You guys fancy white wine??! And never told me before... 

King's Coinshop has finished making the ladder, and has now listed the following collectors' and other coins for sale at friendly prices.

Hint: these coins are good already, but especially good they become as the gold price rises. (There is currently no method to remove the bids in a "selective bulk" way meaning that they will stay until sold, or the gold price rises so that I remove the asks that are nearing spot, which I may or may not have time to do Acquiring gold this way also does not immediately cause a gold price rise in the coinshop HM02B100s. Another hack which might come in handy.)

You can enjoy the list of offers and plan purchases here as well:


All merchandise has come to the coinshop by seller discretion, meaning we are not liable if extreme rarities or personally gifted treasures are included. We do not know the history of the items. Remember that item_id in case of gold coins tells the gold content so that the letter of the alphabet equals number of CKG (eg. E=5)

King has replicated his silver asks:

You are doing your own credibility harm by statements that are backed by neither fact, logic nor experience. For instance, European countries still enjoy more independence than U.S. states have had since 1865. This does not fit to your worldview solely because you lack the prerequisite knowledge in the subjects needed to understand it.


The fact is that my crypto projects are at least going somewhere despite your lack of recognition.

Yours are not, despite all my goodwill and appreciation and offers to help.

Gamemaster announcement - IPO for White Wine item dividend shares - 24 hours

Wow, the demand for wine is strong, and the messengers are working full time to source the needs from France, who cannot guarantee supply except until the 48 h from the relevant ANN post (I think a few hours remaining, and the IC must be in your account upon year_change).

The messengers of the merchants have stopped in the taverns in land of Germania, on the way. Their land is in a sad condition after the ravages of war and they seek to ramp up their wine production. We have not enjoyed the Germanian wines in the past, because they are white, and we have had access to vodka in case white is desired.

But now things are a-changing: France prices and logistics costs are up (previously 1 IC->12 btl included tax, now it doesn't) and VODka is made in bad water and has not proven to very popular. Anyone who knows the French knows they are not giving their land away nor accepting foreign investments, we should be grateful even to be able to buy from them...

Technically the concept what we are ramping up is an item dividend share. In the past we have had pool shares that produce a prorated dividend in money, common shares that also do the same, yet are tradable directly unlike pool shares that have been tied to other qualities and whose quantity (as well as payout) is calculated yearly, and also a fixed monetary payout share CON. The first item payout is FOIS, the holders of which get FOIE annually. That is not permanent, though - when countryside becomes implemented, the system changes.

The Germanian opportunity now is a professionally organized (that is what they are good at) white wine producing vineyard. The investment is outside the reach of influence of anyone but the gamemaster, so does not grant any voting rights. The number of shares is not limited, they will expand operations in relation to the capital raised. Each share gets the same number of bottles of W16xxW wines annually, or if the quality is deemed insufficient, some years will not produce anything (not worth it to pay the town tax which the owner must pay upon import - in this case the next dividend is more quantity since they drink the bad stuff themselves and credit it to us with more good stuff). It takes a few years before any production, but once it starts, the estimate is 10 bottles per share on average.

It is possible that the shares "WW" will be available in later offerings, based on the then market price. In this IPO the share price is 5 mil per share. Minimum subscription is 20 shares (100 mil) however. Those interested in smaller stakes can buy in the aftermarket when it becomes available. There is no maximum. If W16xxW will become available to purchase by direct import, it will be fungible (same) as the W16xxW received as a dividend of these shares.

Only 24 hours are given to respond. The money goes to the devfund.

Request to check the parser lookup_table first, because the error may be there as well. Although the drinks show ok.

This post will soon be enlarged to be a schedule concerning how the many different features and modules that already were in the latest Google version (the one in use from autumn 1600 to Ultima) now work, and when this working state is reached.

It is expected that everything works in 2 weeks and that this post will be finalized tomorrow.

I admire the consistency of the posters above.

I needed to explain some fundamentals in another place, so it could be warranted to repeat them here. Oldies have heard about them many times, but I have got the impression that there are some new ones seeking to make sense of it.

World

We are building an alternative world. It is completely independent of the place called "outside world". There are some ways of interaction provided for characters that may or may not have a presence in outside world as well. For humans, the main way for interaction is cryptokingdom.me "Ultima gaming platform". Other interfaces exist as well. Ingame actions may only be taken via the channels existing.

State of the World

The state of the world contains everything that is known of the world at a given time. At present, the state of the world is kept in "Ultima database", which is centralized. Backups of previous states of the world are kept. Ultimately the validity of the data is ensured by player consensus - the game state is completely public, so any suspicious things can be reported and investigated. Changelogs are kept, which clearly reveal where suspicious activity occurred, when, and by whom. This is deemed enough for now - the principle kept us going for a year in a public google document where everyone (who asked) got unlimited write access.

Gold

Owners of gold (CKG) select the Town Council, governing body of of the Town Corporation.

Governance

The Town Council makes the rules of the game and appoints Gamemaster (GM) and Mayor.

Gamemaster and admins

Gamemaster is the head of admins, and their job is to keep the game going, provide ingame content, manage data, help players, etc. Gamemaster is the ultimate authority who decides the State of the World if any dispute arises for any reason. Admin ranks are:
- Gamemaster
- Senior Admin (practically same permissions)
- Junior Admin (lower permission).

Senior Admins belong to the Ancient Order of the King.

Mayor

Mayor leads the Town and chairs the Council.

King

King is the big bully who has massive influence because he was in so early, is so wealthy and well-connected and holds all the other positions. Also many game conventions give favors to the King. On the balancing side, it is a full time job, and requires being married to the Kingdom and always putting the Kingdom's happiness before personal. Also he owns 40% of the gold, but half of that is tied up in the Coinshop, and cannot be sold at will. Similarly 25,000 XMR is on deposit only guaranteeing the solvency of the coinshop. Just today he gave 5,000 XMR loan to the town to make CON market making (causing it to be tied up so once again money thrown to the game without withdrawal option). The King is a person, the soul of the game. The next King will have very different way of reigning. This one sticks to "le roi gouverne par lui-même" as far as it feels best for the Kingdom. (In reality, the role of King has suffered a lot because of my other roles, and I await to get a bit more depth.)

Lead Designer and designers

Lead Designer decides the datatypes and scripts that are implemented to contain and change the State of the World. Designers (currently: none but Thud did earn a few kCKG by designing Ultima) help the lead designer.

Lead Developer and developers

Lead Developer (Wizard Developer P.J.) is responsible to the Lead Designer for the implementation of the new features, and currently also maintains the system storing the State of the World. Other developers and contributors help him. There are currently no developers, except the lead, who receive monetary compensation.

Investing

Both time and money can be invested, and time in two ways:
- Being in early
- Spending time to optimize game.

We are 100 players and are aiming at millions, so congratulations: you are fabulously early. The downside is that you need to put some effort to hang on, and things will change a lot for a long time still. Spending time to optimize game, I don't know if it is possible to make real-world salaries ($5 or more per hour), hopefully not, because otherwise the Asians will sap us dry very soon Previously architecting made me about $30 per hour, now paused. Wealth managing for other players and working as ingame admin are about $10 per hour.

I wrote at length about how to invest in liquid investments (the only ones that you can safely buy however much, and the rules don't change as long as the World exists, and you can sell them at market 24/7).

"Consol rate" is 68%, which means by and large that other game investments are expected to provide a higher return per realyear. The first year gave about 10x despite all the difficulties.

Gold and urban land have been specially guaranteed that they cannot be unilaterally taken by gamemaster actions (eg. "band of marauders"). It is unlikely that financials would, either.

Game existence

Continued existence of the game is the prerequisite of getting any return. Therefore it is good to know what it means for the game to "exist". It means that there has to be a Gamemaster who can judge the State of the World. The Gamemaster needs to be appointed by the Town Council, and that has to be appointed by the gold owners (which in very extreme cases are arbitrated by the Gamemaster, since gold is an ingame item).

A lesser concern is that it is good to have some ways to store and alter the State of the World. Many have been used already and the choice of the storage medium does not itself alter the State of the World in any way. Even in the unlikely event that all copies of the recent backups of the State of the World in mass storage media have been destroyed, the Council and Gamemaster are free (nay, obliged) to create it from memory and judge it to be master.

Purchasing gold, aside from a historically good investment, is also a stake in a better world. Ultimately, if for a reason or another a fork happens, meaning that 2 or more large groups of gold owners cannot contact each other and no medium exists to communicate the changes to the State of the World, both may select a Town Council and decide whether to pause the game or continue, etc. When communication is restored, a unified Town Council is elected, Gamemaster appointed and State of the World decided.

Deposit

The game grants licenses to operate depositories, which allow cryptocurrency to be imported into the game (and withdrawn). These depositories are not operated by the game, but by the independent contractors. Every such depository poses a large risk for operator scam, hack, theft, and government operation. Although we allow the depository shares of these to circulate in the game as a payment medium ("money", "m"), at the instant that there is irregularity in the operation or the viewable balance of the depository address differs from the number of ingame shares issued, the shares will be frozen and situation investigated. Even in the event of total loss, all the holders of such depository shares will lose all, but the game will continue as usual. (A helpful thing to understand is that the game market cap is about 10x the sum total of all the money balances, and that only 1/3 of these balances belong to "real" players, the rest being systemic hoards. So as massive an event as losing all the deposits only represents 3-10% of the marketcap and can be remedied).

If you still want to deposit, your only choice now is BCT:saddambitcoin, who manually issues you a XMR payment address.

Outside world

Nothing that the outside world does, has any effect in the game. Since the game has no presence in the outside world, we cannot return correspondence. In important matters outside world may incorporate themselves in the game and play according to the same rules as everyone else. (Remember: We also were outside world, once.) Playing under the influence of outside world is strictly prohibited. If outside world pressures you regarding game matters, stop playing (or caring about outside world).

Liquid investments in the game

For the game to succeed as a self-sufficient entity, it helps a lot if it is possible for the people to contribute their time, but also their financial resources to it. Most everything in the game is buyable and sellable. To be able to do it in any meaningful degree, a time or money investment must be done first. The Ancients were required to commit money to purchase the "entry gold" of 1,000 CKG, which at the time cost 50-250 mil (now: 750 mil). They have also committed up to a real-year of their time. These both contributed to the fact that most Ancients are very wealthy in the game now.

If one starts now, considering that the total number of characters is 100 and active players even less, there is many orders of magnitude of growth ahead, and committing a year of time to play will alone yield great results after the period has elapsed. But if return of monetary investment is interesting as well, a deposit is a way to gain a starting balance that would take a lifetime to gain by grinding. (We must keep the grinding profitability low and difficulty level high to avoid (especially) bot-controlled character farming.)

In investing, I might classify the investments in the scale of time...money intensive. In the far end of time is character development, which mainly happens as a result of playtime and spending the Time resource wisely. Both do not cost money to the player. In the other end are investments whose value is not dependent on the player's activities, and that can be bought and sold in liquid markets. In between are mixed investments that require monetary stake but whose return is dependent on skill, and illiquid tradables, where the return is dependent on skillful placement of bids and asks, and often marketing.

For the investor-minded person, often unable to commit as much time to the game as would be needed to succeed in the mixed or illiquid investments, there are two strategies:

"Prince of OZ strategy"

Buy everything that does not spoil, when it comes to market, even indiscriminately. This accumulates you a massive portfolio of every asset, and there is no need to sell, the dividends rather ensure that everything can be had in good shape and new opportunities tapped. The character becomes very valuable, and if there comes a time to liquidate, you can start from the most overvalued asset and nimbly give more time to sell illiquid things without disturbing the market.

"Prince of Forte Spagnolo strategy"

Buy mainly the liquid assets that have a 24/7 market where more can be accumulated or dumped at pleasure. In the case of FS, he owns 10% of the game so slippage naturally occurs, but this is less of a concern for someone who starts now.

If some time is at hand, the two other princes offer options:

"Prince of Soul strategy"

If you trust crypto, monero and the game, appoint a wealth manager that you can trust and who is deep in the game, pay him well, and give him a nice stash of cash to develop the character for you according to your orders. Then just login to see how you get richer and chat occasionally. Let the wealth manager do everything else. WM's require payment by the hour, which limits your choices to mainly liquid investments, which on the other hand ensure that money comes in every turn.

"Prince of Ramsey strategy"

I love the game and have enough time and money to jump into every new thing that comes up. If something goes royally wrong, it does not matter, I just get a King's Hero medal and the other ventures have yielded tenfold in the meantime.


So, after the lengthy introduction, I was about to speak about liquid investments, the things where you can just sink money anytime, and get it out anytime, and receive the increase/decrease of the market price when you sell, and dividends in the meantime.

Our game has languished the first year at sub-$1 million marketcap, so it is no wonder we only have 2 of such investments at present:

Gold (CKG), and Consols (CON)

CKG is traded mainly as HM02B100 items, which contain 100 CKG each. At the time of writing, exactly 1,000,000 CKG exist, so one item contains 1/10000 of all gold that exists. New gold is being mined in relation to playtime and gold price, so that every hour of cumulative playtime makes $0.025 worth of new gold generated. This will result in a projected 2-5% real-yearly increase in the amount of gold.

CKG is the "stock of the game". The game is not incorporated in any outside-world jurisdiction and does not support them. Therefore the election of the decision-makers of the "game" - the Town Council, who are the highest decision maker, who appoint the Gamemaster (who arbitrates the status and leads the events), and Mayor, (who chairs the council and plays the char_id #4: The Most Ancient Corporation of the Town of CryptoTown, colloquially Town (capitalized)) happens in a 1 CKG = 1 vote basis.

The Town has also chosen to distribute dividends to the "stock" (CKG), which have ranged from 0.2% to 1.5% of the gold's price per week. The Town has many incomes and few costs, and consistently runs a surplus. Occasionally no dividend has been distributed but this just means that the money is retained in the Town coffer, to be distributed later.

At this point it is good to say that the money does not go to any outside entity since there are no connection to outside parties that the Town was responsible to pay anything to, and it is against our principles to ever enter into such. All financial agreements that the Town binds itself to are ingame only.

Town also does not have the authority to issue more gold (nor has ever had it(!)). All gold that comes into existence, comes through the Proof-of-Play mechanism above.

Enough of that. Just felt that it is important before you commit your money because the system is different than probably anything you have experienced anywhere else, and because the above are rules that were set in stone before the Town was even established, and will remain forever since there is nobody who may change them in the game, and the game rejects every outside attempt to change even those rules that can be changed. If you want to change the rules, buy gold. Who has the gold, makes the rules.

CKG is the most liquid investment in the game, and it has represented about 40-70% of the total value of all assets in the game during its history. Gold trading and price history are available for the entire game period (1416-). Investment wise, the following properties should be considered:

- Gold owners decide the councillors, who decide the town income. Town may freely decide to tax players excessively, but doing so would stifle the game. Historically, a modest tax rate has been applied, with the bulk of Town incomes coming from one-time sales of items, land, and buildings. My vision (as the largest gold owner) is to if possible reduce the tax burden even more, to allow the game to grow, and continue to get the cut from one-time sales of land etc. These would allow nice dividends for gold owners as well, which generally would be reinvested to the game. Having principles and continuity is important in taxation.

- Gold's yield scales up roughly with the function (number of players * revenue per player). Reaching a million players would make the number of players go up by 4 orders of magnitude, but concurrently it is likely that the revenue per player would go down 1-2 orders of magnitude. This would still mean 100-1,000 times increase, making CK gold an excellent vehicle for a diversified personal portfolio consisting of long shots.

- Gold is priced in XMR, but the revenue per player scales more with national currencies, such as USD. If CK takes off in a serious way (or even if it doesn't), it is more than likely that XMR/USD rate will react greatly. Therefore, the XMR-denominated gains of CKG are ultimately capped to the fact that a bounded quantity of XMR exist (about 20 million in a few years, at the same time when CKG is probably between 1-2 million). Unless your personal portfolio is denominated in XMR (I don't know of any who claim such), this of course does not matter. I mention it just because there is also the option to buy XMR and invest it in Consols:

CONsol is a 18th century British invention to increase the liquidity of government bonds, and make borrowing cheaper as a result. The bookkeeping is simple, because the bond only pays interest, and is never paid back. This allows new issuance to be fungible with previous ones.

CK item CON is a Town obligation. Whereas the councillors may decide if and how much dividend CKG gets, with CON there is no liberty. As long as the Town exists, every week, each CON receives 0.1 XMR interest.

CKG and CON have important differences - CKG is a gauge of the future success of the game, its price being dependent on the expectations and reality how many players we get and how eager they are to deposit money to the game, as well as just play ("just playing" actually drains money from the game, albeit little per player); CON is a gauge of the likelihood of folding of the game, combined with the risk-free interest rate of a cryptocurrency. I will explain soon, but what follows in practice is that if you believe the game has a high probability of being a major success, then you should buy gold (in a diversified portfolio), if you instead believe that the probability of success is less than the market is pricing gold, but the probability of failure in the sense of the game going bust is reasonably low, then you should buy consols.

CON is a pure play on yield, and the price is the reverse of yield. At the current price, 10.0 mil, a CON pays 1.0% per week (compounded: 68% APR). The yield follows the formula: (risk-free yield on cryptocurrency + risk premium that CK goes down).

Since cryptocurrency (or anything) does not in fact have a risk-free yield, the first component is about zero. There exists plenty of cryptocurrency earning no interest, and no cryptocurrency anywhere is earning a risk-free positive interest (or even risky interest for that matter). Therefore the efficient CON pricing consists about entirely on the risk that CK goes down. Apart from yield, this can also be expressed as a break-even point (theoretically being the half-life of Crypto Kingdom, the 50% probability point that it is still alive I know this is not exactly correct but if you know in which way it isn't, you should be buying CON already). At present, 100 interest payments and as many weeks earn back your investment, at which point you still have left what you did in the beginning - perpetual right to receive 0.1 XMR per week.

CON started relatively recently, but the intention is to increase the stock to keep them liquid. Town hedges the CON payments with other incomes such as extra land taxes that have been perpetually levied to some chapelries at a fixed rate. Even now, the CON payments are only 200 XMR per week, cf. typical CKG dividends 2,000-9,000 XMR. It is inconceivable that CON would drag the Town to difficulties when there is 1 to 2 orders of magnitude buffer in dividends that are subordinate. CON emissions bring cash to the Town that nicely allows the game development, but their real purpose is to provide economic information. For the last 10 months, the Town has had a positive balance in the development fund (ingame stash of current money, free of encumbrances).

- CKG/USD is not bounded from the upside but CKG/XMR is. CON/XMR is really about the trust that CK exists, and if the trust goes to level of that of any company, a 5-10% APR yield is possible. This would correspond to CON price of 50-100, a 5-10x gain. The British government issued consols for 150 years, and the rate declined in that time from 4% to 2.5%. Then they defaulted them. I do my best to make CK Town more trustworthy than the earthly governments - if they could be trusted, I would not have started this.

- Note well: consols magnify XMR price appreciation, since there is no negative feedback loop as in CKG (in CKG, Coinshop has a sell ladder that absorbs all XMR before price reaches 100 times the current price, denominated in XMR). Because consol yield is denominated in XMR, any success in XMR most probably translates to a success of CK as well, decreasing the risk of failure, and increasing the CON price. So, in USD terms, CON and CKG both have practically unlimited upside, in XMR terms the upside of both is in the 10-100x range.

- If XMR fails, it is conceivable that CK would just change currency and steam on. After all, in technical terms, it already has M and UB1 items, which are both depository shares representing cryptocurrencies (XMR and BTC). The only and all-powerful difference is that one of them is designated "money" and the other is not. In the scenario of XMR going bust, CKG still exists and is traded according to its own merits, but CON will turn worthless.


Practical liquidity

Gold has been traded since ever, and its marketcap is much bigger (750 bil vs. 20 bil). In practice, the liquidity of both is enough for small investors, and insufficient for a large one.

Items HM02B100 and CON have a "perpetual and all-encompassing ladder market making" system in place by the King's Coinshop. This means that there is a range of price points from zero to practical infinity, and the Coinshop is always willing to both buy and sell any quantity up to the total issuance of the item (in buy side) or the total amount of money in the world (sell side). Naturally, such backing needs to have a very high price elasticity (and huge reserves - Coinshop owns 20% of the CKG and 20% of the CON in the game, all paid for).

The ladder uses exponential steps, meaning that a certain injection of money raises the price, and thus marketcap, of the item, always the same absolute amount. Therefore it is possible to calculate the wealth effect (how much marketcap rises as a result of new purchase):

- For CKG, it is 40:1. This is in practice meaningful only in extreme market conditions, because it is a known fact that every Ancient player owns gold, and quite many of them are willing to sell into strength, and add support as well. Apart from the initial spike in the first week, CKG has never declined to a lower level than -28% from the all time high (while rising by 10x in the same period of less than a year).

- For CON, it is 2.88:1. It is very difficult to value CK (CKG valuation dilemma), but it is much easier to estimate the probability of its failure since it is bounded between [0, 1]. Therefore it is possible to have a much stiffer market making and increase the liquidity of this much smaller market cap item. It is not that likely to have many other market participants, since the speculation in CON price without massive leverage equals watching paint dry in fun factor (and leverage is not offered yet).

At the current price, investing 1,000 XMR to CKG would result in the price rise of 5.3%. The same into CON would cause a 14.4% rise in price. This is not the same thing as slippage, however, because the Coinshop also adds the bids up to the new market price, so you can sell the items back by suffering only the spread, which is 4% in CKG and 3% in CON. Also other market participants provide liquidity.


DEP An honorary mention goes to The Hypothecary Bank in CryptoTown, who sell demand deposits at 1.00 mil and buy them back at 0.99 mil so that the principal stays constant, and pay interest in the meantime. This 1% guaranteed spread is the lowest in the market. Downsides:

- Bank is not the Town, it is just one institution in the game, solvent but unguaranteed.

- They may decide the interest, which has been 0.8% per week so far.

- The system allows Bank to place a bid only as large as they have cash at hand. Since it is obviously pointless to take deposits just to have them sitting in the vault, larger withdrawals than the quota in the Agora marketplace, need to be negotiated.

The concept of item "M" is new for everyone who was not here in the 1800s. Quick explanation:

- "M" is an aggregation of items containing "resource M", same as HM02B100 is an item that contains 100*resource CKG.
- Currently there is only one such item, also called M so this causes the confusion
- Later, several depositories are needed to hedge risks, so these will issue items "M1", "M2", etc against the XMR they hold in a publicly viewable address
- In the UI side players only see "M" since all these are legal tender
- I skip the brilliant part how robust this system is in the case of any adversity attempted against our world.

So it is intended that you are able to sell M in the same way as you can sell CKG, and if it is too stupid to do, don't do it.

Foie Gras (item FOIE) is being brought to the Town as tribute in awe of our
1) longstanding counties and duchies in the countryside
2) standing army
3) active gameplay.

All nobles have been evaluated according to these criteria and the Foie Gras will be shared in the principle of fairness in the following proportions:

HM The King   199
HH The Duke of New Liberty   51
HH of North Face   43
HSH The Duke of OZ   36
HE The Prince of Soul   27
Ale of Nassau   22
The Marquess of White Cross   21
HG The Prince-Bishop   18
HE The Prince of Ramsey   16
HRH The Prince Royal   15
HE The Prince of Forte Spagnolo   14
HE The Marquess of CryptoLuna   14
Sir James   13
Roopatra The Marchioness of Neverland   12
Sir Riddick, The Earl of Savannah   10
The Marquess of Rome   8
Lord Crichton   8
Sir Heimo, The Earl of Sarajas   7
The Marquess of Grass   6
The Marquess of Naoned   6
Lord Cryptoknight   5
Sir Hokusai, The Earl of Ghibli   4
Lord Febo   4
Knight serje   4
Knight Cryptonic   4
Knight Gabriel   4
Sir Pablo   3
Lord iluvbitcoins   2
Lord dnaleor   2
Lord Lloyd   2
Lord Callixtus   2
Lord Thud   2
Lord Baron, Dr. HS-S   2
Lord Paul Jr   2
Lord Troy   2
Dame Leila   2
Lord drfred   1
Baroness Asenath   1
Knight othe   1
Knight tacotime   1
Knight eizh   1
Knight NoodleDoodle   1
Knight AdamWhite   1
Knight Haruki   1

Commoners are eligible to buy FOIE on the market, since some nobles get more than they need and others seek to gain income which they do not receive from the town (unlike commoners who do).

The total "shares" in FOIE distribution equal 600. The likely amount of "dividend" per year is 1-5 units per share.

Ah quit that please. You haven't been to Europe - if you had, you would know that there is a population of clueless people here as well as in America. Europeans generally believe Americans to be much more clueless than they themselves are (and certainly the contrary).

In my observation, Europeans are less permeated with the consumerism and more by the socialism, vs. the Americans. Both are not good of course.

There is a population of very brilliant unprogrammed (or deprogrammed) minds in America, as well as in Europe.

Some investments have a reinforcing merit loop - when price goes up/down, the fundamentals of the investment get better/worse as a result.

Cryptocurrencies do have this, to a great extent.


Also some investments have a reinforcing fold loop - when price goes up/down, the propensity of the investment folding totally decrease/increase.

Here one must exercise wisdom:

- If the company in question is dependent on financing, for instance, its stock price crashing may easily prevent both equity and debt financing, resulting in bankruptcy (and win for the vultures).

- XMR is not a stock and does not have costs nor debt which need to be serviced. It can hardly be destroyed merely by crashing its exchange rate. Both XMR and BTC prices have already been decimated to 1/10 of their prior peak levels, both are still alive. Both borrowing and lending for short selling is quite a risky proposition if the ultimate goal - destroying the asset - is not achievable.

2 new commands specified, overruling possible previous spexes on them. Since they are required for year change, they need to be in production in 48 hours, prior to that is a useful bonus.


NEW item_id [other parameters may be given in the format "Year=1600 ..."]

Using the parameters correctly you can automatically populate all the fields in the Item table. Other option is to fill them using administration - item table view module, which is easier for 1 or 2 new items at a time, but for bulk additions (suits are unique yet come into being dozens at a time) the parameters come in handy, allowing the whole batch planned in an external spreadsheet and newed with one click.


The command adds a new row to Items and may initialize the values of its fields.

if no item_id is given, print "Command NEW syntax is 'NEW item_id [parameters]'." and abort
if item_id is in use in the unified id-space, print "Item_id already in use." and abort
if item_id is invalid (starts with number, or other than 3-6 characters), print "Item_id is required to start with a letter and be 3-6 characters with no spaces or special characters." and abort
create a new row in Items table, try to enter values to its fields with validation on
ignore other parameters to the extent they are not in the correct format (valid_field=valid_value), in the case a value does not pass the normal validity check of their respective fields, tag minor issues flag
print "New item added."
if minor_issues=1, print "Some of the parameters were not translated correctly, you might want to check the results in Admin section."
return

NOTE: Required: senior admin. Newing items without filling in all the fields before leaving (there is no check) is forbidden. The command does not create any instances of the item. Newing items and forgetting to create them is unadvised.




CREATE item_id quantity recipient

The command increases the number of instances of item_id owned by recipient by quantity units.

if no item_id is given, print "Command CREATE syntax is 'CREATE item_id quantity recipient'." and abort
if item_id is not a valid item_id, print "No such item." and abort
if quantity is not a positive integer, print "Quantity must be a positive integer." and abort
if recipient is not found from char_id and char_shortname tables, print "No such recipient." and abort
add quantity instances of item_id to recipient and update changelog
print: "quantity units of item_id created to recipient".

NOTE: Required: senior admin.

This part is accomplished!!

I entered 1,500 bids and asks just concatenated from text in a spreadsheet and copy-pasted to the command line box, took about 15 minutes including generating the ladder values and the text for the 3,000 orders in the spreadsheet and executing them.

Now that's what I call good job from PJ  It's more than 3 ops (orders per second) 

This does not take long to fix, there was misunderstanding between devs that first level would be L3: Beginner (sounds like "first"..?), then it was changed to L2 and back to L1. So accidental implementation is now L0. Okeh 

"New" level system is further in the future and will not be waited.


There will not be any resource allocation to improving ingame chat now. The Trollbox module is specified ages ago, and will be a thought-out complete module which builds upon the command line, enabling a full gameplay experience.

Upon development in August, the Wizard told that implementation of trollbox would take 5 days, which meant that it was quickly postponed to far in the future. Some time ago we voted if the ingame chat in its current state is usable, and the vote was "no", so use something else. We won't waste time on this one. The current implementation was a 2-hour effort anyway and will remain so.

There are still some modules with higher prioritization than the Trollbox coming, Health Challenge being one.

King's Coinshop is in operation

One of the things I most yearned after - King's Coinshop - has resumed operations and has listed 1,500*HM02B100's (total: 150,000 CKG) for sale in an exponential ladder. Also about 20,000 mil is committed in bids for 150,000 CKG. Spread is 4%.

Gold midprice is currently 720,000 m/CKG.

Coinshop bids and asks are currently updated manually so it takes a while before it reacts to market changes by narrowing the spread back to 4%. Entering the orders is very quick, it is only that I won't be checking it constantly.

Gamemaster Announcement: Health Challenge, Foods and Drinks, etc.

We are now living 1609, and get to play the trading game any moment now.

This weekend, the year change to 1610 will happen (double-year) with at minimum every mandatory payment (taxes, consols). During this I will get the experience about what the year change will entail in the future, and the script will be made which will take care of it the next year.

Change to 1611 should happen with script.

During 1611 (last week of October), the Health Challenge will be levied to all PC (characters excl corporations). It is actually fully specified here. In addition to drinks, now also foods can be consumed. Much can be read from the link, in addition it is important to know that it is generally believed that eating vegetables compared to not eating, brings the greatest benefit to health. Upgrading the food and adding drinks are incremental benefits. (Before even considering to do anything else, make sure you can and will fill your food quota with veggies, though not necessary do it as your first thing).

New Drinks and Foods

CXO extra old cognac 1,200 bottles have been allocated to the people who labored for the bugfixes:
Wizard
SirJacket
Noms
Mooo

and the 2 characters I still wonder how they poured out their all to help the poor in the plague:
Soul
Cryptonic.

Everyone gets 200 bottles, and the Town cost basis (0.3 mil per) must be paid but if they don't want them, the King will put a floor bid at 0.33.

W1608, W1609 are available for convert from IC. Due to deficiency of routines in Ultima yet, I give you 48 hours to express your wishes (here   )
W1608 you get 6 bottles per IC + 10,000/bottle tax
W1609 you get 12 bottles per IC + tax

This is the last chance to order TS160 silver coins, and they must be ordered in lots of 5, which costs 30 IC and 1 coin is retained as tax by the Town.


Foods will be the ones specified over 200 years ago, with the exception that we have vegetables instead of potatoes:

VEG
MEAT
FOIE
CAV

Vegetables are produced locally and lower-level characters actually grow them in the public land between boroughs (get for free). In addition, they will come to market by growers (system sells to the market). Vegetable balances are reduced to half in the spring (Wed).

Meat is brought from further afield and some characters get it as proceeds from hunting (those selected for historical actions). Mainly it comes to market though and must be bought. Meat is conserved and durable.

Foie Gras is a special delicacy of the King and is compact and brought as tribute from the furthest corners of the Kingdom. Characters will be allocated their quota based on their possession of counties and duchies, army strength and activity. Some may probably offer it for sale via the market as well. Foie Gras is conserved and durable.

Caviar, the mythical health food, is still looking for distribution. What we know for sure is that it is delicious and spoils very quickly.

Got that, and my point is that it does not alter the "balance" of the game whether or not you can buy skills and character traits, because if not, you can buy something else that gives you an advantage. I just believe that being able to start with a boosted character is a welcome addition, and money is a natural way to pay for it. The character traits are not even very relevant for those who have money.

Thanks,

King's Coinshop does not cancel orders. Its operation (once initialized with the "infinite ladder") can be summarized as follows:
- Every time King's Coinshop bid is executed, place an ask 3% higher than the bid was.
- Every time King's Coinshop ask is executed, place a bid 3% lower than the ask was.

This is the law and the prophets.

Therefore, the methods needed are reduced to:
- query of trade history.

Thanks for good points!


Our world is such that "pay to win" in the general sense cannot be avoided (resembles RL here). On the other hand, the ones who pay for getting an easier difficulty level, sponsor the game for everyone else and make possible that a person who deposited nothing, is able to get real money out, especially if he (the latter) played well. Character customization revenue goes to the game economy, raising wages for all

Some levels are clearly easier to get with money, but others require real-world skills or good gameplay. I am happy by the new Viscount "vice-promotion" which allows an Earl to show that this guy is worthy of running a county. When new counties become available, he can be promoted (after all what I desire is that the game is managed properly). Then Duke is just the best guy among the candidates available. And getting to the "management board" (Archduke) is of course based on personal merit.

Therefore the road to L19 Archduke goes through few steps if your gameplay is excellent, regardless of any deposit or not:

- Commoner
- Viscount (positional title, irrespective of your character level, and does not change it)
- Earl
- Duke
- Archduke L19

Getting to L9 Grand Wizard is also somewhat difficult, because if you have money, you tend to become promoted Baron earlier. So in this sense the promotion is available for non-depositors only.

As for your specific concern, I of course will make it such that you can have a lot of skills and attributes, but the cost is going up exponentially to make it still fun and balanced. You can upload unlimited money anyway to your character, and that is not a bug but a feature. If you want to be both tall, beautiful, smart and a few more, the price will be outlandish compared to what a commoner earns in his lifetime. So you will be buying bonuses in a game that you are not playing (commoner skills-labor game) since due to your riches you are destined to be a noble anyway sooner or later, and there your real abilities matter more than either your character traits, play style or wealth in advancing the Noble ranks.