Comments on: Kudos 2 Released: Time To Get A Life?

By: Quirk

Quirk — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:54:14 +0000

My brain doesn’t seem to have been functioning correctly earlier. The 6K to 9.5K calculation should read, “of the extra six dollars (not eleven!) I’m getting gross were the tax band calculated identically, the state is taking most of five.” I would still argue that that’s a hell of a tax hike.

By: roBurky

roBurky — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 13:51:25 +0000

Right, I think I’ve figured out what’s so screwy about games and skill. You only gain skill when you win a game. Is that right?

Shouldn’t that be the other way around? Shouldn’t you be seeking out people with a higher skill in a game than you in order to learn from them?

By: Fede

Fede — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 12:11:25 +0000

Thanks!

And btw, I’m glad I don’t live in the UK nor in a city, where there are oh so many thieves, who are apparently fond of geek books, chess boards and umbrellas! :D

By: cliffski

cliffski — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:59:31 +0000

I’ll patch it. but that value is here:
\data\config.txt
GAMESKILL_DEGRADE
needs to be higher :D

By: Fede

Fede — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:06:40 +0000

I do agree that the chess ability drops a bit too fast, usually one doesn’t lose so much of his strenght at board games even after a 1 or 2 years pause.

By: cliffski

cliffski — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 08:39:49 +0000

Knowledge(iq) is raised by watching the international news or reading the broadsheet newspaper or the encyclopaedia. I think there might be a website that boosts it too.

I shall investigate these reports of a chess related error. I need to sober up this morning before I re-read the tax discussion though :D

By: A bored, relaxed messiah figure

A bored, relaxed messiah figure — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 03:36:21 +0000

God, this game makes me hate significant others. Can’t I go out with the guys once or twice without you kicking up a storm?

By: mathew

mathew — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 01:51:14 +0000

…My girlfriend still bought it, though.

By: mathew

mathew — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 01:25:40 +0000

The demo was good; but I have to give it a “tut” as it crashes when I try to run it from my (1280×800) desktop, but runs perfectly if I set my resolution manually down to 1280×768.

Which is annoying to do, obviously.

By: Nick

Nick — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:40:19 +0000

“Haha, now I see what Cliffski was talking about. I thought this was about CliffyB.”

Yeah, poor cliffski being in any way mistaken for that guy..

By: Quirk

Quirk — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:29:04 +0000

No – the waiting job is, nominally, for 6K per year as well, the same as the sales job. It comes in at a little over a tenner a day plus tips. The sales job, with no promotions, brought in fifteen dollars per day plus commission. I was walking to both jobs (though the costs of commuting are handled explicitly anyway). This would make sense only if I’d found a way to save a fiver a day somehow by working at the other job.

In any case, salaries are screwy. I started it up and checked.

Basic salary, 6K p.a., nets ten dollars and change a day. Moving up, without promotion, to 9.5K p.a. for a cashier job however provides just eleven dollars and some change daily. No newspapers, no new fancy expenses. That’s one murderous tax regime – of the extra eleven dollars I’m getting gross were the tax band calculated identically, the state is taking most of ten. So, out of the 6K sales job, the 6K waiting job and the 9.5K cashier job, the cashier job will leave you worst off as the tiny amount extra that you make won’t make up for the loss of tips, and is under the sales job even before commission.

I’d expect this to be trivial to patch though, it’ll come down to one particular calculation having bugs in. Playtesting a game with that many options has got to be a nightmare for a small studio, so I can understand why things like this might get missed.

Getting my programmer hat on, at a wild guess, tax bands might explain the discrepancies between waiting base and other job base pay – if moving to a new job gave you a new tax band, but that tax band were incorrectly applied over the whole gross sum rather than being only applied to the portion that had gone past the earlier lower-tax allowance, I’d expect to see something similar to the behaviour it exhibits with jobs of ~10-15K. The sales job however seems to have a different bug. My guess there would be that somehow commission is being counted twice, or something like that.

By: Devan

Devan — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:44:23 +0000

I bought the Sims for my wife and she hasn’t played it yet. I’ll have to show her this demo and maybe it’ll click.
I’ve already got Democracy2 and like it quite a lot, so I’ll likely end up buying this too. The no-DRM is a great selling point :)