New stuff:
* Trophy cases (in houses, for collections)
* A chick in every back yard (to kickstart herdkeeping)
* About ~100 bug fixes
* Player-to-player trading (secure, escrowed)
* New Market Hall in Groddle for trading
YAY!
Watching you play through and get all those achievements were driving me nuts.
Will there be queue-jumping? My girlfriend wants to kill me. She didn't get my text in time during the last jumping-event. :P
We oughta build a thing to allow existing testers to send invites. But until then, if there is someone you want to get in, you can email one of us. My email address is my first name + "." + my last name @ gmail
(But it is spelled Stewart Butterfield, not Stoot Barfield.)
Nice changes. The market hall is just a meet-up location? I was expecting a few vendors there too. Perhaps the odd one could wander in from time to time?
Is the vendor functionality just going to completely disappear then?
It seems like the market will be far more useful when there are more people - or more people know where it is. I had a really hard time finding it, only because there was no introduction to it as an idea. I had to scour the map and realize that Market St. was where the market was.
It wasn't difficult, just took a while.
Stoot meant "...who will need vendors [in the Market]??" Otherwise, that would make Rube the source for tools which would take forever to trade up and get.
The blog is not updated every day, but the forums are. I am a rational creature, but blog postings are unpredictable. They always appear AFTER my occasional check to see if there is a new blog post. I think they are actually avoiding me, but I don't take it personally.
"Once it is filled with other players trading, who will need vendors??" - stoot
i agree with this, in theory, partly, but i don't think that more players will automatically scale up to lead to a bustling marketplace. the nice thing about the vendors is that they have nothing better to do than serve your needs. as opposed to other players, who yeah, might need to buy or sell whatever, but are also not going to necessarily want to hang out admiring the (admittedly super cute) scenery for who knows how long before you come along.
i think we need something else to do in there, something we can do even if nobody else is around. a game (did somebody say flowtending?!) or some sort of productive/collective/whatever kinda activity, just something to hold our tiny-speck-like attention spans while waiting for the perfect bargain to come along.
I had the same thought, but it'll be the social center (like in many real societies) where you can hang out and stab people with marshmallow daggers (unlike real societies). The only problem would be where you have too many people there, the offered solution being the loss of mood and therefore energy which takes us back to 'why stand around in the market?'
katlazam: there will still be vendors (indeed, very soon, there will be a simple vendor on almost every street).
striatic: auctions will have more friction in the long run (listing fees and a delivery time to get the items or currants out).
Tingly: Markets will have queues when they get crowded and if the queue gets too long a new market instance will get spawn and everyone in the queue will be dropped in.
"auctions will have more friction in the long run (listing fees and a delivery time to get the items or currants out)."
be careful adding friction. there's already friction just deciding to do things, going through listings, setting prices. all this takes time and effort and understanding and skill.
adding friction atop friction could make people just not want to use the function. the auctions are already unpopular. i checked during the test tonight and *nothing* was up for auction. i know the answer to this is "critical mass" but things that have to wait for critical mass to become at all appealing can stall out before they ever achieve it, right? i'm not sure how adding friction helps the situation, and complexity for the sake of complexity doesn't make the game any more fun.
I was thinking with spawning, the market scene will be more random instead of planned, not a place where a big group of buddies would hang out.
Auctions are unpopular in the baby game cuz DIY is easy enough and vendors handle most things we want. When people get into the grindy achievements and they have 50,000 currants, a lot easier to bid 10 grand than spend days trying to get that last musicblock. It would just have to be worth it for the seller (set a min. price).