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Well... at this point, the cat is kinda out of the bag. We're getting pretty close to launch here, so if people can figure it out one way or another, they can come in.
Yeah, I don't use PHPMyAdmin.... but, it's installed as part of cPanel.
Which reminds me, I usually leave all those web-admin (cpanel, etc) ports blocked by apf.
When I need to use web admin stuff, I log in via SSH (using YubiKey authentication) and then temporarily open those ports, and close them after I'm done.
But I had gotten lazy and just left those ports open. Just closed them off.
The original concern wasn't even Cpanel vulnerabilities, but instead the simple fact that cPanel login is password-only and doesn't support 2-factor authentication.
Preece, Preece, Preece....
Someday you will appreciate the blessing that has been bestowed upon you!
You can create multiple accounts. However, you'll need a separate credit card for each one (each CC # can only be used by one account).
I can't see any harm to the main game from people having more than one account. There is slight harm done to tournaments, but with the recent tournament structure (entry fee plus limit on how much you can win from one partner repeatedly), the advantage you'd get from multiple accounts is both slight and expensive.
Unfortunately (and also partly on purpose, for logistical reasons), people in the booth will only be able to play each other.
Internet on the show floor was going to be something like $1500 for the weekend. I realized that it would be confusing anyway, because if they were on the live server, people at the booth wouldn't be able to reliably play against their friends in the booth. Or there would be no way to ensure that people sitting across from each other (and not next to each other) would be matched up.
SO...
I'm running TWO local-only servers on my laptop, one for each pair of back-to-back terminals. Local play only, and sensible match-ups only (you can only join games against the person across from you at the table).
wait, really? You got OE? I think that when I picked it as a code key, it was (as of yet) unused.
Oh, yeah, and I'll be there, running the booth all three days. Please come up and introduce yourselves to me!
There will be a CORDIAL MINUET cash game pit at PAX South in San Antonio this weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (23-25 of January). Booth number 1760. Custom booth designed and constructed by local artist Alex Diamond---like nothing else in the expo hall guaranteed. Special souvenir payouts available for people who win matches in the booth (my hands are bruised from hand-imprinting 999 of these over the past few days).
PAX three-day passes and Saturday passes are sold out, but there are still some Friday and Sunday passes left. I'm not sure how it works regarding on-site purchase, or if any day passes are held back for at-the-door admission.
Hope that some of you can make it to the show!
If there are few players online, and you're trying to avoid some particular player (or search for some known easy player), you can lose one coin to your partner and then leave the match, and refresh the leaderboards to see who you just lost one coin to. Since there are so few players online, you can start a new game immediately and likely re-join with that player who will also be looking for another game. And then you'll have a good idea of who you're playing. Or you may want to NOT create a new match, if the other person online right now is someone you're trying to avoid.
The leaderboards were intended to allow people to track their own progress, relative to others, over time. They were NOT intended to allow people to track moment-to-moment detailed behavior of other players.
Yeah, Dot-Dot, so the point is that the interval may need to be longer. The fact that it only updates when the leaderboard is requested doesn't need fixing.
Are you sure this is a problem?
My understanding is that RELOADING a board is the trick that's used to spot differences. So, you load it once, play a game, and then afterward reload it again to see who you played against. If this process takes less than 5 minutes, then the cache will prevent you from getting the information that you need, because you'll see an unchanged board the second time. If this process takes more than 5 minutes, you'll see a changed board the second time, but enough time will have passed that (hopefully) loads of changes will be present.
If you haven't viewed the board in a long time, I don't see how loading it fresh (not cached) is going to give you any useful delta information, so that's not a problem. It's the immediate delta's we're trying to stop.
That said, maybe 5 minutes is too short.
Leaderboard caching is in place now.
So, the leaderboards are now cached for 5 minutes before they are updated again.
So, you can't just refresh the leaderboard to figure out who you just played against anymore.
The 5 minute interval can be changed on the server to whatever interval we want.
I intentionally did NOT include chat in the game.
First, there's the issue of aesthetic pollution. I don't want "LOLZ" being part of the game world. I did the same thing for The Castle Doctrine. Hearthstone and Demons Souls do a similar thing, but they allow you to only pick your communications from a static list of options. Still, in Hearthstone, this leads to silliness, with people usually saying the opposite of what they mean (them saying "Well Played" when they just won).
Second, I can imagine some players abusing other players through chat. Bovada poker is anonymous in that you can't track your opponent across games, but they still have a chat feature in a given game, and I've seen it used abusively.
Finally, I really like the idea of communicating THROUGH the game itself. What does the entrance layout of your house SAY in The castle Doctrine? What does your bet say in Cordial Minuet? I want to keep the focus on that kind of through-the-game communication.
Oh... caching leaderboards were on my to-do list. It seems bad to ever know who you played against, because that can be exploited in many ways. The leaderboards weren't MEANT to reveal this kind of info.
I was going to set it to update the cached data every 5 minutes, so I don't think it would mess up your bot too much.
Well, I also want to preserve the behavior of the graph. You mouse over the graph to get a read on the number, not to alter/filter the graph according to what you moused over.
I'm not currently tracking that stat, so I don't know!
Regarding a penalty for leaving, I think knowing when to leave is a VERY important skill in this game. Human nature makes you NOT want to leave even when you are clearly outclassed. Well, at least MY human nature makes me feel that way in Poker, almost always to my detriment.
Funny... I was wondering how Google found it.
But yeah, I leaked it myself when Creature Expression posted that strategy article. Oops!
Here's another idea:
Make a service that people can use to create a name-specific twitter bot that only spits out a stream for their name. Then they can follow that twitter stream to hear only about their own games.
Well, not sure if that's possible. I bet the Twitter API doesn't allow a bot to create new twitter accounts.
So, maybe people would have to create their own twitter account and pass your bot the login credentials.
Wow, JA has really stirred things up.
I don't know how to fix the leaderboards more. At least you can't tell who you're playing NOW, but by leaving and giving someone a little profit, you can look for the increase.
Maybe the leaderboards need to be rounded, kinda like The Castle Doctrine balances were rounded. So, you can't dump a penny to JA and then see his balance go up.
That kinda conflicts with the aesthetic of the game, though, with sub-cent precision displayed everywhere else.
Instituting a delayed update is pretty messy, because this is all based on the live data, and the live data is, of course, current. To have a delay, the leaderboard would have to be in a separate table that got re-generated on some fixed interval from the live data.
This is made extra painful by the fact that there's more than one leaderboard, meaning that there would be a bunch of these mirror tables that would need to be made. Currently, each leaderboard uses the same code, simply specifying its own unique sort order and display column, pulled from the live data.
Hmm... maybe something more general purpose, like a text-based cache for the leaderboards that simply caches the HTML and a date, and only refreshes that HTML cache when it gets stale enough.
Okay, it's on my to-do list.
Essentially, how it will work is that if you mouse over a red or assigned-to-red column, it will assume you want to see the graph with that red square won by your opponent. If you mouse over a green or assigned-to-green OR unassigned (uncolored) column, it will assume you want to see the graph with that square won by you. And clicking on an unassigned square will behave the same as clicking on a green square (little green arrow markers will appear).
Yeah, I got emails from people who were frustrated: "I solved the anagram but it led nowhere, what gives?"
So, I decided to let the anagram-solvers through too.
Your account key should have been sent to you by email when you made a deposit. Copy-paste it into the new copy of your game when you launch it the first time.
So you're really just looking for a one-sum math aid at that point? My current score is 45. Mouse over the 30-cell to help me see 45+30.
I thought you'd also be looking at how the red graph jumped around if you got a given number on turn 3, which is why I thought it would be confusing to mouse over uncolored cells while betting. Yeah, if you clicked on a cell, the little green "arrows" could pop up as usual, but before that, it seems like it could be a little confusing with the graph jumping around.
Obviously, I'd do this during turn 1 betting as well, for consistency, which seems like it would cause even more confusion.
I'm still leaning toward NOT adding this behavior, because mousing over colored/assigned columns feels well-defined, and it seems sensible to have that be the rule. If the column is not colored/assigned yet, you can't mouse over it to sneak-peek the graph.
Hmm... it almost seems like the ante level X could last for X rounds before rising again, like this:
1
2
2
3
3
3
4
4
4
4
5
5
5
5
5
Then again, the rise from 4 to 5 really isn't as big of a deal as the rise from 1 to 2.
Here's another interesting thing:
The average number of rounds per game has actually gone UP slightly since the rising ante was instituted. That average is now 5.5, by the way. So, it's still not very many in terms of learning your opponent, but it's better than it used to be, on average.
The question might be: if two somewhat conservative players are committed to playing to the end, how many rounds will they play? With the rising antes, I think it's clear that this number is smaller than it used to be.
I'd like to get feedback from others on this point. Do you think it's rising too fast now?