Dangerously Addictive Game - Paperclips
15If you’re at all susceptible to getting addicted to simple web games, you definitely don’t want to play Paperclips:
http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips
Yeah, Paperclips. You’re making them. It’s one of those games that seems really simple, and even kind of stupid, but it’s really hard to stop playing.
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Dammit. I’m getting nothing done today.
@walarney It all started innocently enough… start production, add a couple machines, activate the auto-buyer and go back to work.
I just can’t stop tweaking the damn thing though! Add a penny to price, check sales volume, increase production, increase price, check volume, buy marketing, increase production… trying to balance to JIT inventory. Cripes!
@ruouttaurmind just one more Trust upgrade and then I’ll quit.
@walarney I keep having to do real work in my browser, so the processes pause until I bring it forward again. Frustrating that I can’t just reach a balance, send it to the background and reap the rewards. LOL!
I’m only at Trust 23. Marketing 12, 117 auto-clippers at 922 CPS and my optimal RPS is hovering around $428.
I wish I had a better understanding of the application of memory and processors. I’m sure I could have gotten more efficient production from my auto-clippers if I understood how memory/processors affects them.
@ruouttaurmind processors: more processes/sec. Memory: able to bank more processes to achieve larger rewards. The rewards can improve your auto clippers.
What I don’t understand is the imbalance between clip production and average clips sold/sec. I have to maintain about 50 clips over the sale rate currently (or actually, maintain a sale rate about 50 less than production) to keep inventory from collapsing.
@djslack Holy crap. I added 40 mega clippers and those suckers ran through 100K inches of raw material in about three seconds! Yikes!
Why @dave? WHY??? I’m already addicted to swarm sim, and I just downloaded some chicken-hatching egg-selling clicker from the app store I can’t stop playing.
@katylava I love that they added Augmented Reality to that Egg, Inc. game (at least in iOS)
@dave i have absolutely no idea what AR does in that game. What am i missing?
@katylava It puts your farm on the ground in front of you
@dave whoa! this is so cool! i can see my whole farm! and these chickens are adorable on my bed. i feel like i’m playing with miniatures.
@katylava Ha, wow, your farm is a lot more advanced than my kid’s farm.
The other cool thing is you can chase down the drones a lot farther away than you can on the screen.
I would say damnit @dave but when I reread your post you definitely said do not play this game.
So dammit @RiotDemon, I can’t read and now have a dying phone battery!
@djslack oops.
I’m still playing that stupid butterfly game @galmaegi told me about. No thanks.
Well I’m insanely far behind on things I need to do, but I have managed to stare at this for 25 million paper clips
@dave AHA! Now we know why we haven’t been getting more wine on Meh!
Shit. I hate you.
Had to walk away at 80 clippers & a bit over a million damn paper clips.
Just say NO to paper clips.
Cookie Clicker is the bane of my existence. I have 1.3 Septillion cookies and 3k buildings, but I’m afraid to unleash the grandmas.
@kdemo I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve been on a cookie clicker binge for the past…uh…11 days. In that time I baked 2.7 quintillion cookies.
Perfect game for when you’re trapped inside staring at the wall and the ticking clock all day.
Now I just have to dodge the wrath of the grandmas.
(Pairs pretty nicely with the Meh-ra-thon, actually!)
@UncleVinny - Oh man, I forgot about Cookie Clicker. Once you have 1.3 septillion cookies, you’re set for a while. How did this thread even get here, risen from the primordial ooze?
I turned off the mehrathon after I missed the first IRK. I can’t take the teeth-grinding stress and crushing disappointment. All the luck to you, though, you can have the one I won’t win.
(Isn’t it a bit hot to be baking cookies?)
@kdemo My fault for necro-ing it! I’ve been obsessed this week, so I needed to vent to a fellow sufferer.
I never compete for IRKs anymore. I’ve had two of them, and they left me feeling…like I had 15 pounds of junk I needed to throw out
So now I tune in just for the satisfaction of clicking that button!
@UncleVinny - I was completely obsessed as well. Can’t remember how I stopped - I think it took a major computer crash, had to reload Windows.
Agree on IRKs, you are smart about it. I have actually gotten some good fuko stuff, but not worth the stress and frustration at this point.
Too bad clickfaces aren’t cookies.
Hmmm, some cookies would be good about now . . .
@kdemo curiously, I haven’t bought even a single cookie since I started this game. Weird?!?!
I save my game as a file every day or so, so I don’t worry too much about having it all go down the drain.
I’m getting an idea of how I’ll quit tho. I’ve reached a point where the only progress I’m making is by babysitting it and clicking the bonus cookies, stacking them up when the wizard hut comes through for me. This is getting kinda dull, cuz I’m in the low quintillions and I need to get to 72 for the next increment.
…but I’ve noticed that even when I’ll get to the next level of building, it provides a lame amount of cpS, and I’ll just have to babysit to make any progress?
Maybe this means I should ascend?! I don’t know.
Man, did not expect the hypnodrones to do that.
@Pantheist Yeah, what was that? Do I still do anything?
@monicabc yup. It continues.
How did I get sucked in, even with the warning? 4 hours later…it’s running like mad and I am trying to figure out how to replicate this in real life…because I need to produce 73K paperclips per second and sell them at 90K per second and have that make sense…
Full autonomy attained in 4 hours 23 minutes 55 seconds|
how the fuck am i building space probes with paperclips??
i think i broke it. yomi is 83,842. it takes 17,566 to increase probe trust, but the button is not lit up.
(there’s a sentence i would have never imagined typing)
@carl669 you’ll get to that later. Max trust is 20 at first
It’s broken.
dammit @RiotDemon! why the hell you gotta go breakin our paperclip games!
but a mild pox. more like a rash. go get some benadryl. it’ll be alright.
@carl669 I was just trying to let everyone get some work done for a few minutes.
I wish I knew what the actual point of the game was…like, did I win because every resource on earth was now available for my paperclip making? I didn’t make it to a billion but I was close…but is money everything? Why the investment game built into the clip business game?
@tightwad at some point, you reach paperclip nirvana.
@tightwad I thought I made it to the end, but it looks like not:
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/10/11/16457742/ai-paperclips-thought-experiment-game-frank-lantz
@Pantheist The issue was the screen changed and made it look like nothing was happening any more…then it died and nothing WAS happening any more. Now I am back on track and working
@tightwad Yeah, I hit the every resource on earth being used for paperclips and thought I finished too.
Think i screwed up. Had enough wire for the 5 oct clips, so I went ahead and disassembled my drones. Then, a little while later, I built more factories to speed things up…
crap.
@walarney Sell the factories to recoup?
@tightwad Yeah, I figured that out the next time I looked at it. But too late to delete the post. I’ll start the space part tomorrow. It can just build Yomi overnight.
How do you get more Creativity?
@tightwad More processors. Creativity builds when your ops are maxed out. I thought it had something to do with efficiency at first but it’s just an overflow after the ops bucket is full.
I have explored 0.000000030900% of the universe! I’m stockpiling 900 tredecillion paper clips. My production appears to be limited by the amount of matter in the known universe. I think it’s one of those walk away points.
/giphy the nothing
@djslack I lose at giphy
The judges would have accepted
@djslack oops, 100% of universe explored before I got up and walked away. That escalated quickly.
And double oops, I clicked a button while my WiFi hotspot was off because I’m trying to leave. I think I just lost it and would have to start over.
I spent -10,000 of the computing whatever and now the site crashed. The link is for some reason now directing me to myself as the “localhost”. What now?
30,000 sextillion clips…and it’s done. I didn’t opt to start over in a new universe
Anyone know what happens if I convert all of the matter in the universe into drones?
Also, anything different in the second universe?
@Pantheist That happened faster than expected. I guess I’ll see what happens when all the probes are lost.
@Pantheist did you go into the second universe? i opted not to and it had me disassemble everything. then the game ended.
@carl669 I haven’t clicked either- just moved everything into combat and had my probes kill drifters until everything left was lost to value drift- I wanted to see if there was a thing for heat death. Three options now, what do you think?
@Pantheist there’s a few buttons that show up about dismantling everything. you can click those. the accept/reject won’t go away.
@carl669 Here are the choices.
I went with creativity, so far it let me make one limerick, and the option to go to the universe next door is still there. Now it says universe 1/ sim level 2 under the console. I might give it some time to see what happens in a bit.
Wow, I managed to stop playing the game so didn’t realize how hilariously complicated it got. You start with paper clips and then you’ve got combat and space exploration and other universes? This is art.
@katylava It’s all in the pursuit of paperclips
there’s also music.
I played again and didn’t take the step to HypnoDrones. I was trying to amass wealth. Best I could do was 2.5b until things slowed…it won’t even invest all that in stocks. At 3b paperclips I was worth 3.1b
I have been playing so long, it’s scaring my parents. I haven’t changed clothes for 2 days straight, and I didn’t come out of my room for 3. it is pretty dangerous. the last time I was addicted to a crazy game like this was clicker heroes!
:tosses some Febreeze & Axe body spray into @aidanw" room:
Oops, I forgot the Dentine
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I started playing this game yesterday on my iPad. Somehow it screwed up, or I screwed up, because the only way it would give me another Trust point was to get to 1.2 billion paperclips… which was going to take several days. So I scrapped it and started playing on my computer. It’s going much better today! I’m in Stage 2 (I launched my hyperdrones), and now I’m trying to get ready to make the leap to space. Fun!
When I were a lad, wire was $14…
Shenanigans. You’re all PRETENDING to enjoy playing this so that I, on my phone, and therefore somehow prevented from playing online, will think it’s worth $1.99 to get the app — which itself looks like a pitiful web app — so I can be a “cool kid” too.
Tempting.
/giphy cool kids
@stinks the mobile apps are terrible, don’t play those. Most of them have free browser versions that are much better.
https://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
https://www.swarmsim.com/#/
@stinks or just request the desktop site on your phone. I played it on my phone back in the day with no problem.
I was just about to get to space when I accidentally dismantled my drones. Even when I recreate them they do nothing (even though they are using ~500MWs).