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RE: Marketplace Support
It was a field on the web page, and I wondered what it did (actually, from the name, I had a pretty good idea). I've not fully "cracked" it, just looked at a few dozen examples and saw the pattern, then looked at a few more to verify it was simply a sequence number. One of the things I do is track how various breedables are doing; KittyCatS is just one of several. Offspring production rates are a large part of that. I can't track them if I can't count them, so I look for something which does. In this case, it was the catid field.
You may think a 1-of-16 hexadecimal value is obscure. But, I'm a programmer, I work in Base-16 a LOT. Admittedly, it's a bit odd to use both Base-16 and Base-10 in the same element. As a programmer, though, I can hypothesize reasons. This scheme, for example, is meant to shuffle the record keys in the SQL database. We usually do that for performance reasons and it has nothing at all to do with system security. In fact, in researching the scheme, the references to this scheme I could find admitted that it was useless. As a cryptographic hash, it's too trivial. And a key hash, it's too regular. But, it's easy to implement and it's discussed because, every few years, someone "invents" it again.
You seem to be laboring under the false impression that I think it's somehow "bad" that KittyCatS has produced millions of boxes, and made a lot of money as a result. Just the opposite: I applaud their success, and wish them more of the same.
As to breedables bringing in "good money" .. that's a yes-and-no thing (which is why I track them). A few do well. Some flash and fade. But there are a LOT of breedable products out there which never made it, some from companies which had other, successful, breedables.
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