Podcasts

I don't know about most people, but I have been bitten for a while by the podcast bug. I have found so many good podcasts to listen to that I have a hard time keeping up with the list of them on a weekly basis. Since this is a blog primarily about the geolocation games I like to play, I wanted to mention one that I listen to regularly that covers these topics.

One of the best podcasts in this genre is the GeoGearHeads podcast. They tend to cover geocaching more than other geolocation based games, but many of their shows cover topics relating to battery use, GPS systems, biking and caching, and streaking (well, I guess you'll just have to listen to it :). They have also covered Munzee and WallaBee. Be sure to check out their excellent podcast available via iTunes.

Comparison

In my last posting you were able to see how quickly the Disturbing Daughter was purchased from the Store in large part because there were two of them available for purchase at the same time. I wondered if this had happened before, and I found out that it had. Tangledcat mentioned in a Forum post that the Simosaur also had two concurrent store appearances during the first run. So I thought that it would be interesting to see what that looked like.

Looks like there were 139 purchased in the first minute.
After two minutes it started to slow down and 204 items had been purchased.

This was released about 4 months and two weeks before the Disturbing Daughter and it looks like the Daughter went about twice as fast and lasted a bit longer as well. It will be interesting to see how quickly things keep going in the future...

This was disturbing...

Holy cow. That's what I have to say after watching the purchase frenzy of the Disturbing Daughter release today.

The Dev's seemed to wait until I was in the shower to release this one, but I was lucky enough to see the text come in and grab my phone to make the purchase (a man's gotta do...). I was surprised when I went to the Ghosts and Ghouls Store and saw that there were two of the new items in there at the same time (I wonder if this has ever happened before). I got lucky, like many others, to manage to get two DD's. But I was surprised, as many others were probably as well, when they appeared in the store again a short while later that they were already into the high 200's (dang that was fast). So I figured I had to see what this looked like:

This may look like other graphs that I have put up, however, the time duration is MUCH shorter than any other graph. Here's how the numbers broke down:

It took 33 seconds to have all SD and DD's purchased.
The first 200 were gone in 51 seconds.
After 1 minute 220 of them had been purchased.
Within 2 minutes 351 of them had been purchased, when it finally started slowing down.
Then there was another quick buying from numbers 385-450 that took about another minute.

This was definitely the quickest I have ever seen items purchased, and many others have said the same thing in the Forums. However, in another year (with many more players) this may not seem so quick. We'll just have to wait and see...

Coin Dozer Drop

Everyone was waiting, and getting twitchy, for the next release since it had been quite a few days since the last drop. Earlier today the Coin Dozer and 45 Tickets (mix of Coin Dozer and 50C Coin) were released. Here is what the release times and distribution look like for the first six times the Coin Dozer appeared in the Store (459 items were purchased).

First item was purchased from Store at 11:02:47 GMT and it was in the Store for one minute in which 61 items were purchased.
It took another 15 minutes until it appeared in the Store again and was in the Store for another minute and 80 items were purchased.
Fifteen seconds later it appeared in the Store again for another minute and only 30 items were purchased.
The fourth time it appeared in the store was eight and a half minutes later and was in the Store for 2 1/2 minutes and 130 items were purchased.
The fifth time was 5 minutes later and was in the Store for 3 minutes where a little over 90 items were purchased.
The sixth time was about 2 1/2 minutes later, was in the Store for about a minute fifteen seconds and a little over 60 items were purchased.

That was around 40 minutes total for 459 items to be purchased from the Store. I was happily sleeping during this whole time (and was unhappy when I woke up realizing I'd missed the drop :).

Three new Arcade items

Here's the graph of how things transpired on yesterday's release of the new Arcade items. I have only included three of the four new items that were released since the 25c Coin did not factor too much into the distribution and mixing of these items.

The first item, 50c Coin, was foraged at 18:01:38 GMT. Forty two items were foraged in just under 2 minutes until the first 16 Tickets was mixed from the 50c Coin and Pop-A-Shot. It was just over 4 minutes when all SD 50c Coins had been foraged, and at that time only nine 16 Tickets had been mixed. At 18:16:09 (almost 15 minutes after the first 50c Coin forage) all SD 16 Ticket items were created by mixing. It wasn't until one-hundred thirty-five 16 Ticket items had been created (at 18:23:02) before the first Fake Moustache was created by mixing two of the 16 Tickets items. It took another forty-seven and a half minutes before all SD Fake Moustaches had been created. At that time six-hundred-twenty-four 50c Coins had been foraged and three-hundred-sixty-two 16 Ticket items had been created.

I'm wondering how much the app crashing for anyone who had upgraded to iOS7 slowed down some of the foraging and mixing. I know that WallaBee was crashing just about every time I foraged an item.

WallaBee growth

I have often wondered how many WallaBee players there are, and how many people are actually all racing to get the new items when they are released. I finally decided to find out and here's what it looks like.

It's interesting to see that there were three well defined growth spurts, each adding around 2000 players during those short time frames. Not sure what those dates correlate to, but as you can see the rest of the time there is very steady growth in the number of players signing up, which averages out to around 9 new players a day. It's no wonder items are going so fast these days...

366 day calendar complete

With finding a geocache today I was able to complete my 366 day calendar:

Since I really started geocaching seriously on September 22, 2011, it took me one week shy of 2 years of geocaching to fill in my calendar (not counting the one find I had 8 years before that :). I was very surprised that it only took two years, but with the last two fairly mild winters I was able to get through the last December, January and February months filling in any missing days. When those months were complete I figured I had a chance of completing the rest of the months this year. I guess my next goal will be to hit 3000 cache finds (which hopefully will be by the end of the month), and after that I'll have to see what's next. I'll likely start looking at completing the Fizzy Challenge (all 81 Difficulty/Terrrain grid), and then see where I'm at in the Jasper Challenge, which is finding a cache that was placed every month since geocaching started.

Red Roses forage release

The last entry showed the rate that a new release item was purchased from the Store. The Red Roses item was released today and here is what that looked like.

This is showing the first 250 items foraged (which took a little over 16 minutes). The first item was foraged at 20:53:26 GMT and within 2 minutes 5 seconds all SD and DD items had been foraged. Don't know if the twitter notification went out slower than usual (or these were foraged quicker than usual), but by the time I got my SMS message and checked the activity area it was already into the 130's.

New item releases

People have often discussed on the WallaBee forums how quickly new items are bought or foraged. So when thinking about what else might be interesting to graph I have been playing around with the following. The graph below is for the new item released today, the 100c Coin, for the new set The Arcade. (I was hoping for the name Ready Player One, and shout out to jabbott for recognizing the book reference.) This shows how many items were bought on the first three drops in the Stores (the first drop was in the Retrobee store, and the next two were in the WallaStore).

This shows the first item being gifted to Colin at 11 Sep 2013 19:23:19 GMT. Then 4 minutes 27 second later it hit the store. In the first drop 92 of the items were bought in 1 minute 15 seconds. Second drop was 7 minutes and 17 seconds later (yes, it seemed like forever :), and then 102 items were bought in 1 minute and 40 seconds. The third drop was 6 minutes and 8 seconds later and 87 items were bought in 2 minutes 15 seconds.

So there were 3 drops in the store in under 20 minutes and almost 300 items were bought. Looks like items are going pretty fast these days...

Hopefully soon I'll be putting up some graphs that will show how quickly new items are foraged, as well as looking at how quickly items were bought and foraged in the early days. :)

Ok, so maybe I left out a couple...

After I posted the last of the graphs for the sets jabbott reminded me that I forgot to do the Branded Items and the WallaBee Issued Uniques. I had intended to do those, but they slipped my mind. So here are the last two graphs.

The last set graphs

Ok, here are the last set of graphs that bring all sets up to the most recent one of Andrew Cameron's Alice set. That set has not been completed yet, so more items will be added to the set, and I will update the graph either as items are added, or when the set is complete (we'll see :). Hopefully all these graphs have given you some insight into how the items are distributed with the first 250 numbers of each item, and why some items are more rare than others.

I have a few ideas of some other graphs that might be interesting to run, so we'll see what else may show up on these pages. At some point in the future I might do the same graphs, but with numbers from 1 to 1000, which would give a good indication of rarity and such with all TD items.

Lastly, I ordered the graphs from the more recent sets on the top to the older sets. So it should be easier to scroll down and see any changes in sets distributions over time. Looking over all the sets it appears that it's getting more common to hold onto the lower numbered items rather than mixing them right away. Could be a result of more players being active and thus a larger number of people who want to hang onto the first (and maybe second) low item they get before getting an item they want to mix.

The next seven sets...

...and this one includes Pouch Creatures. Hopefully everyone following these find them interesting and a way to track the distribution/rarity of some of the items.

Another ten sets, getting closer

Getting closer to having all the sets up. Here are another ten sets, and this one has WallaBee's First Christmas, which was my first set to complete. Another interesting tidbit is that the set id number for this is #1, so it looks like Ben and crew likely designed this as their first set (also based on the low numbered item id's) and then held out releasing it until Christmas time. Looks like they also added Santa's reindeer's and Rudolph later when they released the set.

Enjoy

The next set of graphs

Here are another ten set of graphs. It's been very interesting to see how all these compare to each other scrolling up and down this page.

Graphs for next ten sets

Ok, here are the graphs for the next ten sets. This one includes the graph for the Eggception set, which I was most interested in seeing, being that it's very hard just to get a TD for some of the items in this set.