An Economic study of Private Ragnarok Online Servers.

[Milkis]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I feel as if this place would be the most appropriate.

I'm currently a 4th year student at an US university, majoring in Economics. One of the things I was planning on doing this year was to write up a thesis on the game that I know and love, Ragnarok Online.

The point of the matter is that, while many of us talk about Economics on servers, and even though some may have solid intuition about what is going on, as far as I know, there hasn't been any rigorous studies analyzing the server economies.

I can't guarantee that I will be able to find information that will, in effect, solve the problems faced by policies of Ragnarok Server that affects the economy. I can't even guarantee a set of results, but at the very least, through this thesis, I will be able to present to you a paper that gives a rather indepth explanation of how the RO economy works. If it works out well, there's a chance that it will even be published.

The focus on the study will be how players allocate their time, and how the average player life develops in the server.

The reason that I'm posting this is that, I require data in order to do my analysis. In particular, I need the zenylog and picklogs from various different kinds of Ragnarok Online servers (hopefully ones that are fairly large and active enough). I had contacts with one of the large private RO servers, but at this point, I believe that it's not going to happen, so at this point, I really need the help of various server owners.

I understand that server owners may be worried about privacy of their data, and I can guarantee that the logs will not be released anywhere at any point in time. Furthermore, I don't believe that there is any data just from the picklog and zenylog that will allow me to uniquely identify players in the server at hand.

I also understand that the server logs are extremely large. One way of solving this is to get rid of all Consumed, Storage, and Guild Storage type transactions in the picklog.

I also understand that, getting the picklog and zenylog will be difficult whether it be through CPU time or Bandwidth. I am perfectly fine with receiving the logs portions at a time.

All tools that I make to analyze the logs will be made public.

Feel free to ask me any questions, through this thread and/or PM. If you're a server owner willing to provide me with zenylog and picklogs, please contact me through PM, and we'll work it out. You and your server, if you wish so, will be credited and mentioned within the thesis.

Thank you for your time.

[Yomi]

Wow .. goodluck to your thesis. Unfortunately, I don't own a Private Server atm so I can't contribute :'<

Goodluck dude.

[Kuprin]

Have fun. It may be an interesting study as to the modern mind in a completely unregulated, barter-system economy. Note that servers tend to have four phases, which I like to call the four Rs: Ramping (starts almost immediately for some people: people start powerlevelling and getting gear, preparing, forming guilds), Racing (people start fighting over BG victories, MvPing is competitive, this is when a server is interesting; the higher the rates the longer this phase, usually), Reaping (one group or small subset of groups becomes dominant; BG becomes teamstacks, WoE becomes a few guilds vs the world, MvPing is mostly one or two farming guilds with optimized parties. When new players see this they often leave; growth mostly stops in this phase), Rebooting (drama explosion, funding runs out, or players just get bored of a finished server and leave, leading to a new server starting or a wipe).

The solution is to remove high tier barriers to entry like MvP cards and such, but that's the game design problem. From an economic standpoint, one thing you may find it shows is that pure, unregulated capitalism with no ability for the people to fight the aristocracy (no pvp/looting) causes social collapse ALMOST IMMEDIATELY.