My Site (Current Status: UP) - Games, KoL Meat

[Beelzebuddy]

[EDIT] Lots of stuff being added here continuously, read all my bigger posts in the thread for what's what or just check my site.

KoL, short for The Kingdom of Loathing, is a free web-based game notable for its wide appeal.  

If you're a casual gamer, or just someone who enjoys a good dick joke, you'll find them aplenty.  Among the variety of things you'll encounter are Senile Lihcs, Giant Sandworms (and befriend their young), and The Trippy Floating Head of Grand Moff Tarkin.  Or if you're VERY lucky, Count Bakula!

If you're a hardcore gamer, you'll find that the pop references and sarcasm are built on a system of very solid and intricate mechanics.  Since you only get a limited number of adventures per day, it's important, profitable, and often difficult to maximize them to accomplish whatever it is you want to do. For example, farming occupies many people's time.  Others like collecting trophies, or basement diving, or just beating the game as fast as possible, possibly with interesting handicaps for powerful and braggable rewards.

And the crafting.  Holy crap, the crafting.

Oh, and it's been actively updated (by "active" I mean active) for over five years.  And it's completely free to play - all financial support comes from $10 donations in return for powerful (but optional) items.  Which you can also buy with meat, the official currency.

Which is where I come in.

I recently coded up a bitcoin - meat exchange site:

http://derpular.dyndns.org/BTCKOL/

If kol sounds like something that would be worth your time, two bitcoins will buy you enough meat to get you comfortably settled in.  Since I have much more meat than bitcoins right now, buying meat gets you a 15% bonus.  That'll theoretically smooth out as people trade, so if you're gonna buy meat, do it soon.  If you already play kol and you want to sell meat, that's cool too, but you might wanna wait until the conversion rate becomes more favorable.

Since the site is very new (just finished coding it last night), there's definitely going to be some bugs, so please limit transfers to amounts you can afford to temporarily lose - a  bitcoin or two here, 100k meat there.  I'm recording all transactions multiple ways and will try my damndest to make sure everything goes smoothly, but shit happens, y'know?

I'd also be very appreciative of any opinions of my server's user experience.  I've tried to make it as straightforward as possible to use, but there's definitely more streamlining I need to do.  You'll notice the link I posted is a deep link, unreachable from the main page; I'm currently talking to the EVE gms to see if I can charge isk (via bitcoins) for the tools I have there, and I thought it would be prudent not to look like an isk laundering operation waiting to happen.

Enjoy!

[Anonymous]

My kol character name is Rage Guy







 

[barbarousrelic]

I want to buy BTC with my meat. Your site says:


"Buy BTC with Meat:
89053 Meat/BTC
Limit of 35621 Meat at this price"

So I can only buy .4 bitcoins? IF this is the case, it should really say:



"Buy BTC with Meat:
89053 Meat/BTC
Limit of .4 BTC at this price"

[Beelzebuddy]

I figured listing it in meat would be more logical, since that's the limit you can send me at that price.  It's the same limit in the other direction, though, so take your pick.

You can buy more, up to the wallet amounts shown at the top of the page.  I'll process .4 BTC worth at a time, recalculate the price, then repeat. 

Is there a more intuitive way to communicate this system?

I want to keep a sliding scale that can, theoretically, incentivize balanced totals on both sides (as opposed to you totally cleaning me out of BTC) , but if I didn't recalc in the middle of large transactions, you could buy all my meat for a profit, then sell it all back for a profit, etc.   

[Beelzebuddy]

Taking the server down for a few hours to do some updating.  Naturally after waiting days for a library to be fixed, as soon as I inconveniently work around it the patch gets done.

[Beelzebuddy]

Okay, she's back up.

Changed:
    Stored Meat corrects more often (like, at all)
    Exchange rate significantly modified: 
        Buying "uphill" is now more punitive, reaching up to 40x the value of an equal trade. 
        On the other hand, trading down the gradient is even more profitable.  Right now you can buy meat with BTC for ~200% profit.
    Trades are recomputed per BTC involved in the trade, instead of 20% of savings.  When my stored BTC value ~ my stored Meat value, the exchange rate changes should be relatively minimal.  I don't have enough bitcoins at the moment to test this robustly, so let me know if you encounter any odd behavior or funny math.
    I will have more BTC soon - my work computer just genned a cache of 50 bitcoins, I'll upload them tomorrow.  That's enough to make the ratio about 1:1, so buy meat while it's still pure profit for you.

[Beelzebuddy]

Over the weekend I coded up a quick sorta-multiplayer game.  It's like rock-paper-scissors in two dimensions, so I called it 2DRPS.  I've written this a time or two before in a few different formats, and the people who've played have always enjoyed it at least enough to humor me.  As far as I'm aware, there's nothing quite like it - as a wannabe part-time game designer, I hate games that are carbon copy clones of each other - so atm this is an exclusively bitcoin thing.

Oh, and you can win BTC by playing.  Both players pitch in an ante, the winner walks away 80% richer.  I've temporarily set the play price pretty low (0.10) to encourage playing around without fear of losing much money.  I'll raise it to 1 BTC per play in a few days time, or if ya'll ask me to do it early so you can get the feeling of money riding on the line.

You'll need a credit account to play the game - with under fifteen second rounds, waiting for full BTC transfers would take too long.  There's no charge for doing so and BTC sent as credit is simply saved until it's used or returned (derefore yer money's safe wit' me, promise), so load up an address with a BTC or two and give 'er a whirl!  

The site, again, is derpular.dyndns.org

Bold denotes newly added features of the site.

As always, PLEASE let me know if there's any odd behavior or errors cropping up.  As I add more detailed transactional functionality, it becomes harder to test by myself.  Copy+pasting the nasty red error trace is more useful than anything to me.

[BioMike]

I've read the description, but only get half of it. Are the squares only compared horizontally, or also vertically?

Anyway, I've put in my squares .

[BioMike]

Ah wait, they work on the whole grid.

How about pay price compared to grid size? Small grids cheap, large grids expensive.

Example:
3 squares = 0.10 btc
5 squares = 1.00 btc
7 squares = 10.00 btc

[BioMike]

Ok, played now a few times.

One thing. Don't have it refresh on the result screen (I walked away and came back, empty grid and a lost game. Would be nice to see what the other player did). And show both individual selections (both users).

[FreeMoney]

Very cool idea.

Once you get all the kinks worked out you should have a micro stake and a more meaningful stake and maybe eventually a large stake. I think the board size is fine.

As was said you should keep the results viewable, maybe even save them for a while.  Maybe you could let people que up plays? Like instead of just telling me I've already entered the round, let me do another and it will automatically get played in the next game, so that I can do 5 now and if someone comes on in a few hours they can do multiples instead of just one and having to wait again. You would need to add a results page or something so I can see how everything worked out I guess.

Oh, sometimes I'm getting redirected to a totally white screen.

[BioMike]

Oh, sometimes I'm getting redirected to a totally white screen.

I haven't encountered that yet.

<edit>I do notice that sometimes the reload hangs.</edit>

[FreeMoney]

Oh, sometimes I'm getting redirected to a totally white screen.

I haven't encountered that yet.

<edit>I do notice that sometimes the reload hangs.</edit>

Yes, that's when it happens.

There must be an easier way than constant reloading, can't a website "watch" for something to happen?

[Beelzebuddy]

Wow, thanks for the quick feedback.  These are pretty much all good ideas, I'll try to implement some of them tonight. 

As far as the smoother and more intelligent web coding goes, the extent of my skills runs currently to the late nineties.  You're lucky the whole thing isn't a thirty page description of my cats, with a static background image that clashes with the text contrast and a midi of Queensryche's "Silent Lucidity" playing on a loop.

Re: the hangups, could be one of three things: Cherrypy is occasionally telling me it ran across some sort of error with static files, my vnc viewer into my server is set to "bandwidth hog," and I had bittorrent open.  The latter two should be fixed, so let me know if it continues to happen.

[Beelzebuddy]

Mkay, it's up and it looks like it's working.  You can queue plays now, and results are easier to interpret.

Do ya'll think I ought to bump the ante up to 1 BTC?  The multiple price levels is a good idea, but not when there's just a couple of people playing.

I'm gonna take an hour break to kill shit online, then we'll see about adding a highscore board.

[Beelzebuddy]

Alright, scoreboard is in!  Right now the only people on it are my two testing addresses, so they should be easy to top.

[FreeMoney]

Nice, I've got 3 queued up. Good luck, suckers.

[Beelzebuddy]

Hrm.  I took you up on that and it gave us BOTH a win.  Checking for bugs now.

[Edit] Nevermind, it wasn't a bug.  We tied, so technically we did both win.  It shouldn't count for e-penis bragging rights though, so I'll fix it to not affect the scoreboard.

[Edit][Edit] 'kay, if the game's a total draw it won't count anymore.

By the way, if you have plays queued you aren't charged for them until someone else joins and the game is computed.  And, when I restart the server it wipes the queue.  I don't wanna make some major change to the rules or how much I charge and leave someone feeling gypped because their queued plays turned out to be a huge waste.  Is that an acceptable convenience-security tradeoff?

[FreeMoney]

Hrm.  I took you up on that and it gave us BOTH a win.  Checking for bugs now.

[Edit] Nevermind, it wasn't a bug.  We tied, so technically we did both win.  It shouldn't count for e-penis bragging rights though, so I'll fix it to not affect the scoreboard.

[Edit][Edit] 'kay, if the game's a total draw it won't count anymore.

By the way, if you have plays queued you aren't charged for them until someone else joins and the game is computed.  And, when I restart the server it wipes the queue.  I don't wanna make some major change to the rules or how much I charge and leave someone feeling gypped because their queued plays turned out to be a huge waste.  Is that an acceptable convenience-security tradeoff?

So no fee for draws either? ;-)

I think it's an acceptable risk, I'm not going to do 50 or anything. Could you make it tell you how many you have in the queue?

A "toggle all" button would be good. I think there is a bias toward not claiming a lot of squares because it's more work.

[Beelzebuddy]

Could you make it tell you how many you have in the queue?

A "toggle all" button would be good. I think there is a bias toward not claiming a lot of squares because it's more work.

Done and done.  Draws btw give you your money back, minus the usual 10%.

Since I don't have anything pressing to implement tonight, I thought I'd take a step back and reassess my goals.  What do you want to see added?  

Additional currency exchanges - EVE isk, TF2 items, other (specify)?  

More arcade style games - quick, cheap plays?

Intricate and/or long term games - MMOs, sims and such?  Since I don't have any examples yet, one game I've been mulling is a casino management sim (in keeping with the theme of most bitcoin endeavors).  You'd take out a loan from a seedy shark for collateral - credit - then build a casino and attract customers to pay it back.  Pay back the loan, get back all your credit.  Fail to stay in the black and mobsters break you fuckin kneecaps and I keep the credit.

Or maybe some kinda community thing?  4chan style image board which prevents spam with a very small charge per post (~0.01 BTC) instead of captcha?

By the way, since I've had it up for a few days without losing everything due to a glitch, I decided to add in the rest of my KoL meat.  Meat is selling for 2.5x its value right now, the equivalent of buying bitcoins for $0.03 each.  It will never be this cheap again, and the best profits will go to the first person to claim them.

[EDIT] One thing though - since the gradient in this case is very large, the meat price will fall faster than normal, so orders greater than 3 or 4 btc might see significant changes in price.  Also, whoever just reloaded the page about a dozen times: prices update every six minutes, which is as fast as I can login to kol to check messages.  I need to add that to the page.

[edit][edit] Ah shit, kol maintenance is in 10 minutes.  Might want to wait until afterward so things don't get snarled up.  I'm not expecting any problems (trades should be queued while kol is down), but it couldn't hurt to be safe.