Dancing With Diablo II - Part 1

TLDR (Too Long Didn't Read)

Hari, an incoming high school freshman, is introduced to Diablo II. He quickly develops a mild addiction to the game but in the process of adventuring through those digital worlds; he begins to understand the following lessons which serve as business fundamentals later in life.

• The Mechanics Of A Free Economy and Inflation.
• Opportunity and Persistence Pays Off.
• People Are People; Good or Bad.

Introduction

Hello! My name is Hari, welcome to the first Zoptiks Letter.

The year was 2009.

As the first African-American president, Obama had just broken the glass ceiling. The economy was reeling from a recession caused by a popped housing bubble, and healthcare reform was all the news could talk about.

'Hope' really was one of the few things everyone in Chapel Hill held.

As a zealous 8th grader eager to leave behind middle school and reinvent myself at the high school two blocks down the road, I didn't care about the recession or health care.

My progressive science teacher, Mrs.Fitzgerald, had given our grade long-term projects to build tiny fuel cell race cars to round out the rest of the year, and a few days after school, I would work with my Odyssey of the Mind team on a bigger battery-powered car.

Smartphones were not a thing; we would go door to door asking if the boys could play or bike around till we found the yard where all the bikes were parked.

There were about a dozen of us back then in our multicultural neighborhood, all in similar age ranges with younger brothers and sisters to pad the numbers. We'd play street ball, Pokemon/YuGiho cards, all kinds of video games, and whatever else our imagination could think of when bored.

Life was good.

One day, a Russian friend of ours stopped coming out as much, and when we asked about it, he introduced a few of us to this new game he was playing.

It was called Diablo II. A role-playing game where you'd pick a character, go on quests in fantasy worlds, slay demons, collect gear, and level up your character to unlock new skills. The game was about eight years old at the point and had tons of awards under its belt alongside a loyal fanbase.

Watching over his shoulder was not enough. I had to play it myself.

The only problem was the game was $40 and was rated 'Mature'... aka forbidden fruit that my parents would never let me taste.

But I was a persistent kid, and for the next few months, I bugged my parents until they agreed to get it for me on my birthday. Which, in all fairness, was a bargain compared to World of Warcraft, with no monthly subscription fees.

August 6th couldn't have come a day sooner for my impatient mind, and the older gamer bro working at Gamestop did me a big favor by convincing my dad that the rating wasn't something to be too worried about.

Little did I know that this game would teach me the fundamentals of trade and tech in the coming years.

And so the journey began, starting out on the family's Gateway desktop, and in the coming years, Diablo found its way onto the family laptop, a chunky Acer with decent ram and poor battery life.

I started playing with people from all around the world, traveling through realms, battling demons, and outfitting my characters with all kinds of gear.

I was a little bit addicted, but nothing compared to how gamers today play.

Selling, Buying, Trading, Bartering

By my sophomore year of high school, Diablo became a secret of mine. A world I could escape into periodically as the developers made changes and released patches and as my interest in the game waxed and waned.

The game rewarded you with better gear and 'runes' for playing harder difficulties along with a community of players to cheer you on. But to play the harder difficulties, you needed the appropriate gear to beat the bosses, a bit of a chicken and egg problem similar to what many startups face today.

Unlike the option of VC funds and investors in the real world; the only way to grow was to bootstrap and trade with other players.

So that's what I set off to do.

Most modern games have a monetized controlled currency; Diablo's community developed its own by tethering value to items called 'high runes', which were monetized itself down the line.(Kind of like cryptocurrency today)

Runes introduced the concept of need, and typically, you'd get them by:

• Playing the game and hoping it would drop as loot.
• Combining lower runes to morph them into higher runes.
• Trading for them or offering services like beating a boss someone is stuck on.

But Hari, why wouldn't people use the game's built-in currency?

You'd think people would use the built-in gold system to trade, but the problem with gold was that it was practically useless. All you could use gold for was to repair your gear and buy items from NPCs who sold nothing of value. Plus, it was everywhere, and the game provided had an infinite supply.

Kind of like the US dollar.

On the other hand, runes only took up one slot in your stash; they were essential to crafting elite gear and had varying rarity levels.

Economically, their value was maintained because people could use runes to craft better runes or create gear that would sometimes roll with bad stats (which no one wanted to use); allowing for a limited supply in the market.

Some people needed specific runes more than others to finish their rune word in order to get the last puzzle piece and finally build their gear. This allowed you to capitalize on urgency and get better deals as a buyer or seller.

So there I was, unknowingly creating game servers and naming them with various offers to trade my way up to the gear I needed. If you saw something interesting, you'd join the game and start negotiating.

Along this process, I learned a lot of things the hard way:

• People could be selling duped items that Blizzard would erase.
• Some things were not tradeable, so you had to drop the item to trade. People would steal from you and leave the game.
• Sometimes you entered a game for something you wanted and had to convince the seller to trade with you.

It became its own little marketplace of free trade, and young Hari was a little digital businessman wheeling and dealing his way towards his goal of creating a character he could take on the harder difficulties with, which theoretically would allow him to gather more resources to trade and build an empire.

Lessons Learned

Playing Diablo unknowingly introduced me to a variety of concepts:

1) The Mechanics Of A Free Economy and Inflation

Gold was readily available everywhere. So its value dropped, and the community developed its own currency using practically usable high runes.

• This can also be applied to the real world and how Uncle Sam printed outed trillions of dollars tethered to nothing but bonds.

2) Opportunity and Persistence Pays Off

Life introduces all sorts of things; if I wasn't persistent with getting access to the game, sticking it out in the early stages, where I had to learn the mechanics of the game/economy, it was built on. I would have never opened the bigger doors to marketplace concepts down the road.

• I had to grind the game playing it to establish a bag of tradable goods to grow from. Whatever you do in your journey, it will take time and lots of committed energy to see results. Throughout this journey, though, you'll pick up valuable skills that might seem like nothing at the moment but turn out to be gems down the line.

3) People Are People; Good Or Bad

I've received my fair share of lucky breaks while playing Diablo, everything from a retiring player dropping all his gear, to kind players who want to help me finish my rune word and see what the roll of my gear will be.

I've also seen my fair share of losses, where players would steal some of the most valuable gear that can't be formally traded.

• Business is about helping people achieve their goals. You have to be able to chat with them to understand their needs and develop the conversational skills to guide the conversation to mutually beneficial goals.

Trust that the good balances out the bad, and everything will work out.

-Hari

In part 2 this Friday:

I'll dive into the more technical side of things and how I botted my character to grind the game by itself once I had achieved the gear needed from trading, why I was motivated even to do that, and how it set up foundational technical lessons that still me build Zoptiks today.