Massively^™

WARNING - MATH AHEAD!

A few weeks ago, a reader e-mailed me with questions about some Auctioneer data that they have been collecting. Though the question was regarding trying to determine inflation patterns on their server, it got me to thinking about what Auctioneer actually captures. And what other data points would be most helpful in making evaluations of item pricing or looking into economic trending.

While I'm not about to go through all of Auctioneer's algorithm rules, I would recommend that anyone who uses this mod check them out on Norganna's Wiki. They explain where the recommended prices come from. Basically, it's a comparison of the historical data accumulated from all of your auction house scans and the most recent snapshot data. The market value ends up being either the median of historical or recent data, flavored with the user-set preferences for markup or markdown.

Seems like we missed this intriguing little bit of info, but just in case you did, too, City of Heroes devs have announced that shortly after the release of issue 12, they're planning to start selling extra character slots for an extra fee.

It's not exactly a new idea -- Guild Wars will sell character slots for a whopping $10 per, up to a limit of 26 beyond the four offered with each purchased edition of the game. City of Heroes doesn't mention a price yet, obviously (or a date when the slots will be on sale), but that seems high, so we'd expect it to be lower than that.

For a certain number of players, the ability to have extra characters is probably very valuable, while for others, it's not something they'd pay even cheaply for. In that way, it's actually a good idea for games that might need a little extra help staying afloat -- it's one more source of revenue directly from fans extremely interested in keeping the game alive.

[Via KTR]

As a final humiliation to what might be, according to the reviews, the worst MMO of the year, WarCry reports that EB Games is now selling Fury for only $29.99. Yes, for only $30, you too can play the game that reviewers said "fails on literally every front."

Poor Fury. They tried so hard, and failed so, so badly. The devs over there are still holding on as hard as they can-- they promise that things will get better and that things will get fixed soon. But when retailers drop your game's price by $20 in the first month of release, the writing is on the wall. Better luck next time, Auran.