Shoes

"A story begins when something unexpected happens. Sometimes this is a mistake, but it can be other things."

I hate it when I can't fall asleep! 70th post in this weblog, not counting deleted posts.

It's hard to give imaginative titles when...

. . . you're not being exposed to new stories or anything interesting. 'LFD queues' sounds boring, 'dungeon queues' even worse, 'Waiting' is just vague and boring !

It's difficult to find average expectations for performance in a population, but given enough interactions it will be found. The problem is that when any kind of learning is needed within a group without any expectation of past or future social interactions, benefit depends on a prediction of the amount of effort to reach the goal but obtaining the information to accurately make that prediction takes its own effort, which may turn out to be a lost investment.

Someone may be presented with two possible cases: 'competence', or 'lack of competence'. In the second case due exactly to the factors leading to lack of competence, advice for improving mistakes may not be instantly accepted. At the same time, the system must be designed on the assumption that improvement will happen.

. . .

Meuh, fine, this entry is about WoW now—

It's important to separate players making honest mistakes from lack of experience from those who blame their mistakes on others and are unwilling to improve.

If the playerbase cannot assist those of the first category, Blizzard will nerf the game, making all of the current encounters much easier exactly like you imply you dislike. The second category is not important, but the only way for a group to distinguish between them is iteration; it can't be done instantly the way groups would like.

For accepting risk to become a popular decision, one of the possible results of taking greater risk must actually be seen as rewarding.

That which cannot be seen

When the system does not provide enough information to preserve justice, it's up to other individuals to ensure fair treatment. Few will admit this as a motive even to themselves when it would be more personally rewarding to let mistakes or ignorance slip by, but it is the basis of many actions.

edit: was trying to preserve an original thought, not restate something else encountered before ._. The loss of information obtained from the current situation (unable to be communicated within the current system in a useful way), and the effect of this potential information loss on decision making due to the uncertainty of future benefit and cost of remembering are the salient points of the thought. This is related to the manipulation of values, and priorities of action, when the source of those values is not known or understood.

Note that it isn't mentioned whose mistakes or ignorance, the definition of rewarding or whether that reward assumes a constancy in factors that might have other influences.

Zero tolerance

Hackers have a wide interest in many things. This is why I'm trying to make myself read an article about how to make it in prison published in the most famous hacker magazine, /sigh. It went like this, 1) mention security vulnerabilities in software 2) re-read articles about the commercialized fraud industry 3) browse blog discussing security issues including 'jihadist publications' (it's hard to criticize someone for not knowing a language when, well~) 4) skim articles for current magazine issue 5) profit!

Wait missing a step there.

"X is too expensive. Y is missing features. Z just doesn't interest me." At some point, one allows oneself less and less freedom to choose an acceptable option until combined with overlap of uncertainty of multiple factors the size of the range of options that one allows oneself to approve of becomes negative, but I don't remember why this is. Probably something to do with being simple, or some other communication-based concern.


(17 Jan 2011 11:09 pm) oh, I remember: "A feeling of control of the environment", or rather when the amount of control is the amount desired. Ultimately arising from feedback on perceptions of and abilities of the self, due to the lack of real information flow when actions neither affect, nor are affected by the 'outside world' and the mental model of the world's current state and direction of change, in other words disassociation from a perceived reality. Related to population trends after the second world war.

Special snowflake

If there are multiple options available, is one of them more attractive because it's your idea? Obviously in some aspects of life this isn't true, as people hire interior decorators so they don't have to think about which colours match, or whether a dragon could fit its tail between the couch and a wall. But in other cases, people seem to display a distinct preference for originating any changes to an arrangement instead of adopting them from an outside source.

The logic seems to be that there are a number of potential solutions towards a goal; however, there is no way to distinguish between them. The only way to find the most beneficial solution is by experimentation, meaning that the knowledge about effectiveness is an 'experience good' or 'credence good' in Wikipedia economics terminology. The benefit of a solution therefore has an important reflection on the source of that idea, as it provides the sole means of evaluating the likely correctness of future analysis in related topics.

It's possible there are things for which an analysis of value or correctness cannot be agreed upon, yet specific sources of opinion or creation have high correlation with economic success or popular appeal. This description would probably apply to many of the fine arts. Yet for the same reason, these things are criticized when something seen as having low value becomes popular due to marketing efforts or being promoted by certain economic products associated with an artistic work, due to the emphasis on convenience of purchase by consumers and lack of interest in comparing the quality of a complex product.


Of a game which is mentioned three times on the first page of search results for "$100 million failed MMO", the pages for job recruitment at the developing company are no longer available due to the failure of the company and archive.org doesn't have them either lol, but a discussion that linked to one of them quotes the following from the previous text on that page:

"If you’re looking for your first job in games, it’s worth thinking very carefully about your future employer. Do you want to work on jaded, derivative titles that receive scathing reviews and go straight to the bargain bin? Do you want to work large amounts of unpaid overtime because your project is underfunded and poorly managed? Do you want to work on codebases that are messy and poorly-designed because there’s never time to do things properly? Do you want to live in fear of your company’s financial security?

It’s sad that these and other games industry horror stories are more frequent than they should be, but it’s not like that here."

(quote continued from a different source)

. . . "And while making games is great fun, we take our work seriously. We pride ourselves on our unusually sensible, sustainable and professional development practices, resulting in smoothly-run projects and far less overtime than is normal for many game developers. We’re passionate about engineering and crafting our games to the highest of standards. We cultivate an open working environment where ideas are valued on their own merits, no matter whose they are."

While being 'original' seems to be one element of success, it should be questioned how much of this is due to the motivational aspect of doing something you like to do, without a real increase in quality compared to others with the same level of motivation.

A textbook for Japanese language lists the following as important for making hiring decisions, based on a survey of 501 companies :-

• Enthusiasm/desire - 86.7%
  
• Personality/cooperation - 57.3%
  
• Creativity - 40.7%
  
• Specialist knowledge/contents of research - 34.9%
  
• Individuality - 31.0%
  
• Amount of effort put forth during education - 16.7%
  
• Practical knowledge/existing ability for work - 11.3%
  
• Grades from education - 6.5%
  
• School graduated from - 5.0%
  
• Other - 2.8%
  

Enthusiasm, or perception of personal benefit from a field of work independent of salary is seen as being twice as important to hiring decisions as the propensity for expressing unique ideas.

Is there any point in quoting this? Lol. It doesn't seem efficient to say the same thing in multiple places. But then again, I'm

/lazy

For many people in NA, the approach to a problem such as the ganking that occurs in Aion is to modify just the situations of the particular individuals involved in a specific scenario - there is the casual player who has just been ganked; and there is the ganker. The 'solution' is one that changes the relationship between these two.

This pattern of asking questions ignores interactions outside the immediate - by penalizing the ganker, it is understood that their ability to PvP against players other than the casual player who was ganked will also be affected, and solutions attempt to minimize this effect while accepting it. In other words, the assumption is any modifications of the interaction of the ganker with other players, other than the casual player who was ganked, are due to changes to the situation of the ganker, and that these distant players will not, or even that they should not be directly affected by any 'solution' that resolves the options and emotions of the casual player who was ganked.

Casual player
　　　||
　　　||
　 Ganker - - - (irrelevant) - - - Another well-geared player
　　　|
　　　|
(irrelevant)
　　　|
　　　|

　Another well-geared player


This is why suggestions to fix PvP consistently omit that all players that PvP frequently should award more AP, and lose more AP than casual players who do not PvP. The 'option' of whether someone is interested in PvP can be expressed, and communicated to other players simply by avoiding participation in it.

Turtle and the rabbit

It's possible that it's often said that it helps a writer to diversify and have experience with many different types of stories. A mystery, then:

There is a mechanism which may result in the death of a cat without any possibility of prediction. However, the cat is not present at the moment. The only way to ascertain whether the cat is living is to examine traces in the environment where the cat has been.

Some of the traces, an incidental result of movement here or a scratched couch there, are not conclusive. The best analysis is unable to conclude they are of recent origin, but even in the case they are several weeks old they only prove the cat existed at the time, and an event to change that may or may not have occurred since then.

But there is also a different kind of evidence, marking unusual behavior for a cat. The question is whether this evidence, left by a cat that seems to be no longer visible, is more likely to have been done by a cat that is currently alive elsewhere, or a cat that is dead..?


Suppose that the motivation for an action is not to prevent someone else from hating something, but to prevent yourself from hating—it, or something else..?

Frozen trees

Warm light on white snow
Shadows open to the sky
The night does not end

The price of future contracts for commodities with low storage cost is remarkably flat and close to spot price. The possibility of buying the commodity now to sell as a future means that the contract price cannot be too high, but also means that spot price cannot be too low and the predictions of the most risky positions by specialists have already influenced the spot market.

However, for goods with significant storage costs especially this only provides a maximum for future contracts price, which not always be at the contango value predicted by the difference between the short-term cost of money and benefit of lending the commodity. When the cost of carry exceeds the investment benefit of the good, the optimal time to invest will be delayed until the inflection point with the rest of the market realizing the coming rise in price, resulting in decreasing purchase volume as prices rise until the market price stabilizes and begins to fall.

But the current popular gold futures exchange requires $5000 USD on margin for a 100 troy ounce contract (~$140k, yay) to even enter, which by itself would not provide nearly enough safety to cope with artificial fluctuations whether or not working the less competitive supply side of contracts is also possible so meh ._. without $20~30k or so not going to happen