I Keep Dreaming About This

I have a recurring dream where I visit the Glitch site and mysteriously (tantalizingly) there is a button that says "Enter World."  The button has no explanation or fanfare.  There are no posts explaining what is going on.  So I click it and see where it takes me.

Each time Humbabella finds herself somewhere new.  Sometimes there are the familiar inhabitants of Ur - piggies, rocks, trees - and sometimes it is something completely different.  Once the Scion of Purple greeted me at an endless tower stretching into a fictional sky.  Once I was in a desolate northern region like those adjacent to the ancestral lands with no features or Glitchen to be found.

A few times someone else has been online to greet me.  I've asked them what is going on.  Explanations vary.  Sometimes they don't know what is going on either.  Sometimes they tell me that the game has come back up but only for a small number of players, that I have to keep it a secret.

I miss watching Humbabella walk around Ur.  I've started to work on little animated .gifs so that I can watch her walk and jump and nod off to sleep again.  But more than that I miss not being alone.  I'm not really alone, not in real life.

If life were as it is presented in news articles, we would think of someone as lonely if all of their friends were online, and they had no one in real life.  But there is a part of me that only exists through my connection to the internet, and to people I don't know.

I miss the small pleasure of fictional daily chores, and I miss you, strangers.

Farewell

I had this big post about gardening that was almost done, but it looks like the value of a plot hour of a crop garden isn't terribly important anymore.

Thanks for reading, perhaps I will see you in game before the end.

Sno Cones

I've been posting very rarely in the past few months, mostly because I'm currently on parental leave and it turns out that spending all day with a baby makes it very hard to think about (or to want to think about) anything.  So when I finally sat down to do this post I was somewhat concerned about the complexity I was approaching.

We can finally make our own sno cones, and even gather our own ice to make them.  I thought I was going to be analyzing a lot of things.

Scraping Ice

Scraping ice is not a highly productive activity.  It is pretty similar to scraping barnacles except that there are no upgrades to make it faster or give better bonuses.  You spend four energy to get between one and three ice and four imagination.  This takes four seconds.  Since ice has been upgraded to a 6 currant value, this would put scraping ice continuously from a never ending ice nubbin at 3.5 currants per second.  Pretty much the worst productivity of any activity ever.

But you can't stand at an infinite ice nubbin.  Instead you have to run from place to place hunting the 145 ice nubbins in the world that refill every six minutes.  That means that in order to get that 317 rainbo sno cone badge - if you are making the cones yourself - you need 1 hour and 45 minutes of the entire world's ice production.  Assuming there are others competing with you, that's going to be a very expensive product.

Elements

Elements are the hardest thing to put a price on in the game.  The in game price doesn't reflect their value at all.  You can't solve for the real value based on their inputs because it's a system of three equations with four unknowns.  It would seem like one of the elements should effectively be worth nothing but all of them are the limited factor in making one useful product or another.  Of course there is also the fact that you have to mine to get them, and that mining is poor productivity.  So even if I could resolve the equations, I'd still end up with a large number of different values to work with based on whether you mined yourself, or you bought rocks and then did the grinding yourself, or whether you bought bags of elements.  Of course because elements can't be listed at auction or put in SDBs determining the cost of buying them directly is nearly impossible.

Saved!

Yes, it was going to be a lot of work to figure out the real value of sno cones but I've been saved from doing all that work by doing one very simply calculation.  Add up the value of all five colours of sno cones: 75 + 150 + 300 + 600 + 1100 = 2225.  But a rainbo sno cone is only worth 2200!

When you make a sno cone you lose value.  Since there is no way that any of these calculations are ever going to work in such a way that losing value from the base products is worth spending time and energy on, I don't really have to do any more work than that.

The final verdict: If you want the badge, it will cost you 634,951 currants at the sno cone vendor, plus about just south of 5k worth of paper (though I imagine most people interested in this badge will be able to pull the paper from their overstocked SDBs of more paper than they will ever use).  Just pay the bear.

The Penyahtewan Assembly

The games first "epic" came and went in the last week.  We had five feats plus a "make up" feat after we failed the third feat of the assembly.  I wanted to offer a quick review of the feats in the assembly and say a few things about what can be learned for future feats.

First of all, a couple of metrics for feats.  The first is the percentage of the total that was completed by the top 26 contributors - that is, if you add up the contributions of the top 26, what is that as a percentage of the total that was accomplished.  This gives us an idea how much the success of the feat was dependent on "hardcore" players or people who really grinded to get the top spot.

The second is the percentage of the total that was completed by the top 1009 contributors.  The feat page only lists the contribution of the top 1009 so it seems like another benchmark.

Finally, we'll take a look at how many glitchen participated.  Since we know how much was contributed in total, and how much was contributed by the top 1009, we know how much was contributed by everyone else.  We also know the maximum contribution of every out of the top 1009.  That means we can calculate an absolute minimum number of participants.  Of course the minimum number of participants doesn't give us a great picture of how many people participated.  For example, on Call to Feast the lowest contribution in the top 1009 was 1 invite, which means that we know for a fact all other participants put in exactly 1 invite.  By contrast, the 1009th place glitch contributed 1830 sparkly for Sparkla's Shine on the Giants.  It's possible that most of the people past the 1009th person contributed over 1000 sparkly or it could be that thousands of people only put in one.  I'm open to suggestions for how to get a decent estimate of how many people participated, but none of the methods I've come up with are satisfactory to me, so I'm not venturing a guess. Still, I'll discuss it a little bit for each one.

Back on Topic with Energy Changes

I went a little off the rails in my last post, adding quite a flight of fancy to my core message.  But the core message is that we need to have some expectations regarding skills and some consistency with regards to how many skills you have to allocate to get something done.  Since there are penalties for having more skills than your brain capacity, it is a little odd that you have to devote very different numbers of skills to very similar capabilities.

This is especially true when I am suggesting that we change the penalty for being over brain capacity to increased energy loss.  So let's get to the bit about energy.

Totally (or at least partially) Redoing Skills

I said I'd follow up my last post with descriptions of how I would actually implement the changes I am suggesting.  Much like that post, I will leave any kind of attempts to express my humility as an exercise for the reader, though this week I will increase the difficulty of that exercise.

I won't be tackling my suggestions in order because there is kind of a natural order to them and I didn't put them in that order when I formulated the list.  Really, the first thing I need to talk about is a top to bottom skill tree rewrite.

How to (maybe) Fix (a subset of) Everything

There have been a number of little balance changes recently for the better.  These changes indicate to me that Tiny Speck may be gearing up for release.  Before we get to that point, I figure I should explain how to fix everything that is currently wrong with the game.

I could obviously give some kind of disclaimer to indicate my humility on this subject - you know, I don't claim to even know all the problems let alone the solutions; this is just one idea of an approach that might work.  Instead I'll leave such qualifiers as an exercise for the reader and instead express myself more and more arrogantly as the post goes on.