ALifePets.info Blog

On Showcattle.com I have spent most of the month in the top 25 now, so perhaps it isn't hubris if I say I've learned some important points about how to climb up that ranch ranking board and finally publish these guidelines.

How to climb up the Ranch Rankings - first, think carefully about whether this is how you want to play the game. You can enjoy an artificial life game a lot just managing your virtual animals, and with more than a thousand active ranches on Showcattle.com, you may not want to stress over trying to break onto that board of the top 100 overall. You can easily play "against the bank" and concentrate on making your ranch profitable, or concentrate on the ranch rankings for a specific breed.

But if you want to see your name in the top 100, here are some tips:

Enter shows every day. Even if you can only afford to show one cow, take it to as many shows as you can. On Showcattle it is easy to enter shows in advance, and nothing will make your ranking drop faster than missing a few days of shows!

Show competitive breeds. The more cattle you beat in a show, the more points your animal brings home! A Breed Champion win for a Balancer bull earned 25 points on 10/30; a Breed Champion win for an Angus bull earned 105 points because he'd beaten more animals. That's a big difference that adds up quickly.

The top 15 breeds on the site can be seen on the front page:
http://www.showcattle.com/SimSteer/

Consider, however, that you need to show good stock, and that it is easier to acquire good cows in breeds with less competition. You will always take home 5 points for each entry, but quantity alone will not get you on the ranch rankings. If none of your cattle place, then even if you have the virtual money to enter the maximum number of cows in each and every show, those 5 points will not add up fast enough to get you in the top 100. (An example - on today, December 20th, if you had entered 40 poor cattle in shows a day, you would have 40 cows X 5 points X 20 days = 4,000 points - and ranch #100 has 5,294.)

You will have to find the breeds that are right for you - ones in which you can build a respectable herd and still face the amount of competition that you want. It will take time to build a good herd, especially in the competitive breeds.

Show as many cattle as you can afford to. Show both steers and breeding stock.
Although I have just stressed the importance of quality over quantity, if you have good cows (at my ranch this means bringing in 10 points or more a show) and the money to pay their entry fees, don't leave them in the pasture!

Don't underestimate the power of steers. :) Don't be afraid to castrate any of your bull calves who aren't better than the bulls currently available in the breed --- you can buy another bull or semen to breed your cows, but once a calf is two weeks old, you cannot castrate him. Steers are only half of an "animal unit" throughout their lives, and they are the only animals who can win money in shows.

Use your ranch rankings and your show results to analyze your weaknesses. For example, I'm currently ranked #24 overall, #23 in Overall Bulls, and #18 in Overall Females. I am not ranked in steers. This tells me that steers are my weak point, and that I should be looking for oportunities to buy or breed better ones. I also look at my show results to identify cows who are not placing in shows and remove them from my show string.

And if you are ready to charge in and win fame and glory, save your resources for the beginning of a month. The ranch rankings are completely reset on the first day of every month!

But don't take my word for it - at any time, you can "spy" on the top-ranked ranches by clicking on their names, then on "Recent Show Results" to see exactly what each player is showing and how it is placing.

Coming soon in the Showcattle series... Evaluating cattle and Breeding strategy; then I'll edit it all together into a single document. :)

Not to brag or anything, but as of Dec 3rd, my Showcattle ranch is...

#21 - Overall Females

#25 - Overall

#27 - Overall Bulls

Out of 1,692 active ranches! :)

Latest news on Showcattle.com:

11/5/2004 - Bulls will begin breeing females in pastures at midnight tonight. On average, bulls will be able to breed one female per day.

Now, if you're like many Showcattle users (me included), you have lots of bulls mixed in with every pasture because you've gotten used to this not being there for the past six months. Scoot over there and rearrange things!

It's a crazy morning for alife, and to add insult to injury, Blogger was even down for part of the morning!

Showdog.com's database is down; presumably the database never came back from its daily reboot (at 6am). It came back up for a very few minutes just now so we can only hope that it is very close to being fixed. (I did see that a litter of puppies was born on my account and that today's shows were judged, so processes seem to be running even though accounts cannot be accessed.) The problem appears to be with the web host and not with Showdog.com itself. Update: Site problems have continued throughout the day. A two hour outage for database matinence will begin at midnight.

VirtualPups lost its data a while back and had to revert to a September 22nd backup. Unfortunately, a lot of player data cannot be recovered, but in compensation players have been given more resources (including ten more import dogs).

This is looking like a good time to sign up for Pawsibilities, the Canadian dog and cat game that I haven't gotten around to evaluating yet.

One dog site is thriving, though --- Furry Paws recently celebrated its first birthday! The member limit (restricting the number of players who can log on at one time) has been lifted, but the site warns that "this probably isn't permanent," so enjoy it while it lasts.

For several months it's been known that Showdog.com plans to add agility and obedience competitions, but Jeff has now announced that one of the two will be added next month, in December! We don't know which he will add first (I suspect that it depends on how many users' experience he can draw on), but it's good to finally have a date --- this is going to expand the site in a big way.

If you're a Showdog.com player and you have real-world experience with agility or obedience competitions, take a look at this thread on the forum.

The economics of a massive multiplayer game are often amazing because they so closely mimic "real world" economic trends. I've often thought that an economics student who wanted a fun thesis topic should tackle Neopets.com.

There is a very interesting thread on the Showdog.com forums right now reflecting the fact that most players at some point say "Well, why don't you just give everyone more money? Wouldn't that solve the problems?" In the cases where this is tried, massive inflation (predictably) results.

Jeff Schreoder, the site admin, contributed "After watching the economy on SimulatedSports for two years, running Simsteer for three years, and now running Showdog and Showcattle, I can say that every basic economic law applies to these simulations. It’s not a system where you can set prices for various things and have the false belief that it will not have an impact on the highly dynamic interactions between users. If you add more money to the simulation the value of that money decreases. It’s not a debatable ‘theory’, it’s just plain old true."

There are many very interesting economic points to examine in any online artificial life game. Jeff himself uses several interesting features to level the playing field in his games; in Showcattle, there is a maximum balance to keep a single player from becoming too powerful, and on Showdog, the amount of money given to players each day is calculated from the amount of money spent the previous day.

One major point to examine with online games is whether players collect money automatically each week or earn it. In either case, wise administrators try to balance the amount of money "leaving" the game (being paid to the computer through automated processes like food bills) and the amount of money "entering" the game (being generated by the computer for player's "salaries" and cash game prizes). This is complicated by the fact that new players join the game and must be provided with starting cash, which is usually created out of thin air.

I only know of a few online games where players cannot get money for nothing (a salary and/or playing a simple game). One is Showcattle.com, mentioned above. The only way to get money from the computer after you've signed up is to send a cow to be slaughtered, for which you are paid per pound; to keep your ranch out of debt you must win prizes in the steer shows or sell livestock to other users. On Virtual Horse Ranch you must make money by entering or betting on horse competitions or by commerce.

When livestock is involved, the fluctuations are even more interesting. Pedigrees and purebred status give an animal additional value, as they do in real life. This is a major part of why purebred registries were founded and why pedigrees are kept. (An interesting aspect of this is that in automated sim games you cannot fake a pedigree or register your animal with a less-prestigious organization; only in Pure Felinity and Showcattle.com can you breed up to purebred status and register as purebred animals from non-purebred parents. All purebred animals are automatically and authentically registered.)

One economic incident that I experienced was the great Pure Felinity market crash; the game started out with only mixed-breed cats, and the goal was to breed purebreds. Once purebred cats were available, there was very little demand for mixed breeds... but thousands were still in the game, and hundreds more were born each day. The asking price for a cat dropped from over $100 game dollars to $50 to $1. Even purebreds of common breeds were soon available at low prices because there was no way to retire a young cat.

At this point a group of users tried to stabalize the market by establishing minimum prices for cats of each breed (for example, $50 instead of $1 for a mixed breed). However, the movement polarized the site into distinct political groups, and failed to gain enough support to really change the situation. I personally think that the largest failing was that the prices set for some purebreds put them out of the range of all but the richest players; most players were broke.

The game designer stepped in and made some changes to gameplay in an attempt to solve the problem. There is now a limit on how many cats players can own and how many cats players can breed. This has slowed down the production of new cats enough that the economy is slowly stabilizing.

I also remember when a loaf of bread on Neopets cost 5 NP. The game has had a lot of inflation, largely because players can win money from games. For quite a while there was no limit at all, and you could earn any amount that you wanted just by playing an inane game many times; now there is a limit on how much a single player can get from each game each day, but as far as I know there is no limit on the amount of money "created" on the site each day. Neopets also offers a bank with interest and a stock market game, but most players who want long-term investments buy in-game items in the hope that the item's value will increase.

I'm going to start drafting some of the things that I keep meaning to write for this site, but haven't.

With one or two exceptions, I'm really not interested in non-automated ALIFE games. These are games where the "animals" exist only in writing, and there is no central database; players create and breed their own animals following the game's rules.

First, these games are usually roleplaying games instead of artificial life games (I am a dog, not I have a dog). Even if they maintain a pet focus they are closer to board games being played over a computer than computer games; they could just as well be taking place through the post office. I'm interested in Computer Science, so I want to examine artificial life where computers have added something.

Also, these games are almost always small, and I have never seen one grow into a large enough population to exhibit interesting characteristics. It's too easy for players to cheat and invent money or animals, and this prevents a valid economy and valued purebreds from developing.

A disgruntled former player of Showdog.com has created a site on Geocities titled "Drop Dead Jeff," http://www.geocities.com/dropdeadjeff/index.html. I will warn any younger readers that there is some objectionable language.

The reasons for the player's banning are numerous and were briefly discussed on the Alpha Dog forum after several Premium players requested more information. In short, multiple complaints were submitted; the ex-player in question is alleged to have harassed other players and cost the site hundreds of dollars in lost revenue. These allegations are supported by the immature behaviour since being banned from the site.

I don't want to drag dirty laundry out in public. If you are a member of Showdog.com, you can get more information on the forums there. If you aren't, then this post is actually for you. While "Drop Dead Jeff" is circulating in search engines, I want to refute the points mentioned on the page in order to reassure anyone thinking about subscribing to the site.

In the dealings that I have had with him, I have found Jeff to be one of the most honest and involved administrators I have ever met. I can only imagine the enormous number of email messages that he handles, but each time that I have sent him a message through Showdog's message system to report a specific bug, I have gotten a prompt response and the problem has been fixed. Several times the fix has actually appeared in the site news --- presumably several people reported it, as in the case of dogs sold the day of the SDWC losing their entry in the show. I have never known him to dismiss a problem or claim that it was someone else's fault, as the "anti-Jeff" site claims. In fact, the Showdog.com customer experience has been the best that I've had from any artificial life website.

I actually find the site's statement that "He thinks he's all high and mighty because he created his website" to be quite amusing, since as administrator and site creator he is, in fact, high and mighty and god-like in the game. Jeff could tear up the server and make Holly a necklace from its microchips. He could change Showdog.com into the world's leading purple-people-eater game. He could ban all users except for those whose names start with the letter "J." Despite the fact that he could do all of these things, I have never witnessed any exchange with a wayward user where Jeff took the role of anything but a reasonable authority figure; in fact, his professional calm throughout this entire situation has been nothing short of remarkable.

The site's statement that "If he had banned everyone that has argued with him he'd have an empty website" is also false. I personally have never argued with Jeff. The vast majority of the users have never argued with Jeff. And yes, admins and moderators will threaten to ban you if you do decide to argue with them about a warning or one of their decisions: site policy is usually not debated with people who have violated it. That is the way that websites, sports games, and all public places work: moderators, referees, or police will take you out of the game if you can't follow the rules.

If you do have a dispute with Jeff, it is his standard practice to offer a refund (as he gave this user) of your subscription fees. Showdog.com is the only website that I know of that is openly willing to refund all of your money if you are unhappy.

The reason that I have gone to such length in my experiences with Showdog.com is that, if you are researching the site before subscribing (a wise thing to do!) and find the "Anti-Jeff" page, you might interpret the information there as crudely-expressed but legitimate customer complaints. One sub-page, however, clearly demonstrates that the site is intended to hurt instead of inform: it is a fictional narrative by one of Jeff's lost pug puppies, describing how both supposedly died, saying at every step how much better it is than their former home. (Both pugs were lost when they wandered away in December 2003 and, tragically, are probably dead --- but of natural predators or exposure instead of puppy mills and trucks.) This clearly exceeds any standard of good taste and should put the site creator's other comments into perspective.

The BBC and Gameware Development (the company that currently owns the Creatures games, although it's several permutations past Cyberlife) have created a children's television show called BAMZOOKi in which children design artificial creatures and pit them against one another.

The first season is now complete, and was re-run during the summer at 8am, one of the most coveted timeslots in children's television. It seems to be gaining popularity --- there are even Bamzooki clubs at British elementary schools. Most of the other artificial life games where animal creations fight have been self-contained, but this one offers the best "zooks" the opportunity to be featured on the website and on telvision. This seems to support one of my theories that competition with others is a key factor in making an artificial life product succeed.