DDR, the 12th year and the dan challenge sytem

Hello welcome back the dan system!!!!

Yeah it's been a while since we can flex on that again. It comes with the option with or without flare which is so welcomed too. I think this is a good chance to review the 12th year of my DDR life.

Let's start with the challenges themselves shall we?

Lv17 Grand Master aka Kaiden aka A3 8-dan

Trip machine evolution(X3)

Possession(X2)

Fascination MAXX (SN)

Do you recall the one in A3? Rave Accelerator, Golden Arrow, Splash Gold and The History of the Future. The first three aren't very hard on paper (16.6, 16.2, 16.7 in 3icecream) 

but the problem is that they are all very niche with niche gimmicks. Rave accelerator is unlocked by course trials with trip machine evolution(!!) like patterns; Golden Arrow is golden league exclusive as a rest song; Splash Gold is an extra exclusive with high speed mess. Even though The History of the Future is rated higher the streams are much more straightforward, allowing an easy clear if you reach the final stage. According to my thoughts in 2023, that was such a hard 8-dan comparing to previous versions. 

And now? The one this year doesn't seem much easier. Trip machine evolution starts with the infamous trap, but it doubles down here if you use the real speed option: you are essentially playing in 0.5x speed since the opening speed is adjusted to your speed count. It doesn't help that there is no restings in the song either. 

The new challenge has 1 song less, but this isn't really a favorable change if the easier songs are taken away. It is clear that in the new system the three songs always follow an increase in difficulty. Oh you have cleared a notorious 16? Welcome to the world of level 17. Possession is among the weakest lv17, but it's absolutely not easy to pass -- you have to waste stamina on all the jumps and there is no way around.

And Fascination MAXX? The classic 17 with a bit of everything, but probably not too much of a threat if you compare it against some newer mid-17.

In overall the two are quite similar in difficulty. The new one has one more 17, but the extra 16 in the old one is nasty. All three songs in the new one are physically demanding, but the old one consists of one more song. Now consider how A3 8-dan is relatively difficult vs past 8-dan, do you think the new GM challenge in general harder than the old 8-dan bar?

Lv18 Foot Dragon aka A3 9-dan

未完成ノ蒸氣驅動乙女(A20)

Come to m1dy(A3)

Paranoia revolution(X3)

Look at what the old 9-dan looks like: Digitalizer, 東京神話, Avengers ESP and Egoism 440 ESP. A very easy 17, a solid 17, a sweet 17 and an intro 18. This is, I would say, the easiest ever 9-dan. (Think about New Decade, Spanish Snowy Dance and FAXX CSP in A20+...)

These three are really solid choices. 未完成ノ蒸氣驅動乙女 is a high 17 with emphasize in tiring long streams. It's similar to Trip machine evolution -- a shocking opener for you. 

I always have the illusion that Come to m1dy is a super easy 18 probably because it was lv17 and I defended that it is borderline not 100% necessary to be promoted to lv18. But when you enter the song expecting that to be easy, this is quite a fatal mistake. The rhythm is relatively simple yet it is a true BPM230 chart where you have to pay at least 70% attention.

...and the final stage is our good old friend. Much like its CSP counterpart, it has become a rather simple chart relative to its level. There's probably a reason why they picked this instead of more modern 18s as we will cover later, but it definitely makes the challenge much easier.

In overall, I would say the first two are solid picks with an easy finish. It is probably harder than A3 9-dan but no harder than the A20+ ones. The score also reflects that: a 756k score played very conservatively, comparing to a 680k in the challenge last time.

Lv19 Foot Legend aka A3 10-dan

Digitalizer(A20+)

New Millennium(A3)

Egoism 440(2014)

Hmmm why am I putting here? Well I think this is very well possible for me with some planning especially with the special HP gauge. Just look at the challenge last time: び, Hypertwist, Neutrino, Paranoia Revolution...I would prefer the current one much more.

Thoughts

- I don't know. Is it very stamina based? They want a lv17 challenge properly challenging you on lv17 tier stamina, and the same for lv18 and 19? Much less gimmicks and more on stream and voltage, if you know what I mean.

- They used the name 足龍 and 足神, referring to the names in groove radar back in DDR2013. That brings me back much of the memory! It's a pity that they do not apply more names over the new challenges. I would be happy to be called 足紙さま？. It also explains the title of U1's new song which I think is good on both song and chart.

- Have you noticed? All final stages of the higher challenges are considered the most significant/representative/boss stage songs in early stages of the game. Here is the list:

11 Paranoia

12 Paranoia Dirty mix

13 Afronova

14 Pluto

15 MAX 300

16 MAXX unlimited

17 FASCINATION MAXX

18 Paranoia Revolution

19 Egoism 440

That explains why Konmai picked Paranoia Revolution. Of course there are other boss like mid/mid-low lv18 charts back in the days that are not picked already. Mmmm how about Elemental Creation? But then it realized it was a tad too recent to be in the classic era. Oh well.

The 12th year

And what about me? I am doing well.

I am recently on the project to not only clearing lv13+ in full but also in Flare ranks. Lv13 and 18 are the only two left: Lv13 due to its massive size, and Lv18 because some are really darn hard. By repeatedly playing Lv18 F1 4 songs in a row I really improve on consistency when facing unfamiliar streams at the end when stamina is running out.

Think about Triple Journey -TAG EDITION-. 1 year ago it would have been something that I would pass and not play again. Now it's just a routine exercise. When I think about the ramping density, I was expecting more, but the stream at the end arrives sooner than I thought i.e. you are preserved more stamina than needed.

Funny enough, digitalizer and new millenium are both examples where progress is visible. Both are among the few charts that I failed on first try, both kept away as very hard charts. But now I can think about playing them without much pressure.

The gap between lv18 and lv19 has been so huge that it took me 6-7 years from start tackling lv18 to start tackling lv19. But I feel like I am now ready. Perhaps I will come back and write about my 13th year in DDR as a lv19 addict. Who knows?

More on virtual economy: taxation and money supply

Recently I came across a post about an generative AI based RPG where the player is suppose to defeat a mafia boss, but the player ended up starving the mafia to death by breaking down their source of income. Shops under their name, individual service spots...eventually the mafia ran broke, can't pay for their pawns or even maintain their weapon, so it ended up dissolving.

While the developer responded by mentioning an underlying logic of the NPCs: it takes money to do anything. Nothing can be done without money, and hence the dissolution of the faction. This is not completely wrong but people are expecting mafia to give a mafia response, by securing their income by all necessary means. The question is, suppose we still managed to starve out the mafia despite all possible retaliation taken by the mafia, does that count as a stage clear? Does that count as a viable approach to clear the stage? 

Well, I have not invest time into the game but I have a very similar question. When we allow a proper market in a game, how far can we understand virtual economy using knowledge from the real world? Are players really taking the market seriously to the point the invisible hand is working? Can we understand in-game competition as a competition of numbers, and to some extent a competition in the economy? I do not plan to propose an answer here. Instead below we go through three different thoughts from the same game a proper market. Those who read my previous entries on (1) game taxation and (2) utility evaluation could probably guessed it. I am talking about the same game, so you may again take this entry as a sequel.

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A competition of production is a competition in sourcing materials

Consider a league based format inside the game where players produce products according to fixed recipe. Each recipe, depending on the difficulty rating, would register a score for the producer. At the end, participants are rewarded based on ranks (and ranks only, no score based rewards).

These produced items are usually have negative gross margin due to oversupply during league. On the other side since ranked reward has positive utility, the means the cost based consideration shifts a lot with the existence of the league. You no longer consider the profit solely by producing items, but also the expected ranking reward by participating the league. 

I don't really like such design though, because that means the more your produce, the lower cost basis it comes due to better reward. One says it promotes competition, but to me a more healthy universal environment is equally important where lesser players could survive at least by taking role in any specific part of the game.

So, how do you win the league? Rather than trying to stay online 24/7 with all kinds of micromanagement, it's much easier to sweep material on the market to that other producers would produce at a deep loss. If league participants are here due to profit, then it's easier to drive them away by shutting profitability down. 

This is even clearer think deeper about how you define 'winning' the league. Is it by ranking #1 or anywhere you think is high enough? Not always. If you define 'winning' by coming out of the league with the biggest net profit, then sweeping the market feels so natural as it lowers your cost and raises others' cost (at least it makes others' cost going up much quicker than yours).

Taxing near currency

This is something I have already discussed before, but finally the devs decided to take action. The background is simple: the monthly pass is a purchasable item in the game. It is also tradable meaning it has trading value circulating in the market. It also has low vendor value meaning it has low effective tax rate comparing to other means, since everything in private trade is 10% taxed by their vendor value. Recently whales flooded in along with huge amount of pass influx disrupting the market, so the dev finally takes the action many have asked over the year.

The dev plans to raise the vendor value of the pass, raising the effective tax rate of trading passes to somewhere non-zero.

First question. Do you think the market price of the pass to go up or down? (Public market is 12% taxed but only on the sell side.)

To me it's a no brainer, but apparently some still think it would go up because those who use the pass for private trading would shift the tax to the opposite side. Well, that's a very Trump idea but you are not Trump. Some obvious reasons the pass would go down are:

- There are alternatives as trading currency. If additional tax is imposed just on this item, there are certainly other choices with similar effect.

- Friction means it loses part of its utility, as well as part of its price.

- The whale at the end is what created oversupply and the downtrend is not going to change until that is resolved.

- The downtrend also means the value of investing in the long term is also popped, attracting further panic sell pressuring the price.

- ...

Beware that this is M1 in the money supply with gold being M0. What would happen in a virtual economy when M1 shrinks but not M0? Usually the answer would be 'the same': with lower money supply we would expect a deflation and bla bla bla...the difference here is, trades that utilize M1 seems to be isolated from trades that utilize M0. This is because the pass itself is quite expensive, and is mostly used in high roll trading only. Most primary resources and production are gold based and has a vendor price floor. Will we see a deflation under such circumstances?

My prediction is a no. I say this is a prediction more than on theory because it involves more than the demand and supply of a single item. This is now about the economy as a whole which is very hard to describe in full here.

In our case, most items are priced either to the vendoring price floor, or to a time-based valuation. If both items are obtained in about 1 hour of work, you would expect them to be priced similarly. This is due to free flow of occupation where players seek to maximize profit per hour, and at equilibrium the profit per hour across all actions should be similar unless you choose to work on something that is unwanted and can only be vendored. Even then, some items provides good profit per hour just by vendoring, and these 'inelastic demand' also provides the price floor of any time-base valuating rates.

At the end, price of items probably would stay, but deflation of the pass means whales must pay more to buy items they wanted. Very fair, win to the devs and f2p players, probably win to the whales too...

Taxing the backbone

Some advocates would suggest to take a step further. That is, to tax some even more essential part of the game economy.

Up to now, there are gold sinks everywhere but it is not very hard to avoid most of them. For trading tax, you can avoid by trading using the pass or just don't trade at all. For entry fees, you can avoid doing those activities too. 

On top of that, one of the important gold sink is malfunctioning -- cost of battling. Most MMORPG prevents low level farming by (1) exp penalties (2) assurance of growing yield curve along level of farming zones. This this game however, multiple mechanics ensures consistent demand on lower farming items to the point where multiple lower items are more valuable despite having a lower vendor price floor. In that case, players simply keep fighting lower mobs with near zero battle cost.

Such a problem is kind of structural without a straightforward solution. We can however, look into the part of players that do not battle. What if we impose a tax on an essential node of production so that every producer is taxed even if they vendor everything?

Let's imagine an item called coal. Coal is required to craft food for battles, as well as doing forging and smelting. Without coal, productions are pretty much reduced to primary: instead of cooking you can only fish, instead of crafting with wood you can only chop trees. Coal is so essential that this is the easiest item that you can farm. On the other hand since it's so popular, it has maintained a high market price above the vendoring price floor.

Not only coal is a nice way to farm gold, it's also a good trading medium other than the pass. It's much more dividable and cheap with an effective tax rate of 2%, small enough to be tolerable. This is such big part of the game yet not sinking much gold.

Here is the nuclear bomb option: we can ban coal mining (existing coal is still tradable) and put coal into NPC shops, providing at a price of equal to or lower than current market price. In that way, we are draining much more gold every time a coal is used.

The reason why this is so destructive is because how much more gold is drained. Suppose a coal is priced at 5g on the market. A traded coal would cost 0.6g of tax at 12%. If it is bought from the NPC, 5g would be drained which is 7.5 folds higher. 

In order to properly account the total money supply in the economy, we first want to properly define the money supply created by a single item to vendor. All intermediate products does not create money supply as long as they are not for vendoring, which is slightly different from the value added approach in GDP calculation. Now the formula is

ΔMS = Price - material cost from players x tax rate - material cost from NPC

And, the total change of money supply over a period of time is the sum of money supply created by all vendorable items produced minus all the gold consumed, upon M1 changes due to price variation and external source such as injection of monthly passes.

It is clear that when we ban coal mining and sell that in NPC shops, money supply created would shrink by price x (1 - tax rate) assuming price stays the same. Consider how vital coal is in the economy, its affect in money supply would easily overwhelm any tax imposed on near currencies. It is so scary that the dev starts questioning so much about such approach.

But...is it that bad really?

Consider another approach of accounting money supply change. Total change of money supply is the sum of money supply change (created - destroyed) of each individuals. We know have a vast group of players, the coal miners, that do not create money supply at all. What are they going to do without being able to mine coals?

There are so many things to do in-game other than mining coals. Many of them are money creating. What we did actually liberated players to create more money supply! Primary production is often the part that creates the least profit, in real world as well as in this virtual economy. If we can do all the mining for them, they can be a real force in money creation. Of course, all these are guesses on paper, and we don't know unless we try that for real. If I have to make a guess the net effect is restrictive, but it is surely not as bad as some would imagine.

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Well, I guess this is why some MMORPG needs a dedicated position of in-game economist. It is not so easy for developers to understand the market as much as the players. But guess what? The game is always the developer's game. I guess it's fine for the dev to mess up the economy at the end of the day. As a player, I am happy to take all arbitrage whenever I find some.