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Archive
(May 2009)
Monday, May 11, 2009 |
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| Reminisce Time for some reminiscing, back to when i used to play Second Life, and back when casinos were allowed. ;) The story: I was introduced to the game by an online friend that I played Ragnarok Online with for the longest time. She was an artist, so she was asking me to check something she just made. She showed me a screenshot of Second Life, and some kind of a panther head she made in the game. At the time, I didn't know what the heck Second Life was, and I was completely baffled at how a game allowed the player to create something like that. So after a while of talking and asking a ton of questions, I decided to try it out. I started around October 2005. I was on and off for a few months, building things...mostly houses, learned a little of creating scripts in the game, etc etc...I discovered that that I was quite creative when it came to building/creating things, because everyone in the game seemed to salivate over the stuff I make. Took a few small jobs here and there, made some nice money. At this time I was quite well known around certain parts of the game, and i was somewhat familiar to how the game mechanics worked. Had my own little store selling the houses I created. Why make money? Well, unlike other online mmo's, the point to making money isn't just to buy better in game stuff that other people make. It is actually legal to sell the in game money. As a matter of fact, it is encouraged. The main site for the game had its own fluctuating economy and transaction system allowing you to sell your in game money to other players. It's kind of like stocks. You place a certain amount on the virtual market they have, for example, selling 100,000L for $1/120L. So you would make about $833.33 from selling that amount, and you can have it sent to you as a check, or to paypal, and so on. So yes, it's become a business pretty much. Another thing about the game is it's actually free. The only time you actually have to pay a monthly fee is when you own land. If you plan on starting a business to sell something, you either had to rent land off someone by paying them in game money, or buy your own virtual piece of land to build on. Or you can borrow a friend's piece of land, which was what I did most of the time. The only limitation is the amount of objects you can have on your land is limited by the size of your piece of land. For example, if you owned a 1024x1024 meter land, you could only have 1000 prims (individual shapes such as cubes, spheres, etc...) on it at a time, otherwise it won't let you create any more. This is the main motivation for people to buy more land...to allow more space for creativity. So after all that background, on with the story... So one day, i was just hanging out with a friend in game. We found next to our land a new neighbor laboring a way making some kind of simple slot machine. My friends and I were nice people, so we started to chat with this newfound neighbor. I ended up becoming good friends with him. I showed him a few goodies I made, and taught him some things. He told me he was going to start a state of the art casino business that works completely differently than other casinos in the game (Casinos were quite the money makers back then). I watched him slowly build his casino up over the period of about a month. I helped him test it. I understood his concept, he told me how his "state of the art" casino system used army security algorithms or something. At the time I was pretty impressed, but already I noticed he was just bragging and making up stuff, exaggerating everything like how one of my shift leaders at work does way too much, but I digress. Finally, his casino was completed, and I watched from the sidelines as his little tiny casino's popularity grew. After all, he was my friend, as well as my neighbor. That was probably the beauty of his casino system. It didn't require a lot of land. I complimented him on a job well done. More and more people started trickling in, and soon his casino was quite packed 24/7. This was around the beginning of December '05. One day soon after that, I was quite bored, and since I was interested in programming, I wanted to take a stab at trying to make what the guy had, with better designs (instead of just a cube that people click on, resembling nothing of a slot machine). I spent about a day designing, creating actual wheels for the slot machine, flashing lights when the player wins something, and stuff like that. I'm not going to go into detail about this casino system, but it wasn't just an ordinary slot machine. It involved different signals flying around the area to other slot machines nearby and casino equipment, etc etc...so a lot of security was involved to prevent outside players from tampering with those signals to cheat the system to make more money than they should. I finished what my neighbor accomplished in about 2 days. I had a fully working system that was equivalent to what he had, except a lot better. ;) I proudly showed him what I made, and offered to help him improve what he had, and was even going to offer him my code. I wasn't interested in starting up a casino at the time, and i made it clear to him that was my intention. I was purely just making these things for fun and to learn. To my surprise, his immediate reaction was of extreme distaste and I was immediately bombarded with accusations of trying to run him over. From then on I was treated with the cold shoulder, like a competitor. This sparked a fierce rage inside of me, and it turned into quite a drama between him and all my friends as well since we were all neighbors. We decided to pack all our stuff and move to an entire different area in the game. We purchased a huge piece of land together, a lot better than what we had before. From then on my new goal was to run the man out of business, out of revenge I guess, because I knew i was fully capable, and if he wanted to be such an ass, then I'll be an ass. I spent the next 4 days perfecting my system, creating more games more gadgets, much more complex than what he had. On my first day of testing, my friend easily hacked through my system, and I was kind of discouraged. But after a few hours of figuring out a solution, I found that one simple line of code fixed everything. From then on everything worked perfectly. I purchased a small piece of land in a populated area, and set up shop. During the next few days, I pretty much camped at my casino, waiting for business. After about a week, I had a slow but steady income. I fixed all little bugs people using my equipment found, and I provided the best service I could offer. When they started comparing me to large scaled casinos in other areas, I knew I was doing something right. Soon my very tiny casino (seriously it was really tiny, not big enough to even hold a medium sized house) became so popular, I had 40 people squeezed in at a time, churning out enough money to pay for land needed to make a full scale casino. However I just kept it simple. My only goal was to run the other guy out of business. After a week, I went back to the guy's place, and found that his system was broken through the same way mine was broken through when I first tested it. By that time he had about 5 locations around the game where he was running the casino, and he had to shut them all down. I happened to cross paths with him at one of his casinos, and he was surprisingly nice and actually talked to me. He told me how he was developing a new innovative and complex way of fixing the security flaw, and it involved connecting to web servers and using secure passwords and shit. As a nice gesture (which I regret), I told him the one simple line of code to fix the problem. He seemed to blow my idea off like it wouldn't work, and told me his way was more secure, and he should be finished in a few days. It was at that point I regretted telling him how to fix it, because sure enough after a few hours, his casino was up and running again. He made more games, and I followed by making more of my own. I also bought more small pieces of land elsewhere in the game and started expanding. My casinos sucked him dry of his customers, and I spoke personally to many of my customers and continued fixing various bugs. I added a mall in one of my casinos where I rented space out to people who wanted to sell their creations while people were in my casino. Basically every move my competitor made, I was one step ahead. Clearly he was starting to shell money out of his own pockets because his casinos were mostly empty yet he was still expanding, and he never updated his casino machines at all while I continually added new functions. He started a commission system where people could rent his casino machines to use, and he would take 25% of the profit. I came up with a multiple-tiered commission system where certain people only had to pay 10% commission, 25% commission, or none at all instead of being limited to one choice. He created a new type of pay chair (I don't really feel like explaining what a pay chair is, but it is the most important part about the casino system we have). His new chair was exactly like the old chair he had, except it looked slightly different. In return, I created different pay machines (pay pod, pay dance pad) with fully customizable colors and designs, topping his designs many many many times over. After about another month, I had a strong group of followers and casino owners using my commission system, most of whom came from my competitor's casinos, complaining about his poor attitude and services. I even had some casino owners who wanted to be mean and build right next to his casinos with my machines, but I told them not to, because that was way too dirty and mean. Eventually, he seemed to have given up. All his other casinos were closed, no one seemed to be using his commission system, his main casino location was barren. I, on the other hand, had quite a few people using my commission system, and even randomly traveling around the game, I would see my casino machines up. I closed all my other casino locations and just left one open because my mission was pretty much complete...I ran the guy out of business. My casino was shown for a bit in a BBC video report here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4583924.stm And was also reported on in a blog: http://www.vtoreality.com/2006/casinos-becoming-tougher-business-in-second-life/26/ Yes, I did churn up to about an equivalent of $1,200 in in game money within 1 month. I left my casino up for another half a month, to make sure the other guy was surly done. Then I shut the whole casino business down, leaving my commission system up in case other people still wanted to use it, and I continued to provide help to people who were still using my system. But by then my system was pretty solid, and there were no problems at all, so it pretty much ran itself automatically. That's pretty much my story. After a year or so Second Life banned all casino type businesses. I guess they were getting too many complaints from people about how the casinos were obstructing their view from their land, and too much noise. Kind of strange how it's pretty much true for real life casinos as well...degrades the value of the neighborhood. That's the beauty of my casino system. It didn't require huge billboards and building space to run, and was cheap as well. Although it can be huge if people wanted to. I'm just proud of what i accomplished in a month compared to what the other guy accomplished in 2 or 3. I did go back into the game 2 years after that just to see what he was up to. He was at it again with a new "innovative" idea, but I knew it was going to fail the minute I heard it. I don't remember what it was, but I just remember knowing it will fail. I guess he's persistent, and I guess I commend him for that, but there comes a point when it's kind of silly to chase an unreachable dream. |
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Thursday, May 07, 2009 |
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| Entertainment Tonight I hate Entertainment Tonight. My god how many times can they report on the same piece of news in how many ways?! When I see it on TV, it looks like a replay of the same news the night before, and the night before that...and the night before that. Are they running out of things to talk about? The overly enthusiastic hosts make me angry for some reason. Who watches this junk? And the show is filled with "Coming up...." 5 frikkin times before they actually talk about it for only 5 seconds. They need to make the show only run once or twice a week instead of everyday. |
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