"Gaming"[0] companies are audited for the expected value each coin toss/slot machine roll etc. has - typically it's a high and unusually precise percentage, like e.g. 95.1681%.
The scam in is advertising, that emphasizes how much you can potentially win, even though obviously on average the house takes those few percent each time.
[0] A term they like to use to describe themselves.
How is this supposed to work? There’s hundreds of people in the store. Someone is always right next to me. How will the can of peas know which price to display
Where are you shopping? I get groceries the most I've seen is 30 people at a time.
> How will the can of peas know which price to display
People are talking about facial recognition and smart phones driving this. What they're missing is that your shopping cart is likely to contain a selection of items which make it _highly unique_. Not just on the day you're shopping but across large spans of time.
Of course the lowest tech is I can just put a tracker in your cart or in your basket.
Midwest Walmarts, Meijer’s, Costco etc very often have hundreds of shoppers.
So we’re going to see a price and by the time we get to the register all the prices will have changed? And that’s not going to cause a bunch of commotion and demands for price checks at the checkout?
> So we’re going to see a price and by the time we get to the register all the prices will have changed?
I think the design of the system entails that the price you see and the price you pay would be the same. It's just that different customers are going to see different prices.
Then the question is how do they track you from the time you picked the item to the time you scan it. Which is what I was opining on.
> demands for price checks
What would that look like in modern commerce? There is no "big book" of prices. The best you can do is go back to the shelf and say the price is wrong.
Now you're debating which is the actual store price? The one on the shelf or the one on the computer? Stores are not generally obliged to honor mistaken prices although they may be in some states. Famously Arizona Iced tea is not actually 99c everywhere it's sold.
It's then a game of chicken and most consumers will probably lose.
If they profile all of the people in the store simultaneously, they can raise/lower prices based on time of day and item purchased. Then you won't see the prices changing constantly as people walk around the stores, they'll just change gradually throughout the day, when people aren't looking.
If all the people who work at Goldman Sachs next door to the store get off work at 6pm, the store can raise steak prices at 6pm while lowering the price of Oreos (or whatever). It doesn't even have to be based on economic class statistics, it can be tailored to the specific times when individual people shop at the store and which items they buy.
Was a big fan of Travian too and have thought about trying to remake something as a side project as well. Can you share any resources or have any tips as a place to get started?
I started with the game mechanics and game design principles first. Needed to refactor that somewhere the last few days and it’s painful to do this „midflight“. Iteration on UIUX is fine but iteration on game dynamics needs to be done carefully. Spent hours and hours studying mechanics and scale mechanics.
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