Retiring this blog: essays.ajs.com taking over

Essays.ajs.com is now taking over where this blog left off. My original intent was to use this blog to update you on what I was doing on other gaming-related blogs, but that's now a moot point as all of the other blogs have been consolidated into the new essays site. Please drop by and give it a read.

Essays blog moved

My other blog is Aaron's Essays, and today it moved from my own server (using MovableType) to Blogger, but you can still use the same URL as before. Stop by and say hi!

Thin people gaming on video

Project Lore is Alex Albrecht's new World of Warcraft site. Albrecht is well known for his work on Screen Savers, diggnation, and The Totally Rad Show. I just watched a couple of the videos, and it certainly needs some polish, but it's pretty darned good. The only thing that bothers me is that... they're so thin. Now a thin gamer doesn't surprise me, but four of them in the same room?! Isn't that a violation of some law of nature?

The one important thing that this might inspire me to do is build out my basement for gaming get-togethers... it's long overdue.

Google and the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

I've seen many Google search result statistics articles around the Web, but I couldn't find one about the Presidential race. This is one of my favorite games, so I decided to give it a shot, and created Google the Vote (a play on MTV's "Rock the Vote") with questions ranging from issues of trust to likability. Each question is formed by adding the candidate's name into a simple phrase. For example, "Barack Obama as President" or "I can trust John McCain" (note that those aren't really the phrases used, as I don't want my blog to have an impact.

We then search for those phrases as exact matches on Google and take Google's estimated number of results. Only in one case do we get no results. I've found a number of things using this approach:

• Obama's results relating to trust have been declining
• McCain's basic Presidential search has been suffering a losing and widening gap with Barack Obama
• Neither candidate appears to be expected to balance the budget, though Obama simply has no results at all on this search!
• Both candidates may "feel the love" of their supporters, but Obama's supporters are quite a bit more vocal about it

I hope you enjoy this. I know I've enjoyed putting it together.

Gaming the phone: GOOG-411

You may know that by dialing "1-800-GOOG-411" you can access a voice-based Google search for businesses by city and state. Well, I just tried it out a few times, and found some amusing results. First, I tried "comic book shop" and was pleasently surprised that it recognized the phrase and found lots of matches. Then I tried something more generic, "thin crust pizza." It responded back with just "pizza" so I figured I was going to get a uselessly broad list, but it gave the name of the best known thin-crust Pizza in Cambridge, MA (Emma's).

I figured it was good, but I was going to really test it. What's a good test for such a system? What about a problem rather than a category? I tried "arachniphobia" and got a pause with some kind of odd sound, followed by "try again." Well, now I was on to something, so I tried simplifying: "phobias." Now I heard that sound again and it was a person saying "boop-de-bop" over and over very quietly. Of course, many voice-based services have a fake "the computer is working" noise, but I was amused to hear an actual human doing a sort of scat on this theme. Bravo for injecting a little humor, Google!

All things considered, GOOG-411 is a very solid service as far as I can tell. I'll have to try it in more rural areas next, but certainly for my next White Wolf game, I'll have to use this to decide where to order from!

Saturnalia: 3-Manning World of Warcraft

Saturnalia is a guild that some friends of mine and I started, and almost entirely by accident we started 3-manning lots of the old-world instances. Turns out it's quite hard to do, but fun in ways that most of the stuff I've been doing in World of Warcraft for the last few years just isn't. We've done all of the old-world (Azeroth) instances from RFC to BRD and now we're working on the level 60 instances and will then move on to Outland. We should hit level 70 just in time for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, and we'll just keep 3-manning everything we can in that expansion.

Some things we've discovered about the game:

• A paladin as tank can make a lot of content much easier
• Shamans are wonderful at healing and dpsing in whatever ratio is required
• In general the hybrid classes are more valuable for undersized groups
• Twinking with outrageous gear is definitely not required
• Voice chat is a must if you're not in the same room

It's been a fun ride, and I hope it continues to be. See you in the game!

Item pricing rolls on...

My World of Warcraft item pricing database, which I've discussed previously, continues to grow in terms of features, visitors and data. One important new feature, and the most widely requested one, was a histogram that accompanies every graph. This histogram shows how many data points went into generating a given day's data and gives you a good sense of how reliable a price might be. This is especially important when looking at prices that are for a specific realm and faction, where the data might be very thin.

I've also added packaged reports on the most and least volatile items. Volatility is a metric used in the financial world to measure the standard deviation of a set of prices relative to their mean. This tells you how "stable" or "volatile" a price is at any given time in a way that can be compared across multiple stocks, bonds, currencies or (in my case) WoW items. If you look at the most volatile report right now, you'll find that it's dominated by items which have no inherent value and are priced arbitrarily by those putting them up to see if they can get some cash for them. On the other hand, stable items tend to be those which are crafted as the seller knows how much it cost to make the item and most sellers will want to make some profit on their items.

For the future, I'll be working on a conversion to a template library for the source code. This will make it easier to make other changes down the line. I'm also going to be adding new reports that look at how much items are changing in price over time and which items prices have gone up or down the most recently (probably on a week-over-week basis).