CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

Right... you mean because you can't fold when you're not up against a bet at the moment?  So you can't fold while making a move or while picking your reveal.  You can only fold if they bet more after that.  You're forced to either reveal or leave if you haven't folded yet.  Hmm... I'll think about that.

As far as the bluff hail mary goes... I'm still not getting why that can't happen before the reveal.  Push all in before the reveal, for example.  Your opponent has much less hard info about your score at that point.

One kindof interesting thing about this game is that "good play" is hard to pin down and define.  There is a huge skill gap between a beginner and an expert (I pretty much never lose these days, and have stopped playing because I feel bad for new players), but I can't put what a skilled player is doing into words the way that I can with League of Legends or even The Castle Doctrine.  I can't list techniques to try like I could for TCD.

I think the same thing is true for Poker.  You get advice like "fold more."  But that's not very concrete.  How much folding is enough?  How much is too much?

In CM, there are some more concrete advanced things that you can do in terms of which information you're taking into account, but I'm not sure how much that stuff helps compared the the more basic mind-reading skill that is harder to spell out.

Thanks, glad you liked it!

Yeah, it looks like there was some kind of database overload (too many connections) on the server this morning.

Maybe one transaction got hung, locking the tables and blocking other transactions, though I didn't get any deadlock messages.

In your case, Jere, it looks like a ton of your waiting_game_start requests got backlogged, and in the mean time, the flush cleared out your game as stale, and then after that, all of those wait_game_start requests came through (with some dropped, too, it seems), and the final one (the one your client was still waiting for a response from, that it had not abandoned) was denied.

I did get some connection overload messages, but they happened 10 minutes later, so I don't know what was going on.  Sadly, in my experience with PHP/MySQL, sometimes this kind of thing just happens.

See this other stuck topic, "Getting the Game":

http://cordialminuet.com/originensemble … c.php?id=2

In your invite email, I warned you that this was a back door, not a front door 

Hmm... I think that some things can be left outside the game.  Tracking pick order is pretty advanced, and you would have time to quickly jot down the column/row symbols on a piece of paper.  I like the idea of a piece of paper on your desk accumulating an incomprehensible mass of Hebrew as you play.

Some of these things that you're describing are "non-choices, where you're still asked to chose."

I'm not happy that these moments exist in the game, but I don't know how else to structure it.  Sometimes there IS a choice to be made at these points, but other times, not.  Usually, for the reveal, you want to pick the square that creates the largest spread in the score graph---the most uncertainty.  This could be done automatically for you by the computer, but it would feel weird if that's how it worked.  So I left the choice to the player.  There are some rare situations where there's actually a choice to make, but usually you want the largest spread.

Post-reveal, there are only 5 possibilities from your perspective.  Both their scores above, both below, both between, interleaved below, interleaved above.

Two of these are force-folds for one player.  But still, should the computer auto-fold?

The other three are juicier, with important betting decisions for both players.  So, the game just lets you make the decision no matter what.

Note that very advanced players can control the game so that at the end, there is a juicy decision for the other player and a sure win for themselves.  The best game state for you is actually not the one with the highest possible score, but instead the one where you're winning with the most uncertainty in your opponent's mind.

This mirrors poker, where a 22 with a 2KA on the flop is a really good game state in terms of winning money from your opponent, but a 22 is not a strong hand compared to KQ suited.

The "knowing you've won sometimes" mirrors poker as well (having the nuts).  The "knowing you've lost" has no mirror in poker, so that's not so great.

Even if there is no reveal, knowing you've lost can happen when all 6 of their possible scores are above your true score.

But, in this game, it goes further, where you know you've lost and you know they know too (no chance of bluffing).  That can happen even without the reveal.

The original game had no reveal step, but I felt like the final bets were placed with too much uncertainty.

I don't like the idea of breaking the math (because an advanced player would overcome that).

There could be some kind of deception in the reveal (maybe reveal a possible square for yourself that you didn't actually win).

Sorry for the trouble!  This should never happen...

Looking up your account in the server logs, it looks like the most recent time that this happened was at 2014-12-09 17:42:48 GMT (adjust for your timezone), about 10 minutes ago.  From the log, it looks like maybe your client lost connection, because two of your messages never made it to the server.  By the time your move (in this case, your second column choice) came through, on your client's third retry, the game had already timed out.  Yes, the client enforces a timer on you (red number that shows up), but if you complete your move on time but your move doesn't make it through to the server, your client will retry after 16 seconds or so.  By that time, if you cut it close, the server has likely timed you out and the game has ended.  Your move is thus denied.

Do you recall seeing a red [!] box show up?  That means the client cannot connect to the server and is retrying.

Sadly, there's no way to prevent this from happening during times of lost connection.  I'll tweak the server a bit to loosen up the grace period though.  Still, it WILL happen sometimes.

I'm not sure how this should be messaged client-side.  DENIED BY SERVER is probably confusing here.  Maybe GAME ENDED instead?  Or CONNECTION LOST?

Well, you have to muck around in the settings folder to switch servers (by changing the reflector), so I figure that anyone doing that will clear their account details, too.

There are no official instructions about any of this yet, of course.  I simply haven't written the "how to run your own server" document yet.  There were some server instructions that shipped with The Castle Doctrine that pretty much apply (but you don't need to do the ticketServer part for this game).  You can look in the mercurial repository for The Castle Doctrine on SourceForge, or you can see a mirror of this text in the wiki:

http://thecastledoctrine.gamepedia.com/ … p_a_Server

I'm planning on hosting tournaments on a separate server someday, and for that I will simply ship out alternative client bundles that point to that server (to make it easy for people).

Well, it was going to be NEXT weekend... but it may not be happening after all.

These are important questions to be asking.

One answer is "raise the stakes."  If you're making X% an hour, and that results in a cashflow that is not worth your time, bigger stakes at the same skill level would raise that cash flow.  It obviously requires more capital and more risk.

In one online poker room, the cheapest buy-in in the whole place is $5.  It goes way up from there.  The biggest game in CM history, so far, was $5.

I'm also curious about the "on its own merits" part.  It seems like Holdem poker isn't so interesting on its own merits, though there is the thrill of the killer hand that shows up every hundred hands or so.  That's just the gambling thrill though, I think.  The thrill of the heavens aligning and you "getting lucky."  This game doesn't have that rat-pushing-lever thing going on, so that "merit" is missing.  That might also be why "games like this are legal."  You're not hooked.

There is a thrill waiting here when your opponent has the second best score at the table and you know it---they're falling into your trap so perfectly, betting high trying to scare you.

Anyway, I intentionally designed a very simple game where betting strategies would be the focus---a game that wouldn't function on its own merits.  I wanted to make a betting game, not a game with betting slapped on top.  But that doesn't mean that what I did worked, of course.

Can you play a short session that demonstrates this and then send me the recordedGame file?  I can watch the recording on my end and maybe figure something out.

jasonrohrer@fastmail.fm

Also, did Yosemite produce any kind of crash report or log that you can send me?  I know that MacOS is sometimes pretty good about that.

If you're willing to delve a bit deeper, email me, and I can walk you through the steps of running the game inside a debugger that would catch the crash once and for all and give solid info for fixing it.  It would be REALLY helpful!  I don't have access to a machine running Yosemite.