ByteCoin

[Wind in the Willows]

I would love for it to stay slightly longer, but not incorporate it as a permanent part of the game.

[Merconitonitopia]

OH GOD PLEASE NO.

[Port blood]

No,we don't wanne be Twitter with Ellen Degeneres

[Totally Not Leningrad Union]

No,we don't wanne be Twitter with Ellen Degeneres

Explain?

[Darwinish Brentsylvania]

Guys, the server won't be a problem if it's year round. Why? Because people were always in a rush to get the most byte coins in those two days. With it made a year round thing, then people will know they have all the time they want, so they don't constantly stay online.

[Port blood]

No,we don't wanne be Twitter with Ellen Degeneres

Explain?

She crashed twitter;something even google going down couldn't do;with a single photo

Guys, the server won't be a problem if it's year round. Why? Because people were always in a rush to get the most byte coins in those two days. With it made a year round thing, then people will know they have all the time they want, so they don't constantly stay online.

The server peaked at 100x traffic at certain parts of the site,you really think the servers won't cry out year around? the sheer amount of extra pageloads is extreme
Normally pageloads are lesser then a average due to the lengthy pages like the forums and issues,but bytecoins are a load of pageloads,including a buttload of calculations behind the scenes


Sidequestion btw:does NS adjust ads for those longer pageloads? normally ads are aimed at load and move on,but NS is load and keep displaying for a long time

[Republic of Coldwater]

Yes, I want it back, it was fun actually, and if users don't want to use it, then they didn't have to.

[Republic of Coldwater]

#bringbytecoinback

[Totally Not Leningrad Union]

#bringbytecoinback

No.

[Port blood]

#bringbytecoinback

No.

No.
(who uses hashtags on other things?)

Yes, I want it back, it was fun actually, and if users don't want to use it, then they didn't have to.

Meanwhile in reality,other users are being affected by extra serverload

[Wintermoot]

Personally I'd rather see more regular Zombie Apocalypse events than a return of ByteCoin. Just as someone that leads a region and has observed reactions within that region to both events, the ZA was almost universally liked, especially with the improvements made for Halloween, while the ByteCoin event didn't garner much excitement. People mentioned that the event required too much time to participate in successfully and was a little on the convoluted side. Most people in our region just weren't interested, and I didn't have that problem with the ZA event. I guess for me currency isn't really my thing, so I didn't find it as fun...I wonder if that was the issue for others too?

I personally liked the idea mentioned a few pages back of having it on another website. It seems something like this would be doable on another site, and it would be there for those that wanted it.

[Unibot III]

I actually had more fun with ByteCoin than the Zombie Apocalypse because I could do more as an individual.

[Britonisea]

Do you want to keep ByteCoin? I do.

NO. It was confusing and also, It was an April fools 'joke'.

[Atorea]

Yes.

[Berdanvia]

Yes.

[Aurora Confederacy]

nice idea, HOWEVER given the experience of the last couple of days with Bytecoin, and so NS running slower than a slow thing in slowtown, and booting me out more times than a soccer ball gets kicked in a soccer match, I must say NO to the idea.

[Britonisea]

nice idea, HOWEVER given the experience of the last couple of days with Bytecoin, and so NS running slower than a slow thing in slowtown, and booting me out more times than a soccer ball gets kicked in a soccer match, I must say NO to the idea.

It is true! Many things was shutting down and it was a pain.

[Magna Libero]

Absolutely not. It slowed down the site. While it was interesting, it was also very boring, due to lack of realism and exponentially growing incomes.

I mean the nation with the top exchange had I don't know how many 1000*trillions after one day. How would you write that up during the next upcoming years? 1*1000,000,000,000^1000,000 ??

I'd rather play with a real stock market or a simulator that is actually realistic. E: Also, as Max said it is extremely difficult to code a realistic exchange market.

[Totally Not Leningrad Union]

Absolutely not. It slowed down the site. While it was interesting, it was also very boring, due to lack of realism and exponentially growing incomes.

I mean the nation with the top exchange had I don't know how many 1000*trillions after one day. How would you write that up during the next upcoming years? 1*1000,000,000,000^1000,000 ??

I'd rather play with a real stock market or a simulator that is actually realistic.

*nudges* I'm working on one.

[Holy Trek]

ByteCoin definitely wouldn't generate that kind of lag if we kept it as a permanent feature. The feature itself generates some additional load, but not that much; the lag comes from the fact that a lot more people than usual are being a lot more active on the site than usual, since it's a one-off event that doesn't last very long.

This happens every novelty day, to varying degrees. Last Halloween the site went down completely for a while. This one offered a lot of opportunities for interaction (i.e. you could do a lot of different stuff: mine, transfer, trade, donate) so players were exceptionally busy.

The Ten Year Challenge game is still around if you know where to look.

The reason we don't keep novelty days is the features aren't designed for long-term play. In particular, they're usually unbalanced, so that certain players start with a significant advantage over others (e.g. by controlling many large nations), or develop an entrenched advantage, or they rely on players not knowing things in advance (e.g. that you can get IPO shares from puppet populations). They could theoretically be balanced, but that takes time and discussion and testing.

So rather than leave a novelty day feature hanging around, not really working all that well, we make it a one-off special.

In terms of keeping ByteCoin, or using it as the foundation for a vaguely similar economic-type game, I think that's possible, with fairly significant changes. The mechanism of having to use another nation as a bank, and having to trust that bank not to steal it (or cease to exist) is a good one, I think. And it would be fun to try to manipulate the market, if there actually was a real one, rather than a random algorithm.

Sounds like a wonderful suggestion. And to alleviate the *ahem* FEARS *cough cough* of those who spent several pages decrying the ByteCoin idea, have an opt-in/opt-out option put in. If they don't wanna deal with the fuss they seemed to have suffered from a one-day event (and I can't believe you guys complained about that, either), then they can opt out. Truthfully, I'd rather have the ByteCoin than the Halloween Zombie outbreak, as it's being overdone (zombies were never really that frightening anyway, just as vampires have gone from being modestly scary to looking like 'Glam-pires' thanks to Twilight)

[Applebania]

What manner of necromancy is this?

[Brechalht]

Perhaps the Bytecoin market does not have to be attached to Nation States. I have been working independently on creating a program similar to bytecoin but with fake stock tickers. My plan was to attach this to an off-site forum or website and link to it from the regional factbook. Perhaps Max Barry could open-source the code, and allow players to host their own markets off-site? Anyway, this is what I have produced after a few hours of work. I do not know javascript however, so this program is not operable yet.

<script="text/javascript" >
/*<![CDATA[*/

Timer timer = new Timer ( );
TimerTask hourlyTask = new
TimerTask ( ) {
@Override
public void run ( ) {
//var randomnumber =
Math.floor(Math.random( ) * (13 - 7 + 1)) + 7;
}
};

timer.schedule (hourlyTask, 01, 1000*60*60);
/*]]>*/
</script>

In theory, the program should have a non-uniform random number generator run once an hour, updating a fake stock ticker. Any thoughts? Anyone else get farther? Could the ByteCoin code be open sourced?

[Shadow Afforess]

I started work on a ByteCoin clone back in May but stopped when I got busy w/final exams and moving, and never went back because I can't tell how many people would actually use it. I would say it's about 25% done.

[Brechalht]

I started work on a ByteCoin clone back in May but stopped when I got busy w/final exams and moving, and never went back because I can't tell how many people would actually use it. I would say it's about 25% done.

Well, it would be amazing if we could actually finish a program. Several regions such as Texas have "stock markets" but it is composed of one person writing what they think stock prices are. I already have programs that can do that for me, but I wanted something that would automatically change prices, ect. Think of all the regions that would benefit!

[Elke and Elba]

Ending 7th place before I slept and dropping to around 14th place and my puppet in 23rd place, I'd actually beg you guys not to do it because of the immense amount of time spent watching the market.

However, I have a question for both coders - given Max actually hardcoded the entire two days to make it drop/rise without regard of the end-user's action - will your codes be similar to that or substantially different in that user actions will trigger off a reaction?