That does make things simpler
BabeTrader changes
- Thread starter HotnessRater
- Start date
I don't remember how long ago. It's been quite a while. I think there is a thread about it from that time somewhere if you want to find it.
There was battling going on similar to what you see in the auctions, except it would never end so it had potential to get a lot higher
This picture was purchased for 510,000 : http://babetrader.com/picture/73061/vanessa-williams
This one 433,000: http://babetrader.com/picture/1946886/sydney-a-maler
This one 220,000: http://babetrader.com/picture/2258168/shanna-marie-mclaughlin
200,000: http://babetrader.com/picture/2424812/karen-mcdougal and http://babetrader.com/picture/2424729/karen-mcdougal
Those all happened in the beginning of 2018. I don't get the vanessa williams one but whatever
There was battling going on similar to what you see in the auctions, except it would never end so it had potential to get a lot higher
This picture was purchased for 510,000 : http://babetrader.com/picture/73061/vanessa-williams
This one 433,000: http://babetrader.com/picture/1946886/sydney-a-maler
This one 220,000: http://babetrader.com/picture/2258168/shanna-marie-mclaughlin
200,000: http://babetrader.com/picture/2424812/karen-mcdougal and http://babetrader.com/picture/2424729/karen-mcdougal
Those all happened in the beginning of 2018. I don't get the vanessa williams one but whatever
Morgan Lalique
Member
Huh. And I thought I was pretty crazy paying 3000 for this pic:
https://babesrater.com/picture/4601005/erika-eleniak
I mean, 3000 is 300 pics at 10 points each, and there are really good unbought pics out there, although it takes some methodical hunting to find them.
https://babesrater.com/picture/4601005/erika-eleniak
I mean, 3000 is 300 pics at 10 points each, and there are really good unbought pics out there, although it takes some methodical hunting to find them.
... I wasn't aware there was a problem with that that needed to be solved. I had never intended to just reduce by 10% until it came down. I was going to make bigger cuts to larger mark ups. But even if I didn't, the pictures would still come down to where they should be. It might take a couple weeks longer than if they were at 1 million but that's really no big deal.
You are spending time thinking about fixes to anticipated problems to algorithms that haven't been designed yet and suggesting fixes to problems that don't exist yet and might never exist.
If you apply the persons full markup allowance as early as possible, there isn't any excess to cut after that. Not sure what you are saying.
You're assuming that is the algorithm I would use.
I was thinking more along the line of looking at each picture and saving how much markup it had. Find out what 5% of that is and subtract that every day from all pictures until they hit their allowable markup.
So if a picture has 1,000,000 mark up, the next day it would have 950,000 then 900,000, then 850,000. All pictures would be within their allowable markup within 20 days
I might even do 10% and have markups done in 10 days
Well I haven't really decided on anything with that yet. There are all sorts of ways I could do it
Meh, thats like 3 lines of code. It's not a big deal at all.
That puts things in a complete deadlock for a week. I don't want to do that.
The average query that you ask me for to find out stats is way more work than this database mod would be.
I have no idea. I haven't given it any thought really. I do know just a cash on hand rating doesn't do it, and a cash paid rating doesn't do it. It has to be something outside of that. This is a complex question. I need to give it some thought when I have time.
Yes, early on I realized it would be important to have a full log of all sales.
Yes that is a factor that I could consider.
I might go in a completely different direction with this. This is just off the top of my head and I just thought about it now so this is in no way binding but I could just make a new score field that increases with different actions.
Your account could get more points based on something like this:
+2 points for viewing a picture
+1 point for having your picture viewed
+X points for completing some quests
+ who knows what for stuff that isn't necessarily related to the price of pictures bought and sold.
Make the ratings points a separate number based on picture performance and player performance instead of cash.
Again this is just off the top of my head. I would have to give this a lot of thought
These points would be separate from the currency points that are currently used. I should probably renamed these to Babes Dollars or something.
This way I can keep the Babes Dollars completely separate from the points on the leader board and have the leader board points only go up with different actions, and only go up an appropriate amount based on the actions taken
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Why would you care if I did that?
Just points for the sake of ranking players.
Pictures can get in the queue for a number of different reasons. I think I already listed off a bunch of them in a different thread.
I wouldn't say pictures with high page views were "sought out". It is usually either because we do an article on them or someone posts the link somewhere that has high traffic. Or they are doing well in our ratings so they have more visibility.
Like the Caylee Cowan pictures that had high page views. Nobody was coming to the site and seeking her out. They were Caylee Cowan fans on reddit that happened to get a link to her that got a lot of hits. Most of them weren't super highly rated (or great) pictures, they just benefited from Reddit having a ton of traffic.
And yeah, the queue code was written long before I started keeping track of views for Babetrader... so no, views aren't considered when building the queue. Am I'm not sure they should be really.
I didn't understand most of that
Yes and I aim for more votes. I just don't think it is necessary to put them all on the same matchup.
I don't believe that having 10 match ups that are decided by 10 votes each is better than having 100 matchups. What you are doing is decreasing the data points that are used in the calculation from 100 to 10 with the assumption that your matchups are better quality... which they would be, but having the 100 match ups overcomes that.
I have no idea... do we need to ask this in multiple threads?
We get new pics daily... whether they are quality or not, is up for debate.
The thing was Babetrader was supposed to be a game where you would fight over pics, steal them away from each other and battle over pictures. It wasn't supposed to be someplace to just buy your pictures and take them off the market. That takes all of the game out of the game... and it might as well not exist. If you just want a list of pictures and not play a game, then I guess it would make more sense to just upload those pictures and have them in your "My Pictures" section. I have put in a Like feature for girls on BabesRater. I could extend that same concept to pictures or just allow users to create lists of pictures that have nothing to do with BabeTrader.
I agree. Every time I read the forums, I need a beer too.
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Well there originally wasn't price setting because I did intend that part of the game to be trading back and forth and fighting for pics.
Yeah that's only about 10,000 times what it was originally. That system just wasn't going to work. People started buying bot traffic instead of just posting it on reddit and stuff. It did nothing to increase real traffic which was kind of the point of the cash out.
Yes, I'm sure you did.
Morgan Lalique
Member
Quite generous of him to give them to your site for free instead of selling them to commercial sites for real money.
Dawnbreaker
New Member
First I woud like to congratulate the admin on an excellent idea and the many hours of fun I had using their implementation of this idea. This had and has a lot of potential and I would like to see it reach that potential. So anything I say beyond this point should be seen in that light.
They asked for feedback so here it goes and despite my huge respect for how they put their idea in motion I will not be pulling any punches. It would be disrespectful not to give my honest opinion.
- We are talking about this like it is a full fledged game. The babetrader-environment has several characteristics of it but at the same time it also lacks a lot of things. For instance what is exactly the goal of this game....."gotta catch them all", "find and own the hottest babe", "win the auction", "top the leaderboard".....the fact that there are a multitude of options also leads to a lack of focus. Everybody (the 10 to 20 active players) is just doing something different and only sometimes it collides. Some people might enjoy this level of freedom within their "game" but most people get bored after a while because the have reached all their personal goals or they realise that their initial goals are unattainable and it just becomes a daily grind. The "game" itself does very little to keep things fresh.
Their are some achievements but they are limited and it is just rinse and repeat after that. Besides the "win me back"-achievement doesn't seem to work for me.
To be honest to speak of an actual game it simply needs more features.
- The interface needs a multitude of "Quality of Life"-improvements. For instance the search and categorize function for your own pictures are basically non-existent. Now if I had a couple of hundred pictures that will be a nuisance but when you are talking about thousands it becomes more than annoying and simply a waste of time.
- It doesn't look like someone took the time to build a smart "game" economy. An imperative key to building an enticing game economy is balance. That means the admins must ensure the users earnings are somewhat in balance with their spending (often called the sink). This "game" doesn't have a sink apart for the investments in pictures. In other words the in-game currency over time just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and got totally out of control. The result is that there is no balance to speak of. For this "game" to be more appealing to newcomers it needs some in-game currency sinks. A good example would be upkeep. Each owned picture at a specific time should cost the owner a weekly or monthly fee. I know this is not going to be a popular opinion but ideally the upkeep should go up the more pictures you have or the longer you have a certain picture. For instance any picture should cost 1 the first month you own it, 2 the next, 4 in the third, 8 in the fourth, 16 during the 5th and so on. The upkeep will pretty soon outweigh the income and it becomes a burden to own it. It should therefore be sold back to the market (for a fraction of the initial investment) or to another individual thereby resetting the upkeep cost.
Without a proper sink you see what you are currently seeing the oldtimers own the most valuable pictures and keep earning more and more thereby cornering the market and scaring away most newcomers. It also means that any investment is a good investment even a picture that is hardly viewed at all will eventually earn back its initial investment making the auction basically a win-win situation. Either someone outbids you and you get your in-game currency back + compensation or you get a picture that earns you in-game currency over time......no loss whatsoever. The fact that Morgan has 582 bids outstanding some far from reasonable is a perfect example of it. You can't blame him for abusing this system but the way it currently works is not a smart solution if you want to have a fair auction. Outbidding someone else should directly or indirectly have a cost to it. This way the auction (but basically the entire economy as it is merely an example) is broken and is begging to be abused like it is by Morgan. (HINT: at least limit the amount of bids by an account to a maximum. The way it is now is simply ridiculous).
- Morgan has addressed this issue as well. Everything I've said about the "game"economy becomes null and void if the admins do not actively prevent and punish multi-accounts. I also have enough working brain cells to know that several accounts in the top (the same ones Morgan mentioned) are either the same user or at least working together. Admin said there is no proof to support that theory but the fact that the #4, 5, 6 and 9, 10 in the leaderboard (the ones not being Rcrus, Duderino, Acornet and Rich Garces) are within 32 pictures of each other AND are within 110.000 BTP of each other AND them using the same selling price for a lot of their pictures (10.000, 20.000, 30.000 and 80.000) without them somehow being correlated is statistically highly implausible. I am not just talking winning the lottery odds here.....I am talking winning the lottery back to back 97 times odds here. This is even disregarding that Ygroup has slightly less pictures and slightly more BTP but also using the same selling prices making it the account that needs to be "fixed". The fact that 6 accounts are this close and admin brushed the concerns of Morgan aside means that they either are in on whatever is going on there or they just don't care. Either way if they continue to tolerate that kind of in your face multi-accounting there is no way you are ever going to create a fair trade "game". If no one for instance is wondering what the deal is with this "The Mogul" account who has been bidding on hundreds of pictures but somehow owns zero than you might as well just hack the data and give yourself and the 20 accounts you can use to outbid yourself in the auction over and over again 999999999999999999999 BTP. If you allow multi-accounts there is no game......there is just a time sink.
- As a feature and in-game currency sink you could also let users build a mansion (like Hugh) with rooms (to expand the number of pictures one is allowed to own) or open different advantages or possibilities within the "game". Chaoticpanda mentioned something like that. I like it and it offers way to increase content.
- There have been talks about changes for a long period but hardly anything has been changed in that time. Letting people determine their own price was a mistake.....a mistake that should have been fixed ASAP. Instead more than a year after that change and 2 months after a second announcement that things are going to get sorted out we are still talking about "possible changes eventually". I understand that the whole point behind this "game" is to encourage traffic to several websites but to get this "game" beyond a clever idea and to give a vague sense of accomplishment for about 10-20 guys while they are looking at pictures of hot girls and women it needs an actual plan to change things. Especially the multi-accounts thing is simply a deal-breaker for me. In its current state it simply has too many problems, has too little appeal and most importantly has too many alternatives for me to spend more time on it than I already have.
Hope this feedback is somehow useful and I'll check back in about 6 months to see if something has been done with it.
Best of luck and thanks for the good times.
They asked for feedback so here it goes and despite my huge respect for how they put their idea in motion I will not be pulling any punches. It would be disrespectful not to give my honest opinion.
- We are talking about this like it is a full fledged game. The babetrader-environment has several characteristics of it but at the same time it also lacks a lot of things. For instance what is exactly the goal of this game....."gotta catch them all", "find and own the hottest babe", "win the auction", "top the leaderboard".....the fact that there are a multitude of options also leads to a lack of focus. Everybody (the 10 to 20 active players) is just doing something different and only sometimes it collides. Some people might enjoy this level of freedom within their "game" but most people get bored after a while because the have reached all their personal goals or they realise that their initial goals are unattainable and it just becomes a daily grind. The "game" itself does very little to keep things fresh.
Their are some achievements but they are limited and it is just rinse and repeat after that. Besides the "win me back"-achievement doesn't seem to work for me.
To be honest to speak of an actual game it simply needs more features.
- The interface needs a multitude of "Quality of Life"-improvements. For instance the search and categorize function for your own pictures are basically non-existent. Now if I had a couple of hundred pictures that will be a nuisance but when you are talking about thousands it becomes more than annoying and simply a waste of time.
- It doesn't look like someone took the time to build a smart "game" economy. An imperative key to building an enticing game economy is balance. That means the admins must ensure the users earnings are somewhat in balance with their spending (often called the sink). This "game" doesn't have a sink apart for the investments in pictures. In other words the in-game currency over time just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and got totally out of control. The result is that there is no balance to speak of. For this "game" to be more appealing to newcomers it needs some in-game currency sinks. A good example would be upkeep. Each owned picture at a specific time should cost the owner a weekly or monthly fee. I know this is not going to be a popular opinion but ideally the upkeep should go up the more pictures you have or the longer you have a certain picture. For instance any picture should cost 1 the first month you own it, 2 the next, 4 in the third, 8 in the fourth, 16 during the 5th and so on. The upkeep will pretty soon outweigh the income and it becomes a burden to own it. It should therefore be sold back to the market (for a fraction of the initial investment) or to another individual thereby resetting the upkeep cost.
Without a proper sink you see what you are currently seeing the oldtimers own the most valuable pictures and keep earning more and more thereby cornering the market and scaring away most newcomers. It also means that any investment is a good investment even a picture that is hardly viewed at all will eventually earn back its initial investment making the auction basically a win-win situation. Either someone outbids you and you get your in-game currency back + compensation or you get a picture that earns you in-game currency over time......no loss whatsoever. The fact that Morgan has 582 bids outstanding some far from reasonable is a perfect example of it. You can't blame him for abusing this system but the way it currently works is not a smart solution if you want to have a fair auction. Outbidding someone else should directly or indirectly have a cost to it. This way the auction (but basically the entire economy as it is merely an example) is broken and is begging to be abused like it is by Morgan. (HINT: at least limit the amount of bids by an account to a maximum. The way it is now is simply ridiculous).
- Morgan has addressed this issue as well. Everything I've said about the "game"economy becomes null and void if the admins do not actively prevent and punish multi-accounts. I also have enough working brain cells to know that several accounts in the top (the same ones Morgan mentioned) are either the same user or at least working together. Admin said there is no proof to support that theory but the fact that the #4, 5, 6 and 9, 10 in the leaderboard (the ones not being Rcrus, Duderino, Acornet and Rich Garces) are within 32 pictures of each other AND are within 110.000 BTP of each other AND them using the same selling price for a lot of their pictures (10.000, 20.000, 30.000 and 80.000) without them somehow being correlated is statistically highly implausible. I am not just talking winning the lottery odds here.....I am talking winning the lottery back to back 97 times odds here. This is even disregarding that Ygroup has slightly less pictures and slightly more BTP but also using the same selling prices making it the account that needs to be "fixed". The fact that 6 accounts are this close and admin brushed the concerns of Morgan aside means that they either are in on whatever is going on there or they just don't care. Either way if they continue to tolerate that kind of in your face multi-accounting there is no way you are ever going to create a fair trade "game". If no one for instance is wondering what the deal is with this "The Mogul" account who has been bidding on hundreds of pictures but somehow owns zero than you might as well just hack the data and give yourself and the 20 accounts you can use to outbid yourself in the auction over and over again 999999999999999999999 BTP. If you allow multi-accounts there is no game......there is just a time sink.
- As a feature and in-game currency sink you could also let users build a mansion (like Hugh) with rooms (to expand the number of pictures one is allowed to own) or open different advantages or possibilities within the "game". Chaoticpanda mentioned something like that. I like it and it offers way to increase content.
- There have been talks about changes for a long period but hardly anything has been changed in that time. Letting people determine their own price was a mistake.....a mistake that should have been fixed ASAP. Instead more than a year after that change and 2 months after a second announcement that things are going to get sorted out we are still talking about "possible changes eventually". I understand that the whole point behind this "game" is to encourage traffic to several websites but to get this "game" beyond a clever idea and to give a vague sense of accomplishment for about 10-20 guys while they are looking at pictures of hot girls and women it needs an actual plan to change things. Especially the multi-accounts thing is simply a deal-breaker for me. In its current state it simply has too many problems, has too little appeal and most importantly has too many alternatives for me to spend more time on it than I already have.
Hope this feedback is somehow useful and I'll check back in about 6 months to see if something has been done with it.
Best of luck and thanks for the good times.
Morgan Lalique
Member
Thanks for the well-reasoned input. I for one am glad you spoke up.
I emailed the admin about an additional account before I created The Mogul and received his permission. If he ever objects I'll drop it of course. I wanted to show him some pf the possibilities of multiple accounts. Of course, I'm locking up pics I want, and hopefully I'll make some points in the end, right now I'm actually down about 50,000 in points I paid out (yes, that includes adding the two accounts together). I was up to almost 250,000 before I started, but the pics I'll get over the next 40 days will be some compensation. It's a looong time to wait, though, auctions should run much quicker.
I like a lot of your ideas, I have proposed many of them myself. As much as I wrote on boards, I wrote more via email.
The admin told me he is working on pagination, so that google can search the long lists on the site, but that was weeks ago. I haven't heard any news of progress, all I got for the work and thought I put in was to be blown off on the silly rating problems. So, I stopped posting, and decided to take it all less seriously until he makes some changes.
I have some ideas about getting pics out of the top accounts. The only way a player can do it is to buy them. So, I was thinking about just creating a bunch of accounts for the quest points, and then spreading the points around so I don't affect the standings much. All accounts would gain points, but getting the income pics out of the inactive accounts would stop them from growing any further.
I like the idea of an upkeep cost, I proposed that somewhere along the line.
The BIG flaw in auctions is when you bid on a pic, the money stays in the game, it goes to the previous bidder, letting them make a profit by bidding you up. Instead, you should be able to enter your max bid, and the system compares them and raises the price the same way ebay works. The money would go out of the game. Or, two friends can bid up pictures for each other. Or one person can do it with two accounts, obviously.
I don't know about the progressive upkeep thing, though. People should be able to keep some pics that are not for sale. I suggested galleries, which would be public web pages. You could choose from a set of themes, like tumblr, and display a fixed number of pics, which presumably would get you more hits. You could buy more slots for pics you want to keep with points, and buy more gallery pages.
As for my in game goals, it is buy 100,000 pics. I figure just random hits will be more than the lead accounts are getting, so I will catch them in time. Plus at some point in the next couple months I was planning to start social media accounts on tumblr, reddit, and pinterest, to try to get more hits on my pics.
In the meantime, on auctions, generally I bid until I get to a price I would sell for, and after that stay out of it. Once you make a good bid on a pic I won't bid you up. It really I stopped other people from making money by running me up. But I get most of my pics (about 95%) from searching babe lists.
If there are particular pics I have that you like, make me an offer on boards, and we'll talk. You're actually one of my more liked players, you didn't exploit the problems I was having using an ipad, where I could only set prices on the 60 pics at the top of my list. Other players raided me. That prompted the change to set prices on the individual pic screen, btw, that was another of my suggestions, one that actually got implemented.
I emailed the admin about an additional account before I created The Mogul and received his permission. If he ever objects I'll drop it of course. I wanted to show him some pf the possibilities of multiple accounts. Of course, I'm locking up pics I want, and hopefully I'll make some points in the end, right now I'm actually down about 50,000 in points I paid out (yes, that includes adding the two accounts together). I was up to almost 250,000 before I started, but the pics I'll get over the next 40 days will be some compensation. It's a looong time to wait, though, auctions should run much quicker.
I like a lot of your ideas, I have proposed many of them myself. As much as I wrote on boards, I wrote more via email.
The admin told me he is working on pagination, so that google can search the long lists on the site, but that was weeks ago. I haven't heard any news of progress, all I got for the work and thought I put in was to be blown off on the silly rating problems. So, I stopped posting, and decided to take it all less seriously until he makes some changes.
I have some ideas about getting pics out of the top accounts. The only way a player can do it is to buy them. So, I was thinking about just creating a bunch of accounts for the quest points, and then spreading the points around so I don't affect the standings much. All accounts would gain points, but getting the income pics out of the inactive accounts would stop them from growing any further.
I like the idea of an upkeep cost, I proposed that somewhere along the line.
The BIG flaw in auctions is when you bid on a pic, the money stays in the game, it goes to the previous bidder, letting them make a profit by bidding you up. Instead, you should be able to enter your max bid, and the system compares them and raises the price the same way ebay works. The money would go out of the game. Or, two friends can bid up pictures for each other. Or one person can do it with two accounts, obviously.
I don't know about the progressive upkeep thing, though. People should be able to keep some pics that are not for sale. I suggested galleries, which would be public web pages. You could choose from a set of themes, like tumblr, and display a fixed number of pics, which presumably would get you more hits. You could buy more slots for pics you want to keep with points, and buy more gallery pages.
As for my in game goals, it is buy 100,000 pics. I figure just random hits will be more than the lead accounts are getting, so I will catch them in time. Plus at some point in the next couple months I was planning to start social media accounts on tumblr, reddit, and pinterest, to try to get more hits on my pics.
In the meantime, on auctions, generally I bid until I get to a price I would sell for, and after that stay out of it. Once you make a good bid on a pic I won't bid you up. It really I stopped other people from making money by running me up. But I get most of my pics (about 95%) from searching babe lists.
If there are particular pics I have that you like, make me an offer on boards, and we'll talk. You're actually one of my more liked players, you didn't exploit the problems I was having using an ipad, where I could only set prices on the 60 pics at the top of my list. Other players raided me. That prompted the change to set prices on the individual pic screen, btw, that was another of my suggestions, one that actually got implemented.
Morgan Lalique
Member
Oh, The game knows your IP address, I suggested the game just give you an error message that you can't buy a pic from yourself. But, that still leaves players in college computer labs.
Another idea I had was a sales tax on auctions equal to 10% of the amount bid, so making each id cost you money that goes out of the game. That would do a lot to prevent abuse.
Another idea I had was a sales tax on auctions equal to 10% of the amount bid, so making each id cost you money that goes out of the game. That would do a lot to prevent abuse.