Websites

About This Project

3DPguides.com

It started as a spreadsheet to provide a comparison between all FDM-based 3D printers, and included some basic calculations such as price per unit volume. The sheet was well-received on the forums, and I decided to create a website to host it and other useful resources for people just getting started with 3D printing.
Although I haven’t added any significant content since last year, I may revisit it in the future with some of my latest projects.

d3gg.org

I make no secret about the fact that videogames are a favorite pastime of mine, especially PC games. In May 2012, Blizzard released the latest iteration in the Diablo series of games: Diablo III. I had played Diablo II religiously, and one of my favorite aspects of it was the economy that emerged both in-game and on the forums.

One of the most significant changes from Diablo II to Diablo III was the addition of an auction house. Players could buy and sell items from the auction house for both the in-game currency (“gold”) as well as real money. Eager to take my knowledge from Diablo II and apply it to a new market, I set out to find a viable strategy.

My first instinct was to focus on the weapon slot. Items “roll” values within a range, and creating an appraisal based on the damage per second (DPS) seemed like a logical place to start. I wrote an autoit script that cycled through item types and buyout values and screenshotted each iteration. From there, I used an OCR program to extract the data and create the spreadsheets that served as price guides.

I posted the results on the Diablo subreddit and received an overwhelmingly positive response. My newly created site received nearly 12,000 hits in 24 hours.

In retrospect, weapon DPS turned out to be less important than other attributes in terms of overall item value. The synergy created by critical hit chance, critical hit damage, and attack speed essentially mandated that weapons have sockets. Gathering all the mods and affixes would have been a much more ambitious project than I was ready for, and I didn’t pursue it further. Still, it was an interesting exercise and a great example of “if you build it, they shall come.”