Old Bloke Gaming and his quest for truth
He uploads twice a week and his starter guides are one of the best way into Entropia there is. Beyond guides, OBG is on a mission, and it is not about loot. He wants the truth behind all the numbers.
The man behind the data
Old Bloke Gaming is one of those Entropia Universe channels that sits somewhere between player, educator and researcher.
Rather than simply covering what is happening in the game, OBG has spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand how Entropia actually works, and increasingly, trying to put some hard data behind it.
His channel covers the practical side of Entropia Universe: guides for new and experienced players, hunting, missions, equipment, events, updates and the occasional deeper dive into the mechanics behind the game.
The Skills Project
One of the more interesting pieces of work OBG has been pursuing is his research into Entropia Universe's skill system.
Skills are fundamental to Entropia. They increase as players perform activities, contribute to professions, and ultimately determine what players can do and what equipment they can effectively use.
But understanding exactly how those numbers translate into progression is considerably more complicated.
OBG has been working hard towards collecting real player data to better understand skill gains from actual gameplay, particularly the relationship between activity, skill gains and progression. And ultimately, what skills are actually worth and whether they can be quantified as returns.
That means this isn't simply someone looking at the skill window and writing down what it says. The goal is to build a useful body of evidence from repeated observations and player data.
It's the sort of work that has historically been done piecemeal by the Entropia community. There are long-running community efforts to establish how individual skills contribute to professions, with players contributing their own skill and profession data to work out the underlying relationships.
OBG is continuing that tradition, but with the tools and recording capabilities available today.
Follow the research
If you're interested in seeing the work rather than just reading about it, OBG's channel is the best place to start.
His catalogue includes dedicated videos on skill gains from hunting, skill research updates, and other experiments and guides around Entropia's mechanics.
Old Bloke Gaming on YouTube
He has also been building out the Entropia Vault, a reference project covering equipment, upgrades, skills and other areas of the universe.
The Entropia Vault
For anyone interested in understanding Entropia beyond simply playing it, this is the interesting bit.
The game generates an enormous amount of data.
The question is what we can learn from it when someone actually starts collecting it.
Thanks for your efforts mate!