My god, What on earth are you doing here?
Chris | Barry | da bird | Post Studio | Jonathan | Louis | Morgaine | Subwolf | Geekblog | Arvind |
It's a shame blogger doesn't have a comment system, as I'm too lazy to go find another one. There is one here over there --> though it's pretty lame. Trillionaires have arrived on the blogshares scene. Seems another new change to the system... no cap on Idea pricing for the top blogs. $5M + per idea is a little insane, and has created a few trillionaires and soon to be Quadrillionaires, yeash. I decided to check see just what you could make on a raid blog... hehe 500 ideas * 5,700,000 = $2.8 Billion. I easily doubled my $7B to 14 in 3 raids. Oh and I decided to go admin, and retire other than testing from the game.
Seeing as the game is all of 4 months old now I suppose someone should write a blurb on what has basically happened in these intervening months.
March sometime Seyed concieves a new baby, Blogshares is born and is unleashed to the public in beta form on April 1st. A novel approach to weblog linking and the inherent value of a weblog. A weblog is valued upon its incoming links.
Now the first couple weeks I missed out on. I managed to find my way there April 18. I had already missed out on the IPO of Moveable Type, Mena Trott (owner) being the richest player / non player on the system. There were no premium players. All of us were playing the game with a 20 transactions per day limit. Most of the top 10 blogs where already completely owned and discussions carried on about what to do to promote wider ownership, or more stock movement. The exchange order system is implemented to help make it easier to buy/sell blogs and it is hoped to create a little more fluidity in what is starting to become a stagnant market.
There were a few interesting bugs in the game: sell > buy 0 mins. The lucky few players holding MT or Blogger made many Millions, when Millions where very hard to come by. The reason for this was, Max pe in buying from the public was 3.5-3.7, and the reindexing of blogs was completely random. A reindex of MT was a event as the outgoing link stocks were snapped up... oh there was no cap on outgoing link values ;) so a $50,000 incoming link was pretty nice to see.
Sometime before the site went live Index funds were introduced, these promised a place for the richer players to place some of their monies rather than tying up all the top shares... of course this didn't quite happen as players simply bought the index funds as they could afford them and still held on tightly to their shares of the top blogs.
The couple days leading up to site going live, the forums were abuzz with the doom and gloom predictions about everyone selling out and crashing the market. Seyed replied with a Buy order on every blog at the current market price... still doomsayers moaned, however it was a fair bit more muted. Everyone who played in Beta was to be allowed to keep their cash on hand but all shares owned would be lost, When the site goes live. I left beta with $248,000 in 48th place, not bad I figured for 12 days.
The site leaves the Beta Testing period and goes Live May 1st. Premium memberships are available for the bargin basement price of $15, this will give you unlimited transactions and a few other goodies, unlimited searches etc. Many a player camped out on their computers waiting for the site to go live... the Beta banner to disappear...
<Morgaine> I stayed up throughout the night, working with Matthew on the design of the BSJ. As the site could go live somewhere in the morning (local time) and it was already around 6 am, I decided to stay awake. I figured, the site might go live around 11 am or so. 11 am came but the Beta banner was still there. I figured that if I went to sleep the site might get live the next minute, so I decided to stay awake... trying to keep my eyes open. It finally went live around 5:30 pm and when it did.... oh boy, you would want to buy stock, you hit the buy button.... only to get the message there wern't that many shares available *grin*</Morgaine>
There was a posting on the forums saying when site goes live only 5 transactions per player in the first 12 hrs, there was another bit which most myself included overlooked (no 25% cap on those purchases). Anyhow the mad rush happens and most of the top 50 is owned within 20 minutes of the site going live. I still had about $200,000 and nowhere to put it, my 5 transactions used up... so Buy index funds. Within about 2 hrs of doing that Index funds had more than doubled (BS100). Fortunes were made.
I was still losing ground on the top players as they all had premium accounts. May 2 I made the decision to buy premium, and promptly tripled my worth in 12 hrs. It was about this time Seyed finally fixed the Sell > Buy, 0 mins bug. I wonder if had something to do with my doing that on Monkeyx.com hehe.
On the forums there is a interesting posting from Protect and Gamble... "Since where into giveaways... $114M giveaway." It turns out he sells the account for $100 real money to angrycoder, there was also a rather largish $15M acct sold on EBay! for $25.
There is a interesting forum posting mentioning a IRC Channel. I go have a look see, first few days are rather quiet Ronin, mouse, RoUS, Aine, Jonathan, and myself are about it. Jonathan & I go on a recruiting campaign via email, IM, blog comments and soon we have most of the top 10 ish richest players in the channel... cool. Even Seyed pops in once in a while to get our views on game ideas or just to shoot the breeze.
One weekend May 10, Seyed tweaks the Market order system, suddenly any sell or buy via a market order at any given price moves a stock to that price. blogshares.com stock is the subject of massive stock price swings. One minute it's trading at $.50 /share, someone buys some shares from a market order at $1 /share, now the price is $1.00 /share, market orders are placed for some pretty outrageous prices... the stock seems to follow along... Millions upon Millions is made by players seeing this... Monday comes, The first round of suspensions are handed out... penalties, huge fines are paid. The Market order system is changed back.
Now an interesting thing happens when a group of people start communicating ideas back and forth... stock manipulations previously unthinkable when your working by yourself become incredibly easy with 2-4 players. Suspensions also tend to happen :( The note on the news page regarding group play and ethics plays out on IRC in Johnathan, myself, Louis and Aine forming "The Cartel". Seyed listens to Michelle's Idea in IRC and sets in motion the forming of the BSEC, a board to govern ethics in playing the game. Another very good idea is acted upon and the formation of a test group to test new changes to the system is introduced.
Edmundas in the forums posts "There is no spoon", a look at how index funds are being manipulated and fortunes are being made, also a hint that bots may take over the market. Seyed takes action in removing index funds from the game but allowing all players to sell their funds at their discretion.
May 21 a major change is introduced to the game which Seyed hopes will suck up some of excess capital, a 100x share issuance on MT. The Max P/E limit is changed from 3.5 ish in buying/selling to the public to 250. This works quite well until most everything is bought... 55% shares in public hands May 21, %5 May 26. The bots have arrived as well, and billionaires are now in the game.
Now for those players that decided to wait a few days to sell their index funds the P/E change meant those funds were now worth about 80 times as much as they were a scant few days earlier. Now you want to hear an uproar... how about adjusting the indicies back to pre P/E 250 levels... This is just what happened to the dismay of more than a few players.
Louis buys a domain and sets up www.bscartel.com, Aine & Louis start writing of a 30's - 40's gangland style tongue in cheek look at blogshares. It soon has it's own following and players writing themselves into the story.
June rolls around and the BSEC is voted in Morgaine, Christine, Daphne, Jonathan, RoUS, and Frenetic Papa are the inagural board members. They have a few things on their palatte right of the bat besides figuring out how to communicate and stay in touch with each other. There is the appeal of Index funds, and figuring out just what is and isn't allowed in the game.
The end of june approaches... Ideas and Artefacts are placed on the test site (June 25th) the forums are a buzz again with ppl wanting to test them out, the test group grows significantly in numbers. The BSEC rules on Botting and Index funds, and player accounts.
July 1 possibly the biggest change to blogshares, designed again to suck up that ever increasing wealth. Ideas and Artefacts go live. A fundamental shift in the market occurs with artefacts as any blog can now be taken over with the shares being purchased at 3 times the market price. Now it is no longer possible to sit on any given blog (unless it's yours). This shift upsets alot of players as the top blogs can no longer be held for certain. The other half of the equation, Ideas generate massive fortunes for those that got in early and waited for the inevitable increase in price per idea.
July also sees the start of a new contest to run for 3 months with cash prizes being offered for top play during the month.
Oh my Chris has gone on Hiatus, Bearman is also MIA :( Blogshares is still going, though server slowdowns plague the system. I've reached $100 Billion in Blogdollars Net worth. (with a little help $37 B, from my friends). Jonathan asked Seyed if there was anything He & I could do to help out with the day to day running of Blogshares and lo and behold were both admins :) ask and ye shall recieve.
Found yet another Stock market type game to play... The Hollywood Stock Exchange. Tis pretty cool Apparently it's been around since 1998-9 though I've just found it... July 10. You start with $2 Million and invest in movies, and the actors/actresses/directors in them. I took a beating the first weekend. Lost !/4 of my wealth but there is a nice feature which lets you reset your account once per season. So I decided to take advantage of that. I'm up to almost $4M now. Oh and if you want to use me as a referer the username is: "Ashes". I could always use some extra holly dollars ;)
Yay, no more messing with <table>, <tr>, <td> tags etc. Cascading Style Sheets (css) rock my world :) Gracias to Owen Briggs, glish.com, brainjar.com, tantek.com, alistapart.com and of course www.w3.org for making it all make sense.
