Level 60s and Badges

Over 400 glitchen have reached level 60 to date, and there is probably another week to go before xp goes away.  I still have the high score, naturally.

1009 Tinctures.  I was a little surprised this one took as long as it did.  It seems like I made so many tinctures that did not go into potions that I would have hit this way in advance of hitting the potion badge, but I suppose it's easy to overestimate how many things you've actually made.

5000 Herbs.  This one surprised me in the other way.  I thought I was going to get the top potion badge first.

1033 Potions.  It can't be much longer before I get this.  I have a very large pile of charades potions that were made after the 457 badge.  Obviously the number I need to get from point A to point B can't be larger than 576, so I have to be getting close.  Speaking of which, if you'd like a charades potion, feel free to request one.

Icons and Vendors

Oh boy, icons again!  Vendor prices have changed and that should change our evaluation of the worth of icons.  This time instead of whether we should be carrying them around - a question made irrelevant by free access to homes - I'll talk about the value you can extract from your icons in terms of currants and whether there is a good reason to be acquiring icons at this point.

Vendor Prices!

The new vendor prices are a little more complicated than they used to be, but not very complicated.  Prices at vendors, with a few exceptions, are set by two variables.  The first is the their base price for purchasing things from you, the second is their spread.

The price vendors buy at (or the price you sell at) varied by vendor before these changes.  Tool Vendor bought at 80%, most vendors at 70%, toy vendors at 60% and gardening tools at 50%.  Vendors still have this number, though it is no longer the real price they will buy from you at.

Each type of vendor also now has a spread.  This spread is subtracted from the price they buy from you at and added to the price of everything they sell.

For instance, Produce vendors still have a base buy price of 70%, but currently have a spread of 11%.  As a result, they will only buy from you for 59% of the item's base value and everything they sell it marked up to 111% of the base value.

Because spreads are currently very strange numbers like 11%, 8% and such, I expect they will change over time.  Keep an eye on them.

But as of this post, here are the base buy values, spreads and consequent buy and sell values for each vendor type.

	Base Buy	Spread	Vendor Sells at	Vendor Buys at
Alchemical Tools Vendor	70%	7%	107%	63%
Animal Goods Vendor	70%	9%	109%	61%
Gardening Goods Vendor	70%	8%	108%	62%
Gardening Tools Vendor	55%	5%	105%	50%
Groceries Vendor	70%	13%	113%	57%
Hardware Vendor	70%	12%	112%	58%
Helga	60%	10%	110%	50%
Kitchen Tools Vendor	70%	10%	110%	60%
Meal Vendor	70%	5%	105%	65%
Produce Vendor	70%	11%	111%	59%
Tool Vendor	80%	5%	105%	75%
Toy Vendor	60%	10%	110%	50%
Uncle Friendly	70%	10%	110%	60%

Am I Back?

Is this blog still alive?  We'll soon see!

Hiatus.  Well obviously I disappeared for a few weeks there, partly thanks to the Diablo 3 beta (I will disappear again on May 15) and partly because of my disappointment with the early March housing release.  That's not to say that the housing release wasn't awesome in a way, but because it was just a test, there were limited furniture styles and everything was free there was nothing to work towards and not a lot of play to extract from it.  I thought early March was the big change to imagination.

Butterfly Milkers.  Having a large number of butterfly milkers means getting less milk per time.  I'm determining the actual formula.

"Nerf" to Vendors.  According to today's tweet there will be a bigger spread between vendor buy and sell prices.  This is going to have a huge economic impact and will probably be a sizable benefit to the wealthy at the expense of the less-wealthy.  I'll get into this more in a couple of days, first I have to see what the new prices are, plug some numbers into existing spreadsheets and built a new spreadsheet.  I like spreadsheets!

Butterflies

I'm on my second run through singing to butterflies to see how long they live, but the first run suggests that singing extends the life of a butterfly by 3 milks.

Keeping butterflies in your house is a pretty huge return on investment, though a slow one.  I'm going to stick with donation-based valuation because it leaves a lot of questions aside.  A butterfly egg is worth 400, so for 400 currants you get to make 3200 currants over the course of six and two-thirds real days.  It's 17.5 currants an hour for very minimal upkeep.

Nothing New Here

I have to admit I haven't gotten a lot of Glitch in this week, mostly thanks to the beta of a certain other game.

Longer-lived Butterflies.  I unwittingly did an experiment in letting my butterfly milker get full this week. It is reasonable to wonder whether a full milker continues to drain life from the butterflies or if the milk-taking event gets stopped short.  By not logging in for three days I probably got my answer as my butterfly is alive and well when it would have expired had I been emptying the milker.  Of course this is confounded by my singing experiment, but I should be able to separate the two issues and be sure that a full milker doesn't shorten a butterfly's life soon enough.

Diablo 3.  Now obviously Glitch and Diablo 3 have slightly different target audiences, so I'm not going to recommend all Glitch players jump on the Diablo 3 bandwagon, but wow is this game fun.  Right now it also has the distinction of probably being the only action game I've ever played that is actually easier than Glitch.  If you don't understand how that could be, my only answer is that I beat the final boss of the beta without touching my keyboard or mouse - in Glitch you will actually die if you wander away from the computer for long enough.  At any rate, I'm sure they will sort that out and I am looking forward to fighting the forces of evil at launch.

More Mining

When there is a fixed amount of a resource in the world, more people being after it means there is less for each person.  This is an obvious fact in reality, in Glitch, and in pretty much every other game.  In the particular case of mining in Glitch, more glitchen has a synergistic effect that speeds the mining of each glitch.  That means that what's there will be used up even faster, making it seem like there is even less to go around.

As I discussed in my previous, overlong post about mining, the primary source of extra chunks when people mine together is not the bonus chunks but the extra chunks that are generated because people get extra ticks after the rock has disappeared.