I PK UR NUMBERS

Rob — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 04:22:22 +0000

Raph Koster had an interesting post up today with a few random statistics and numbers he’s found browsing things over the last while. After taking issue with one of the numbers he posted from Time Magazine (damn you, Time), I decided that it might be neat to toss up a few random numbers of my own that I found interesting. Math is occasionally fun.

Average Pieces of Eight earned per hour of Puzzle Pirates voyaging: ~1,000*
Exchange rate in Pieces of Eight for Doubloons on our newest Ocean, Malachite, as of 8:12 PM, June 26th: 832
Average hourly ‘wage’ of a Puzzle Pirates player: USD$0.30
Minimum hourly wage, San Francisco, CA: USD$9.36
Amount of time required to earn the equivalent of one hour of San Francisco minimum wage playing Puzzle Pirates: 31.2 hours
California Lottery Mega Millions jackpot for 6/27/2008: $34,000,000
Number of new Mounted Tigershark items winning the Mega Millions jackpot could get you: 2,045,728**

Percentage of all players’ total playtime spent as Pyro class in Team Fortress 2 since Pyro Pack update on 6/19/2008: 26.4%
Percentage of all players’ total playtime spent as extraordinarily flammable Spy class in Team Fortress 2 since Pyro Pack update on 6/19/2008: 5.2%***

Total number of downloadable Rock Band songs available as of June 24th: 152
Total cost to download all available Rock Band songs as of June 24th onto your Xbox 360: $268.50****

More sources and explanation after the break.

* — Your average pillage can mow through 4 battles an hour, making 100-500 Pieces of Eight per pirate per win. Four battles at 300 PoE minus a 15% restocking cut is equal to 1,020 PoE, or ~1,000 PoE for an average hour of ‘work’.

** — Best current price found on Viridian Ocean for a Mounted Tigershark at 8:33 PM, June 26th was 68,462. Combined with the Doubloon delivery fee of 25 and the exchange rate of 1,178 Pieces of Eight per Doubloon, we get 83.12 Doubloons per shark. Why 83.12? So we can multiply it out by the bulk discount Doubloon cost: USD$0.20. This gets us our answer: $16.62 per shark!

*** — Source

**** — Complete breakdown is 1 free song, 7 $1 songs, 55 $2 songs, 15 $5.50 packs, 2 $10 long packs, 2 $15 albums and 1 $19 album.

GDC 2008: Day 0

Rob — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:37:31 +0000

This year, I am once again attending the GDC as a Conference Associate, so today was spent doing various preparatory tasks at the Moscone Center. Well, to be fair, the bulk of the day was taken up by one particularly draining task: tote bag stuffing. Frankly, I’m sure the conference totes are one of those things most people take for granted; that said, the group of CAs working on them only just barely finished assembling them before Midnight, and I am just now home and contemplating sleep.

So, please, I beg you: if you’re attending the GDC this week, for the love of God, at least sort through and *look* at the contents of your tote before dumping it out in a corner somewhere and grabbing your conference schedule. A lot of love and tears went into making the damn things, and there’s actually a few neat/useful things in there this year.

No socks this time, though. Damnit.

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I PK UR NUMBERS

GDC 2008: Day 0