CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

Well... the flush happens at 2-minute intervals, so they likely held it for 2 hours + 2 minutes until the next flush caught them.

But for some reason, the amulets aren't getting picked back up after being dropped like this... hmm...

No, actually, that part actually does seem to be working.  It looks like there simply aren't enough non-amulet players around to pick them up (everyone keeps getting pulled into amulet games, making them ineligible to pick up one of the free-floating amulets).

You should only see that button if you're currently holding the amulet.

Otherwise, you just play any game for stakes of $3 or under, and you may randomly get pulled to challenge one of the amulet-holders.

Josh, yeah, I think it could work to pull a player away from a game that's about to begin.  A random delay would be needed before picking a such a game to pull players away from, of course.

You're right that if the amulet holder is shown the stakes at the start, higher stakes will have a greater chance of scaring them into leaving the game and dropping the amulet.  But won't higher stakes also be less likely to find a joiner, so be less likely to end up in an amulet game?  I.e., it wouldn't be a viable strategy to propose high stakes ($3!!!) in hopes of scaring the amulet holder, because the game would sit there, unjoined, and thereby be ineligible to be pulled into an amulet game (according to your suggestion).

Well, it sorta seems like any game where you can reliably force a draw is inherently broken for the purpose of this discussion.  So, let's use Hex as the example here.

If you are playing the optimal strategy as player 1, you can do no better than to play that strategy.  There's nothing about a weak opponent that is worth exploiting.  A win is a win.

I agree that non-binary win states are part of the picture here.

But with the tribute, two Nash Eq CM players will both lose money.  The only way to win money is to draw your opponent out into sub-optimal play through sub-optimal play.

Well, I guess it's the same as Checkers, then, were the opt-vs-opt states is a draw, and the only way to win is to play sub-optimally and draw your opponent out into sub-optimal play.  In Checkers, you'd be hoping that they would be trying to exploit you for better than a draw, and thus play sub-optimally, and thereby open themselves up to exploitation.

Took a long walk and thought about this.

As Josh has pointed out, amulet players will WANT to play as low stakes as they can to find the weakest opponents.  And also, if a win is a win, why risk more money than necessary?  So, that's another strike against tiered stakes that the amulet-holder can pick from.  They'd mostly pick from the lowest tier, looking for the weakest opponents. This would push non-amulet holders toward the lowest tier as well. 

I hear the suggestion about different tiers for different amulets, but that puts gold amulets more out of reach.

Rising stakes, based on how much you've won while holding the amulet so far, is really good... It would have to be a random, unknown stake within that range to avoid collusion.  You're about to play a random-stake game where the stake is less than $1.24, the total you've won while holding it so far.

The longer you win with it, the riskier it becomes to keep playing with it.  But you're only risking what you've won on it so far.

Oh, crap, this would make the amulet games slowly rise in stakes, system-wide, over time.  The following numbers ignore the tribute for simplicity.  If you play a 62-cent game (half of your $1.24 max) and lose, then your opponent has now WON 62-cents on that amulet.  Which means their limit will START at 62-cents and go up from there.  Say they win three games, averaging stakes of 31, 46, and 70 (because the stake cap rises after each win).  Their stake cap is now $2.09, and their next game will have average stakes of $1.04.  If their opponent wins, they will START with a stake cap of $1.04.

Deliberations on this topic are now approaching the three week mark.

I think that a fixed stake cap for a random match-up for the amulet holder, known to all, and the same for all, is the cleanest solution.  Maybe $5 is to high.  How about $3?  Remember, you can gain the amulet at lower stakes, but to keep playing with it, you must have at least $3 in your account.  You've got the football.  Time to money-up and run with it.

We could also TELL the amulet-holder what the stakes are once the game starts.  So they have the opportunity to leave and drop the amulet if the stakes are too high.  They could also leave half-way through the game if they feel like they've lost too much.  A game of chicken.

DAMN YOU, COLLUSION!  Imagine the design freedoms that would be possible if collusion wasn't a factor!

Three weeks of my life have been sacrificed upon your altar, cruel collusion.

Yeah, it was out because it would motivate players to alter their balances in order to control their amulet game stakes.  You know, most amulet holders would want to rack wins on penny games (to find easy opponents).  So they'd dump their balance down really low to ensure that 5% of their balance was a penny.  That would also help them collude, perhaps, because the games they were joining would no longer be random.

And dumping your balance is pretty easy.  You don't need to pay a $3 check fee.  Just dump the money by throwing a game to an alt account.

With a fixed range for ALL players, no player has any control over their amulet stakes.

The rising stake thing is a cool idea, but the whole point of this discussion is to let amulets pass around without collusion being used to rack up amulet points.

From the server source:

$cm_accountHmacVersion = "13";

That number only changes when protocol changes completely break the old version.  It turns out that v13 clients can still connect to the v15 server without breaking.

Once I add the amulet stuff, both version numbers will go up to 16, because older clients won't be able to connect.

Yes, the server SUGGESTS that you upgrade to v15, but a modified client could ignore that, or an already-connected client that's still connected during the upgrade process.  When the hash changes, old client messages will start becoming DENIED.

But you're correct that it's ascii for those numbers, and your SSL pipe above should be correct if you put the 13 in there.

Yeah, the extra bet-0 steps when all-in have been removed in source and will be released in v16.

Josh, if your goal during the tournament is to make money.... hmm... I guess any amulet structure that encourages low stakes won't be good for you.  But you would be a counter-example for your money pool idea.  If a good player played loads of high stakes games against low-stakes players and won most of them, they would suck the money pool dry.

You're right about the downward pressure on player balances.

What if it was just "a random stake of $5 or less." and you had to have at least $5 in your balance to play an amulet game?  Maybe $5 is too high in this case.  Then you'd have NO control over your stakes, there'd still be a whole range of low-stakes games on offer.  Maybe it could be a random stake of $2 or less.

The cool thing about this is that if you have a winning streak while holding an amulet, your balance will be growing, so it's not like you'll go deep into financial ruin while holding it.

Yeah, this is how it's supposed to work.  I'm trying to do something new here with the betting that hasn't been done before.  The fact that the lower bettor gets more information tends to exert a downward pressure on the bets, but that's an interesting counter-balance to the upward pressures on betting that also exist in any betting game.

No, I'm pretty sure there are boards that offer forced wins to one player and not the other.  But you can use turn 1 and 2 picks to NOT let yourself get painted into that corner.

It's interesting to think about how there's no skill cap in CM as compared to perfect information games.

In those game, a perfect strategy exists, and after you master that, you can get no better.  Hypothetically, of course, because for most games beyond tic-tac-toe, the perfect strategy is unknown.

Here, even if you discover and play the Nash equilibrium strategy (and one does exist), you still are not maximizing the amount you win against a non-equilibrium player, so you can STILL get better.  It seems like the dance in donkeyspace can recurse into infinite layers of complexity, as you develop a strategy to exploit the strategy that is supposed to exploit the strategy that your opponent thinks you are using, etc.