September 2012 Archives

Although I play a lot of TF2 I tend not to trade much so it was as a surprise to learn of the TF2 raffle. Just like real world raffles people enter by buying tickets for a chance to win a major prize.

As an example this raffle offers a 1 in 150 chance of winning a Max's Severed Head, a TF2 hat which is worth roughly 50x the ticket price. In dollar terms the ticket price is around US$0.50, and the hat worth ~US$25. In any case a 66% margin is pretty tidy!

From a former World of Warcraft player I learned that a common gambling game in WoW is the roll game where one player acts as the house, the player gives her $x and using the in-game /roll function to generate a random number from 1-100 the pay back is something like 1-66 = loss, 67-97 = 2x wager, 98+ = 3x wager.

What's interesting about using in-game currencies is that in some cases the link to real world value is not obvious. Not all games provide a direct conversion mechanism between real world dollars and in-game currency so players may perhaps gamble without the mental association with real financial gains/losses.

I also wonder what other real world gambling games have been ported to virtual worlds. How long before we see a Swoopo implemented with in-game currency?

What other gambling mechanisms have people seen in virtual worlds?

Going further - what other seedier real world activities have been or are to be ported to virtual worlds?

There's a virtual crap tonne of research suggesting that virtual currencies is an emerging money laundering threat but I'd be interested to know of real instances of it occurring.

Interesting announcements from Foxtel and Australian free-to-air broadcasters that they will begin broadcasting US originated shows soon after their US broadcast in an effort to fight piracy.

One wonders why they did not do this sooner. Has it taken this long for piracy to become a sufficiently mainstream practice that it's only now a serious concern?

I'd guess one reason for holding up fast-tracking is the problem it creates by fragmenting audiences. If the broadcaster's business model is built around selling advertising for prime time audiences you have unavoidable time zone issues. For example with US Thursday night being Australian Friday morning, to fight piracy does an Aussie broadcaster broadcast the same episode that Friday night? Or wait til the following Sunday or Monday evening when audiences are likely to be larger?

Every time I think about TV piracy I end up with the same conclusion - IPTV. In an IPTV world you could have content originators from anywhere in the world and without the limitations of a fixed broadcast schedule content can be conveniently viewed by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Ads could be targeted specifically to the viewer, not based on some generalisation about a show being popular with a particular demographic. Or the episodes could be viewed sans advertising for a small fee!

As with all transitions the hard question is how do we get from here to there?

I wonder if, unfortunately, the Australian broadcasters' efforts may be too late. Otherwise law abiding citizens have already learned how to pirate TV. Now that they know how to do it, and that it's ad-free, why would they go back to watching FTA or [paying for] Foxtel?

I'd actually argue that it's in the interests of viewers to continue pirating as it will -- by reducing traditional broadcast audiences -- accelerate the transition towards IPTV which will ultimately lead to a wider array of content being legally available.

Would Hulu exist if BitTorrent hadn't been invented?

Yesterday I started collecting data for all TF2 servers in the Australian region as returned by the Steam master servers. This includes NZ but misses some Aussie servers which don't have a region setting (I might look for these based on latency and contact the server owners later).

There's lots of questions I have about the Aus TF2 player & server base but by happy coincidence Valve released an update around 7am this morning (Sydney time, AKA Australian EST) so here's a simple graph of total players & servers starting at 2am and ending at 2pm (7 Sept 2012).

The total number of servers hovers around the 470 mark. Within 5 hours we're back to over 400 servers and during a time when most operators are probably at school & work. No doubt auto-update scripts and server rental companies help here.

And at 2am in the morning each player could have their own server, forever alone! :)

Random factoid: the player base last night (Thursday) peaked at ~2,800 around 7:30-8pm.

Raw data here.