New players in MYOB take on the role of a mining company CEO that starts with 100m cash to explore for minerals to mine. So click on Surveys to choose somewhere to start your search.
There will be several measures of achievement in MYOB. One will be personal wealth and at the very start of the game, you as a player, effectively own 10% of the 100m valued shares. So, your personal wealth starts at 10m. As you find new mines and make various decisions your company share price will vary and so your personal fortune is mainly tied to company share price. Each company has its own mining technology ability in the various minerals that you can find in this game. However, your company might not have the necessary technology capability to mine everything you find and so you have to auction the mining rights for another company to co-operate with your company, in return for a commission and to improve your mining technology.
Improving your technology levels is probably the most important part of MYOB aside from finding new minerals to mine. There is an alternative method to improve your technology. You can buy shares in other companys with the objective of taking them over and improving your mineral technologies, along with gaining other potentially useful assets. Naturally, you can also just buy and sell shares if you speculate on a profitable situation developing.
Just as you might expect, as well as taking over other companys, your company can also be takenover but as long as you are active then it will be difficult for anyone to do this, unless you are particularly unlucky.
However, if your company is takenover then you can restart a new company or if available, buy an existing company to operate thereafter. If your company was properly managed your personal fortune should have received a massive boost from being bought out (takenover). It is a positive achievement in the game that will rate your MYOB skill.
One of the problems I have observed in similar competitive games is that experienced players have a big advantage over new players. To help combat this demoralising behaviour, new players will effectively be protected from being takenover because for the first 30 cycles no other company will be allowed to buy more than 5% of their shares and between 31 and 60 cycles the limit is increased to 15%.
As the participants in MYOB increase we will monitor the effectiveness of various features and things will be fine tuned as we receive feedback from players or in some cases from our own observations. Another feature that may be added in future is an automatic level system that will restrict high level companys from taking over lower rated, perhaps in the guise of anti-competition rules that prevail in a different way in real life. It may also slowly introduce more advanced features so the game has new things to master. For instance the warehouse size is unlimited initially but in the next level up you will need to build your own warehouse capacity for storage of various minerals. The idea is to start the game as simple as possible and slowly build up difficulty once players are used to the basic things then we'll add more complicated challenges to keep MYOB interesting for veterans.
The MYOB experience should feel like the natural progression of a real life mining company over time and the potential future outlook of the mining industry. The first mines were open cast before going deeper and deeper underground primarily on land and eventually deep and structurally good enough to safely extend under water. Then mining on the oceans continental shelves for oil and gas. That pretty much takes us up to the modern day. Hereafter there is deep ocean mining or mining under the frozen arctic before lunar and planetary in due course. MYOB is just the beginning and how the game evolves will be prioritised based upon a consensus of player opinions and not just the game developers preferences.
Any comment welcome at s.rush@espsoftware.co.uk
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