Please don't make your team work on a U.S. holiday weekend for this. Just don't hit the deploy button on this change and now there's no deadline and no need for crunch.
Nintendo was late to dip their toes into f2p game economies and it shows with the poorly balanced bell economy in (farmville-like) Animal Crossing.
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.
This seems like an issue with semver. Its idealism is not compatible with actual human behavior.
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.
There's many different kinds of players with an equally rich spectrum of player motivations. Animal Crossing is a phenomenon for some players because games like it are released pretty rarely. For others, it's "not even a game".
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.
I keep a log for each project and write down the problem I'm trying to solve followed by the idea I think solves it. If I hit a roadblock, I write that down as the new problem. Now I have to solve that before I can pop the stack and get back to the original problem.
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.
Slack is surprisingly anti remote work. They only offer it to incredibly senior roles. Everyone else has to jump through hoops and get approvals from many layers of middle management - it's one of those ask Mom / ask Dad policies that's designed to make sure no one gets an answer.
You have little control over businesses transmitting purchase data to Facebook or other data aggregators.
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.
I'm always surprised that npm, a for-profit company with a lame business model, is graciously serving redundant package requests millions of times per day to everyone's CI/CD flows.
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`.
Because a bunch of college kids and bootcampers only learned React and are afraid of the job market spotlight moving on from where they're standing.
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.
Good points. Based on my experience with whales in f2p games you will get outsized income from 0.1% of whale users, reliable income from 20% of hobby users, and one-off spend here and there from the rest.
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.
You described the business model of Ludwig van Beethoven. One of the first independent artist in his profession. He had a few whales which gained status through personal inscription of his works and paid him to stay in Vienna. But he was massively popular in Vienna before he gained whales.
I quite like and agree with the numbers here - you could be getting 10k / year before your first whale, so it does not make much economic sense to only focus on a 100 biggest fans.
