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[ndkid]

I was just pondering turning my Google spreadsheet into a google form that I could then make available for people. I'll see what I can wrangle.

The real value here, I think, would be the ability for a retailer to look at two products on B2B, at different prices and qualities, and be able to evaluate which is the more profitable deal for them in the current conditions.

[Sowelu]

Starting to sound less like a spreadsheet and more like a full program.

Click-drag ctrl-c ctrl-v, and for each quality, it shows you the entire supply chain leading onwards from that point, along with your costs and profit per factory second.  So with these low-quality apples and your big beverage factory, you could produce a lot of low-unit-profit apple juice very fast, but with these high-quality apples and your smaller bakery, you could produce fewer high-unit-profit apple pie, with better ROI.

Hmm.

[ndkid]

I probably mentioned way above in this thread someplace my temptation to write a screen-scraping program for EoS. Once I had that, client apps that use it would be a cinch. An API provided by Scott would be easier, of course, but, at the point that everyone is just using bots to play the game, is there a point? (Answer: yes, the point is to see who can write the best bot.)

[Sowelu]

(Answer: yes, the point is to see who can write the best bot.)

I love the way you think.

I'm going to write an email and see if writing a browser plugin for this would be legit.  Copy-pasting raw text clearly is okay.  Automating clicking on every damn thing in your store, I dunno.  I'd propose some kind of limit on how often it could be run, though.  :V

[forsaken1111]

(Answer: yes, the point is to see who can write the best bot.)

I'm getting the feeling this game has no point at all.

In fact I'm done with it. Again.

[ndkid]

As a short-term stop-gab, I have a spreadsheet that people can't edit, but I believe you should still be able to copy-paste it in your own spreadsheets to use as necessary. I'll likely be continuing to fiddle with it to work out what I find useful.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlR6V1WHPZRkdE9VNmhfcE1RbUlHMHN5WjJReWN2Smc

[ndkid]

(Answer: yes, the point is to see who can write the best bot.)

I'm getting the feeling this game has no point at all.

Well, sure. Which ones do? And, if the measure of whether a game has a point is whether good play can be done by computer, then very, very few do!

[Sowelu]

I once wrote a bot to play MUDs for me, including exploring, testing out strategies against monsters, building up an optimal powerleveling route, identifying gear and choosing what to get when.

Never got finished, but it was a hell of a lot of fun to work on.  More fun than actually playing (and I like MUDs.)

[Mr. Palau]

Wait if the best way to earn money is 2*cost, then why is the average global sales price for Strawberry Bannana Smoothie 33$, when it costs 5$ to make it? Wouldn't the most poriftable be 10$?

[Carcanken]

ARA stock hasnt been doing too well anymore, sudden burst, now its slowly going back down.

[MrWiggles]

Its two time cost adjust by Q value.

[mainiac]

The password reset feature is bugged.  I keep resetting my password and it never works after the first time.

[debvon]

Seems to be working for me. I just reset it twice and the new passwords all worked.

[Paul]

I don't get how some of the companies are still being traded. Do people not even look at the companies when they buy shares of them?

Take JTM for instance. It has somehow managed to keep a decent share price, 40 cents a share - an overall stock value of about 221 million with 107.6 million of that in the hands of players. And people keep buying more of it. Yet if you look at the balance sheet, the company is 209 million in the red with absolutely no assets due to blatant abuse of the system. The CEO paid himself all the company's money (including the money from the loan, apparently - probably close to a billion all total, and probably starting as soon as the company went public) in salary and has since abandoned the company.

In reality the company would be declaring bankruptcy and the CEO and board of directors would be facing prison time. In this game? People go "Ooh, cheap stock! buy buy buy!" and it keeps their value at over 200 million even though the actual company value is negative 200 million and falling daily.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qileP4bAzek

[ndkid]

Wait if the best way to earn money is 2*cost, then why is the average global sales price for Strawberry Bannana Smoothie 33$, when it costs 5$ to make it? Wouldn't the most poriftable be 10$?

Good question. This relates to the postulates I made going in: specifically, this assumes infinite supply, such as with the import market. When you have products without infinite supply (and, specifically, when you have someone attempting to sell a product they manufacture themselves), you will often not be able to maintain the manufacturing necessary to saturate the demand maximum.
Second, note that my analysis was from the perspective of the *retailer*. It may cost the manufacturer $5 to make that Strawberry Banana Smoothie, but if he sells his excess on B2B for, say, $200, whoever buys that smoothie to send it to retail will make the most money-per-tick from it by setting its price at $400. Contrary to what was suggested above, this is *independent* of quality, or any other factor... it is completely a function of the cost of the product to the retailer.

This is rather counter-intuitive, I know, and this is one of the less realistic aspects of the game engine. Scott currently has the price curve programmed identically for every product; at best, different products get different multipliers, but they still all have the same quantity = x/price^2 model, and that's the root fact that leads to the MAX(profit) = 2 * cost math.

I'd be happy to show some examples if you don't believe it, but what I'd recommend you try is a simple 2-tick test. Take a product from the import market, set the price at whatever you think should be right, see what your profit (not revenue, but profit: price - cost times units sold) is, and then try again with the 2 * cost, and see how it works out. (Note that because the game just carries over remainders, you probably need a product with a decent throughput to do a good test... trying it with low-volume products like refrigerators will need a really long time to compare.)