CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

And I completely understand this concern. I think gambling in general is a tool used to manipulate people into parting with their hard earned money. But playing Cordial Minuet is not gambling per say. There are some similarities, but in the end Cordial Minuet is a fair game of skill. Cordial Minuet is not the first attempt to create a fair game of skill that you play for money, and it is not the first to fail either. Every attempt at making this kind of thing work that I have ever seen has failed. And the problem is always the same. When it becomes clear to someone that they are losing money, they go back to playing other things. There is no possibility of miraculous reversal of fortune, and the longer you play, the more you lose. Why would anyone play a game like that? Well, the only answer I can think of, is that they would if they were paying to play the game itself, and not for the sake of making money. The game has to stand on it's own merits as something people are willing to pay to participate in. The lure of profitability can be part of the equation, but it really has to be emphasized that the majority of people who play will not make money, or else people will feel cheated. I think that's what happened during the launch tournament to an extent. People were lured in with the promise of making money playing a game online, only to be given the bait and switch when they realized they were being taken by the skilled players from the beta who had much more time to build experience with the game than they did. Honestly, if I had started playing during the launch period, I probably would have been intimidated by the level of play and quit too. So I really believe that what this amounts to is a basic marketing problem. Unless you can sell Cordial Minuet as a game that is worth spending money to keep playing, the game, by definition, cannot be successful, because it is the type of game where the majority of players will lose money. If you don't sell the game that way, you are being fundamentally dishonest.

Actually, I don't think the problem is that people don't want to spend money at all. The problem is, people don't want to keep spending money. The game is structured so that once you put your money in, there is nothing that encourages you to ever buy in again. You have to think about this from a psychological perspective, and think about what motivates people to spend money. The way casinos do it is to make money seem worthless. That tiny bit of change in your pocket seems insignificant compared to the ridiculous sums of money you might gain by gambling, so why wouldn't you want to gamble down to your last penny? But that doesn't work in Cordial Minuet, because ironically, Cordial Minuet is a fair game, and a fair game with fair prizes isn't nearly as compelling as an unfair game with ludicrous prizes. With casino style gambling, you can think to yourself, it doesn't really matter how much I lose, because I'll just make it back when I hit it big. In reality that almost never happens, but that is the mentality casinos use to keep the money flowing. But in Cordial Minuet, when you lose, all you can think is, crap, how much work am I going to have to do to make my money back?

Cordial Minuet essentially created a virtual tug of war for a fixed sum of money. Players who bought in and lost never had any motivation to buy back in again, because they believed they would never make back their money. What the fixed buy-in system does, is to change the mentality of how people play. Instead of thinking of things like, I am only going to buy in once and I will work my way up from the bottom, a player should be thinking that they will spend $5 to be able to play for a month, and any money they make is a bonus. It's a subtle difference, but it's an important one, and a necessary one to maintain any real money game. You need to keep money flowing into the system by reinforcing the idea that your buy-in is the cost of playing, not a precious cash reserve that you must never allow to become empty. You buy in every month at a loss, and you try you best to get ahead, but you can still have fun if you don't, and it only cost $5. That is the way people need to think for this to work. Otherwise, they will just lose money, lose interest, and stop playing.

They will spend the money because they have to spend it to play. You can't have a real money game that no one is willing to actually spend money to play. If Cordial Minuet isn't compelling enough to get people to keep spending to keep playing, it had no chance in the first place. But the nice thing about the fixed buy-in system is that you already know you are buying in a loss, so you have to play in order to justify the cost of the buy-in. There no point in buying in if you don't play, so you know that the people who buy in during any given period will usually be active players. Look at it this way, if Jason could convince even two people to buy in and play during the first month the system was in place, he'd already be making more than he did in the previous month.

I still think that the lack of a community aspect is why Cordial Minuet is struggling so much right now. Without being able to interact with the person you are playing with, the game is nothing but staring at numbers and calculating things in your head. It gets really tedious if you do that too much. If Cordial Minuet had a chat feature built into the client, I might not have given it up.

Either way, I think your video was really cool and I would like to see more of these! I still enjoy Cordial Minuet as a game, even if I've decided I don't want to play it, and I tend to watch "let's play" videos more than I actually play games anyway. Maybe Cordial Minuet might find new life by becoming a spectator "sport". It worked for poker.

A simple substitution cypher isn't very hard to break... In cases with a sufficiently long message, you usually don't even need a hint to break it. I wonder if there isn't more to this then meets the eye. In the first place, we don't really have a message to decode yet, do we?

If nothing else, it might help the game to gain more exposure. Players could learn the game and practice in Steam, and move on to the full version when they are ready. It worked for online poker.

I have to say though, the thoughts you expressed in this thread mirror what I have been thinking for a while now. I actually have had some discussions in the chat, where I explained why I thought this game would have difficulty ever building up a large player base. And from what I've seen so far, things are not looking good. The player count has already dropped significantly from what it was during the peak of the launch, and I have serious doubts it will ever recover. The way I put it in the chat, was that the game just doesn't offer anything for casual players. If you are not making money, it's not fun, and you will probably quit before you lose very much. No one wants to deposit much either, because there seems to be no correlation between how much you deposit and how much you can make. In fact, it's the players who have deposited the most who have lost the most. I'm not really sure if there is any way to fix these issues.

So the contest is starting this Wednesday, correct? I was wondering if there was any sort of plan in place to help publicize the game before the contest starts. If you search for Cordial Minuet in Google right now, most of the top results were things published last year. I'm just worried that the contest will start before word has enough time to spread that the game is officially launching.

I actually suggested this is the last tournament thread... It completely fixes the collusion issue with dropping amulets, and still allows you to not lose points if you get the amulet during a downtime.

That would still allow for collusion though, although it would be limited to the total number of accounts you have access to. Dropping amulets is really only something that should be done when you are ready to stop playing, or you can't find matches to the point where the cost/reward of keeping the amulet is not in your favor. If this is not true, you shouldn't have any incentive to drop it. I really think that if you want to drop an amulet, you should not be able to pick up any amulet or participate in amulet matches for a certain period of time.

Actually though, I am also okay with just removing the drop amulet button. It seems like the most simple/obvious solution, and as long as there aren't too many really bad downtimes during the launch period, the problem of being stuck with an amulet and not being able to find any games shouldn't be too bad. It also incentives people who win amulets when lots of other people are playing, which is probably a good thing.

Except the non-amulet holder wouldn't even know if they were playing an amulet game, so it probably wouldn't be much of a deterrent. For the non-amulet holder, even if they don't win as many points to start with, getting the amulet in the first place is the most important thing.

The biggest problem with penny games, is that it puts an uneven amount of pressure on the amulet holder. The amulet holder is under a lot of pressure to play conservatively and not lose, and putting against someone who doesn't think they have anything significant at stake makes for a very unbalanced game. You could just tell the other player they were in an amulet match, but this could create other problems, such as the other player stalling for time to spite the amulet holder when they were losing (or even in cases where they weren't, just to be a troll). I think that if you want to play for an amulet, you need to be willing to risk an amount you actually care about losing. It doesn't have to be $1.00, even $0.10 would be better than nothing. But if a player doesn't have an amount they care about at stake, it may encourage them to try to exploit the contest even if profiting from doing so is unlikely (because why not if the contest only lasts a short time and they have no other chance of winning). You need to have some sort of deterrent against that, or players attempting to exploit the contest structure may end up taking over the game and ruining it for people trying to play seriously. That is definitely not what you want the first impression of your game to be.

I have some other reservations about how the tournament went as well. While I think most of them did stem from the fact that there were just not enough players for the contest structure to really work the way it was supposed to, I still think it's possible they could present themselves in the real launch tournament. Keep in mind, if there is any downtime, and I mean any at all, where the player count drops below the total number of amulets times two, collusion and other strategies designed to exploit the system become viable. There are two changes that I think you should consider making to prevent this. One is to ensure that amulets are only dropped in proportion to the number of non-amulet games currently being played. So if all games are currently amulet games, or there are no other games being played, no amulets may be dropped. The higher the number of non-amulet games that are required, the more protection it will provide against collusion, but I'm not sure what the best amount would be. The other is to ensure that amulets are dropped randomly, and not in order of value. Dropping the amulets in order of value means that it is possible to quickly play a game, drop an amulet to bypass the amulet game system, and quickly win it back before anyone else gets a chance to pick it up. Random amulet drops would help to prevent this.

Edit: Or maybe there should just be an invisible timer put in place after you drop an amulet, that doesn't allow you to pick up another amulet for a period of time? That might be a more elegant solution. I think the key is just to make sure people don't exploit the ability to drop amulets...

One small bug I noticed is that right after you get an amulet and click okay on the "you received an amulet" screen, and then click on the deposit button, when you exit the deposit screen it will display the "you received an amulet" screen again. Probably not a big deal or anything, but I thought you might want to know about it.

I think Jason is right that it's really time to move on and just go with a plan. I know everyone here has their own ideas about what will create the best possible tournament, but at a certain point you just have to say it's good enough and move on. For what it's worth, I think the current plan isn't perfect, and I am concerned incentivising higher stakes play so soon could decimate the new player base. But then again, it's completely true that if this game can't attract new players willing to lose significant amount of money in exchange for the opportunity to win even larger amounts, the game is doomed in the long term either way. Maybe increasing the stakes during the tournament is just what it takes to break the mentality I was talking about that has artificially inflated the value on money in this game. At any rate, I am really excited about the official launch and all the new opportunities that will bring, and I wouldn't want to see it delayed any longer for the sake of a debate that really has no definite right answer.

Personally, I've found that the existing time limits are right about where they should be. Sometimes I run short of time and have to make a hasty decision without completely thinking things through, and sometimes the correct choice is so obvious it only takes me the amount of time I need to move the selectors. But I think the average amount of time I use for picking is around 50% of the time limit, which is pretty much ideal. For betting I usually use a lot less than the available time, although there are times (such as deciding whether to call an all in raise) where I really need the full time to make a good decision. So overall, I think the limits are right about where they should be. If they were decreased, I know I would have some serious problem fully analyzing a lot of board layouts in time, and that would increase the incentive to use automated tools to help me make decisions.