melkathi

Feeling the urge to drink some Quanta Cola Now all I need to do is find some at the local supermarket...

Been pondering Steam Trading Card maths: A game that is buy to play comes with a number of card drops usually equal to 50% (rounding up) of the total cards in the collection. Of coure these are likely to include doubles or triples. Upon recieveing all drops (one drop per 20-30 mins game time), you become eligible to a 3 card booster pack for that game. A number of booster packs are made available each time a customer completes a badge. The packs become distributed among a random number of other customers eligible for packs. Chances to be one of these customers increases with steam level (lvl 50 has twice the chance of a level 10) and by being eligible for boosters in more games (as each game has a sepparate chance). The booster pack can of course also include doubles and triples. A game that is free to play has no card drops by itself. Instead one drop is recieved per $9 spend in the game's item shop. Cards can be sold between gamers in the community market place. 10% (rounding to the nearest cent) of the final price go to the developer. 5% (rounding to the nearest cent) of the final price go to Steam i.e Valve. Team Fortress 2 trading card prices have stabilized at the low price of $0,17. At this price they may still sell, but a lot of them are available at it. Any card under that price will sell almost imediatly. At that price 1 cent goes to the Developer (Valve) and 1 cent goes to Steam (Valve). A card bought at $0,14 can be resold at $0,16 without the buyer/re-seller incuring a loss, but creating a win for Valve of $0,04 from the two transactions. A card resold at a price $0,03 above the purchase price will net the reseller a profit of $0,01 and Valve the aforementioned net profit of $0,04. For the card to have been issued, Valve had already registered a profit of $9 or the player recieved a booster pack for already having been issued cards for the game (for having spend the $9). Someone sold a scout card for $0,11 which I bought and resold for $0,16. This means: Valve recieved $9 and issued the card. The player didn't want it and sold it, recieving $0,09 and earning back 0,01% of their expenses. Valve made an additional $0,02. I then sold it, earning $0,03 while Valve earned another $0,02. Thus $9 spend by gamer 1 result in an ingame purchase for gamer 1 with a 0,01% discount to a price of $8,91, an income of $0,03 for gamer 2 (me), an expense of $0,16 for gamer 3 and an income of $9,04 for Valve. No, there is no point to this post. By just selling my spares I made about $4,5. A bit over half of which was spend on finishing trading card collections for the hell of it.

*grumblegrumble* "So you will cover travel expenses?" "Yes, up to this amound. We could do the booking for you, but then our agency will pick the cheapest flight on their list which is very likely to not be the most convenient. I would strongly urge you to book yourself and just hand us your reciept and boarding pass during the event so we can reinburce you. As a matter of fact there is this extremly convenient and cheap flight you could take that the colleagues in charge of booking are not flexible enough to provide as an option. But especially as you will be accompanied by your wife, for whom we cannot book anyway, but who I assume you wish to be on the same flight with, I can only urge you to book yourself." "Hmm... can I trust you to truly reinburse me?" ... "Erm.. yes?"

31 celsius here today. Feels like more. Listening to crickets through the open window. Gives the whole day a summer vacation on an islan feeling, even though I am in the city and drowning in work.

Good luck in Louisville. Though I am a bit worried about the company you keep if you are the most liberal in the group

A 3D modelling guy with a fetish?

That looks so very wrong. Both the screenshot and the Beetlejuice clip

With the Volge finally arriving from the pilot of the show to the game, I played some Defiance. Died more often than the whole past month

Meanwhile on another forum: "Today my older brother actually helped me out for a change. They say as you get older you se everything...." ;)

Costume Quest was a lot of fun but very very short. The Cave was shorter, lacking in fun, lacking in writing but did have some not-very-good-bordering-on-the-bad gameplay and tried to get players to replay it multiple times without truly offering anything through those replays other than getting tired of the narrator's voice. The unskippable intro narration convinced me to uninstal when I realized that even though I could try to play it again, I could not listen to that again.

Antje Traue is not just super hot shes also a good actor you pinhead. *blink* Ok. Your inpeccable manners are most convincing; an indisputable proof of her talent.

And alongside the shirt you also broke your avatar and had to replace that?

Your dog is called Spot?

So we can start a list of shady kickstarter practices? Because Harebrained revealing that their promise for a DRM free game.... eh, well, let's nitpick about the letter of the promise and not the spirit, just after making a drive for pre-orders. that doesn't put them in my list of most honest developers. Not that I am all that keen on hearing that one of the mos successfull kickstarters did not have the cash to implement proper savegames or lootable corpses. It may not have been as badly missmanaged as Double Fine, but it sure as hell wasn't managed well. Makes you wonder (or makes me wonder) if there isn't a reason that some "big" names end up using crowd funding. Sometimes serial entrepeneurs have the "serial" part not just because they have loads of ideas, but because those ideas can only survive if the person who had the idea leaves it alone

Then at least someone knows my password. I sure don't. Password: m1lfluv3r So I have the same password as Mike? Awesome!

Says so in the top right of the screenshots with tiny letters: Firefall Open Beta

I didn't get any mail. Maybe someone hacked it to fix it? UPlay is a bloody mess.

Then at least someone knows my password. I sure don't.

Hehe. I keep telling people to do that in the kickstarter comment section but completly forgot to add a note of the links here Also, the dev video chat in update #5:

Where does Angel come up with this ****?

Other than them saying that you'd abduct researchers to... research for example?

+adjusting taxation to tread the fine line between high income and a revolting population ?

Played some Endless Space. Got fairly lucky with the races that showed up. Imperials were the only evil race. Made for a very dreamy, calm early game. Ended up with two powerful alliance at peace with each other: Horatio and the Sophons on one side and the Imperials, Amoeba and Automatons on the other, with the Sowers stuck right in the middle. As the Sowers were about to be wiped out, I offered them to join us, which my two allies accepted and we split the territory held by Horatio and the Sophons pretty much three ways. And suddenly I got an alert that Amoeba were close to winning the game. Doh. A wonder victory, but only 0% complete, while I was 30% towards the economic victory. no worrie I thought, I'll just continue making cash and if need be, race my research for a wonder victory as well and buy the wonders. Then came the alert that the Amoeba were close to an economic victory: 55% while I was at 35%. Huh? Where did that come from? They must have maxed their taxes. When I was at 72% towards the economic victory they were at 96%. Ended up with me at 97% and them 99% before I clicked "End turn" hoping that I'd get 3% without them getting the final 1%... We both hit 100% at the same time, but the game was kind enough as to count it as a victory for me.

It wasn't all that bad. I got my money's worth out of it fun wise. Far more than I did out of some of the games others here would deem "good" games