CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

I've thought about this...

I set the antes based on fraction-of-max-buy-in that is used in poker.  You buy in with 100x the big blind, for example.

Raising the ante would have a similar effect to giving the players fewer chips (instead of making the ante 2, keep it at 1 and give each player 50 chips).  The only difference would be the granularity of bets above the ante (for example, being able to raise a 2-chip ante up to 3 by putting in one chip).  But in poker, that kind of granularity is thwarted by the minimum bet and raise rules.  You can't raise by half the big blind, for example.

Seeing people go all-in all the time down at the penny tables is a symptom of a penny being worthless.  Conservative play is the first step toward becoming more skilled.  You don't have to worry about that all-in behavior so much if you move up to a $5 table.  At a $100 table (which is more like the norm for poker), each chip is $1, and that ante stops looking so small.

But anyway, there are ways to play against an over-aggressive player who goes all-in all the time... very satisfying ways...

Oh, and not sure about the game stopping updating when you switch out of X.

I tried switching to a virtual terminal (ctrl-alt-F4 or whatever) and the game did not pause.  So it's not detecting minimzation the way it does when you switch desktops.

I get exactly the same behavior with the game stopping while X is out, though.  The Chime for a new game starting does come through until I bring X back.

I could imagine that OpenGL frames are simply not happening when the OpenGL context is gone, which causes the game loop to stop stepping.

Interestingly, if you swap away from X right as the chime sounds, it finishes sounding (it doesn't get cut off), so the audio thread is still running fine.  However, the ante chips hang in the air and wait to fly until you bring X back.  Thus, the process isn't freezing, just the game update loop.

This seems to be a known issue:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.p … 48152.html

Leave confirmation has been added in source.  Will be released in v9.

More responses:

Yes, this game is 100% skill in that there are no random elements.  It is not "subject to chance" according to legal interpretations.

You're right that very few people bet money on "hard skill" games like chess.  You can rank players with such fine granularity that the pool of evenly matched players at a given level is very small.  And only a fool would play for money (or play at all, really) against someone above their own skill level.

But this game is an experiment in what I'm calling "soft skill."  What are you doing in CM to win?  You're not searching the 500,000-leaf game tree (though doing that would help you).  You're not crunching loads of math and probability (though doing that would help you).  You're learning to read and predict the behavior of your opponent and learning to be unpredictable yourself.

So, whereas hard-skill games involve complex (in both senses) algorithms to play well, and thus require years of study to get good at, with an amateur absolutely standing no chance against a more skilled opponent.... games of soft skill are different.

People don't just come back to poker because they might get lucky next time.  They come back because "reading their opponent" and "bluffing better next time" seem like reasonably attainable goals.  The soft skill is based on intuition, and it feels more like an "art" than a "science."

But yes, Poker also has a strong random element.  This game tries to build a system of soft skill, akin to the soft skill present in poker, from the ground up with no random element.

As far as I'm aware, there is no precedent here, so I really have no idea where the player ecosystem will end up in the long run.

Regarding your strategy of always giving the opponent the row with the lowest high number:

Let's say you do that consistently.  You know your opponent will never get more than a 25 or whatever on turn one.  You can box your opponent in that way, and over time, train them to always pick the row with that 25 (or whatever) in it.  Over time, you can predict exactly what row they will pick for themselves.

But once you have them trained that way... would you really give them the 25 every time?  There's certainly some lower number in the row that they picked.  If you knew what they would pick, you'd probably switch at some point and stick them with a lower number.

A pure Nash equilibrium only happens when both players know what their opponent will pick and still don't want to switch.  In your example, this only operates in one direction.  Your opponent knows what column you will pick for them and still doesn't want to switch (they want to take the 25).  BUT, it's not a Nash equilibrium because you, knowing that your opponent will do that, would want to switch columns.

You know, I'm actually not tracking any per-round stats.

I'm just tracking stats about whole games.

In the history of this server, there have been 361 games, and 83 where the house raked $0 total from the game.  Of course, that counts abandoned games too.

With the old 10% cap-4 system, the server was taking an average of 2.5% of every buy-in.  I'll be watching the totals over the next few days to see how the new system works.  I'm hoping to keep the net effect at about 2.5%, but just make it feel different and more fair.

Over $260 have gone into games in the past few days, but I've made only $8 total.

Yeah, I changed it out from under you.  See a thread that I just posted about it! 

Does the board fade out and then come back in, like what would happen at the end of a round?

Sounds pretty strange!  Please send me a recording if you can catch one:

jasonrohrer@fastmail.fm

Chimes happen:

--When waiting for the opponent, right before the game starts (a "game is starting" chime)

--When you've been waiting more than 10 seconds for your opponent's move, and the move finally comes through (unless that move has coin-movement sounds that will play---no chime needed then).

--When you have less than 10 seconds left to make your own move.

Yeah, when you reload the game, it gets the balance first, which doesn't currently kick you from the old table.  Then it loads the list of games, which DOES kick you.  Of course, the balance is already loaded before that, so you see the old balance one time.  After re-loading the list of games, the balance is fetched again.  I should probably change it so that fetching the balance itself is one of the things that kicks you from the game.

About the crash:

I'm sorry that this happened.  I LOVE that MacOS actually produces real crash reports.  Sadly, this one doesn't actually show what happened, except that the game got into an infinite loop.  I didn't know the OS would actually catch this and kill the process, but that's cool!  The stack traces don't show what was actually stuck, for some reason.

If you're just dragging sliders around, the the game is doing nothing else, so maybe there's an infinite loop in the slider-repositioning code.  There should be no network operations while you're doing that, for example.  One thought:  the audio thread could also be involved, because maybe your time is running out and the chime is trying to play when there are 10 seconds left.

Do you happen to have a recording that shows one of these crashes?  Please email it to me:

jasonrohrer@fastmail.fm

I don't have a SHORT recording of a tie game.  You know, like, where it happens in someone's first game.

I don't recall ever seeing one in my own personal testing, either.