CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

When gambling, good betting is all about maintaining the correct balance. Any player that bets large amounts every round is using an unbalanced strategy, and to balance them out you must play more conservatively. Just be patient, wait for an opportunity, and then call them when the moment is right. Sometimes it is necessary to be willing to take risks, even when you don't know for sure you will win. But as long as you read the situation correctly and wait for the times when you have an advantage, you will usually come out ahead. Remember that ultimately the thing that makes it the hardest to win, is trying too hard not to lose.

Oh, lol, I must've missed that. Sorry, I was skimming through your post a bit when I read it the first time.

Yes, yes it is... Do you think it's possible the bot is actually Jason's attempt to make sure someone is always playing the game? It would make sense, because he wouldn't want there to be times when no one was available to play right after the game launched. It would make perfect sense for him to create a bot that lost small amounts over time to help get people into the game. And it's doubtful anyone would complain about him running a bot if it was losing money. Hmm...

Interesting... Well, when you think about it, right now the cost of training a bot pales in comparison to what you might make with a bot that wins 51% of it's games. I'm not really surprised that someone is attempting it. I considered doing it myself early on. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized what a difficult task it would be. Playing Cordial Minuet well is really more about human psychology than anything else. It's about finding behavior patterns, misdirection, and manipulation. None of which are things any existing AI can do very well. With the current state of AI, I think it would be next to impossible to write a Cordial Minuet bot that could constantly beat skilled human players. I'm not sure, but maybe they are thinking that when the influx of new players comes after the game is publicly released, they bot will be able to perform well enough against to inevitable flood of unskilled players to make money. Though personally I think they may just be programming the bot for the sake of the challenge, since realistically they would have a very difficult time making enough money with it to justify the time they'd have to spend on it.

Incidentally, doesn't "Clock Form" sound like the perfect name for a bot? Cordial Minuet's name generator is remarkably astute sometimes.

This was actually a sort of tongue in cheek way to illustrate how the current high score charts are exploitable.

Didn't anyone read that line? -_- The lesson here is, don't ever take me too seriously.

...but, if Jason decides to not fix this, it's better that people are aware that the system can be exploited. It's only fair.

That aside, does anyone want to help me watch out for Jeopardy Alcohol and record their matches with him? He's doing something right, and I'd like to know what it is.

I think that if there is a leaving penalty, it should be a flat fee of something like 5 chips. If the stakes are high and you are significantly short stacked, leaving makes the most sense and you shouldn't be penalized too much for it (compared to what you'd lose to the ante). But if the ante is still low players should be motivated to stick around to prevent cherry picking opponents, or leaving when you even have a slight disadvantage.

Well, I don't, but then again, high pressure really suits my style. People are so much easier to manipulate when they're under pressure. But I think that is really the key to making the game interesting. Both players need to feel like they are under constant pressure. The winner should be determined by who handles the pressure the best and makes good decisions in spite of it. At least that's how I feel about it. The current system does a very good job of that, and in my opinion, reducing the rate of the ante increase would only move use back toward the old, boring, conservative style of play.

I would be completely in favor of a built in replay feature on the server. But I can work with the replay files for now. The only problem is, I tend to leave the client open in the background, and the replay files include all that idle time as well. My solution for now is to run the entire replay through a video capture program at the highest speed so I can easily browse though it and take screen-shots.

I think the question right now is, is it worth it to pressure your opponent to fold after the first pick? The balance between betting and picking comes only when pressuring someone to fold becomes meaningful. Right now I think the answer to that question is yes, but only just barely. With an ante of 3, you can gradually pressure a conservative player to fold themselves into oblivion, and make on average about 20% of the stake in the process. But usually what happens is that the player who is folding will, instead of countering you by betting more aggressively, just leave the match when they become short stacked. This means that ultra conservative play is still finding a niche, even if it is not as profitable as it used to be. Maybe this is as it should be, since you don't necessarily want to make conservative play completely unprofitable. But I still think and ante of 5 at a minimum is really required to completely balance out conservative vs aggressive betting styles.

Edit: You had asked before about what statistic you should measure to determine the success of the new ante system. I believe I figured out what that should be. The most meaningful statistic, is the ratio of money lost in games that do end in an all in, to games that don't. Right now the biggest problem with Cordial Minuet, is that players feel like they need to go all in to make any real profit. Games that aren't won or lost in an all in aren't usually worth it in terms of time played vs. profit gained. Even when players have a good back and forth match, it often ends in an all in that completely overturns everything else that had happened in the match up to that point, because in the end both players really just want a decisive result. Ideally, I would think the ratio should be something like 2/1, meaning the average game that doesn't end in an all in should result in one player losing around 50% of their chips. Even 3/1 would probably be okay. Right now, I have no idea what the actual ratio is, but I'm sure it's not that high.

Looking forward to it.

Bump. Since we have so many new players, I want to make sure they all have a chance to see this.

I honestly have no idea. I don't think there is any legal precedent that covers whether wagering money on a skill based game and playing randomly would be a game of chance. I would be interested to know if someone could cite one though.

Well, you said that creating a website that acts as a bot for playing Rock Paper Scissors randomly for money would be a game of chance, so yes? I don't know, I'm not intentionally trying to be difficult, but I really don't understand how the law works in this situation. Why is it that playing a game where you know the outcome is dictated by chance would be made illegal or not illegal based on the circumstances under which it is played? The law says that a game is a game of chance if "the character of the game rather than a particular player's skill or lack of it" determines the outcome of the game. So if the outcome of Rock Paper Scissors is really determined by the player and not the game, why is it that when you make the player a computer that picks randomly and not a human, all of a sudden the game is a game of chance, even if none of the game's rules were changed in any way? Aren't you just making an arbitrary distinction if you can make the game illegal or not depending on who or what is playing it? This just doesn't make any sense to me.