Impulse buys are good. There'd be a lot fewer Instant New Days sold if people had to buy them beforehand in the Lodge.

(Not to mention Chronospheres... I'm sure I'm not the only one who has racked up an embarrassingly large number of those gorgeous purple-swirly glass spheres. Gets me every time: "Damn, out of days! Do I have to stop playing? No! For just $2.50 plus a mere handful of (mumble) dimes, I can be the Energizer Bunny and start all over again!")

So yeah. Add my voice to those saying "Aye!" to this. In-Place purchase of Place-related gadgets would totally work.

...I heard that Pinrut wants 18 squares of II. 72 dwellings. With 200-300 rooms each. That'd be 7200 cigarettes, at least. And over 216000 rooms.

If only that effort was supported by donations! XD.

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Yeah, there ain't no rest for the wiiicked...

Please note that the full proceeds of any donation given to Pinrut will be going towards hiring Stephen King to create enough page-filler to decorate those 216000 rooms.

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http://maniak.cu.cc/

Stephen King? Psh. Amateur. The only thing he should be hired for is to take part in the seance to contact Charles Dickens. That man could fill a page.

This. So much.

Hmm. All of a sudden, I'm seeing a dwelling called Great Expectations.

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Yeah, there ain't no rest for the wiiicked...

I have high hopes for it.

I honestly think cobblestones need to be used for more than just copying mementoes at the moment, and my idea is to use them in conjunction with supporter points as a new material for building and jobs in the same manner as mementoes. Say, 10 cobblestones and 1 supporter point can replace 1 wood or 1 stone if any player is having trouble (or just can't be arsed) getting those materials because for instance they have to lug them through a breached outpost when they teleport in.

Linking them to building in this way will make the cobblestones much more useful, and motivate perhaps even more players to donate their time to the World Community Grid as well as cough up a little more cash in exchange for DP used for building.

Many awesome ideas already...

Some use for the cobblestones would be much appreciated - whether as weapons, armor, building material, jewelry, edibles or having a literal rock concert. Temporarily allowing 1,000 cobblestones to = 1 cigarette or some such comparable exchange rate would also be awesome, even if there was an additional real world fee attached to activate this option.

In the meantime... Since Spiderkitty plush does not seem very likely at the moment... With your permission, would it be okay to attempt to design a Spiderkitty tee shirt? We could submit the design to threadless.com. They pay for designs if the designs get made. Deciding what gets made takes voting and anyone can join to vote. So if the design was good enough and had support here, it would help. If the design gets made, that would be a donation of two grand for this site. Plus two hundred if you didn't want a gift card for threadless.com. And a new shirt would be available for fans to advertise the site with. Does this sound reasonable?

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Arigato, Toriyama-san.

With the place building bundle, I see it as an extremely great value.

However, with the weightless wood and stone amounts being the same (1000 each), I have one slight problem:
Places typically use up more wood than stone.

Don't get me wrong, I'd still buy the bundle if there weren't more wood than stone, but it just seems somewhat counter-intuitive to have the same amount of wood and stone given out when stone is used less than wood.

Then again, the fact that most dwellings are close to a forest might balance that out, but with costs of wood being at least twice as much as the costs of stone (in jobs that require stone) this doesn't quite seem right.

Perhaps raising the amount of wood supplied would be a good idea.

Still... that is a lot of wood and stone.

Most people are simply going to have a lot of wood and a lot more stone left over.

For the truly ambitious who want a huge place in a remote non-forest location... well, once you run out of the starter wood in the bundle (which will take a good while), there are all those brews to help with logging. A good three-steak day and a brew can... well it depends on your skill level, but you can easily wind up with a couple thousand logs that way, and you have twenty brews.

As for getting your insane quantities of materials to the remote locations ... this is harder without first class passes (sorry!), but one way is to save up or buy enough cigs to install and fuel a teleporter beacon in your place. I imagine others will chime in to suggest cheaper methods.

There ar a decent number of beacon's out there.. if you just find one with a nice public one you can build around it rather easily. The titan's watches for instance I've noticed they have beacons to help titan hunters get to titans but as they are rather open they are quite useful to use to fuel and use for building near... if your of a mind.

Spiderkitty may be good place to start but wanted to add that this wonderful game of yours offers many other potential ideas for tee shirt designs. I, for one, would love a Friend of Hedgehogs or Crazy Audrey themed shirt to advertise this site with. Am sure that other players who have spent more time here would have all kinds of design suggestions. Maybe a shirt with the rock-paper-scissor mutant? Maybe some angry midgets? Maybe one of The Watcher or the Failboat? Only to be done with your permission, though.

It would be a donation of two grand for the site each time a design got made. Plus an additional donation each time the design got reprinted. And that may not be much, in the grand scheme of things but perhaps it could help - yes? Granted, threadless.com would take a share of the profit from any shirt design they made but they'd also handle production, advertising and distribution - so maybe this balances out? *shrugs*

And how about 5,000 cobbblestones = 1 cigarette, if a small fee is paid to activate this option?

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Arigato, Toriyama-san.

I can predict this right now:
If I get the bundle, I'm going to run out of wood really quickly.

No, seriously, the version of the place I have in the Places Testing server has already used more than 1000 wood. Heck, I think using over 5000 isn't an unreasonable estimate. And I will probably never finish the top floors on that server. The real thing won't be quite as big as Stonehenge, but it will be quite the feat.

Still, you've got a good point, Sessine.

Still, you have to admit. 1000 pieces of weightless wood is still a good deal with everything else.

Hell, I'm piss broke and I'm still trying to scrape up money to pay off my credit card to buy this thing.

The thing that's hard about balancing cobblestones is that you'll have more or less depending on how fast your computer is, which gives people with blazing-fast machines a pretty big advantage over others with slower ones.

It's why the amount of supporter points given out is the same for everyone, and not based on the amount of cobblestones accumulated in that period.

Cobblestones, if used for anything, would need to be for a community advantage.

Or something purely cosmetic, like the Mementos.

Here's another idea, and this one actually has a use. How about selling in the Hunter's Lodge:

A BIGGER COOKING PAN.

How about a pan that holds 50, or 100 bites of meat? Then those of us who can fight well over 200+ rounds per day, and don't mind defending ever-besieged outposts without food, could actually feed ourselves. 20 bites of French hen even 50 fights or so does not keep a warrior going.

And, game-world-wise --- it's really something that would happen. People would contrive themselves bigger cooking pans so as to be self-reliant.

(To FML: once your objection was voiced, I understood your query better. To which I reply: tattoos you proclaim yourself to have, aren't real.)

That sounds more like a special weapon. "Comically Large Frying Pan", you could call it. Attack bonus, defense bonus, and the ability to cook lotsa meat at once. Though I'm sure some savvy Island is going to tell you all about how it's better to just visit PV and grab some noodles.

(About the tattoos: I see what you did there. )

The game Dwarf Fortress is being programmed by 1 man with his brother for idea and business support. The developer subsists entirely on donations from the players who download and enjoy his pre-Alpha versions of the game, and if I remember correctly, brings in about $30-35k per year.

Recently, due to a very long period without a new version update (in order to completely restructure the internal code), he held an "Animal Donation Drive" for a month, where people voted with their donation dollars on which animals they wanted to see get implemented into the game as a wildlife creature. (This went beyond just making a whole bunch of creatures--each creature brings in another industry for the Dwarves to work with, like beekeeping, ivory-crafting, ink-sac-harvesting, etc.)



CMJ needs money to live and enjoy doing what he's doing, and I understand that. I'm always loathe to encourage any sort of donated in-game benefit that reduces challenge/complexity, because it breaks the integrity of a level playing field in a game by awarding advantages to the deepest pockets. I think a "Feature-Drive" might be a solution that helps incentivize players into giving their money--players love adding their own ideas to the game, after all. This, of course, is by no means an easy solution on CMJ's side because it shifts away attention from the current list of bugs to fix and features to add, but the 70+ animals are being added a few at a time in each standard bug-fix release. It's possible to balance "a little bit for the donation drive and a little bit that I intended to work on anyway".

Of course, animals were more limited in scope for that game than simply broad "features" on Improbable Island. If we can narrow it down to something that's acceptably reasonable yet still people are eager to donate for, that would be cool.





I reread this and I'm not sure I'm being clear, so let me use a hypothetical example:

CMJ says, "Hey guys, I'm gonna replace the Joker in-combat suit-based card drawing with more specific cards. I'm gonna need 50-60 card suggestions of a minor bonus or penalty (cig, 20 req, lose 5 health, deal half damage on this turn) accompanied by a single line of up to 70 characters of flavor text (roll the card into the cig, pull the coins from the monsters' ears, papercut, distracted by playing card turning into a dove)." The forum thread racks up about 150-180 suggestions. After a week, CMJ locks the thread and prunes any of the least-likely or unpalatable suggestions with excessive buffing, and then announces on the MOTD for people to donate with a message that tells CMJ which suggestions they want to see implemented as an effect, 1 dollar per vote. The top 50 or 60 suggestions that were donated for get implemented. Joker combat is forever a little more interesting, and many players delight to see their own permanent effect on the game. CMJ gets money. And no one walks away defeated, dejected, and deflated.



By the way, this forum moves WAY slower when I'm not around to stir up unnecessary debate.