Due to our contract with a Nigerian prince who is seeking to exfiltrate his family wealth, your last month's bill of $14.99 will be refunded in its entirety, and the fee schedule from now on will be as follows:
[6 pages of legalese]
$39.99
[3 more pages of legalese]
You can opt out at any time by sending a notarized letter to our legal department at ___. Should you wish to continue using our service, we will auto-renew you at the new rate on your next login.
I had exactly this case with T-Mobile in my country. They'd sent me price increase but I didn't see it and realised only when got charged 3x more for internet I didn't use. Then I answered them with email that I resign, but they wrote that they need my signature and I need to send it by post office or go to one of their places
It costs the same, we just mark it as an opportunity cost of unloading the memory on the spot market.
If I buy contracts for 1 gold bar at $500, and the gold price runs to $1200, I can either continue to market my gold-containing product for the same profit margin, or I can unload all that gold for $1200/bar and make a profit of $700/bar. If my profit margin is high and it doesn't take many gold bars to make a thousand units, maybe discontinuation doesn't make any sense. But if my product is "solid gold statuary of Dear Leader", and the bars are most of my cost basis, I know what I'd do.
You’re thinking only finance. Their goal in buying the contract is to secure the good. The ability to maintain price will allow them to sell more units which is the number they want to show.
Can you even market a fully fledged desktop replacement thin and light in this price hemisphere in 2026? Both RAM and flash SSDs are now worth their weight in gold.
You approach that from a game design perspective to reduce the reward and set bounds on how much fun a player is allowed to destroy maliciously and what kind of counterplay is available, but if you completely eliminate it the world loses a lot of its drama. Conflict drives narrative.
I know Raph Koster has spent a lot of time since he designed UO thinking about this problem. I haven't looked at his current project but am curious to what extent he's licked this issue.
They're by no means equally compelling. But they are viable ways to generate currency, you progress in them over time as a specialist, they feed back into the player economy performing tasks that other people want performed, and they are, importantly, in the same world, on the same shard. I know not to go near Orc Camp because there's a group of player killers down there, despite the fact that there's a rich Agapite vein running through the mountains near the entrance that I would love to mine and make armor out of. Back to the relative safety of Minoc for me, however crowded. In some timeline two weeks in the future, I band together with a bunch of other players (most of whom just want to farm orcs) to kick them out. Territorial control, even without any formal mechanics of territorial control, is closely correlated with narrative and socialization; I wouldn't have met any of those players if we were all on our own separate instance.
Eve Online accomplished something a little more combat-focused, but similarly diverse in playstyle, mostly by dint of having a single large persistent world-shard with minimal functional instancing.
The concepts come with the idea of a persistent game map, which is online 23/7 and never wipes.
When UO came out, it had to deal with a large game world that nevertheless would be too small to reasonably hold a number of players that represented financial success. So the game world was duplicated on multiple servers running the same map. A player on Atlantic server could have no interaction with a player on Chesapeake server. If you wanted to play together you needed to make characters on the same server. In-game this was reflected in cosmological lore about the world being some kind of crystal that was shattered into shards. This jargon spread, to some extent, to be a generic terminology in MMORPGs.
I believe UO launched with only three shards, and added a couple dozen at the height of its popularity.
Eve is notoriously a single-shard game, with the player count being accommodated in other ways as the map grows larger and more organized play is added patch to patch, and the actual play changing notably from the era of 5,000 simultaneous online to the era of 50,000 simultaneous online.
Even without deep skill-stat specialization, when your alliance has 500 people it lends itself strongly to role specialization, because an alliance of 500 people is an organization of 500 people, who find different things fun in different contexts, and whose operations have every category of need you would find in a small nation state, from diplomacy to collective resource allocation to logistics to surveying to espionage to military service, recruiting, communications, practice and command.
Eve has every player on the same global system, and "shards" only by running the code for a particular system on a particular server. As a result, if you're in Eve Online every other player has some influence on you however minute.
One of the key infrastructures for the Inca's large transportation network connecting diverse territories in the Andes was a system of of grass-rope bridges across the ravines that had to be rebuilt annually. I would imagine their fragility played a substantial role in the invasion / occupation. The most important ones were rebuilt by the Spanish in stone once their position was secure.
If it makes seven figures of revenue, there is a real system in place to litigate copyright disputes between corporations. Two kaijiu summoned by ritual magic to fight for the future of the franchise / giant pile of money.
Everything else in the entire system is just bits of monster and building falling randomly. We know if we put the whole population under strict scrutiny ("laser eyes" + "lightning wings"), it would kill every last one of them; every teenager is theoretically criminally liable for the GDP of the Milky Way, a series of violations beginning with a performance of The Birthday Song at their first cake day. Even hiring the cheapest defense lawyer would bankrupt nearly any family in the nation. So we try imperfectly to dodge copyright, hopefully by a couple zip codes, and live in a state of nature on the ground.
The formula they have generalized their responses to in basic explainer mode is pretty distinctive for a lot of us who are otherwise used to reading long-form written pieces.
Due to our contract with a Nigerian prince who is seeking to exfiltrate his family wealth, your last month's bill of $14.99 will be refunded in its entirety, and the fee schedule from now on will be as follows:
[6 pages of legalese]
$39.99
[3 more pages of legalese]
You can opt out at any time by sending a notarized letter to our legal department at ___. Should you wish to continue using our service, we will auto-renew you at the new rate on your next login.
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