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주인장의 한마디
게임시장, 아는만큼 보인다. 카테고리
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참 쥐도새도모르게 개발 ..
by 로무 at 14:20 누군가 했더니 형님. =_=.. by 고금아 at 06/13 감사합니다. 좋은 글 .. by 펭구리 at 06/12 벌써 이 글을 3번째 봅니다.. by 센스키보드 at 05/23 오랜만입니다 석환형. 저.. by Saga at 03/25 이전 블로그
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2006년 01월 31일
Why Not To Mine Data We have glossed over the general process. Let's now step back and consider a healthy scope for data mining. Data mining provides answers that other methods of evolutionary game design cannot. However, it is not a panacea. Data mining takes numbers, processes them, and makes new numbers. These numbers cannot tell you how each player feels. The player may be misinformed or biased about the balance of the game, but she is always right about how she feels. Some players' feelings may be immature, and some players may have contradictory responses. Yet the paradox is that they are all right. Every player's emotional response is valid. The data also does a poor job of revealing how players feel about each game asset. It does not indicate which asset has beautiful modeling, expressive animation, or a compelling story.
A healthy scope excludes preemptive or preventive data mining, which attempts to identify and prevent cheating, harassment, or sabotage. This equates to profiling and an invasion of privacy. Besides being unethical, preemptive data mining is disastrous. Data mining cannot establish cooperation or culpability. Not only is it prone to random error and false positives, but also it creates a new source of player harassment. This source of harassment is hard to discover, impossible to eliminate, and much more costly: Harassment by your own staff upon your customers. Data mining is also called knowledge discovery. While you can mine knowledge from data, you cannot mine wisdom. You have to prioritize results and decide which game imbalances should be left alone. Data mining automates a process within your overall evolutionary design cycle. It amplifies an efficient design process and multiplies the problems in a poor process. Four practical uses Now that you have seen the general process, let's apply it to some common MMOG problems. Here are four practical applications of data mining:
Balance The Economy Each game asset that passes hands between players is a commodity or currency. These tradable game assets define the game's economy. The commodities and currencies need not be limited to money and property. For example, in Nexon's Dark Ages, I designed and implemented a labor currency, a political currency, and a religious currency.
Be careful when measuring individual character gains and losses. Account for transactions that exchange one commodity or currency for another. For example, a character could have less money after one week but have more wealth. He may have exchanged his money for other commodities of greater value. Track the game's macro-economic indicators. See if the supply of currency is increasing or decreasing. Like a real-world money supply, this tells you about the inflation rate of the currency. Measure key performance indicators and generate hypotheses of how to improve game balance. One simple balancing technique you can use is to change the price of a game asset. Players are more receptive to price changes than they are to other attribute changes. For example, in 2002 when Stewart Steel noticed low admittance rate for wizards in Nexon's Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds, he increased the rate by increasing the starting items of that class. In effect, this increased the price that an NPC paid the player for choosing the wizard career.
After testing the hypothesis, repeat the cycle each month. Each modification, although seemingly insignificant, can have a huge ripple effect on the rest of the economy. In the same example, if there were a higher starting value but a poor prospectus for the career of a wizard, then retention rate among wizards might drop. While balancing the strategies, such as player classes in a fantasy setting, ensure that each strategy remains unique. Keep the clusters in strategic space from converging. Let's return to the original example. The low-performing, high-level fighters have several unique and shared assets. When adding a new asset to balance their performance, it might be better not to give a fighter "Poison Tolerance." If the Priest class has an ability to cure poison, then this would be redundant. It would reduce the group's demand for Priests and begin to merge the two classes. Instead it might be better to provide "Sword Mastery" if no other class has this kind of ability. This controls the supply of assets so that each cluster of assets retains its unique niche in the game.
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