It is my humble opinion that player points stores are dumb. However, with the way points beta testing have been going, it doesn’t really look like they’re leaving. And they’re making tons of money. Obviously, there’s a market for users who want numbers on their profiles that display how rich they were before they bought those numbers.
So I’ve decided to hop on board, but my store has a bit of a twist. Points Dilemma. I thought of this last night, and I put it together today. My game is based on the prisoner’s dilemma.
The game is really simple. Two players pay in to participate in a game against each other, and a pot of points is generated for their game out of the points that they bought and some leftover points in the server. They can choose to cooperate with each other or betray each other.
If they both cooperate, the pot will split evenly between the two. It’s likely that this way they can still get more points than they bought simply because of how likely it would be that the game has spare points to pitch in to the pot.
However, if one betrays the other, the player who betrayed gets the entire pot- twice as many points as he or she paid for. Seems like a tempting decision, right?
Well, if both players betray each other, all the points in the pot are lost, and neither player is awarded points. These points go back to the game to be contributed to other pots.
It’s a big mind game of trust and betrayal. Because it’s been found in the prisoner’s dilemma that players constantly betray each other, the pots for my game would conceivably grow larger and larger, allowing me to offer a much better potential value of points for the money that a player pays than other points stores offer.
Also, huge thanks to Woot3 for helping me get the total number of players in the game. This helps determine how much of the game’s available points can be contributed to a particular pot based on how many potential players there currently are.