So what exactly is a "Game Brew Master" and how do I become one?
A "Game Brew Master" is a player who excels at making a wide variety of high quality beers and selling them. Registered players can earn points toward Game Brew Master status
and we will recognize the high scoring Game Brew Masters on the leaderboard page. For those of you who want to know exactly how your score is calculated the formula is included below. If you are not so much
into the math then all you really need to know is that selling beer always increases your score, making high or low quality beers can either increase or decrease your score, and managing multiple labels while selling
a lot of beer will make your score go up very fast.
So for example a brewer who has sold 120 beers and has two active labels and a current average label quality of 550 would have a Game Brew Master score of:
4 * (550/1000) * 120 = 264
Notes:
Active labels are not expired and at least 1 beer is available for sale
The current quality of your active labels is used and not the historic quality of labels sold in the past.
Beers sold is the value of all beers sold for all time for both active and inactive labels
Game Brew Master points are recalculated and tabulated once per day.
I'm digging the new addition of the GBM to the game. I was wondering, however, if there is a way to calculate it's scoring on, say, a 5-day moving average? The reason I ask is that I've watched with interest throughout it's young duration so far and seen my score (as I can't speak on others' scores) fluctuate from near 10k to 0 in a 24 hr period, and rank based solely upon when the server polls the players each day. I would think that the fact a player sells out of all of their batches would be considered a high-marking factor into the conceptual idea of a GBM as well, although I don't have the foggiest of how that could be implemented. It seems as though it may be a better representation of players' progressions in the game by taking a multi-day moving average to take out some of the extreme flux. ...just a ponder.
2) Robc on March, 20 2012 4:36 PM
It does jump around a lot. But let's revisit this topic when the player population has increased a little bit more and the game has matured a little more also. I'll tell you why.
Right now we have exactly the opposite problem that we had during testing. During testing the ratio of beer makers to beer drinkers was too high, so your beer sat in storage and didn't sell.
Right now, because of marketing, a whole lot of people are discovering the game, registering, and staying for a little while and then moving on if the game is not for them. They are drinking beer but not making any... so the ratio problem has flipped, too many buyers not enough makers.
The current situation makes it hard to keep labels in stock. Therefore the GBM score fluctuates wildly. Once we reach a stable player population I will stop marketing so hard to the masses and fewer people will bounce in and out again... beer sales will start to drop.
By that time I expect veterans like you to have substantially increased your beer making ability also, and the risk of too few buyers will become very real again. That is when I will have to try to balance things out by marketing just a little to keep a sustaining inflow of potential players, who also drink a lot of beer. Or, fingers crossed, the game population will have increased enough to where some players stay and buy beer for the social experience and thereby keep sales elevated.
As you can imagine the beer sales/creation ratio is a critical metric for the success of the game, it IS out of balance right now, but that is something I cannot help until the player pop increases a bit.
As for why I chose an equation that lets the score bounce a lot in the first place, obviously, I like the incentive that the score fluctuation puts on the player. That incentive is to buy a lot of labels, but it is not good enough to just buy them, you have to keep them stocked or you won't gain the advantage of the score multiplier. Empty shelves make you invisible to the consumer is my mantra here.
There is one more thing, ever started a game 'late' and felt like you had no chance of ever catching up? I have already heard players in this game saying they have no hope of ever catching the top players, and in a competitive environment no one wants to play when there is really no hope of getting to the top. If I let that situation stand then I might as well kiss this game goodbye because new players just won't join.
I really really want to give hard working new players who start late an incentive to play, and that incentive is improved when they see their position on the leaderboard bounces but always goes up because they play steadily. Existing players have to stay diligent to avoid being overtaken by aggressive newcomers.
Does this punish dedicated players who started early and can't put in as much time now? Yes, but only so long as beer sales exceed your beer making ability... and of course that is nothing more than an incentive to increase your beer making ability and to stay involved with the game.
Sorry for the long post, but I thought it might be helpful if I share my thought processes on these things. As I say Stan, lets look at this again when the game pop is stable and marketing is not influencing beer sales so much. If the problem still exists then we'll find a solution, perhaps along the lines of your suggestion.
Sounds fair enough to me. I can definitely appreciate the aspect of newer players being able to jump in and run up well, too. I'm hoping to see a large population of folks that get hooked and stick around for the long run.
So what exactly is a "Game Brew Master" and how do I become one?
A "Game Brew Master" is a player who excels at making a wide variety of high quality beers and selling them. Registered players can earn points toward Game Brew Master status and we will recognize the high scoring Game Brew Masters on the leaderboard page. For those of you who want to know exactly how your score is calculated the formula is included below. If you are not so much into the math then all you really need to know is that selling beer always increases your score, making high or low quality beers can either increase or decrease your score, and managing multiple labels while selling a lot of beer will make your score go up very fast.The formula for earning these points is:
(active labels)^2 * (average label quality/1000) * (beers sold)
So for example a brewer who has sold 120 beers and has two active labels and a current average label quality of 550 would have a Game Brew Master score of:4 * (550/1000) * 120 = 264
Notes:
Right now we have exactly the opposite problem that we had during testing. During testing the ratio of beer makers to beer drinkers was too high, so your beer sat in storage and didn't sell.
Right now, because of marketing, a whole lot of people are discovering the game, registering, and staying for a little while and then moving on if the game is not for them. They are drinking beer but not making any... so the ratio problem has flipped, too many buyers not enough makers.
The current situation makes it hard to keep labels in stock. Therefore the GBM score fluctuates wildly. Once we reach a stable player population I will stop marketing so hard to the masses and fewer people will bounce in and out again... beer sales will start to drop.
By that time I expect veterans like you to have substantially increased your beer making ability also, and the risk of too few buyers will become very real again. That is when I will have to try to balance things out by marketing just a little to keep a sustaining inflow of potential players, who also drink a lot of beer. Or, fingers crossed, the game population will have increased enough to where some players stay and buy beer for the social experience and thereby keep sales elevated.
As you can imagine the beer sales/creation ratio is a critical metric for the success of the game, it IS out of balance right now, but that is something I cannot help until the player pop increases a bit.
As for why I chose an equation that lets the score bounce a lot in the first place, obviously, I like the incentive that the score fluctuation puts on the player. That incentive is to buy a lot of labels, but it is not good enough to just buy them, you have to keep them stocked or you won't gain the advantage of the score multiplier. Empty shelves make you invisible to the consumer is my mantra here.
There is one more thing, ever started a game 'late' and felt like you had no chance of ever catching up? I have already heard players in this game saying they have no hope of ever catching the top players, and in a competitive environment no one wants to play when there is really no hope of getting to the top. If I let that situation stand then I might as well kiss this game goodbye because new players just won't join.
I really really want to give hard working new players who start late an incentive to play, and that incentive is improved when they see their position on the leaderboard bounces but always goes up because they play steadily. Existing players have to stay diligent to avoid being overtaken by aggressive newcomers.
Does this punish dedicated players who started early and can't put in as much time now? Yes, but only so long as beer sales exceed your beer making ability... and of course that is nothing more than an incentive to increase your beer making ability and to stay involved with the game.
Sorry for the long post, but I thought it might be helpful if I share my thought processes on these things. As I say Stan, lets look at this again when the game pop is stable and marketing is not influencing beer sales so much. If the problem still exists then we'll find a solution, perhaps along the lines of your suggestion.