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I just tried running the 32-bit binary on 64-bit linux. The same "No such file" error. Installing libc6-i386 fixed that error, but then there were errors finding libgl.so.1, even though I know it's installed. I think this is because the binary was linked against 32-bit libgl, so I'd have to install 32-bit versions of all the shared libraries that the binary uses.
Way easier to just build it from source.
Yeah, the way it works is that games are counted when then end during the allotted time.
See the link above. There's some 32-bit compatibility libraries that need to be installed. Surprised they aren't included by default.
That's a misleading error message.
See this:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/133389/n … ile-exists
You're probably trying to run a 32-bit binary on a 64-bit system that doesn't have 32-bit support installed.
Oh, no, as an amulet guardian, I'm going to be playing with my real money.
So if I did go that route of electing 36.... real money play would be part of the deal!
But I'm currently leaning toward it just being me for a bunch of reasons.
Yeah, it's counting you in that number, lonely soul.
Wait, what's my alias, josh?
Yeah, I meant PDT, and I fixed the time range on the server settings to be GMT -7 instead of GMT -8. That was my mistake.
This contest will run from 9am to Noon US PDT time (Los Angeles time) on Friday, April 3, 2015.
I will play the game during that time using a secondary account that I have created. I will both create and join games at a variety of stakes and try to behave as mysteriously as possible, in general. I'm pretty mysterious already, so I should have no problem with that.
Players score 1 point for each net coin that they win in games against me, and lose 1 point for each net coin that they lose in games against me. Leaving a game with 103 coins means you won 3 net coins, while leaving with 95 coins means you lost 5 net coins.
At the end of the contest, the top three players will win prizes:
$100
$50
$25
The leaderboard for the contest will appear here:
http://cordialminuet.com/gameServer/ser … name=test1
After the contest ends, prizes will be paid as direct payments into the game balances of the winners.
In the case of a tie for a given place, the player with the oldest account wins the tie.
NOTE: this contest is intentionally short. It is not intended to be fair to people who work daytime jobs or live in other timezones. It is simply meant to test the new code for bugs.
Aside from the new contest stuff, there's an active player count in the client.
Change log is here:
Also, though you wouldn't want to play your own dummy accounts, collusion between friends who are both trying to play me is still likely. Like, Jere and Josh could talk in the chat room and determine if they are playing each other. If they are, they are certainly not playing me, so they should quit their game and try joining again.
Still, that's a brand of collusion that I can live with (does not give free points to anyone), and it is completely impossible to prevent.
So, as I implement this server-side, which as Jere predicted involves very little code, I'm noticing something funny.
First, we have to track both coins won from me and lost to me (the net) so that people don't play recklessly against me. That means that people can go negative, and negative scores will show on the leaderboard.
But obviously, some players will never play me. They don't have a 0 score, they just have no score at all. So they don't beat the people with negative score, because they never played me. Though someone who played me once and tied me would have a legitimate 0 score.
The result of this is that someone could win an amulet by LOSING coins to me. This seems strange, because in terms of their game balance, they would be better off not playing me at all, but here they are on the leaderboard.
This is only an issue if less than 36 people have a positive score against me. (I'm not wedded to 36 amulets, by the way, but it's a good placeholder number). That actually seems pretty likely if I play well.
Unless anyone with a negative score against me simply cannot win an amulet. Then maybe I hand out less than 36. Maybe I cycle back through the list handing out the rest, and some people get two? That seems like a good solution.
CHOKE ON MY BOOMSTICK
Well, I don't think I could chose games randomly. I mean, I could use dice or something, but baring that, I am human and it is my money that's at stake in each game. I would just be playing normally. Also, I can't just pick random games to join, because then players who wanted an amulet would never join games themselves. Of course, I have to BOTH create games AND join games. And how can I create games randomly? No, I'd be naming stakes on my whim.
You know, there have been times in the past where players were trying to play a certain opponent or trying to avoid a certain opponent. Thinking you were playing Judge Doorman when you were really playing each other. Or trying to bait someone with stakes. Or that time that Nate put up the $6666.66 stake for days.
So, that's a normal part of the game. The stake game. The opponent game. Fishing.
What stakes are "Jason bait" that I won't be able to resist clicking on? And what stakes will I be proposing? And then there's the meta of other players trying to mimic me so that they can trick other players into thinking that they're playing me.
Also, last time I checked, I was really bad at the game. Or maybe I'm making that up. Who is Jeopardy Alcohol anyway? All I said was that I knew him... Does Judge Doorman really exist? Doesn't that story sound too good to be true? Andy Kaufman lives.
Well, likewise, someone could bully me and walk away with a few chips.
Essentially, whatever strategies work to make money in the main game would work here.
The problem with martingale is that Doorman would have to know that I'm willing to ride the elevator up with him. I could get off on any floor, and it might not even be me. Though at some point, he could learn that it's me by watching Canto. Still, there's no guarantee that it's me continuing to ride up with him.
But yes, I can see that it would be discouraging if dollars counted. If not theoretically (because of amplified risks of big negative amulet scores), then emotionally.
As far as a maximum stake.... well, try me.
Well, I was thinking there would be no stake cap.
The game would function as it normally does in every respect.
Hours of the day or something like that could be good for spacing out the amulets.
The question is whether Nate winning $1000 from me would put him in the lead by $1000 or only put him in the lead by 85 chips.
It seems like counting chips only, and not dollars, would change the game and encourage people to play lots of penny games... well, not if people thought I wasn't playing penny games at the moment.
If people felt like it was probably me proposing a $50 game that was on the board at the moment, and if we were only counting chips, I think everyone would avoid the $50 game, because it counts for the same number of points as a penny game, and there's a 5000x opportunity cost. Well, not really an opportunity cost, but a risk of loss. There's also a chance of winning $50 in addition to winning points toward the amulet. But... why not wait for a penny game against me? Or maybe take the chance, because you know that the penny games against me would be swamped with people trying?
It almost seems like, by making "dollars not count," we might give rich players an even bigger advantage, because they're the only ones who can afford to risk $50 to get 85 points. Whereas if you're risking $50 to get 5000x points, it's much more affordable.
Also, keep in mind that I can play however I want. So if I'm in a $1000 game with Doorman, I might bully him for the first few rounds, taking 10 chips, which is $100, and then leave. He'd then be down $40, both in terms of balance and in terms of amulet score. At that point, he'd be wishing he played a penny game against me, if dollars counted.
Well... you all don't know my name on the leaderboards, do you?
I just did a forum search for it, and my alias has never been mentioned here.
If there was some kind of flashy display in-game after playing me, people would try to use Canto to figure it out collectively, which would be a cool meta.
And then whenever I would come online and start playing, there would be a collective HE'S HERE! moment.
Yes, it does solve all of the other problems too (no longer need fixed stakes, or stake caps... is that Jason trying to bait us with a $25 game?... no longer need random delays of any kind.... player behavior isn't altered at all, besides playing more... essentially, the game is played exactly how it's been played.... heck, I've been playing myself from time to time, so even that would be the same.... also, we've already had HE'S HERE moments in the past when people were waiting for judge doorman to come online, so that's business as usual too...).
Also, I just realized that chips lost must count against positive chips won. Otherwise, if losses didn't matter, there would be a motivation to play a risky aggressive style in hopes of racking up some big wins that would add up.
If I play really well, the winners could actually be the ones who lose the least against me!
Also, there's something a little strange about counting just chips and not money. So, you could lose 100 chips in a $100 game against me, and then win 180 chips in two penny games against me, and then you'd be up by 80 points? But you're out over $99.94. So that seems to change the game somewhat, where the money doesn't matter. When people were trying to play against Judge Doorman, they were probably playing very differently on the $1 games vs the $500 games. Also, clearly Doorman himself was at least trying to play differently.
And I'd want to preserve that... maybe you'd be throwing several penny games to lure someone up into 10-cent games, but if you cared about the amulet and chips counted over dollars, you wouldn't want to do that.
Well, I guess even if we were counting dollars, you wouldn't want to do that, because the thrown penny games could be against me, and the 10-cent games might not be. Of course, when counting dollars, thrown penny games don't really hurt you much.
It's interesting that having dollars count doesn't necessarily privilege rich players, because playing high stakes against me just means their swings could be bigger. If you play against me in that one rare $50 game that I play and lose, you would never catch up if I never played at that stake level again.
There would clearly have to be some kind of leaderboard for this...
I'm still waiting for a bit more lightning here about how the amulets fit thematically into this. Are there still 36 of them? Are they just 1st - 36th place, which is kinda boring? Or do they represent something else? Times of day, stake levels that I'm playing, numbers that you stuck me with during the match? It would be interesting if you could still score separately on each amulet somehow, by playing games against me.
Jere, I now really appreciate how you baited me perfectly with the whole "walk in the park" lead-in!
It's funny... I was logging into the forums today thinking... man, when is one of the smart people in the forums going to find a solution to this mess and save me?
And there it was.
But wait, were you joking? It doesn't matter if you were!
(Also, by "suck it up and do it," I didn't mean play for non-stop for 120 hours... I meant play quite a bit each day at mysterious times.)
HOLY MOTHER OF DUNG!
I screamed with joyful laughter when I read this.
This is perfect.
Isn't taking a walk in the park the best thing for lightning bolts like this?
So... details would need to be ironed out.
First of all, how am I going to stop playing Rust for five days straight?
More seriously, is it the most total money won from me? Or maybe most chips won? I don't think the "last person standing" rule should matter here. Would losses against me count as negative points?
The whole "RECEIVING AMULET" and amulet point count display in the client could be salvaged so that the top 36 players would each hold an amulet currently and their "points won against me so far" could be displayed.
Or something... would be cool to preserve that exciting moment in the game of HOLY CRAP, I GOT AN AMULET. Maybe right after you win from me, there's some amulet display...
Anyway, beating the creator of the game, anonymously and without being sure if it, fits the occult themes of the game perfectly. It is also a great PR story.
There is some concern about my exhaustion/sanity/health.
Maybe there could be some way to elect 36 "high council" members who would each be defending one amulet during the week. Of course, that would make you all (Jere, et al.) ineligible to win an amulet, which would suck for you.
Yeah, I guess I would just have to suck it up and do it.
3. Fake Name 272
4. Caravan Distuber 272
Caravan, that's just laziness on my part. It's easiest to just loop through the list in the code and ignore the ties, and I figure that for the leaderboard, it really doesn't matter. For the tournament code (long ago we ran tournaments, will do so again after launch), I fixed it so that there can be two third-place people, etc., because it really matters there.
Josh:
Sorry that I failed to respond to that idea.
In my experience (from the Castle Doctrine), checking for cheating manually is a nightmare. If people know that cheating is possible, they'll report stuff to me all the time (an anonymous game makes it even worse). Most of the time, these will be false reports, but each will have to be investigated. This takes time, and it's easy for ME to see patterns where there are none. In TCD, I actually falsely accused someone of cheating at least once... that was a pretty horrible experience for me... and the accused!
And imagine if I get no reports. Do I just blindly mail out 36 amulets? No, I'd probably want to check each one. Combing through logs and history 36 times...
Last night in Rust, some dude sky-leaped into my house, sky-leaped back out again, and ran away at 10x normal speed. How's that VAC working out, Valve? Should I report this guy? To who? Who would check it out?
As a computer-science guy, I learned early on not to try for "work around" solutions to impossible problems (the halting problem and all that). I remember some interview with Steve Jobs where he said, "We've got some of the very smartest people working on this here at Apple, and they're saying that DRM is fundamentally impossible." Somebody gets it, yes!
The Castle Doctrine cemented this for me---I'll never make a multiplayer game with sensitive client-side code again. Cordial Minuet is cheat-proof (assuming that there aren't bugs). End of story.
It turns out that Elo is pretty exploitable with multiple accounts. Yes, the amount you win by beating the same opponent over and over goes down over time (as your Elo rises and theirs falls), BUT it never goes to zero. So accomplices and bots can achieve whatever Elo they want by playing hundreds of games and getting a little Elo boost each time.
Of course, there's little motivation to "cheat" the Elo leaderboard as it stands. But when prizes are involved, there's plenty of motivation.
Yeah... but it also seems to change the game quite a bit for the non-amulet holders.
Enforcing slower games is interesting, but also weird. Some games are legitimately faster. We wouldn't want to encourage slow playing (people would be motivated to do that to get more amulet points). Finally, though it would slow down colluders, it still wouldn't deal with the fundamental issue (unlimited number of points to be had with no skill).
I've also thought about queuing.... but does that mean the non-amulet people would be waiting around too? Like, they would know they were in the queue and be watching a timer too?
Waiting for certain people to be ready to play seems fragile and messy.
I end up thinking in terms of a kind of false conception of what's going on. Thinking of all these amulet-holders waiting for games, and all these other people joining games, and if we mark certain people as queued, they'll just pair up, and there will be nice bounds on wait times. BUT, the reality is that most of the time, people are in-game, with no bound on how long that game will last. In fact, a closer picture to reality is one where there's never more than one person waiting for a game (the odd person), and there aren't really loads of new games starting up all the time.
The false conception is "chaos, with a flurry of activity." But even with quite a few more players, that chaos isn't usually realized.
Well, there's no way to stop two buddies from playing each other completely. The problem is that if they exclusively play each other repeatedly to gain loads of false points. Playing each other once is okay.
But multiply "two buddies" into 25 false accounts, which is easy to achieve with a few trips to the gas station for visa gift cards.
With that in mind, Josh, I though about it for many hours this morning before I finally made that post. I worry that all of your fixes can be bypassed by using more than just two accounts. Yes, fixing the "drop amulet and repeat" stuff is easy enough. But fixing the threat of someone with the amulet playing against dummy accounts is really hard.
Remember, you only fire up your dummy accounts when you get the amulet that you want. That's a rare event. Maybe a once-in-the-contest event. So, those dummy accounts would have no strikes against them. They wouldn't have been playing too many games already, or playing X games per minute.
The other problem is that, as the amulet-holder, you control the timing. You decide to play an amulet game and when to play it. That means your colluding accounts have an advantage over any other account in getting paired with you, no matter what we do, for the simple fact that they know WHEN to try the most and no one else does. They're not going to be in the middle of another game. They're not going to be on lunch break.
So... you create an amulet game... maybe you wait for a moment when there are very few other games waiting. Then you start your pairs of dummy accounts joining each other. To bypass any of your limits, just use each pair of dummy accounts once. If you had 24 accounts, that'd be 12 chances in a row. Or if Josh's first suggested limit is in place, tracking only pairs, have one dummy account cycle through playing all 23 others in a row.
Then you play a 5 minute game against the dummy (to bypass any short-game blocking methods), and also to reset all of your timers, Josh, so that the 12 dummy pairs could be ready to go again.
Unless your timers are extremely long (like, longer than the 2-hour force-drop window), the amulet holder could play a waiting game with a stable of dummy accounts and rack up unlimited points. And putting really long limits in place for pairs of players would create a frustrating situation for other players (playing the same person repeatedly at some stake is pretty normal---why am I never put into an amulet game??)
And if you did the obvious thing of blocking an amulet-holder from winning too many points from a given non-amulet account... well, having multiple dummy accounts obviously bypasses that.
The one fix that would work is to pick the opponent for the amulet-holder ourselves, based on no timing that they or their colluders could control (storeroom's suggestion). But that means the amulet holder would have to wait for the chosen opponent to be ready to play, which would be a pretty terrible experience for the amulet holder. Imagine the case where the chosen opponent is done playing for the day, so they're never ready to play the amulet-holder. There'd be some timeout (15 minutes was suggested) and then we'd have to pick someone else and wait AGAIN, making the wait even worse for the amulet-holder.
My spouse had a really funny, perverse suggestion today: A contest with the tagline "May the best cheater win."
Looking back on my original post about a launch contest... wow, that was on February 20.
We've gone round and round, and it seems like there's no structures that's not either vulnerable to collusion or burdened with too many nasty anti-collusion side-effects.
In my original post, I was kinda speculating that it probably wasn't a solvable problem, but willing to punt for a solution one more time.
Well, that seemingly harmless punt turned into quite a long excursion down the rabbit hole.... and yeah, it doesn't seem like there's a bottom down here.
If the threat model is one person with 25 visa gift cards... it would be really hard to stop them from racking 25 easy wins while holding the amulet (5000 points) without an opponent-matching system so onerous that it would ruin the play experience for non-colluding amulet holders.
Even with "lots of active players," the reality is that active games take a while to finish, so the colluder has way more control over timing than I thought they did. Random delays, etc., only help a little bit when the colluder can play many games in rapid succession, always putting them in the right place at the right time. Meanwhile, non-colluders are still in the middle of their real games, unavailable as opponents for the amulet-holder.
In order to make it very likely that the amulet-holder plays a non-colluder, we must have the amulet holder wait a long time for one of these "real" players to become available (assuming a threat model where the colluder can't completely swamp the game with 50%+ fake accounts, picking a random active player and waiting for their availability means we pick a non-colluder most of the time).
So, it seems best to kill this idea and move on.
I've got all my wax carving supplies here, and I still like the idea of unique amulets as prizes.
As we discussed long ago, almost all of the "most X during the week" metrics are easily exploitable by multiple accounts or bots. Less exploitable metrics, like most unique opponents, are still exploitable by bots (not to mention frustrating for human players who can't control who the uniqueness of their opponents anyway).
A very boring option is just a straight-up random drawing for everyone who plays at least X games during the week. No purchase necessary, of course (would have to have a mail-in option for people to enter for free).
Maybe there are less boring options here...
This is a back-to-the-drawing-board moment for me.
On the bright side, it's good to realize this before the launch contest and not during or after. Which was the point of these test contests. There's no point in a test if the answer is known.
THANK YOU CARAVAN DISTURBER.
(You are aptly named.)
Seems like the important thing is full randomization when picking amulet challengers.
We can try to come up with some rule that would make is hard to exploit (using active game players, some timing mechanism, etc.) But in the end, what we really want is a mechanism that gives players NO avenue for control over their being picked.
So, why not mark players as amulet challengers (AC) randomly at some rate, and then when pulling players from starting games, only consider players that have been so marked.
Colluding accounts could still spam-start loads of games, but they would have no control over whether they were marked as an amulet challenger or not.
Of course, having loads of active collusion accounts increases your chances of one of your accounts being marked as an AC, but I don't think there's any way around that issue (even in a straight lottery to award amulets as prizes, multiple entries into the lottery would have an advantage).
In the end, this is still not a skill-free way to WIN an amulet (because you'd still have to win games while holding it).
The big problem here is not colluders having a better chance of getting picked for an amulet game by spam-starting games, but rather the threat of the those colluders working with the current amulet holder. If spam-starting will get you paired up with the amulet-holder, and you can then throw the game to the amulet holder, this would be a reliable way to feed the amulet-holder points.
Also, it seems like there's no way around keeping the amulet holder waiting longer in order to solve this problem. If there's some mechanism that allows an amulet holder to quickly get paired up, it seems that mechanism is going to be exploitable to control who the amulet holder pairs with.
Which makes this sound like quite a frustrating experience for the amulet holder... waiting around for some blessed opponent to be ready.... essentially not playing most of the time. Yuck.
I just paid the winners.