow about the sleeping sickness without having first given evidence that they provided an opportunity to do some meaningful work, paying off with something, at least praise, in a 1,3,5,7,11 curve I am going to break through charter and have a go. We have slavery and exploitation, it's just that the code says the best way to get work out of someone is to be a little encouraging at first, have mostly sleepy town, and let the little suckers die or wander off before they even get demanding about pay. (not a terrifically encouraging new player experience)

As the RD and the ProgD continue in their work in giving economic activity some meaning, Lets do what we can to keep some of the flood of players who come in, only the best, but at least those. If we can start pumping up the number of players those hammers in storage shrink a little from 20 per character to 18. Doesn't solve the problem, but it's another little step that can be taken.

World size should be linked to player population, as it expands we have mechanisms to expand it, and god help anyone brave enough to suggest a mechanism for shrinking it.

Decreasing travel time between places could help social interaction, and trade, most especially it would allow our newest players to look at more than one town in the couple of weeks they have, and hopefully find a reason to live somewhere.
On the other hand it would have a whole lot of implications on any economy that emerged.


Everything should be smash-able for some of it's raw materials