This website was originally developed in 2010 as a server stats tracker by me, but eventually became more.
BZStocks, as the name suggests, is the idea that every server holds a certain monetary value. This monetary value is directly influenced by the player counts in game! The actual formula is much more complex (And unpublished), but the idea is that the longer the server remains popular, the larger the stock grows!
Each server that enters the list server is considered and is given a starting amount (Which generally falls very quickly). The website has been in alpha testing for a long time and is now in Public Beta testing. You are free to sign up and start playing along, users that sign up during the beta testing get an extra $10,000 for their portfolio, starting off with $30,000 "BZ Dollars" to use to buy any stocks you want!
Get a BZStocks Account today!
Not convinced?
Some quick screenshots:
Choose your investments and purchase wisely to reap the most benefits.
Get detailed stock history for any server on the server list!
See how your portfolio stacks up against the competition!
View the portal for the latest on which stocks are IN and OUT
Every 30 minutes is another update to the market simulation, and thus you will see that over time stocks are influenced. Obviously, the stock market game is a slow paced game, so you are not expected to always be online, and in fact, unlike a real stock market, there is no opening and closing times, the market is always opened. (Having a closing time, especially since this game is region-free is silly.)
Buying shares is easy, you specify the number of shares, and you get that many added to your account. Note that you may only purchase each stock once every 6 hours, and for a maximum of 10,000 shares per transaction. Though, this should be plenty. Should the value of your stock increase, each share does as well. You may also sell shares at any time (Partially, or the bulk of what you purchased), but to prevent pulling out money right when a decline occurs, sell transactions take 6 hours to process.
Feel free to also suggest ideas if you would like. It's just a fun little "add-on" to BZFlag as I would call it to try out every once in awhile.
As a side note, all data that you enter on the website is secured and in a database that cannot be read by me or anyone else. Just some information for paranoiacs.
I actually came up with the idea on my own, but there are other great minds that thought alike! See this old topic! http://forums.bzflag.org/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=9179
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An update for server owners. I have added in a feature to BZStocks that runs bzadmin on servers where players of BZStocks are playing at in game in order to provide them with an update at each half an hour. The message is and will always be exactly as displayed below to the recipient:
What happens is my script checks for all players online, pinpoints and matches the ones on servers, collects all players that may be on the same server, and then goes to the servers to display these three messages to each recipient. The bzadmin client is named BZStocksNotifier and only remains on the server for 3-8 seconds."You {gained/lost} $X.XX and now have $X.XX in your BZStocks Portfolio."
"You are currently ranked Xth."
{"You need an additional $X.XX to beat X in Xth place." / "You are the leader, keep it up."}
If you do not want BZStocksNotifier bugging the BZStocks players on your server, you may choose to ban the IP address 173.230.152.119 and it will not appear anymore. Note that this will stifle the purpose of the notifier for players on that server however, but I do not mind if you would rather have your server untouched. Finally, all servers where the notifier has no talk permissions (such as the league servers) have already been taken out of the list of servers that BZStocksNotifier is allowed to join, so no worries about leagues.
In the future I will also be adding a little option for players to not get notifications from the BZStocksNotifier while they are in-game, as this should not be forced upon them.