LRRcast - Post Desert Bus AskLRR

[Graham]

Cameron, Graham and James join you this week as they answer all your Desert Bus question, just one short week after we ended this years run.

[Cardshark]

How do we recover from it? Personally, I look at my (now nearly empty) bank account, pass out, and sleep for a few days. For the children!

[MagisterMystax]

I was thinking about the often-made prediction that the totals will plateau at some point, and I'm not sure they necessarily will. The amount of money in circulation certainly won't be barrier - not only because it's about a billion times more than we have ever collected, but also because it grows far faster than Desert Bus. If you look at the past totals, it doesn't look like we grow by a percentage each year, but by an absolute amount, namely about 50-100k. Only DB5 and DB8 made bigger jumps than that, which might be the result of major technical leaps forward (DB5) and moving to a non-crappy location (DB8). Since considerably more than 100k enters the economy each year from inflation alone, we'll never catch up even if Desert Bus is still around when the Sun goes red giant.

A much more important limit than the economy is the number of people watching. In fact, I expect the increasing totals are mainly the result of an increasing audience. As long as LRR keeps making videos and streams and people thus keep discovering DB through them, I don't think we're likely to lose more viewers between two years than we gained.

[hacofo]

Let's hope DBX won't have to face that problem.
And I guess there will be a lot of things that will making it worth to save a few bucks every month for the donation Budget next year.

For me a year without a new highscore would be a bit disappointing but won't take away from the overall enjoyment and the cause behind DB.

But I guess we won't have to face that till DB XIV or higher.

[Lord Chrusher]

One slight drawback to draw back to the fixed shifts is that if you can only watch at certain times of day, you tend to see some people more than others. Some of this may be due to the fact that living in Australia I was used to watching what is now Night Watch and Zeta Shift where as now that I live in the UK I mostly watched Dawn Guard and Alpha Flight this year.

However, I think this is more than offset by the benefits to the Desert Bus crew and volunteers of being on the same schedule though out the run. When I was a volunteer at last year's Desert Bus, part of my feedback was to avoid having people switch schedule during the run.