Stricter Comments...

Someone has decided that this blog makes a good place to post spam back-links to their products.  I've turned on higher levels of security to prevent comments which don't help people from being made.  Unfortunately that makes is a little harder for people who want to use the site to leave a comment, but it means that it wont get overrun with spam.

Overgrowth

This game recently came to my attention via Reddit.  You many have seen Lugaru on the Humble Indie Bundle.  Here is a link that is a two for one: a discussion of Overgrowth via Indie Game: The Movie.  The video describes what they have been up to better then I can.

The development team has done a lot of things right during development of Overgrowth.  Check out Wolfire Games and you can read blogs on their opinion of open development.  More than just talking about development of their own games, the blog has 'design tours' of other games.  They discus the game from a development standpoint.  They are really post mortems of other peoples games.  There is much to learn from Wolfire Games, and fortunately they are will to openly share just about anything.  If you are developing your own game, drop them a line.  Ask them a good question and I bet you'll get an answer.

D3 Gold Experiment

My previous hypothesis is that each 1K of gold is going to effectively become it's own market due to the buying behavior of the players.  1K will have the highest purchase frequency.  2K lower frequency.  10K the lowest frequency.  There could be weird spikes in demand or supply at price points that correlate to gold values that players need to spend to purchase upgrades (the stash for example).

My first test of this hypothesis was to create a few auction to see what happens. 2 1k auctions at a fairly high Blizzard Buck (temporary place holder for real money in the beta) value.  1 2k auction at a slightly lower rate then the 2 1k auctions.  It would be more cost effective for the purchaser to buy the 1K auctions.  Now this doesn't really prove all that much, because there is a system behind the scenes which makes it so that if someone asks for 3K they would get all my auctions (odd numbered values are why I think 1K will sell most frequently).

Can I login to check the status of these auctions?  Unfortunately no.  Error 37 blocks my way.  I have no idea what that means...  Just that it prevents me from logging in.  I should find out tomorrow (Monday morning). So you may not even see this sentence.  Perhaps I'll just have some results.

--Update--
I can view the auctions now.  Two of them have sold, one of them has not.  Unfortunately as this is the beta, the 'Completed Tab' of the AH reads 0 for all information.  There is no way to know right now which auction sold and which one didn't.  The total number of Beta Bucks has increased to 66.  So that's working...  But nothing else is.