Author Topic: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.  (Read 333211 times)

ryuplaneswalker

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #900 on: April 02, 2014, 02:45:32 AM »
Insurance companies could offer discounts for confirmed use of it.  People who choose to drive manually would face higher liability and higher insurance costs.  And accident rates would still go down if most people choose to use it, even if one goober doesn't and kills someone.  One goober can't possibly kill 10,000 people in a single year to make up the difference.

If it is proven that driverless Cars reduce crashes in a significant way mass Insurance companies -will- offer discounts for it because it will save them money in the long run, say Crashes are reduced by 10% that gives the insurance companies the ability to reduce the price by 5% and pocket an extra 5% of profit.

Presuming that a driver less car costs the same as a non driverless car, but even if it does not start that way eventually the technology will become cheap enough for it to be a ubiquitous thing.

In regards to "people hacking them and killing other people by crashing them" a person crazy enough can do that with a car now.

LadyVamp

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #901 on: April 02, 2014, 03:05:26 AM »
The problem with this type of economic system, in terms of trying to make it work in the real world, is two-fold.  First, it requires a level of technical sophistication and surplus resources that we don't currently have.  Second, it was able to be established throughout the planet because its ideological competitors were decimated in a nuclear war.  How you get there from here without both of those triggers occurring I'm not sure.

That system you refer to is known as barter, and all it takes is complete loss in the faith of currencies.  It doesn't require nuclear war.  As for surpluses, most every place has too much of one thing and not enough of another.  People barter for the things they need with the things they got.  Things, by the way, might be general manpower or skills and not just something tangible.
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LadyVamp

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #902 on: April 02, 2014, 03:09:17 AM »
Automated driving is less about judgment and more about technical capability.

I'm guessing you've never ridden a motorcycle on city streets where the difference between good judgement and bad judgement is life or death.  I ride a Suzuki Boulevard S83.  What others are doing and how I will react to what they might do is always on my mind.
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houtex

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #903 on: April 02, 2014, 03:21:29 AM »
Motorcyclist checking in to confirm:

Agreed.  Everyone is targeting me.  And I'm targeting myself.  I figure if I watch all us jerks, I might be able to avoid something untowards.

And I do that whatever I'm driving.  Motorcycle or car, doesn't matter.  World's out to kill me, and so'm I if'n I ain't careful.

LadyVamp

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #904 on: April 02, 2014, 03:24:50 AM »
All I can say is that I'm not giving up manual control of my car, whatever the trend to do otherwise is.  In fact, I'm looking at possibly going the "classic car" of some sort route specifically to avoid all of these lovely new Big Brother features.

Ranchero or El Camino.  There are people who stopped buying new vehicles when Ford and GM stopped making their respective "cars".  A tragedy really.  Both were incredibly successful.

That would be my classic car.  Pre-computerized.  About as bullet proof as they got.  And more practical than a pickup/suv/sut.
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Arcana

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #905 on: April 02, 2014, 03:27:41 AM »
That system you refer to is known as barter, and all it takes is complete loss in the faith of currencies.  It doesn't require nuclear war.  As for surpluses, most every place has too much of one thing and not enough of another.  People barter for the things they need with the things they got.  Things, by the way, might be general manpower or skills and not just something tangible.
The system being described is not a barter system except in the most superficial of senses; in the same sense as I barter money for Starbucks.  The concept of shortage-free economies has nothing to do with the notion that in a free market excesses are distributed from one place to another.  The question is what happens when certain goods become effectively unlimited for everyone, everywhere in non-trivial non-cornercases, such as energy.  This is not just something I made up for discussion yesterday: its an actual field of academic discussion.  What happens in an economic system where needs cost nothing to deliver?  Do you artificially constrain supply to retain a hierarchy of exchange?  If you don't, what prevents arbitrage seekers from attempting to leverage that free supply to non-contiguous parts of the market?

"Barter" doesn't really answer those systemic questions, because no barter system in history had congruent properties.

LadyVamp

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #906 on: April 02, 2014, 03:29:06 AM »
Motorcyclist checking in to confirm:

Agreed.  Everyone is targeting me.  And I'm targeting myself.  I figure if I watch all us jerks, I might be able to avoid something untowards.

And I do that whatever I'm driving.  Motorcycle or car, doesn't matter.  World's out to kill me, and so'm I if'n I ain't careful.

Yep and when behind the wheel of my car, I watch out for our brothers and sisters on their bikes.  Give them extra room.  Protect them when an unruly driver is near (when I'm in the car).  Try to anticipate their responses to a bad situation and get out of their way.  350Z pretty car.  350Z with human hood ornament is not pretty.
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LadyVamp

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #907 on: April 02, 2014, 03:32:37 AM »
The system being described is not a barter system except in the most superficial of senses; in the same sense as I barter money for Starbucks.  The concept of shortage-free economies has nothing to do with the notion that in a free market excesses are distributed from one place to another.  The question is what happens when certain goods become effectively unlimited for everyone, everywhere in non-trivial non-cornercases, such as energy.  This is not just something I made up for discussion yesterday: its an actual field of academic discussion.  What happens in an economic system where needs cost nothing to deliver?  Do you artificially constrain supply to retain a hierarchy of exchange?  If you don't, what prevents arbitrage seekers from attempting to leverage that free supply to non-contiguous parts of the market?

"Barter" doesn't really answer those systemic questions, because no barter system in history had congruent properties.

Barter system predated money.   Money systems were created because you can't cut enough grass directly to buy a car but you can have someone give you money for cutting their grass to trade for the car when you've cut enough lawns.

Barter wasn't meant to answer the questions you are asking.  It was a way to trade what you had for what you wanted.

BTW:  US Tax code actually addresses barter transactions too by forcing you to place fair market value for the trade and taxing based on that equivalent transaction
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Arcana

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #908 on: April 02, 2014, 03:39:51 AM »
I'm guessing you've never ridden a motorcycle on city streets where the difference between good judgement and bad judgement is life or death.  I ride a Suzuki Boulevard S83.  What others are doing and how I will react to what they might do is always on my mind.
Motorcycles are not cars.  Even so, if motorcycle operators only exercised the same legal options available to cars, that need for good judgment would largely be eliminated.  You're using "judgment" in a colloquial sense to cover all aspects of driver decision making.  But there's a fundamental difference, from an automation perspective, between the decision to stop in time to avoid a collision, which requires skill but no complex judgment, and the decision on which path to take to navigate a hazardous road, which no automobile driver is *supposed* to exercise, because they are legally required to limit their maneuvering to only safe maneuvers within designated roadway markers.  Taking emergency action because, say, a driver changed lane without clearing a blind spot is not an exercise in judgment.  Its taking the only action proscribed under those conditions.  That doesn't require an expert system to figure out.

"Human judgment" within the context of discussing automation, deals with the case where the computer is presented with a situation in which there are a number of possible distinct options, *none* of them with a computationally guaranteed chance of being successful.  The case where you are required to make the choice to take the only possible action that safeguards your life is skill, not judgment.  That sort of skill is far easier to program into a computer than genuine judgment, which is not needed for automated driving.  In almost every case where an emergency situation arises, you can either slow down or stop, or change direction to avoid the problem.  Only in an incredibly small number of cases will options similar to those not be available or not be applicable.  Humans make life more difficult by making those choices harder to execute, for example by following another car too closely to make an emergency stop.  A computer would be programmed to simply not do that, so an emergency maneuver was always possible.

The hard part is getting a computer to be able to do it at all.  But most of the hazards on the road are due to human drivers operating their vehicles in a manner that reduces the options for hazard avoidance.  A computer, driving conservatively, would not have to deal with most of those kinds of problems because they would not exist for an automated driver.

MWRuger

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #909 on: April 02, 2014, 04:48:12 AM »
1.  You don't have to convince people to give up control of their own cars.  You just have to convince them its in their best interests to force everyone else to give up control of their cars.

2.  The Department of Transportation just issued a new rule mandating rear view camera systems in all new cars manufactured after May 2018.  If the technology proves effective and will save lives, its possible to mandate it.

3.  You could still make it optional and have it be effective.  Insurance companies could offer discounts for confirmed use of it.  People who choose to drive manually would face higher liability and higher insurance costs.  And accident rates would still go down if most people choose to use it, even if one goober doesn't and kills someone.  One goober can't possibly kill 10,000 people in a single year to make up the difference.

I don't think that you will get the speed and efficiency that you need to sell the system with a mix of manual and automatic driving. One guy driving slowly will pretty much kill high speed automatic driving.

I don't think you can sell this system on the basis of saving lives. If you could, we would limit gun purchases and outlaw cigarettes. I don't think people care about saving other people's lives and they certainly don't think they will be part of the statistics. Mostly they want to know how it benefits them. To me this like the promise of electric cars but even harder to sell.

Adding new features, like rear view mirror cameras, doesn't invalidate the current vehicles but his tells me that we aren't talking about the same system. I'm seeing a system where all the cars have to be automatic. Higher speeds and super efficient engines to reduce carbon emissions and less time spent commuting to me are the big draws.

But mainly this doesn't address either my infrastructure concerns or how this would effect so many people who can't really afford even crappy used cars. 
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LadyVamp

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #910 on: April 02, 2014, 05:18:39 AM »
Motorcycles are not cars.  Even so, if motorcycle operators only exercised the same legal options available to cars, that need for good judgment would largely be eliminated.  You're using "judgment" in a colloquial sense to cover all aspects of driver decision making.  But there's a fundamental difference, from an automation perspective, between the decision to stop in time to avoid a collision, which requires skill but no complex judgment, and the decision on which path to take to navigate a hazardous road, which no automobile driver is *supposed* to exercise, because they are legally required to limit their maneuvering to only safe maneuvers within designated roadway markers.  Taking emergency action because, say, a driver changed lane without clearing a blind spot is not an exercise in judgment.  Its taking the only action proscribed under those conditions.  That doesn't require an expert system to figure out.

"Human judgment" within the context of discussing automation, deals with the case where the computer is presented with a situation in which there are a number of possible distinct options, *none* of them with a computationally guaranteed chance of being successful.  The case where you are required to make the choice to take the only possible action that safeguards your life is skill, not judgment.  That sort of skill is far easier to program into a computer than genuine judgment, which is not needed for automated driving.  In almost every case where an emergency situation arises, you can either slow down or stop, or change direction to avoid the problem.  Only in an incredibly small number of cases will options similar to those not be available or not be applicable.  Humans make life more difficult by making those choices harder to execute, for example by following another car too closely to make an emergency stop.  A computer would be programmed to simply not do that, so an emergency maneuver was always possible.

The hard part is getting a computer to be able to do it at all.  But most of the hazards on the road are due to human drivers operating their vehicles in a manner that reduces the options for hazard avoidance.  A computer, driving conservatively, would not have to deal with most of those kinds of problems because they would not exist for an automated driver.

Never said motorcycles were cars.  But, when I'm riding, I am prepared to take any action I see fit, legal or not, to avoid being in an accident.  I believe you will find that attitude is shared by all of us who ride.  There are three conditions:  right, wrong, and dead right.  first two are obvious.  dead right means you were in the right of way but you are dead because you didn't use your judgement (not skills) to correctly deduce it was better to take another path or decision.

I would like to point out that you are confusing skills with judgement.  Applying brakes, swerving, changing gears are skills.  Deciding to apply the brakes vs swerving is judgement.  Driving takes much more than the state's rulebook and skills to operate the car.  It takes being able to evaluate a situation and select among a number of choices which action(s) you are going to take.  Always applying the brakes, for example, is not the answer to every situation.  If you happen to pull out in front of a motorcycle, don't stop.  Keep going.  Clear the path.  Applying the brakes only puts the cyclist in danger by turning your car into a large barrier he/she may not be able to swerve around and likely won't have time to stop for.

Might I suggest you take a beginner's class on motorcycle riding even if you never plan on riding.  I believe it will really open your eyes to that world.
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Ohioknight

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #911 on: April 02, 2014, 05:56:40 AM »
I don't think that you will get the speed and efficiency that you need to sell the system with a mix of manual and automatic driving. One guy driving slowly will pretty much kill high speed automatic driving.

I don't think you can sell this system on the basis of saving lives. If you could, we would limit gun purchases and outlaw cigarettes. I don't think people care about saving other people's lives and they certainly don't think they will be part of the statistics. Mostly they want to know how it benefits them. To me this like the promise of electric cars but even harder to sell.

Adding new features, like rear view mirror cameras, doesn't invalidate the current vehicles but his tells me that we aren't talking about the same system. I'm seeing a system where all the cars have to be automatic. Higher speeds and super efficient engines to reduce carbon emissions and less time spent commuting to me are the big draws.

But mainly this doesn't address either my infrastructure concerns or how this would effect so many people who can't really afford even crappy used cars.

You know, these systems ARE smart enough to deal with complex road conditions, like being the only (or one of the few) driverless cars in traffic or even jackknifing trucks knocking wheels and barrels into the roadway -- and they demonstrate dealing with them better than humans.  These guys are REAL GAME CHANGERS!  And the impact isn't just going to be on automobiles.
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Arcana

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #912 on: April 02, 2014, 07:20:49 AM »
I would like to point out that you are confusing skills with judgement.
As it pertains to automation systems, I'm very certain I'm not.

Ironwolf

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #913 on: April 02, 2014, 01:46:42 PM »
I don't think that you will get the speed and efficiency that you need to sell the system with a mix of manual and automatic driving. One guy driving slowly will pretty much kill high speed automatic driving.

I don't think you can sell this system on the basis of saving lives. If you could, we would limit gun purchases and outlaw cigarettes. I don't think people care about saving other people's lives and they certainly don't think they will be part of the statistics. Mostly they want to know how it benefits them. To me this like the promise of electric cars but even harder to sell.


Different topic but I can't let it slide without amy comment - guns aren't evil. The only answer to a bad person with a gun, knife or other instrument of violence is a good guy with a gun. You call the police and they come out and use force or the threat of it to stop the bad guy. People don't complain about that - much. However a trained and responsible owner (I have a CCW)  provides the same security - to themselves and everyone around them.

I will bet most folks never heard of the addict who attacked security guards at a store with a dirty hypodermic needle? Guess who stopped him? Yes, a customer with a CCW.

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/guns/handgun-carrying-customer-puts-stop-syringe-assault-detroit-home-depot

I don't want to derail the discussion but it is worth keeping an open mind and note the guy did NOT shoot the criminal when he got up and ran - he just stopped the assault. He let the police catch the criminal. Smoking - I will completely agree with - it has no redeeming value and just damages hearts and lungs also spreading many other types of cancers.

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #914 on: April 02, 2014, 02:49:36 PM »
Barter system predated money.   Money systems were created because you can't cut enough grass directly to buy a car but you can have someone give you money for cutting their grass to trade for the car when you've cut enough lawns.

Barter wasn't meant to answer the questions you are asking.  It was a way to trade what you had for what you wanted.

BTW:  US Tax code actually addresses barter transactions too by forcing you to place fair market value for the trade and taxing based on that equivalent transaction

Star Trek's economy and a barter system are very different. A barter system is based on Person 1 having, say, a bunch of chickens, and trading their eggs to Person 2, who has a bunch of cows and is trading their milk. Or maybe to Person 3 for a car. Either way, each person has something extra they can trade, and they put a certain value on that thing, and trade for an equivalent value of what other people have. There is a limited amount of "Stuff" in the economy, and it has to be traded for survival, or the ability to have things.

But in Star Trek, no one needs to trade, because they can just go to a replicator and get their eggs, or milk, or car, or robot mower, whatever. Why should Person 1 give up their eggs to Persons 2 or 3, when they can go get milk or a car for free? Ok, so maybe grass-fed cow milk is a luxury that tastes better than replicated stuff. So you trade for it, but you don't have to. All essentials are available to everyone, and everyone can have a happy healthy life without effort. Anything beyond that is for personal fulfillment - whether you decide to create art and trade for delicious real milk, or become a chicken farmer to trade eggs for real milk, it's something that you choose to do, not because you gotta get your dollar a day to pay for things.
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Arcana

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #915 on: April 02, 2014, 06:11:45 PM »
Star Trek's economy and a barter system are very different. A barter system is based on Person 1 having, say, a bunch of chickens, and trading their eggs to Person 2, who has a bunch of cows and is trading their milk. Or maybe to Person 3 for a car. Either way, each person has something extra they can trade, and they put a certain value on that thing, and trade for an equivalent value of what other people have. There is a limited amount of "Stuff" in the economy, and it has to be traded for survival, or the ability to have things.

But in Star Trek, no one needs to trade, because they can just go to a replicator and get their eggs, or milk, or car, or robot mower, whatever. Why should Person 1 give up their eggs to Persons 2 or 3, when they can go get milk or a car for free? Ok, so maybe grass-fed cow milk is a luxury that tastes better than replicated stuff. So you trade for it, but you don't have to. All essentials are available to everyone, and everyone can have a happy healthy life without effort. Anything beyond that is for personal fulfillment - whether you decide to create art and trade for delicious real milk, or become a chicken farmer to trade eggs for real milk, it's something that you choose to do, not because you gotta get your dollar a day to pay for things.
Beyond that, its also not a barter system because there's evidence many of the trades are not directly reciprocal.  Meaning: in DS9 you see that the Sisko family has a restaurant in New Orleans.  They use what's implied to be real grown groceries, not replicated food.  Customers eat there but there's no evidence they pay in money or trade.  So Sisko's father isn't directly making anything from the food he cooks and sells.  And if he's not making anything, its unlikely he's paying or directly trading for the groceries he uses (and its unlikely he's also a farmer capable of growing all the food his restaurant uses).  So there's evidence of a pay-it-forward system of trade that is not barter: farmers giving Sisko's father produce not directly in trade for something back, but probably just to contribute to someone who is himself contributing to society in an interesting way.  Maybe there is an enlightened self-interest involved where the reason they do it is because they like to eat in organic restaurants themselves and contributing to one helps them thrive.  But its not barter, its a reverse tragedy of the commons where instead of people exploiting a common they are instead motivated to contribute to a common (of sorts) because there's no need or incentive to over exploit it.  In a scarcity-based economy, there's always an incentive to exploit frictionless supplies like unrestricted commons.  In a non-scarcity economy, that incentive could hypothetically go away, leaving behind pay-it-forward based micro-economies embedded within the larger base surplus economy.

In an MMO with a private server architecture, the question arose as to how you could possibly make that work economically.  And its possible it fails: the players could assume a mentality that creates a tragedy of the commons situation where everyone exploits shared resources and no one contributes to them, causing the larger shared systems to fail.  But it could also succeed if the game is explicitly designed to attract players with the mindset that their private servers are a form of non-scarcity: you can do anything you want in them.  With that, it could also encourage a desire to amplify rather than exploit commons such as shared nexus environments, where the "return" on contributing to those environments was a desire to see them flourish as the primary motivation.  That could be encouraged by replicating in some fashion the fictional constructs of the Star Trek economy: make sure every player always has enough resources to basically do whatever they *need* to do, for some definition of need, and then allow them to earn the ability to do far more by contributing to the shared space.  You'd weed out most troublemakers by granting them a space where they can already do whatever they want without any need to follow any rules - the private instances.  What's left could contain a sufficient critical mass for peer pressure to enforce better social contracts on participating in shared spaces.

MWRuger

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #916 on: April 02, 2014, 07:56:34 PM »
You know, these systems ARE smart enough to deal with complex road conditions, like being the only (or one of the few) driverless cars in traffic or even jackknifing trucks knocking wheels and barrels into the roadway -- and they demonstrate dealing with them better than humans.  These guys are REAL GAME CHANGERS!  And the impact isn't just going to be on automobiles.

If it doesn't see widespread adoption it will just be another toy for those with lots of disposable income. Personally, I would rather see development of cleaner and more efficient engines prioritized over automatic driving.

Do you see these cars as completely self-contained? Would there be communication with roadways and other traffic devices? Would these cars have to follow the same speed limits as non-automated cars? How much will our roadways have to be modified to accommodate this change?

I think this is a vastly more complex issue than just whether it is possible or even desirable.
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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #917 on: April 02, 2014, 08:24:40 PM »
In an MMO with a private server architecture, the question arose as to how you could possibly make that work economically.  ...

Are you referring to "loot" or crafting materials, or server resources like space / bandwidth?
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Arcana

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #918 on: April 02, 2014, 08:27:30 PM »
If it doesn't see widespread adoption it will just be another toy for those with lots of disposable income. Personally, I would rather see development of cleaner and more efficient engines prioritized over automatic driving.
This came up with the CoH developers also.  Why are they wasting their time making costumes when everyone knows powersets are more important.  Why are they making more incarnate trials when we really need new zones?

Separate from the fact the developers saw different priorities, there was the more salient fact that the people who made costume parts didn't and couldn't make missions; the people who made powersets could not make zone maps.  The people who are making automated driving systems do not, and cannot, make engines.

Arcana

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Re: OK, what now? I need a private server or the ability to run my own.
« Reply #919 on: April 02, 2014, 08:37:24 PM »
Are you referring to "loot" or crafting materials, or server resources like space / bandwidth?
More generally, how do you convince players to support shared servers, which cost money to run, when they have their own server and don't need the shared server to play the game?  There have to be incentives beyond classic access control (i.e. login access or gates to content) because on their own servers they have the keys to all the gates.

The answer might be that with the basics of access to the game wide open, that creates the opportunity to explore new incentives for people to support shared infrastructure beyond the desire to socialize.  Community generated content, for example.  Public notoriety for another - the desire to accomplish things in a communal forum rather than in a private area.  Maybe a critical mass of stuff can accumulate so that separate from the individual ways in which the shared servers are superior to the private ones a meta incentive would arise where people would support a shared server specifically for the things they don't even know might be coming in the future, but assume will be coming because of past history demonstrating the community system works in unpredictable ways.