Player Contracts +

As I noted in my detailed essay on Player Contracts, I'd like to see MMORPGs offer a feature that allows players to be able to create contracts with each other to perform different kinds of tasks.

Not only would this be fun in itself, it would open the door to player missions, since enforceable contracts would allow players to trust each other in financial deals.

Since the original document was pretty detailed, I thought it might be helpful to provide a more condensed version. This will still seem pretty long to most people, but those who enjoy thinking about game design may find this version a little easier to digest than the full workup.

0. OVERVIEW

A Player Contract is an agreement between two players whose terms are enforced by the game to trade items of value. Player A (the "contracting player") agrees to provide goods or money to Player B in exchange for Player B (the "contracted player") agreeing to provide goods, money, or a specific service to Player A. Player A makes the contract offer, and Player B accepts the offer.

A Player Contract system will allow Player A to write a contract document that specifies a number of options:

• the contract type
• what things are to be exchanged
• when exchanges can occur
• how the contract may be successfully terminated
• optional penalties for breaking a contract

The game system itself has to be able to do two things:

• recognize when the terms of a contract are met or broken
• automatically apply contract terms based on contract status

The important thing to recognize about this is that we won't need player lawyers or CSRs to adjudicate contract disputes because the game itself, acting as a completely impartial judge, will handle all contract resolutions automatically.

What follows are the details that describe how to achieve these goals.

1. CONTRACT TYPES

A good contract system goes well beyond merely trading goods. It enables a service economy to flourish because it allows players to perform useful tasks for each other. Not only does this help spread money around, it's just fun.
Examples of possible contract types are:

Exchange	swap goods for goods or goods for money
Tribute	give another player goods or money for an unspecified reason
Transport	move items [or player characters] to a specified location
Delivery	give items to a specified player character or NPC
Recon	go to a particular location
Obtain	take possession of a specified item
Entertain	perform within 20 meters of a specified player character or NPC
Heal	heal or cure a specified player character
Buff	temporarily improve the stats of a specified player character
Craft	create a particular kind of object, possibly with certain stats
Hack	bypass the electronic security of a container or item
Destroy	eliminate a specific lair, destroy a unique item, or kill a creature mob
Guard	defend a specified player character or NPC for a specified time period
Bounty	kill a specified player character or NPC [who must agree to be a target]
Marriage	marry another player character [allows for divorce, too]

These are just contract types that I've thought of -- I'm sure there are more.

2. CONTRACT PERIODS

Contracts become truly useful when they're not restricted to being one-shot, immediate deals. Players should be able to specify the periods in which a contract is to be active according to lifespan and frequency. Lifespan options are:

• immediate (trade happens as soon as both parties agree)
• limited (trade happens at a specific future time)
• indefinite (trade may happen at an unknown future time)

and frequency options are:

• one-time (trade happens once, then the contract ends)
• recurring (trades can happen repeatedly until the contract ends)

3. PLAYER-SPECIFIED CONTRACT TERMINATION

Contracts should have two mutually exclusive termination options:

• unilateral (either player can cancel the contract without penalty
• bilateral (both players must agree to cancel to avoid imposing a penalty)

Players won't use a contract system if the other player can just cancel deals, so the bilateral option has to exist to allow for penalties (see next section) against simply breaking an agreed-on contract. But we don't want to force players who trust each other to have to make every contract bilateral (and indefinite-duration contracts should not be bilateral), so there also needs to be an option to allow a contract to be unilateral.

4. VARIETY OF PENALTIES

There are two types of penalties that could be applied if one player breaks the terms of a contract:

• penalty (a cash reward paid to the contracting player)
• bounty (a cash reward collectable by the first player who eliminates the target)

For a penalty award, both players agree on the reward amount to be paid to whoever doesn't break the contract, and each party puts up half of that amount when the contract is accepted. If Player A breaks the contract, all the penalty money is immediately transferred into Player B's bank account, and vice versa.

A bounty works the same way, except that the penalty money is used to pay a bounty hunter to go after whoever broke the contract.

5. CONTRACT CREATION

The key to understanding how Player Contracts work is recognizing that there are three "accounts" in a contract. Each account is a container that can hold money or goods.

• Payoff Account (what Player B gets when the contract is activated)
• Provision Account (what Player A gets when the contract is activated)
• Penalty Account (what one player gets if the other player breaks the contract)

The first thing Player A does when he creates a contract is to choose the contract type from the available options. Depending on the contract type, this may set some other fields, and will at a minimum determine the specific fields Player A needs to fill in for the rest of the contract.

Player A's next task is to enter the desired values into the three contract accounts. He is required to put the actual payoff into the Payoff Account -- if goods, they're taken from his bank vault (or personal inventory in some cases); if money, it's taken from his bank account. Either way the actual items are taken from him and placed into the contract's Payoff Account container. This insures that the contract is for real. (It also specifies what will be taken from his bank account every additional time the contract is activated if it's not just a one-time deal.)

Player A then specifies in the Provision Account what he wants to receive. It could be a certain type and number of goods; it could be money (assuming he's not offering money as a payoff -- simply swapping money for money would be pointless); or it could be a particular kind of service. If it's a service, then Player A will just fill in the details (if any), since the specific type of service will be set when Player A chooses the contract type.

Next, Player A will specify whether the contract is to be unilateral or multilateral -- in other words, whether it will be OK for either player to break the contract, or whether both players have to agree to terminate the contract in order to avoid getting stuck with a penalty. Allowing this choice enables players to either have a penalty (if they want insurance that the other player will honor the contract) or not (if they fully trust the other player, say, if they're both members of the same PA).

Finally, the penalty type is set -- either as a cash payout, or as a bounty. In either case Player A moves half of the specified amount from his bank account into the Penalty Account.

6. CONTRACT NEGOTIATION

At this point the initial contract (which I call a "draft contract") has been created. Now it's time to negotiate the details with Player B.

After Player A creates a contract he has two choices. The first is to put the contract up on a Contract Terminal (creating an "Open Contract"). Once it's on a terminal the terms can't be altered by anyone; if a wandering Player B reads the terms and likes them, he can accept the contract and it goes into force immediately, or else he can simply choose not to take that contract.

Player A's other option is to offer a contract directly to a player character I call this a "Personal Contract." It's just like the Open Contract except that it's directly offered to one person (another player character), and the terms can be negotiated in real time by both players.

Player A offers the contract to Player B just like a trade request. Player B looks at the terms and changes whatever he wants, then Player A can change the terms, then Player B can change them again, and so on. This negotiation process can continue indefinitely; it ends when one of two things happens:

either player cancels the negotiation (ending the contract offer)

both players accept the contract as negotiated

Like the Secure Trade, once either player clicks on the "Accept" button no further negotiation is permitted; at that point all the other player can do is cancel or accept.

7. CONTRACT RESOLUTION

Once both players have accepted a contract, it goes into effect, and both players get a contract document in their datapad.
If there's an immediate exchange specified, it happens immediately, and if the contract was a one-time deal, it ends. (Notice that this implies that a Secure Trade -- the basic person-to-person exchange available in most MMORPGs -- is just a particular type of Player Contract.)

If the deal is for later trade (either of goods or for a later provision of some service), then the game itself has to watch for this event to happen. As soon as Player B fulfills the contract's provisioning terms (either supplying money or goods into the Provision Account, or performing the required service), the contract is "activated." This means that the items in the Provision account are transferred to Player A, and the items in the Payoff Account (if any) are transferred to Player B. In a recurring deal, after the first trade any goods are taken from the providing player's bank vault -- to keep the deal going, you just keep putting the required number of those goods into your bank vault. (Note: It might be better to require that goods to be transferred are actually moved into the Payoff or Provision Account box in the contract document, rather than being taken from a player's bank vault, but either approach should work.)

If this was a one-time deal, then the contract ends. If it's a recurring deal, then it can be activated again when Player B fulfills his side of the contract terms.

8. CONTRACT TERMINATION

A contract can end in a number of ways, but all terminations are of two types: successful or unsuccessful. Successfully terminated contracts just end; unsuccessfully terminated contracts trigger the agreed-upon penalty (if any).

A contract terminates successfully when all the terms of the contract are met, including the terms for how the contract is to end. Assuming all goods and money transferred successfully, then if the contract was a one-time deal or if the timer expired on a limited or recurring deal, the contract ends successfully. Also, if the contract is a unilateral contract, then as soon as either player cancels the contract it ends successfully.

A contract terminates unsuccessfully when anything happens in the game that prevents it from being terminated successfully. The most common ways in which a contract terminates unsuccessfully are:

1. The service can no longer be provided. For example, if someone other than Player B destroys the object to be destroyed in a Destroy contract, then that contract is broken because there's no longer any way for Player B to successfully complete it.

2. The goods can't be transferred either from or to a player. If you don't have enough of the agreed-on goods in the Provision or Payoff accounts when a transfer is scheduled, or you don't have the agreed number of credits in the Payoff account or your bank account, then you've broken the contract. Similarly, if you don't have enough room in your bank vault to receive goods to be transferred to you, then you've broken the contract.

3. Either player cancels a bilateral contract. By definition a bilateral contract requires both players to agree to cancel it; if either player cancels a bilateral contract, then he's broken the terms of the deal. (Note that canceling a contract can happen either by clicking on the "Cancel" button on the contract document or by manually destroying the contract document in your inventory.)

Regardless of how a contract ends, once it ends the contract document is deleted from the inventories of both players. It's also important to note that any goods or money in the Payoff and Provision accounts return to their owners when a contract is terminated (so there's no way to cheat the system). Also, if a contract is terminated successfully, the money that each player put into the Penalty Account is returned (since the contract wasn't broken, no penalty is enforced).