CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

AnoHito, I was thinking the same thing. I made a mention on the last page. Seems kind of odd, but this isn't Jason's first time at the rodeo. I'm sure he has something planned...

The contest lasts an unusually long time. I just realized that the quality distribution of the amulets is meant to hit a peak this weekend, cool off, and then ramp up to a final climax (2 golds). Makes sense. Most people will probably not want to jump into a new game until the weekend. So if there is some announcement later this week, there will be tons of opportunities left to win and simultaneously the feeling that you can start right now (as opposed to: this game is shipping in 3 quarters).

Neat. What kind of feedback are you looking for? Is this the page that actually advertises the contest? If so, it takes a while to explain what's at stake and why you should play at least compared to this: http://thecastledoctrine.net/stealRealMoneyContest.php

The problem with flooring points at 0 is that a sequence of win-loss leaves you with 0 points and a sequence of loss-win leaves you with 99 points. Bleh! I do see the temptation to create another account after that first loss though.

I've always liked the idea of prizes being handed out more often, so you have an incentive to keep playing even if your chances at the big prize seem unlikely.

I think if you're going to elect these council members and they need to playing the game LOTS to support a huge playerbase, shouldn't they also have some additional incentives?

Can you?

Maybe cullman is my rich uncle. Or maybe "Josh" started as a pen name so nobody would know I was spending all my time on Primrose and then was repurposed into a dual account for robbing houses in TCD. I might even be one of Caravan Disturber's many "friends." How far does the rabbit hole go?

Yea, I can't believe. I thought this idea was very absurd. The joke is also on me because I got -100 points.

Honestly, the only problem I saw was that I was F5ing the leaderboard constantly waiting for movement (signaling that Jason was getting out of a game). If I saw movement, I left my current game and tried to join a new one. Perhaps that leaderboard should be cached or delayed.

Dates, times, timezones, DST. The bane of my existence. My lazy googling for the time in PST failed me.

I guess where my confusion stems from is I assumed that if the "play the game how you normally play" attitude is going to be respected, you would basically select games/stakes to play at random. So Doorman could just play games at whatever level he wanted without having to hunt you down and he would be just as likely to get a game as anyone else.

If instead it's our responsibility to figure out which stakes you're playing that changes how the game is played. I will admit however that the metagame of trying to predict not only what columns you're going to pick but what stakes is somewhat interesting.

Yup. I figured you'd have to start ramping up the trash talking if we all know you're going to be playing the game.

What I meant with no additional code was that technically the winners could be determined with a few mysql queries. It would never actually be implemented that way, but I was trying to amp up the joke (which I really didn't think anyone would take seriously). I do empathize with you on the time zone issue. If Jason is willing to adopt some odd sleeping patterns and keep an eye on which hours he has played (easy with a query), then he could balance his games throughout the day. But then does that give you the advantage because you're competing against fewer players for games?

If we're going back to games on demand as opposed to the random delay stuff, then your particular collusion concern isn't an issue. Because you normally wouldn't join games with yourself. It makes no sense.

Your comment made me wonder about a few similar issues. If you had 50 visa gift cards, you could open up 50 stakes and dramatically increase the chance that you might play a game with Jason. But then you have a few big problems: what happens when several of your stakes get joined? Do you play all of them simultaneously? And even if you do manage to funnel Jason into a game, you're reducing your chances of wracking up many wins against Jason down to nothing. So I'm still not seeing collusion issues. And even if they do arise, there's certainly will never be a way to get free points.

Jason, you'd have to put a cap on the stakes right? I assume you're not going to be playing $1000 games against Judge Doorman or Nate.

One cool thing about time of day is it seems to match the occult theme very well. Right? I'm kind of speculating here, but I think it would. It reminds me of three characters in American Gods:

You could have the most valuable amulet only start after midnight PST. Aren't demonic rituals most effective at night?

The random delay/timing stuff has always struck me as very exploitable. And you're right that picking a specific opponent and having the amulet holder wait for them is pretty bad. Here's an idea that I think is better: queue players up and randomly assign the queued players every, say, 5 minutes. The timer is shown on the UI (e.g. next assignment in 1:20).

-You start/join a stake.
-You know exactly how long you'll have to wait for a game. This'll let you know if you have time to take a quick bathroom break or whatever.
-If 20 people join (and there are <= 10 amulet holders), they all get games.
-Sometimes you will be the odd person, but then you'll be guaranteed a game on the next assignment (assuming the game isn't completely dead).

This has some reasonable worst case bounds on waiting and it hurts colluders pretty hard. Their chance of getting a colluding game is proportional to how many accounts they control over how many total non-amulet holders there are (not just at a given instant that the colluder controls but over a FIVE MINUTE span). It'd hurt even more if amulet holders were allowed to be assigned to each other. If you want, you could require a minimum number of players in the queue before pairing them.

Another idea that may have been thrown out there that I will agree on: make points proportional to how long a game lasts based on time or rounds (with a cap around 10-20 minutes). What Caravan says they were doing (going all in immediately) isn't how most games play out realistically and this diminishes the effect of fast colluder games.

Both of these ideas prevent colluders racking up points very fast, but shouldn't bother normal players too much. One other thing about the points being proportional to time: it somewhat punishes this atypical, reckless play that you see quite often during the amulet contest. You still can get points for doing it but they'll be worth less.

Chaos Building comes online (and by "comes online", I mean first game ever played) 3.5 hours before the competition ends and, other than one game against Garments Infection, plays only against Caravan Disturber and Nursery Malice.*

Nursery Malice comes online 1.75 hours before the competition and plays 5 games exclusively between Caravan Disturber and Chaos Building. This is exactly what you would do if you wanted to secure the amulet (because in the last 2 hours you can stop playing after you have the lead).

Caravan Disturber doesn't lose any of those games. The games are fast, happening at least every 5 minutes.

Could be collusion, could be luck, could be Caravan bringing two friends into the game at the right time. Take it how you will.

Jason's response in the past seems to: well, the system should be fixed rather than the person punished. With enough people, I hope it will be less of an issue, but this makes me a bit more skeptical.

*You can  confirm all this data yourself with a combination of the Games Played leaderboard and searching on Twitter for those aliases (it helps if you follow Canto Delirium and you select "People you follow" and "All" in the search.... otherwise you're going to get a lot of unrelated news items).

What does active mean? Logged in?