tablethnuser
Turnips are a terrible way to make bells in the single-player game. You have to buy a stack of them for around 10,000 bells and then wait all week for the market to pop. Let's say you see it pop to 130-160, which is a fairly common range in my experience. For all the hassle of buying and storing turnips (AC's inventory management is high effort and turnips have additional restrictions) you might net 6,000 bells per inventory space. Thing is, Animal Crossing regularly generates bugs and insects which sell for 2,000-8,000 bells. They are also one inventory space, and they are available all the time with no expiration or holding strategy needed. There are also abundant resources like iron ore, where a crafted stack of 30 ore in one inventory space will net you 22,500 bells in profit. Turnips are low value per inventory slot.
To get around this, players coordinated online. Sometimes turnips hit a jackpot price in the 300-600 bell range. So that stack is suddenly worth 60,000 and now we see inventory efficiency worth playing with turnips. All you have to do is join an online group and someone will be having a jackpot day every day. You do have to share profits with the host but the scheme is still worth it.
This is a big economy mistake. 60,000 bells is quite a lot of money in AC, and a backpack full of turnips turns into 2,400,000 bells which is enough money to bypass most of the game. Avg item price is magnitude 3-4 so these are effectively free now. All from doing a single turnip scheme. Of course players will do this with multiple backpack loads and become deep millionaires living off bank account interest.
Nintendo's second mistake was to fix this exploit by attacking a symptom and not the root cause. They reduced interest rates by a magnitude, making it balanced for ppl with huge savings accounts and worthless for anyone playing the game as intended. We of course see the folly in this approach in OPs blog where his wife was punished for playing the game as intended. She is now incentivized to join the turnip schemers, making the problem worse.
Nintendo should either cap the amount of turnips you can sell on a friend's island, reduce the turnip value for island visitors, or disallow visitors selling turnips altogether. Then the bank accounts can remain as is.
Anyone with experience tuning f2p economies would have seen this leak a mile away and prevented it from ever happening. Now Nintendo only has bad options since removing player assets is never an option. Once you leaked you leaked.
Musings from a former f2p economy designer.
The package devs clearly violated semver guidelines and npm puts a lot of faith in individual packages to take semver seriously. By default it opts every user into semver.
If you need semver to be explained to you bottom up (lists of 42 things that require a major bump) then you don't get semver. All you have to do is think: will releasing this into a world full of "^1.0.0" break everyone's shit?
This and left-pad are extreme examples. But any maintainer with a package.json who tries to do right by `npm audit` knows that there is an endless parade of suffering at the hands of semver misuse. Most of it doesn't make the news.
Reviews of Animal Crossing are more a reflection of the author than Animal Crossing itself. The game, like any topic viral enough to drive the engagement economy, is just some bobbet to anchor an opinion around.
For example, in the article I can tell that Bogost uses games to live out his fantasy as a humanities professor. And Lantz enjoys playing the contrarian.
Nothing wrong with that, they are playing the game in their own way, perhaps without even needing to _play_ it.
On and on and on. I might be building a CI/CD pipeline for a simple web extension cuz I've realized that manual deploys of it are boring and it's keeping me from updating the project. Once that's done I return to the original problem and geez it's annoying to work in this vanilla js project structure. Let me just set up a transpiler and organize the project...
I call it extreme yak shaving, cuz you do things you could never justify in a workplace, but it's my personal time and it's what works to keep me going on side projects.
Better yet by forcing yourself to write down why you're blocked you can self reflect on trends. I learned that when the dev experience gets too rough on a project, I abandon it. So now I'm happy to pause project features to build out dev exp. Very different than how I behave at work, where I guess the paycheck motivates me thru the tough times.
Best you can do is withhold information at time of purchase. Use cash, don't give your email, phone number, etc.
Some businesses are clever and dangle a carrot with the request for PII such as emailing you the receipt or texting you status updates. You will have to learn to be "that guy" and politely refuse, or give bogus information.
One day this is going to happen for real and it will be because npm org decided to charge for API requests by `npm ci`.
Popularity is not a useful metric when evaluating frameworks. Community engagement and core team motivation are, and some people may use popularity as a proxy for those measurements.
When I think of someone paying me $1000 for art that others may pay only $20 or $5 for, first of all it still feels like charity from the whales. I think you could meaningfully create $20 and $5 tiers for any digital art. But what do you sell to raise the value two magnitudes other than status? Selling status to whales relies on a huge "commons" population for them to feel superior to. Nobody whales in a vacuum.
Second issue is whale rarity. Just to find your first $1000 whale you already need 1000 fans. The rest of them are only paying you $20 x 200 = $4,000 and $5 x 799 = $3,995 per year. That's $10k/yr.
The idea that you could only cultivate a stable of whales with artistic output is ridiculous. You somehow need to make the whales believe that the general population is their commons and then sell them status over gen pop, which is probably why the article hones in on wellness as the only vehicle in town.
Maybe try giving people the benefit of the doubt. And spend an extra second or two considering valid reasons why someone might post something.
No idea what Google is thinking. In one short decade they've become the new villains of the internet.
I had used them in the past and even tried to take them into their third and fourth years, but they felt sluggish and had more and more app crashes as I fell behind the adoption curve. At their price point I'm absolutely expecting a 4+ year lifespan. I think Apple has a different vision though and is aiming a little more upmarket than where I am.
I'm not really sure what people are paying for when they get those $800+ beasts for phones. When I use a friend's I can tell they are higher quality; either they feel more fancy or load apps more quickly. But it's marginal like the difference between a workstation and a gaming PC.
I think more people should try out budget Android lines. One really nice benefit is they only contain the technologies that have proved themselves. This article focuses on headphone jacks but there's quite a lot of silly phone tech that comes and goes in the name of marketing showmanship.
Or the countless families devastated by beanie baby addiction?
Me neither. Collectibles aren't the problem.
And it isn't gambling if you can't cash out. Why do you think there's so many casino games in the app stores even though digital gambling is illegal? Cuz they aren't gambling - they're hobbies. Thirty years ago you bought a $20 handheld slot device from the department store. Now you download an app.
I updated my original comment to remove the confusing analogy
Amazon could never ever compete with Etsy in this category. The twist is Etsy can't advertise that they are the font of dreams for whatever IP you'd like to violate the commercial rights of.
Moment to moment is the really gamefeel stuff like how it feels good to make a line in Tetris or step on a goomba in Mario. While the player is playing your game they should constantly be experiencing these moments.
Minute to minute focuses on how engaging your game is within a session. If it's a level-based game does it have that "just one more round" feeling?
Session to session is all about having the player set something up before they stop playing, so that they look forward to the next time they can play. The most famous example is the plow-plant-harvest loop that made Zynga a billionaire. You came back to the game cuz you wanted to harvest all those crops for the rewards. But if you think about what the session to session is in Pokemon Go, the curiosity of what's in your immediate area, you can see that there's a lot of design space here.
5-7 days retention sounds like at least one of these loops is missing or broken. Don't be discouraged, getting all these things to overlap is hard.
Internet communities should aspire to be more like local communities. If you're a jerk in real life, people will show you the door.
Making this about grand abstract concepts like free speech or censorship is internet fun for people who like to debate. But it's overcomplicating the situation. Twitter is just showing a jerk the door. They can rejoin the community after an act of contrition.
The nine year thing is misdirection. Twitter's search algorithm in 2019 will still gladly show that tweet if your search term is just so. If tweets are the inventory on Twitter's store shelves, why would any business want to display the tweet in question at any time?
Academic institutions and governments have already hooked themselves up to the Twitter fire hose. All tweets are saved for archival purposes. Twitter itself doesn't have to muddy its product to provide an archival experience.
This is curatorship; not censorship. Unfortunately reality isn't ~~outrageous~~ _engagement-inducing_ enough to make the front page news.
The loose thread now is in how the companies are required to communicate their data mining. These twenty page privacy policies that I agree to with a flick of the scrollbar and a button click, or these equally boring popovers when I visit a site, are where the governmental innovation needs to happen next.
I rarely go through these flows myself so I don't know what they reveal or are capable of. I'd rather be anonymous
I have the same criticisms as others do about a company like Zoom that only responds to security issues after they wait-and-see if it will impact the bottom line. And that quick peek behind the curtain where their own employees view this as a "PR crisis" (their exact words in the article) rather than something more tells me everything I need to know about their leadership's DNA. Buyer beware.
Unfortunately for the game (and the world), 9/11 happened a few months after launch and due to the theme of the game it was shut down. Now it's just an interesting bit of gaming history!
The way this solution solves the I Don't Know What I Don't Know Problem is by making you curate your own list of experts. For your example query, a colleague may have told you about a popular list that thousands of DBAs subscribe and contribute to. So when you search that query it has the sites to crawl and find the material
e.g. someone's list of installed lists might look like:
- New York Public Library reference list
- Good Housekeeping list of consumer goods
- YCombinator list of tech news
- California education system approved sources
- Joe Internet's surprisingly popular list of JavaScript news and resources
How do you find out about these lists and add them? Word of mouth and advertising the old fashioned way. Marketplaces created specifically to be "curators of curators". Premium payments for things like Amazing Black Friday Deals 2019 which, if you liked, you'll buy again in 2020 and tell your friends.
There are two points to this. First, new websites only enter your search graph when you make a trust decision about a curator - trust you can revoke or redistribute whenever you want. Second, your list-of-lists serves as an overview of your own biases. You can't read conspiracy theory websites without first trusting "Insane Jake's Real Truth the Govt Won't Tell You". Which is your call to make! But at least you made a call rather than some outrage optimizing algorithm making it for you.
I guess this would start as a browser plugin. If there's interest let's build it FOSS.
Edit: Or maybe it starts as a layer on top of an existing search engine. Are you hiring, DDG? :P