CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

What is HN?

Well, I just posted in the 2+2 forums about CM. http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com

A few hours later, my posts were removed, I was scolded by private message spamming, and an infraction was logged against me.

Even though two people had replied to my thread with interest.

So, reddit ain't so bad, I guess.

Yeah, I guess if they turn delay on for you, they have to maintain a buffer for your video content on their server, so they are hesitant to let everyone start doing that.

Thanks for this great post!

It sounds like "it worked" in terms of the path into playing and learning the game.  There's always a worry for any somewhat hard game that it will be too hard for new people to get into, especially a competitive game like this.  You do have the benefit of loads of new players to play against right now.  If you had come in a few weeks ago, you'd have been swimming in a pool full of sharks.  Though most experienced players have moved on from penny games, so the stakes have a natural tendency toward good matchmaking.

As far as the anonymity goes, I hear you on the hollowness, but anonymity is an aesthetic theme in a number of my games.  There has been some talk of some opaque channel for communication... like each player could pick from one of 5 tarot cards to display a mood... or something.  But I haven't ever settled on anything really good.

This chat room helps a lot in terms of community:

http://us19.chatzy.com/88872904022107

Often times, people arrange games in there at some named stake and then chat as they play.

In terms of aesthetics, the dehumanization of the opponent is really important to me.  It's a very strange thing to celebrate a big, profitable win when your profit means someone else's crushing loss.  I literally want you to see them as L'Abisso, faceless and nameless, almost like a mysterious part of the machine.  When the chime sounds, as someone joins your game, I want that urgent sense of nervous anticipation, and that's fueled by the anonymity.  Finally, I really like the idea of communication that happens through the game mechanics itself.  Learning a new game is quite a bit like learning a new language.  A medium for direct mind-to-mind communication, albeit combative communication.

Yeah, your account could have gotten lost in the shuffle, Defiant00, sorry about that!  It was pretty overwhelming to discover all those dormant spam accounts.

http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/vie … php?id=776

Well, currently, the top 4 players on each leaderboard get a *, and it's not more sophisticated than that.  Each day operates in isolation.

The point is, if we have a "usual suspect" problem across multiple days, those *'s will be misleading.  If it's a huge problem, I may do something about it mid-contest.

Yeah, that case is outside the scope of the algorithm, because no one won more than one.  The contest does not guarantee a "stable matching."  The post-contest algorithm guarantees that you will get the favorite prize among those of which you won.

I'm kinda going back and forth about whether someone can win more than one cash prize or not.

What I really don't want is 4 "usual suspects" swamping the whole thing and making everyone else feel like they have no chance.  Also, if you win $5, you'll be trying for a bigger one anyway, right?  So will you really be so sad to drop the $5 and replace it with a $10 or $20?  Whatever other prize you win will always be 2x (or equal) the one you're dropping, right?

dot-dot, it turns out that hand-crafing amulets was a ton of work.  I think it took me something like 3 weeks to make these 12.  Making 36 was kinda out of the question, as cool as that number is.  12 is actually a bit cooler (6+6, the number of rows and columns in the game, and also 3+4+5, the sum of the smallest Pythagorean triple, and 12 is one of the most important occult numbers, given that we have 12 fingers).  Anyway, I still have a callous on my right hand from all that wax carving!

The copper one is worth way less than $50, and the silver way less than $100, by metal weight alone, so the lesser-place cash prizes are supposed to be relative to the first place cash prizes.

I gotta be careful here, because the cash prizes already total $2000+, and there's $2000+ in the metal.  So I'm well over $4K already on a game that made less than $1K over 8 months of alpha testing (total rake is $1200, but don't forget all those test prizes I paid out along the way).

With a pay-to-play Steam game like TCD, it made $50K during pre-steam alpha testing, so it was safe to give $3K+ of prizes away in the launch contest.  This is much riskier.  There have been $17K in player deposits, but I only rake a tiny fraction of that.

I actually haven't proved that this algorithm works, but I would do this:

1. Everyone who has won more than one amulet picks one to keep.

2.  Non-kept amulets are then won by the next-place player on that day.

3. Repeat 1 and 2 as long as anyone still has more than one.

This respects everyone's preferences, assuming their preferences are transitive (if Jane picks B over A, so drops A, and then later goes on to have someone drop C to her, and prefers C over B, we can assume she also prefers C over A, so her having already dropped A is not a problem).

In your example, Adam is the only one with two at the start, so he drops one, say silver.  Then we return to step (1) and find Dave with two, so Dave can chose which to drop.

Yeah, that detail is not explained on the page (didn't want to clutter it too much), but if you win more than one amulet day, you decide which one to keep and the rest are passed on to the second place players on those days.

Maybe I'll add a line about that...

Also, they are not in order so that the gold and silver ones are toward the ends of the weeks, ending with two gold on the last Saturday and Sunday.

Yeah, using your brain should give you an advantage!