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Last Updated: 19:06 20 Aug 2006
B$ Help: Ideas
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(1.1) - Ideas (This Page)
(1.11) - Ideas Market
The Ideas Market is undergoing radical change as the new math is being implemented. This section of the Help will be updated as things stabilize. In the meantime, check the forums and #blogshares (tutorial here) for the latest details and for answers to any questions.
In particular, these three threads include pertinent information:
*** Ideas Math Update ***
*** New Ideas Math: High Priced Ideas ***
*** Updated User Ideas View w/ New Math Data!! ***
What are Ideas
Think of the various BlogShares Industries as much like industries in the real world, only here, the blogs are the companies. This would make the ideas their products and services. These products and services are sold on the Idea Market. There are currently over 4900 industries, and nearly all of them produce ideas.
Ideas can only be produced from blogs that have been voted into Industries. A reindexed blog will produce ideas only in the top 5 industries in which it resides. So, a blog categorized as English and Male will produce ideas in those industries. If a blog is in more than 5 industries, only the top 5 will be produced with each Production run.
Why buy Ideas
Most players begin to dabble in Ideas after amassing a reasonable cushion of free cash. Profit in buying and selling shares diminishes after a few weeks (or days) of active trading in comparison to a player's net worth. Free cash levels rise, and players look to other outlets to invest. Ideas offer just such an investment. Players can buy up what they perceive to be good risk Industries and grow wealth through price appreciation, or they may attempt to try a hand at turning faster profits by quickly reselling ideas in the Bond Market. Buyer and seller: beware. Great fortunes can be lost selling underpriced bonds or buying overpriced bonds.
Ideas are also used to build Artefacts, which are game tools useful in growing networth. Some players attempt to own ideas in every industry. These people are termed collectors. Check the Idea Collectors Rank to see where the competition stands.
Idea Pricing
Idea prices are recalculated during each production run (see next section), which are approximately 3-4 times per hour, 60-100 times per day. During each calculation, Idea prices are basically affected by 3 actions, all of them involving the Ideas Market (only actions since the last production run are considered).
Selling / Production of an Industry's Ideas: Generally, if a player sells ideas in an industry, the price will decline or slow appreciation until the next production run.
Buying an Industry's Ideas: Generally, buying Ideas from the market will slow/stop depreciation rate or increase appreciation rate.
Available Ideas: If ideas sit on the Ideas Market, there will be downward pressure on the prices. If no ideas stay on the Ideas Market, there is upward pressure on prices.
One other pressure on Idea pricing is the number of blogs in an industry. Industries with 50 or more blogs in the industry have a lower growth rate than those under 50, all other conditions being equal.
Bonds, Players Market, and Raids have no effect on Idea pricing. However, players seeding in advance of a Raid will put downward pressure on prices since it is a sell.
Of course, the actual math behind price changes is more complex than that, and takes into account multiple (and often opposing) actions over each 15-20 minute span between production runs.
Production
Production runs every 15 minutes with a random variable thrown in to truly confuse even the most hardcore gamer. Throughout the day, all day, spiders parse through blogs to make sure they are valid and check for updates and errors, etc... This happens at an average of about 300K blogs per day. As spiders complete parsing a blog the system appends a specific number of ideas to that particular blog for it's production. The amount of ideas produced from a single blog is based off of several factors including the valuation of shares and the number of incoming links. When the production takes place, these ideas enter the market, a process called a 'drop'.
Generally you will see anywhere from 10 - 200 Different industries produce ideas. There really is no limit to how many industries produce ideas in one drop, other than the total number of industries, as the producing industries are determined by the blogs indexed. There are also times where you will go 30 - 45 minutes without seeing a drop - this is because on occasion there are silent drops where nothing is produced at all. This is an anomaly that many players feel adds to the game.
Besides the chronological indexing of blogs producing ideas, Premium Members may also re-index blogs at their will. Any blog can be re-indexed once in a 24 hours period. Re-indexing forces this blog into the Priority Queue which has a separate spider constantly parsing through those blogs (and at a much slower rate). This is how many members achieve a large amount of rare ideas - they force the ideas to drop. One thing to note is a blog will only produce ideas if it has been updated since the last time it was indexed.
One additional thing to note on Idea Production is that drops are 'tiered', meaning that ideas get spit out at the beginning of the production. For every single industry there is a variable (picked at random) that forces the idea to wait either one second, or zero, before dropping. This happens every single time an idea has a chance to drop. So, if a drop is supposed to give 117 industries each one will randomly have a one second delay or zero second delay appended to them. The very following second any ideas that didn't get dropped the first time will try to drop again and will go through the same process. This will occur until every industry has successfully dropped. It can actually take 30 - 45 seconds or longer for an entire production run to come to a halt.
Where to Find Ideas
There are actually a couple of places you can find ideas, the Ideas Market and the Bond Market. The Idea Market is where ideas fall freely during production and the Bond Market (see below) is where players bond out their ideas at fair (and sometimes extortionate) prices for others to buy.
You can also use the Ideas Totals tool and the Players Market Ideas Offer and Players Market Ideas Bid tools. The Players Market is still very new. No documentation is yet available for it.
Idea Rarity
There are several factors that decide the rarity of an idea:
1) Number of blogs in the industry: Though this isn't a major deciding factor it is a big one. Typically, industries with more than 20 blogs are common (possible semi-rare), 10 - 20 blogs are generally semi-rare, 5 - 10 are rare, and 1 - 5 are ultra rare. Idea pricing will consider whether an Industry has less than 50 blogs, which offers greater upward price pressure than Industries with 50 or more.
2) The number of incoming links: That is a larger player for idea production than the number of blogs. 5 blogs with 300 incoming links between them are going to produce a lot more ideas than 20 blogs with 100. Incoming links determine the supposed popularity of a blog and therefor play a high role in its value, in turn effecting idea production. Only the top 5 Industries on a blog (determined by vote totals) will be produced.
3) Though not exactly a factor in deciding if an industry is rare, Idea price is a fair way to determine the rarity of an industry. Industries that have low values (Female, Teen Life, and Personal for example) just are not popular sellers. This is generally because so many ideas are produced in these industries that they sit on the Idea Market for long periods of time. It is hard to keep up with ideas that fall every single drop, as opposed to ones that are lucky to fall once a day.
The exceptions to this rule are industries that just began producing ideas. Brand new industries start of with idea values under B$100 and take quite some time to build up their worth. Some of them will grow to be rare, others will be rather common. It is a good idea to snatch some of these up anyway when you see them. Anything new is always clamored for.
4) One of the most important factors in determining Idea rarity is the number of players actually holding Ideas in that industry as well as the number of Ideas they hold. Hands down, an Industry with 400 people holding ideas is far less rare than one in which only ten people hold ideas. Collectors want Ideas in every Industry.
Bond Market
This brings us now to the second place on site where you can find ideas available, the Bond Market. This is one huge area to find all assortments of ideas you may never have an opportunity to see on the open Ideas Market. When you first load up the page it will default to only showing you the bonds created within the last 48 hours and it will sort them by the lowest profit margin first. It does this because for the site to list all bond available at all times would take an immense amount of bandwidth.
You can find all the information on bonds in the bond section of the help system.
Artefacts
Ideas are consumed to build Artefacts which can be used for functions such as raiding blogs (and acquire up to 500 ideas in the artefact's industry for free), taking control of a blog's shares, or hyping the market price of the shares. In order to create an artefact in an industry you must have 10K ideas in that industry. The ideas are lost upon artefact creation, and, since the artefact has no value affecting your net worth, the value of the ideas is consumed, causing your net worth to take a hit.
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