Feedback on amulet contest

storeroom leaflet · 2015-03-19 08:19:23

I'm not sure what sort of feedback will be useful for Jason for this contest, but I thought it would be useful to have a separate thread for it, and I might as well give my thoughts from playing in it so far:

1. Definitely felt increased tension playing amulet games, and even games that might be amulet games, so I think it achieves that goal fairly well.

2. The current system feels quite unfair to those who pick up a dropped amulet. Not only have they won an amulet game without getting points for it but if they then go on to win a second game they'll have significantly *less* points than somebody who just wins one game against an amulet holder. Even worse if they win the game to pick up the amulet and then lose their next game they'll end up on *negative* points. Plus you'll have lost the chance to play other amulet holders, there will definitely be cases where picking up an amulet will be bad in expectation for the player that does it at the moment which is not what you want.

3. The system is currently feels incredibly punishing to those who play at unpopular times (e.g. those of us on the other side of the world!) As well as having to play for longer to get the same game volume because of the lower number of players you can be sitting waiting for games, uncontrollably losing points for long periods of time. This doesn't feel very fair and is not very fun. Mind you I suppose players playing at unpopular times are compensated by the higher density of amulet games. In this practice, probably not sufficient as the density is always going to be high, and I've been waiting about an hour losing points on an amulet and I'm not even sure this is an unpopular time. Numbers like that are going to make it very difficult to rack up points (and it's no good getting amulets if you've got no chance of getting very high scores on them; you need to get the *highest* number of points and there are going to be players who get the amulet during the popular times with much lower wait times). Maybe the extra players from the launch will mitigate this issue but that brings me to my next point:

4. One thing I don't think anyone's mentioned about the current system, and which I hadn't thought about until now is that it requires a *lot* of players to have everyone playing games or even to avoid long waits. Just not allowing amulet holders to play each other, and assuming amulet holders only want to play amulet games, means you need twice as many players as amulets (so in the real competition this will be 72 players playing). Further, currently for an amulet holder to get a game there need to be two non-amulet holders, one who proposes a game and another who joins. Add in that the random delay will mean multiple games will have to start on average before the amulet holder gets a game and we're talking about 80 players active at all times to avoid amulet holders having large wait times. These sort of numbers make me think that collusion will be more of a problem than I had thought. If you've got a decent chance of sitting there waiting for an amulet for awhile you can just start an amulet game and then get your alts to keep starting games with each other. After my experience today I'd probably make alt accounts just to make sure I don't end up uncontrollably losing points.

Suggested fixes (roughly from what seem simplest to most complex):
1. Whenever someone wins a game to win an amulet, give them 200 points (even if the amulet they won was dropped).
2. Don't have amulet holders lose points while waiting for an amulet game.
3. Give amulet holders the option of just dropping an amulet.

I'd would argue for all 3 together, though any one or two on their own would mitigate the issues above. Also none of them get the fundamental issue about the requirement for large numbers of players to be active, and playing at times when there are not those sort of numbers not being very rewarding (unless colluding when it will be amazing). For that I think you would need bigger changes e.g.:

1. Reduce the number of amulets. Halve the number of amulets and you almost halve the number of active players you need to avoid long wait times.

2. Allow amulet holders to play each other. In fact have that as default behaviour have an amulet holder waiting for a game to be about as likely to be pulled as a player just joining a game, and definitely be pulled rather than having both amulet holders waiting there for a few minutes (You haven't said how the current delay on amulet games works so I don't know the details about how you would do this). This would basically deal with the problem I think (for instance at the moment I wouldn't be surprised that there are 3 or 4 players all waiting for a game, and with this change we'd be playing each other).

Last edited by storeroom leaflet (2015-03-19 12:26:51)

storeroom leaflet · 2015-03-19 08:27:27

Oh I should add if you don't want to implement any of my three simpler suggestions, a compromise would be to have it so players couldn't have a negative score. (Ideally you'd have it so they couldn't lose points by picking up an amulet, but you can't easily do this without giving players a motive to stall if they have a high score on an amulet and are lucky enough to pick it up again; mind you I'm not sure how worried one should be about this, and am still inclined to think amulet holder should not be losing so many points while playing a game).

.. · 2015-03-19 13:41:19

I agree with most of this, especially the problem with negative scores.

It's OK if amulet holders aren't in-game 100% of the time. For them to be in-game 50% of the time would only require about 50 active players. However if I understand correctly, if all amulet holders want to play amulet games only and there are less than 72 players active then pretty much every game will be an amulet game (ignoring the effects of the random delays, which I can't comment on because I don't know how they work). Is that bad? I don't know.

Also in practice a number of amulet holders won't be playing amulet games at any moment either because they're AFK and haven't timed out yet, or they want to be able to control the stakes they're playing at rather than risk $3, especially people who don't think they have a chance. I'd think a large fraction (half?) of the amulets would be out of play (not contested in an amulet game) even with enough active players.

An alternative to starting with more than 0 points when an amulet is dropped on you would be to just not lose any points until you play your first amulet game. But I don't see any need for people to lose points while they're waiting for an amulet game to begin anyway, which is also a partial solution. (They could still lose points while actually in-game, to reward people with a higher profit/time ratio.)

I also agree with the suggestion to allow amulet holders to play each other. There's two options: either randomly pair up those waiting for amulet games if they've been waiting too long, or allow amulet holders to end up in amulet games when they tried to play a regular game.
In both cases, I suggest that the winner of a double-amulet match keeps their amulet, while the loser of a match loses their amulet only if they tried to play an amulet game. Using this rule you don't really need to add a "drop amulet" button because you can continue to play regular games against anyone (without endangering your amulet or winning points or being in the running for any other amulets), and it only requires a server change. However, this doesn't cover the case where you want to drop your amulet to get a different one. But is it a good idea to assist people to do that?
I don't see anything wrong with randomly pairing up two people waiting for amulet games either.

Last edited by .. (2015-03-19 14:00:14)

jasonrohrer · 2015-03-19 15:56:46

Well, at peak yesterday, we had 19 active players. I think we'll have way more than that during the launch contest. The Castle Doctrine launch contest peaked above 1000 active players. I'm not expecting 1000, but at least 100 should be do-able. There's not a good way to deal with the "other side of the world" issue.... recruit more people from your side of the world!

Currently, your score can't go below 0. There are no negative scores.

I agree that it's weird for people who pick up a dropped amulet to start with 0. Because for them, the experience of winning a game and getting an amulet as a result is identical in either case (the case of a dropped amulet or the case of taking an amulet from someone). So, I think both cases should get +200. I'll change that on the server.

As far as amulet-holders playing each other, I don't think that will be needed with a larger player population. I don't want the amulet-holders to hog each other.

Currently, it is quite slow because you're not just waiting for an opponent, but actually waiting for TWO opponents to join each other (so that one can be pulled away for you). So in a situation where only one person does not have an amulet, the whole thing stalls.

Niateph · 2015-03-19 16:20:18

I also agree mostly on the "other side of the world" part.

I usually have to launch Cordial Minuet and do my stuff (good thing I'm working at home) while hoping for another player to join in the correct stakes range so I lose a lot of precious minutes just waiting for an opponent.
My personal suggestion would be a coefficient of sort decreasing the per minute loss while you're queuing while keeping the 2h inactivity timer.
The major abuse would be players queuing at empty times but the risk of being sniped and auto defeated kinda solve the whole thing from my point of view (but I'm still new to the game and the community so I'm still not aware of all the leaderboard stalking things)

I know it would kinda fix itself with a bigger community which will probably be the case with the real event but meanwhile I feel totally at a disadvantage to rake some precious points.

jasonrohrer · 2015-03-19 16:37:06

Well, this contest is mainly to work out legitimate bugs in the amulet code. I'm not trying to tune it to this situation, really.

domep1ece · 2015-03-19 18:59:06

Im running into a lot of issues with games showing up while i am waiting for an opponent but not being available when i exit the "lobby" so to speak. It shows multiple available at $3 but when i leave there are none.

Cobblestone · 2015-03-19 19:31:09

jasonrohrer wrote:

Currently, your score can't go below 0. There are no negative scores.

That's weird, because experience shows otherwise. I won and picked up an amulet at 0. Then won another game, and instead of 200 points, I had 158. This makes sense since I waited about 40 or so minutes to get in to that other game. I'm glad to hear you're giving winners 200 regardless of where they got it from. That should solve the issue, but if you're looking for bugs, then it seems there's one here.

I said this in the other thread, but I'll repeat it here. I agree with the others that say there needs to be a way to drop the amulet without having to join a match.

It's incredibly frustrating to win an amulet and then not have anyone else to play against. Even if I wanted to drop it, I couldn't get in a game to do it. All I could do was sit and watch my points decay. At the end of the night I won two games and ended with 38 points. With this current system, a person who wins one and loses one immediately would have vastly more points.

jasonrohrer · 2015-03-19 21:02:47

Yeah, I guess I need to get a DROP button in there pronto.

See the other thread for the explanation about negative points....

storeroom leaflet · 2015-03-19 21:41:21

jasonrohrer wrote:

There's not a good way to deal with the "other side of the world" issue.... recruit more people from your side of the world!

Well much simpler and more profitable for me will be to create two alt accounts which (when and only when I'm waiting for an amulet game) spam 1c games and leave any game they find themselves in immediately. This won't give a noticable edge with a thousand players playing at the same time, but it would give a huge one with <80 players, and I think still a noticeable one with 100. I'd go from being at a significant disadvantage to having a huge advantage, shading into the territory of "I won the contest with one simple trick" territory I think. This sort thing seem unavoidably to give an edge without completely changing the whole thing. But allowing amulet holders to play each other would certainly reduce it significantly especially if you can count on having 36 players playing at any one time. Putting limits on number of times you can play any particular opponent will help reduce the advantage from this as well, but it will also make things even worse for non-colluding players playing at "unpopular" (less than 80(!) active players) times.

Cobblestone · 2015-03-19 22:07:27

jasonrohrer wrote:

Yeah, I guess I need to get a DROP button in there pronto.
See the other thread for the explanation about negative points....

Cool, the drop button will be really helpful for those late night amulet wins.
I just saw the other thread. The penalty definitely gave the appearance of negative points, but now that there's no more 0 point amulet wins it makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.

Regarding storeroom leaflet's idea to let amulet players play each other, you could possibly make that work. If an amulet holder has been searching for a long time (over an hour maybe, so half the point decay time), the server opens the search up to other amulet holders at a random stake. The amulet holders wouldn't need to know their oppenent is another amulet holder, and the loser just drops their amulet into the pool. So the winner wins points on their amulet, the loser drops theirs, everything works as expected.

Edit: maybe this was already suggested, but what if the points only went down while you're inactive? So if you're in an amulet game or, more importantly, actively seaching for an amulet game but there's no one to play, you're at least participating and not losing points.

Last edited by Cobblestone (2015-03-20 00:20:00)

computermouth · 2015-03-20 04:16:43

+1 for [DROP], already burnt through 1/4 of my points waiting for my first amulet match

claspa · 2015-03-20 11:55:54

Here are some of my impressions:

- When I got the message that I received an amulet, the game crashed on me.

- It's not fair losing amulet points while waiting for a new game. What else can you do than just be ready for the next game? I am aware that the waiting time might change with a bigger player base, but the concept itself is still wrong.

- I had an intense lenghty match with jere. Lots of back and forth. Strategy changes, high level. But it didn't give me a lot of points because the game took so long.
Strictly speaking on terms of amulet points why do I get less points for playing the game as I used too instead of someone else who just plays super risky all ins?

- As an amulet holder not knowing what the stakes are is giving the non-amulet holder a mental advantage. For me and probably other also it makes a difference if you are playing for 1 Cent or 3 Dollars.
I am aware that 5 Dollars are nothing in Online Poker, but this is not the living culture in current CM. 1 Cent is maybe the Online Poker's 5 Dollars. You are even advertising a minimum deposit of 2 Dollars and explain that you can play 164 penny games, this is estabilishing culture and a certain mind set. Given that there is a huge difference between 1 Cent and 3 Dollars.

- If you just want to get rid of the amulet (besides finding an opponent) due to the different stakes you loose a different amount of money (7 Points in a 3 Dollar game = 21 cents; or 0,0007$)

I am sorry, if my plain talking is harsh. No personal offense intended.

.. · 2015-03-20 13:25:37

The crash on receiving an amulet has apparently been fixed in the next version, but I can't say for sure it's the same crash.

Because losing points while waiting for a game isn't very fair, a drop amulet button without changing that isn't really fair either: Player A wins an amulet, scores 200 points, and then waits futilely for a game for 2 hours, ending with 80 points. Player B receives an amulet, isn't interested in even trying, drops immediately, and gets 200 points.

jasonrohrer wrote:

As far as amulet-holders playing each other, I don't think that will be needed with a larger player population. I don't want the amulet-holders to hog each other.

Because one of the amulet holders is guaranteed to drop their amulet, pairing up two people waiting for an amulet game actually has no effect on anyone's chance of receiving an amulet after winning a game. Indeed because the wait to start an amulet game would be reduced, amulets would move around players faster.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Well, at peak yesterday, we had 19 active players. I think we'll have way more than that during the launch contest. The Castle Doctrine launch contest peaked above 1000 active players. I'm not expecting 1000, but at least 100 should be do-able.

The problem isn't on-peak but off-peak; if on-peak max is 200 players then judging by the current user graph (scaling it linearly), about 8 hours a day active users would be a small fraction of that, below 50, and everything would grind to a halt.

storeroom leaflet wrote:

Well much simpler and more profitable for me will be to create two alt accounts which (when and only when I'm waiting for an amulet game) spam 1c games and leave any game they find themselves in immediately.

That's very serious. But it raises the question: should you get points if your opponent leaves immediately? Of course, there's no minimum game length requirement that would stop it, it would only slow it down.

LiteS · 2015-03-20 15:22:08

Maybe the lesson to learn here is we need a nice balance between # of amulets and # of active players. I'd guess that right now the number of amulets is too high.

Last edited by LiteS (2015-03-20 15:22:34)

jasonrohrer · 2015-03-20 19:33:09

Hmm... yeah, that is interesting.

Free-floating amulets perhaps could only be released into the player pool when there are enough players around to support extra amulets.

.. · 2015-03-20 23:45:30

Why didn't I think of that?

The problem is that amulets can only be removed from the player pool by time-out, which probably means there are already too many active amulets, and things would take a few hours to correct.

jasonrohrer · 2015-03-21 01:10:00

Well, players could self-regulate based on their perception of point loss for holding it any longer (with the new DROP AMULET button).

In fact, I think this is happening automatically to some extent. Because a free amulet is only dropped to a player that is in a non-amulet game, and there are only non-amulet games when there are an excess of non-amulet players. Otherwise, all players are pulled into amulet games.

For example, and the moment, THREE amulets are in limbo and haven't been handed back out, because there are no non-amulet games happening that would trigger the handing-out part.

Thoughts?

This still means that there will always be SLIGHTLY too many amulets out there, but when it's at that threshold, some players will be motivated to drop instead of continue to shed points.

cornercoin · 2015-03-21 20:47:17

just had the top amulet @ 550 or so points and started an amulet game.

walked away heard the gong and when i returned there was red text saying an error about server response and i no longer had the amulet.

i also lost some microchange. sorry if this has been relayed already just providing feedback.

-cc

edit: want to note that i got to the machine about 3 seconds after the chime

Last edited by cornercoin (2015-03-21 20:50:01)

.. · 2015-03-22 13:00:52

Sure sounds like a bug to me.

jasonrohrer wrote:

In fact, I think this is happening automatically to some extent. Because a free amulet is only dropped to a player that is in a non-amulet game, and there are only non-amulet games when there are an excess of non-amulet players. Otherwise, all players are pulled into amulet games.

Regulating the number of active amulets is exactly what's needed. However, the problem with what you described (the simplified situation where an amulet is handed out for every non-amulet game) is that it's a very bad behaviour because amulets will keep getting handed out until either the supply of amulets runs out, or the supply of players runs out. In order words, the MAXIMUM number of amulets is distributed, so the system is doing no at all regulation (it's up to the players to drop amulets because it's out of control):

jasonrohrer in Working Rules for Launch Contest wrote:

Let N be the number of live games that are currently in progress. A dropped amulet passes to the Nth player, system-wide, to be the last player standing in a non-amulet match and who does not currently hold an amulet and who has a balance of at least $3.00.

I had a look at the source code; the quote above describes it well but it misses a crucial detail (which is a mistake): ALL amulets waits concurrently for N games.

The way it works is the following:

-Every amulet has a counter users_to_skip_on_drop.
-When an amulet becomes available (timeout, dropped, or has never been owned), users_to_skip_on_drop gets set to number of non-amulet games being played - 1
-Any time a relevant non-amulet game* finishes, users_to_skip_on_drop is decremented for all amulets
-Any time a relevant non-amulet game* finishes, the last person standing gets the first available amulet with users_to_skip_on_drop=0
-In addition, when amulets are handed out for the first time it's staggered: one gets added at a time with users_to_skip_on_drop as above whenever none of the previous amulets are unclaimed

(*relevant if the last person standing doesn't have an amulet and has $3.)

What's wrong here is that this regulation is quite broken: if there are fewer active players then amulets are handed out faster!! Actually, since the delay before an amulet is handed out is equal to the number of non-amulet games, the above rule tries to hand out one amulet every average-game-length minutes!

This is back to front. Consider the two extremes: firstly, there are no non-amulet games because almost all active players hold amulets. Then an amulet will always be dropped when possible! The other extreme: suppose are 36 amulets and thousands of active players. Suppose an average game is 5 minutes, so an amulet is dropped on a player roughly every 5 minutes. Occasionally a player with an amulet either discards it or walks away without dropping it. Consider a single amulet. If on average it's discarded by a player every 5min*36 = 3 hours, then the system can't reintroduce amulets fast enough to keep up with the rate they're being discarded, and that's not even counting time-outs. 3 hours sounds like what could actually happen, but repeat the calculation supposing there are 200 amulets and you will see the flaw.

(BTW: it's confusing to use 'drop' with two opposite meanings, so I'm using 'discard')

OK, so how to fix this flaw? Options 1 & 2: Scale the existing rate amulets are distributed by the number of active players, or perhaps by min(num amulets, constant * num active players). Option 3: try to explicitly maintain a ratio between number of players with amulets and active players without. Option 3 is similar to option 1 but more direct, but behaves differently when the players with amulets aren't looking for games: in that case option 1 hands out more amulets, under option 3 the other players are out of luck. And option 1 means replacing N (starting value for users_to_skip_on_drop) with a fixed constant. Something like 5-10 might do.

Last edited by .. (2015-03-22 13:03:21)

Cobblestone · 2015-03-22 22:16:11

Can we please show the stakes to the amulet holders? My worst fears were realized, and I just lost $2. I would've gladly dropped the amulet had I known.

Fortune Letterhead · 2015-03-23 07:31:14

I had the same issue as Cobblestone. I worked out what the stakes could be, if I was watching. During non-peak game times, it's better to run the game in the background and wait for the gong.

There was one match I simply left because I didn't know what the stakes were. I didn't want to quit, but I didn't want to get my account cut down to less than $1.

I think that as a launch contest, people affected by not knowing stakes are going to get angry in droves. It would be a less than ideal way to introduce the game to new players. I knew the risks going in and acted accordingly. I don't expect the same will be true of all players during the launch contest.

Yes, they could choose to not participate, but that kind of runs against the idea of a "launch contest."

Last edited by Fortune Letterhead (2015-03-23 09:31:54)

jasonrohrer · 2015-03-23 14:46:26

Yeah, Fortune and Cobblestone, I will add this info.

corner: I believe you emailed me about this, correct?

dot-dot: Yeah, the drop to the Nth player thing was concocted to prevent colluders from dropping to each other BEFORE the whole "pull a player from a non-amulet game" thing was in place. I don't think it's needed anymore, because two alt accounts, playing against each other, can not even be guaranteed to play against each other (one of them is likely to be pulled into an amulet game).

It should probably wait to drop until there are X non-amulet games running.

If a non-amulet game actually runs, then there are an excess of non-amulet players. Otherwise, one of them would be pulled into a waiting amulet game. If there are a bunch of amulet games waiting to start, non-amulet games will never start.

jasonrohrer · 2015-03-23 19:56:37

dot-dot:

I think I've fixed it to handle these issues.

Here's what it's doing now:

1. Count the total live, paired, non-amulet games G.

2. Cap that value at 10 max (so if there are 100s of live games, we don't wait forever).

3. Never hand out a floating amulet if there are unpaired amulet games waiting for a partner

4. Never hand out a floating amulet if there are less than 2 * N + 3 active players (in the last two minutes, where N is the number of held amulets).

If 3 and 4 are satisfied:

5. Wait for G non-amulet games to end before handing out each floating amulet (counters decremented one-by-one, not in parallel).

The 2 * N + 3 number comes from realising that you need 2 * N + 1 players to provide match ups for N amulet games. If you have 2 * N + 2, you can't hand out an amulet, because then you'll have N+1 amulets, and will need 2 *(N+1) + 1 players, but that's 2 * N + 3, and you only have 2*N + 2.

Thus, if you do have 2 * N + 3 and you hand out another amulet, you're still good.

You always need at least one extra, non-amulet player to facilitate the pairing of the other N non-amulet players so they can pulled into amulet games.

jasonrohrer · 2015-03-23 19:59:42

Oh, this also means we will never hand out amulets, at all, unless there are at least three active players.

CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

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