Tuesday, May 20, 2008

The Value of Cool

If you have a game with an auction house where there are no stats on the clothes and shit you can put on your paper doll and everything had equal rarity (let's just say for the sake of argument), then the value of the clothes on the auction house would tell you how popular that piece of content was, 'cause its value would be determined by how cool it was.

Easier to think of if everything has to be done by bidding wars.

There's more to that, though, 'cause the highest price things will go to most vicious bidders on the auction house.

So if you measure "cool" like that, you might be accidentally weighting what's cool to the tastes of the most vicious bidders.

3 comments:

Sundry Chicken said...

vicious or victorious? don't look now, i'm calling clarence beaks... gonna buy low and then buy, buy, buy. gonna sell high and sell, sell, sell. until i got myself a rollercoaster, wave-set of cash based, cache transactions roiling the market like a tsunami. cause once they see me rolling they gonna know there's mad cash to be had and come a running offering more. then ya'll see me running away wit teh goodz leaving you wit da empty bag. man, my pockets of phat lewtz are totally like musical chairs where everybodies be sitting around da throne eh. oh wait, what is this a hedge fund?

Jeffool said...

I think a better measure of 'cool' might be how many people voted on it, and how hotly it was bidded on by a wider array of bidders.

Ole Bald Angus the Monk said...

Yah mebbe if the bidders couldn't see what the other folks were bidding or how many bids there were on an item that'd give you those kinds of numbers better, it'd cut more of the error like away from it.

'Cause there ARE folks that hate conflict and confrontatin so much that they'll even avoid bidding wars.

Jeesh that's a lot of set up and constraints (no stats, rarity control, all those bidding requirements) just to get a somewhat accurate (barring all the other things that might contribute to error in an imperfect world like the selection of OTHER stuff of a similar type available which might draw bids away) measurement of "cool" value out of it.

This is starting to remind me of that People Play Elves Because... thingie now that I'm sobering up heh.

There'd prolly be easier ways to get at your "wider array of bidders" number (which I think is probably the best number) in specific games where an item enters the world as loot just by seeing how many people it have it equipped or something.

But the idea of seeing an auction house where the items had no stats and all the votes were based on how things looked and their rarity and mebbe the external things people associate with 'em and all that is still kinda interesting to think about (that's how the real world works heh).