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And you're right that better point granularity would help with a lot of things here. It just makes it seem more complicated, even if it's not. I'd just have you lose 1 point per minute, and gain 100 points every time you're the last player standing.
Well, you can't control when you drop an amulet, right? I mean, most of the time, if you had it, you wouldn't WANT to drop it. If you only drop it after 2 hours of inactivity... it's not like that would be something you'd shoot for in order to drop it at a specific time.
If you lose a match, you don't drop it, but pass it to the person you lost to.
Are you suggesting that if your alt account gets it, you'd time out on purpose and try to pass it to your main account? But why would your alt ever get it? I can't imagine people using alts that way... actually playing loads of real games with them... might as well just play loads of games with your main account.
Unless you envision two friends, where A has racked up loads of points and B has not. If B gets the amulet, B may want to pass it to A by timing out and making sure A is the last player standing (against A's alt) before anyone else.
Any known, fixed number would just be beaten by a player using 2 times that number of alt accounts. For example, if we always pass it to the 10th player to be the last player standing, a player with 20 alts could ensure that they are the one picked.
Why not a random number? The Rth player to be the last player standing, where R is picked at random when the amulet is dropped? That feels too much like a lottery.
But n/2, where N is the current number of active games, is also a hidden value (players don't know how many games are active), so it's essentially just a random number, right? But it's not ACTUALLY a random number. We wouldn't use the word Random to describe it. Also, I think I would just use n, not n/2.
Daemon Gullet is pretty sweet... anagrams are a great idea!
How about:
Nu Metal Lodge
If a player only has 18 cents, then yeah, their amulet games would be capped at 1 cent. Fixing rules to handle this.
Also, if you notice, I do ship games.
One of my secrets is a "get er done" attitude about protocols and code structure. I almost never do major refactors.
Someone recently was shocked that the protocol for this game wasn't json. Are you kidding me? Like, even though NOTHING here is written in javascript, and we're not actually serializing javascript objects, I should implement a javascript object serializer for my protocol?
"But what if the protocol changes? What if you need to add new elements to a message? Everything will break!"
Umm... if the protocol changed, would I really want old clients blindly ignoring some new element that they don't understand? When the protocol changes, everyone gets a new client.
This isn't an open internet standard that I'm developing here...
Yeah, it was agile! :-)
Reveal step wasn't planned, so I had to add it later in a way that wouldn't break the rather-complex client logic.
Coin movement happens instantly on the server, so the client is left to infer what must have happened based on where the coins ended up.
This is a pretty clean way to handle it, except in a few tricky cases.
I guess the server could track and present a list of recent coin deltas and directions. But then we're in a situation where we're not sure what deltas the client has already seen and is done with. I guess there could be an ever-growing, numbered list of deltas that the server keeps appending to and sending the whole thing to the client each time.
I feel like this problem kinda solves itself by both players naming a stake.
Say claspa says 20, while cullman says 100. They'll both see the other game on their WAITING screen. At that point, either one can say, "I'll do 50" and create a new game that the other will see. Oh, so you won't come up from 20 to 50? What about 30? Still no? What about 25? Okay!
Yeah, it's a bit slower than naming a range, but it's also simpler.
Yeah, that's the reason I don't want amulet holders to only be able to create games. All non-amulet holders would be motivated to do nothing but join games...
Dan, the idea of playing amulet games for non-money stakes is gone.
I'll up those times to 2 hours.
Jere, yeah, the idea was that winning an amulet game as the non-amulet holder would give you one point for that amulet. If you timed out with it, you'd lose that point. But even if you never win after picking it up, you'd still get a point for each win-based pickup.
I'm pretty set on the idea of 36 unique objects with different scores. Yes, they would look different in game (I'd scan the actual amulets and make icons). Yes, your point count for the amulet you hold would be displayed. Yes, that means 36 leaderboards. No, you still wouldn't know you were in an amulet game, as a non-amulet holder, until it was over. You wouldn't see your opponent's amulet until the end.
Yes, you're right that proposing a game with the alt and looking for it with the amulet account would be a way to bypass the random delays without risking the amulet to a non-alt account.
Sheesh...
Okay, one thing to remember is that I DON'T care about changing the game experience for the amulet holders. There are only 36 of those people.
So, what about if amulet holders don't get to pick their own stakes? What if we pick a random stake for them that is no greater than 5% of their bankroll. 50% of the time, this could be in the form of joining a randomly-chosen existing game in the required range, if one exists. The other 50% of the time, we create a new game for them with a random stake no greater than 5% of their bankroll. Also no greater than $5 (so the amulet-holder can't simple deposit a lot and recognize the only high stake with their alt).
So, the amulet-holders would have a AMULET GAME button on their game list that would be separate from the normal games, but everyone else would just be playing as normal, creating and joining sub-$5 games, until they get an amulet.
No random delays necessary.
Updated above to reflect all of this.
In terms of timeline, once we determine that this will actually work, I'll have to make the amulets, which will take a few weeks.
Yeah, whoever has the most wins/points by the end gets the amulet, regardless of who is holding it at the end.
But if the current point leader was holding it and there were a few hours left, the current leader would obviously be motivated to slow play and delay as much as possible. That's okay, I think, because the current point leader will have a hard time getting a hold of it again right at the end.
These are the work-in-progress rules for the launch contest. You can comment below, and I will continue editing this post to tweak the rules based on comments.
At some point, I will also begin transitioning these rules into a more PERSUASIVE and IMPACTFUL style that best suits a CONTEST OF THIS MAGNITUDE.
Working Title: HERMETIC ORDER OF THE GOLDEN AMULET
36 metal amulets, each one-of-a-kind, are hand-wax-carved, hand cast, and hand polished by the game designer.
6 will contain a half ounce of 99.99% pure gold.
12 will contain a half ounce of 99.99% pure silver.
18 will contain a half ounce of the purest available copper.
The contest will run for one week.
The amulets will be represented in-game as unique icons that are each held by one player at a time. Throughout these rules, these icons are called "amulets."
Each player will have 36 scores, all starting at 0, one for each amulet. At the end of the contest, the player with the highest score for each amulet will receive the associated physical amulet. In the case of a tie, the last tied player to have held the amulet wins. Each player can receive at most one amulet, with the gold amulets handed out before silver, and silver handed out before copper, and all amulets handed out in numerical order from 1 to 36. Thus, a player who has won a gold amulet is out of the running for a silver amulet, even if they also had the highest score for a silver amulet.
Each amulet will be accompanied by a cash prize payed into the winner's game balance in the following amounts:
Gold (1 - 6): $305, $304, $303, $302, $301, $300
Silver (7 - 18): $111, $110, $109, ... , $101, $100
Copper (19 - 36): $67, $66, $65, ... , $51, $50
Definition: Last player standing
The last player in a Cordial Minuet match who still has coins. Leaving while your opponent still has coins means your opponent is the last player standing. To be the last player standing, don't leave the match until your opponent leaves first or has been reduced to 0 coins.
Definition: Amulet dropped into the player pool.
Let N be the number of live games that are currently in progress. A dropped amulet passes to the Nth player, system-wide, to be the last player standing in a non-amulet match and who does not currently hold an amulet and who has a balance of at least $3.00.
At the start of the contest, the 36 amulets will be dropped into the player pool. These will be dropped in order from gold to silver to copper.
Definition: Amulet match
A match for stakes of $3.00 or less where exactly one player holds an amulet. The amulet holder must have a balance of at least $3.00 and pick AMULET GAME from the game menu. A random, non-amulet-holding opponent will be chosen for them at stakes no greater than $3.00. The amulet holder will be shown the stakes at the start of the match. The non-amulet holder will not be aware of the amulet until the end of the match.
When a player holds an amulet
For each amulet match where they are the last player standing, they gain 200 points for that amulet.
If their opponent in an amulet match is the last player standing, they lose the amulet and their opponent gains the amulet, plus 200 points for that amulet
For each full minute that a player holds an amulet, they lose 1 point for that amulet.
Non-amulet matches can still be played, though they don't affect the amulet.
After a full two hours of no amulet match play, they drop the amulet into the player pool.
Two amulet holders can never play each other.
Oh... but the main point of the amulet contest was the actual AMULETS themselves.
As in, 36 physical pieces of metal that would be mailed out at the end. 6 of them from 99.99% pure gold, 12 in 99.99% pure silver, and 18 in copper. I.e., I'd buy some Canadian Maple Leaf coins and lost-wax-cast the metal into hand-carved occult amulets that are one-of-a-kind. At the end of the contest, there would be 36 winners.
A few people have pointed out that there should be a cash prize along with the amulet to attract players that don't care about the game's themes. Okay, sure.
But GIVING AWAY REAL GOLD is going to be the thing about the contest that attracts media attention.
And the in-game amulets (just an icon on the screen, really) will always represent a physical amulet that you can win. That's the cool concept here.
Your idea of losing points the longer you hold it is good. Say you lose 1 point per hour that you hold it. You can keep holding it forever without changing your current score by playing 1 game per hour. It's different from an inactivity timer because the same behavior with just an inactivity timer would cause your score with the amulet to go up (i.e., playing the bare minimum of games to not time out).
So, when you pick up the amulet, you gain one point. If your score on it ever drops to 0, you drop it back into the pool. If you lose while holding it, the winner takes it.
An idea similar to what you are describing (to make it less zero-sum) would be to divide the cash part of the prize based upon your fraction of the total points built up on that amulet. So, even if you were in the lead, you'd still be motivated to gain more points.
I don't know how much this Slow Playing Leaders thing will actually be a problem. As long as you can't hold it forever without playing, you will eventually lose a match and drop it. That means the runner-up will have a chance to score more points and surpass you. Instead of just holding it, you'd better score as many points as possible.
No matter what delay-prevention system is in place, there are going to be leaders trying to hold it during the last few hours, but that's okay, I think. In order to hold it, they have to get it again.
Dan:
Can you email me with more info about this?
Like, do you remember the approximate date/time with timezone? Do you remember the stakes? Also email me with your account email address. Then I can look the game up in the logs and figure out what happened.
Oh, seeing that recorded game would be great too.
Yeah, client sometimes shows weird coin movements if some situation happens on the server that leaves the client hanging without a complete picture of what happened.
Wait, so you're suggesting that the prize FOR ME gets bigger the more points I score while holding the amulet?
I.e., if I score 10 before dropping it, and you score 8 before dropping it, if I win at the end, I get $1000 (whereas you would have just gotten $800).
Or are you suggesting that BOTH players would get prizes at the end? $1000 AND $800?
I'm really trying to limit the prize structure so that my total liability is capped and known up front. Like the Steal Real Money contest, I was never going to be liable for more than $3000 total.
After losing my shirt a few times in online poker (an admittedly tiny shirt, but I've decided to get better before playing for real money again), I've been playing a lot of poker for play money.
On one site, you can get back up to $1000 for free whenever you have less than $1000.
So... this is play money, it shouldn't matter, right?
But once you get up to $5000 and start playing at higher stakes, it starts to matter. You worked hard to get that $5000 play money bankroll, and you don't want to squander it. Doesn't this weaken my claim that real money is necessary?
The point with Cordial Minuet is that you should always be playing for something that matters. Real money is the most direct route to that, because you can never get more of that "for free." In Cordial Minuet, this goes all the way to the bottom.
On poker sites that give you free play money, there's a tier below which the play money really doesn't matter. For example, sub-$1000 games. You can get $1000 more instantly if you bust. Down there, play is twisted terribly. People go all-in all the time. Why not?
Sadly, the poker sites don't let you play extremely low real money stakes. The smallest big blind is always a nickle, I think. So you've always got $5 at the table. You can never have just a penny at the table. So, it's either "money that really matters" (lose 10 games and you're out $50), or free money that doesn't matter at all until you amass quite a bit of it.
Another option would be to allow people to buy more play money with real money. PokerStars does it this way.
That seems very odd to me, though... it's like a real money version of poker that simply never lets you cash out.
This issue crops up in poker too. These players are playing poorly and can be beaten. In fact, beating this kind of player is one of the best feelings.
You guys are right about the bots having the best chance at dropped amulets.
Starting amulets and dropped amulets could be, as you are suggesting, handed out to some non-amulet holder who just won a game (last player to leave, or last player with non-zero chips in the game).
You're right that I don't want to discourage strategic play that takes time.
However, imagine an amulet holder who wants to bully other players into leaving through slow play. Let's say they want to drag it out for as many rounds as possible. If they never bet above the ante, that's a minimum of 14 rounds before they run out of coins. Even if their opponent bets as soon as possible and gets them to fold each round, they still gets 1 minute for their first pick, one minute to bet 0, and another minute to fold. So, 3 minutes per round... that's 42 minutes, guaranteed. If your opponent refuses to leave, you can tie them up for 42 minutes.
Now, an amulet holder would NEVER want to leave, and you can imagine non-amulet holders doing this slow-folding play for a while in each game to sniff out amulet holders. A non-amulet holder would probably get fed up and leave, so if their opponent stays, this is probably an amulet game.
But if there's no incentive for an amulet holder to pick up the pace, couldn't they use this strategy to bully non-amulet holders into leaving most of the time?
Well, maybe not. You're slowly winning all the coins, I guess you'd stay in? And the amulet holder would have less and less of a chance at actually winning the longer you stayed, so I guess this strategy would be naturally discouraged.
Maybe some combo of inactivity timer (which would be shorter, like a few hours) and an overall timer (which would be longer, like 6 hours).
Why not just have the winner take all the amulets in play with them all remaing active while they have them. That way an amulet holder gets the same benefit from being paired with another amulet holder as everyone else, and realistically it's unlikely anyone will hold multiple amulets for long. This would also be easier to incorporate with a points system like the one I suggested above to keep games constant sum.
Snowballing. Eventually, one person would hold all 36 amulets, and that ball would pass from person to person.
An amulet holder stands to rack a win for the amulet while holding it, no matter whether they play another amulet holder or not. If they play another amulet holder, then they also get the chance to switch amulets if they win.
Good point here.
What I worry about with an inactivity criteria is this:
What if you're in the lead for a given amulet, and there's only a few hours left. At that point, instead of playing as many winning games as fast as possible, you might be motivated to spread your games out as much as possible.
If there was an inactivity timeout only, then by playing (and winning) one game every 25 minutes, you could likely hold the amulet all the way until the end, thus protecting your lead.
I.e., "keeping it away from other players" could become a viable strategy at some point, and THAT would not be good.
Even with a much shorter inactivity timer, a leading player would be motivated to "slow play" each game while they had the amulet. In general, if you only dropped it due to inactivity or loss, you'd always be motivated to slow play each game, because that means all the less time for other players to rack up wins.
Example:
Let's say that you are going to rack up 10 wins while holding the amulet before you lose. Well, you could play those 10 games at normal speed and drop the amulet after 1.5 hours. Or you could slow play every game and drag it out for 5 hours. Either way, you gain 10 points before dropping it, but in the second case, other players will have less time with it.
If there was a set timer for holding the amulet, you'd never be motivated to slow play.
You're right that it would suck to get stuck with a slow opponent while you hold the amulet because you can't leave and your overall amulet time would be running out.
But even opponents won't be motivated to slow play, because they don't know if a given game is an amulet game, and they don't want to waste time (they want to get as many chances at the amulets as possible).
Talked to Judge Doorman today for a long while.
He had deep concerns about the idea that, if you're in an amulet game without knowing it, the cash stakes might not count. (I.e., a $20 player paired up with a penny player who has the amulet... the $20 player wins, but SURPRISE, you get this copper amulet instead of $20, and you were really playing against a penny player without knowing it).
He pointed out that this runs counter to the spirit of the game and sets a nasty precedent. Currently, a chip is always worth the same for both players, and you always know what it is worth. That's a good way for it to work.
He's right that I don't want to sacrifice "THE PROPER WAY THE GAME ACTUALLY WORKS" on the alter of "PREVENTING PLAYER BEHAVIOR FROM CHANGING." Better to change player behavior than to muck with the real-money certainties of the game.
The best option to limit collusion while altering player behavior the least is to just have a cap on games that could count as amulet games. Say $5, where any game for $5 or under could potentially involve an amulet, but $5.01 and higher guarantees the game is NOT for an amulet. That cap could even change in the middle of the contest if there was some good reason to change it.
Couple this with a random delay of when proposed games show up on various player's game lists (a forced, randomly-delayed roll-out of new games onto people's lists), and collusion would be thwarted, even if someone set specific stakes (like 4.21) as a signal to their collusion partner. This would become the way that new games show up on game lists for the main game, forever---delayed roll-out.
JD points out that if you had tiered stakes for amulet games instead (bins like 10 cents, 50 cents, $2, and $5, where amulet games could ONLY happen at those fixed stakes), someone who is trying to collude and fails would be facing TWO real games to deal with against non-colluding players, because there'd be so many players trying to join games at those tiers.
Still, since you need random roll-out delays in both directions anyway (for both amulet holders and non-holders who propose games), it seems like adding "special" tiers alters the game too much. That takes more explaining than just a stake cap for amulet games, funnels player behavior more, etc.
Because, without random new-game roll-out delays, colluders ALWAYS have a better chance of joining with each other than non-colluders, simply because they completely control join timing (everyone who is not colluding is sitting and waiting for a 5-second game list refresh).
JD also had some other good ideas:
--Amulets handed out initially based on how many games you played until the end in the last 24 hours (the same way we count amulet points, except you don't have to win a game to have it count).
--Fixed time limit for holding the amulet (say, 1 hour max), to encourage players to play as much as possible while holding it (to rack wins before time runs out) and not delay.
--Amulets going back into the pool to be handed out again using the above criteria when an amulet-holder's time limit elapses.
--Two amulet holders face each other, the winner gets to pick which amulet to keep, the other amulet goes back in the pool. This prevents someone who holds copper from being blocked from gold, but doesn't assume they WANT gold (maybe they're very close to being top for that copper amulet).
Maybe you've seen this in the source:
http://sourceforge.net/p/hcsoftware/Cor … mNouns.txt
Grandmother Passageway Lubricant is possible...
Yeah, I probably should put the three-word code in there NOW instead of waiting until it's a problem.
It could search randomly for a collision-free word-pair 10 times and then resort to a word triplet.
Yeah, there will probably be some kind of search function on the leaderboards eventually.
I was thinking that, if we've got a million players, and there's one other person with your name, you'd probably be able to figure out which one you are on most of the boards. I mean, it's kind of a mind boggling situation at that point. How many pages would you need to look through with 100 lines per page? 10,000 pages... who is going to do that?
So, at that point, name collisions are rare enough that you'd probably never see a collision for yourself in practice. You probably wouldn't be able to find yourself, in practice. The people at the top of the board would probably know who they were, and there would be a very slim likelihood of name collisions near the top of the board.
The boards and names are mostly there for the top players to be able to say, "Hey, that's me!" And to give other players something to shoot for.
I'm not the only Jason Rohrer on the internet. Even IMDB has us mixed up:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1827432/
Anyway, it's kindof a bridge to cross later. For now, 2-word names are better. If collisions become a big problem, we can add 3-word names.
For a moment, I was thinking, "If only I could go back in a time machine and give the first 666 players 1-word names..." But 2-word names are really far more evocative and strange. Bird Graduation....
Yeah, there could be a variable amount of time per step, just like you suggest. Picking which square to reveal, for example, should probably never take a full minute.
I don't think I'd want a number moving on the screen the whole time, because it would be visually distracting. Maybe it should start showing up sooner than the last 10 seconds, though... maybe last 15 seconds.
Swapped names are permitted.
Currently, it will keep trying for a unique name upon collision ten times before giving up and accepting a name that has a collision. Thus, duplicate names will start happening before we hit that 442,890 limit.
The point of the names is so that players can compare themselves to other players. Thus, in a population of hundreds of thousands of players, the names don't need to be unique to enable that (just rare). You know your own balance, for example.
If we got several hundred thousand players, I'd have other problems beyond just name collisions...
Still, if we got to that point, I might expand that database field so that there's room for some players to have three words instead of two. Then we'd have 295 million possible names, which should be enough for quite a while.
Or there could be a time bank, like a timed chess game. Maybe you have 2 minutes total per round that you can use however you please.
But I'd like to keep it simple and eventually settle on one fixed time limit per decision.
I tend to think that 1 minute is too long and that 30 seconds is better.
However, new players are really put off by 30 seconds, I think.
This is something that can be adjusted as much as we want later, server-side.