Hello everyone, I’ve been building PC Versus for almost 2 years now. It’s an upcoming free to play live service game and the first ever competitive PC building game. Two players get the same task and the same budget, build a PC with components from their decks, and our simulation decides who built it better.
One of the biggest issues with live service games, and specially one like this, is that the meta gets solved within weeks. The “best build” for each budget, the “best components”, etc. Once that happens replayability kinda breaks. To fix this I implemented a mechanic that Im calling "Market Shift" and I wanted to share it and get your opinions on it.
Before I explain it, I think you need to know a bit about how PC Versus works.
You build a deck from the components you own, and your era is set by the newest component in your deck. So if everything you own is from 2015 but you put in just 1 component from 2016, you’re now playing in the 2016 era and get matched with other 2016 players. Components also get cheaper the further you move from their release year, so a 2014 GPU is significantly cheaper in the 2018 era than it was in 2014.
Match price is what a component costs inside a match. To own a component you spend bits/frags (the game currencies that you have to earn), but to use it in a match you pay its match price, which is similar to the real world pricing (this you just have to stay under the budget). Every match has a budget and tasks, and you build the PC under that budget. Since a component has a different match price in every era, each era works like its own separate market.
Now, Market Shift works like this. Every match, the game tracks which components the players used, which era they were playing in, and how many builds that era has seen in X amount of time (planned to be weekly for now). When the time is up, a script runs, goes through every component that was used and builds a pick rate for it inside each era separately. Pick rate is measured against the total number of builds in that era, so a busy era and a quiet era are judged fairly.
The higher the pick rate in an era, the bigger the match price hike in that era. So if a GPU is used a lot in 2015, its price in 2015 goes up, for example from $100 to $130 the next week. But if that same GPU barely gets picked in 2016, its price in 2016 goes down, say from $90 to $80. Every era has its own prices based on how the community uses that component in THAT era.
Since every match has a budget and results has a dedicated category that depend on price to performance, a price hike can make a meta component unviable in the budget range it was dominating, and an underused one suddenly becomes a real option. This way every era’s market constantly shifts and the game theoretically stays fresh every week. Since PC Versus hasn't released yet so the mechanic itself is not tested and all this is designed with a decent enough player base in mind. So if PC Versus doesn't get enough players, market shift won't work as intended.. But from the description, what do you guys think? What weaknesses does it have and what would you have done differently?
Link to PC Versus if you're curious: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3815360/PC_Versus/
