Fundamental issues that limit critical mass

jasonrohrer · 2015-05-13 02:54:52

I'm comparing this game to poker in terms of critical mass potential.

We've already talked extensively about the parity issue. Essentially, this game can only accommodate an even number of players who pair up, and then only if their desired game stakes match up. As the live player population grows, there are very minimal network effects. Each new player to join a pool of N players does not add +N utility the way such a player would with the telephone system, P2P networks, The Castle Doctrine, Rust, or even an FPS deathmatch. (The +N factor comes from this new player being able to interact with each of the N existing players. Furthermore, the new player is even more motivated to join than the Nth player was, so it snowballs.)

In CM, each new player that joins is an immediate opponent only for one player---the very next player to join.

Poker doesn't have this problem because of tables. You can have two people sitting at a table, and they both server as opponents for the third, fourth, etc. players that join. Most Holdem tables are capped at 9 or 10 players, but the game can theoretically handle up to 22 players.

I used to think that the large table in online poker was a vestigial feature left over from live poker (where the dealer is the most expensive element in a poker room). If computers are dealing, wouldn't heads-up be the ideal form of the game? Obviously, it eliminates collusion, but beyond that, way more hands become playable (less likely that someone at the table has better cards than you). Playing well at a 10-handed poker table is literally like this: fold, fold, fold, fold, fold. It's pretty boring. Online, it's so boring that it's hard NOT to play at multiple tables or at least do something else online while playing.

So, I was confused by why the heads up games aren't more popular online. They are offered, but you often have to wait a while for an opponent, while the 9-player tables are often full.

Okay, so the network effects and lack of parity problem are important, but I now think there's more to it than that.

Heads up is like a duel. Very few people duel anymore. Why? Because one person will die, and there's a 50% chance of it being you. Heads up means one of us two are going to lose money. There is no other possible outcome. If you're the fish, then good for me, but you'll learn pretty quick and stop playing, and then I have to find another fish. If we're evenly matched, it's a coin flip. Thus, two pros would never want to play heads up.

Larger table games are different, because the only thing that's guaranteed is that ONE person will lose money. There's a much smaller chance of it being you, even if everyone is evenly matched. Most likely, someone is worse than you. And it's plenty possible for several good players to make reasonable money from one bad player. 8 sharks can share one fish. Thus, the pros are more than willing to sit down with each other and a larger table game. It's not like they look for a table with no other pros. Maybe they avoid tables that are full of nothing BUT pros, but even then, they have only a 1/9 chance of being the losing pro that day.

Over time, a game of skill like Poker will tend to weed out the people who aren't good, leaving a population of very good players. As long as there are a few bad players left around (and there always are, for example, during the weekends in Vegas), the pros will keep playing. All you need is 1/9th of the player population to be bad. One player per table, in a room full of pros.

In a heads-up game like CM, each pro needs to be matched with a bad player. That means 1/2 of the players need to be bad. Obviously, that's probably not likely, and certainly not sustainable over time.

Thus, you'll notice an extreme risk aversion among the pros in this game. Most of the best players have made a single small deposit and built it up from there. No one is saying, "Hey, I'm good at this game, let's try playing for $500 every game, because that will increase my income." Because who else would play for $500 but another pro? Meaning an evenly matched opponent for you, with way too much risk. Yes, $500 games of CM have happened, but the "pros" playing those games were playing with money they had already won in CM, not "real" money from real life.

Sitting down with $500 in a poker room, on the other hand, is perfectly normal and actually considered small stakes. In online poker rooms, which offer microstakes, $5 is the minimum game stake. That's the very bottom.

There are over 1100 accounts now, and only seven people have ever deposited more than $50. Only three people have ever deposited more than $100. Only one player has deposited more than $300.

Unfortunately, the critical mass issues described here are fundamental to the game. There is no way to extend 2-player CM into 10-player CM.

Discordant Mind · 2015-05-13 04:11:10

Playing head to head with another person is part of the game's appeal, for me. The experience of directly battling wits with another human is hard to find. Moments in the game can be intense, and winning a close round can be a powerful rush. I haven't had quite the same experience with any other game. I think the game deserves to succeed in a big way, but hardly anyone knows about it. The problems with nobody wanting to stake large amounts of money would be solved if a steady stream of new players were constantly trying the game out, and new money kept flowing in. How can you attract new players to the game?

jasonrohrer · 2015-05-13 04:40:56

Steam said "No" because they simply do not support or allow games that send money back to players.

I just had a funny thought: what about a "play money" version on Steam?

Where, they buy the game for $10 and get $7 of in-game "play money" (my 70% cut of the Steam price). The game is exactly the same, and they're even playing on the same server. The DEPOSIT and WITHDRAW buttons are missing, however.

AnoHito · 2015-05-13 05:34:28

If nothing else, it might help the game to gain more exposure. Players could learn the game and practice in Steam, and move on to the full version when they are ready. It worked for online poker.

I have to say though, the thoughts you expressed in this thread mirror what I have been thinking for a while now. I actually have had some discussions in the chat, where I explained why I thought this game would have difficulty ever building up a large player base. And from what I've seen so far, things are not looking good. The player count has already dropped significantly from what it was during the peak of the launch, and I have serious doubts it will ever recover. The way I put it in the chat, was that the game just doesn't offer anything for casual players. If you are not making money, it's not fun, and you will probably quit before you lose very much. No one wants to deposit much either, because there seems to be no correlation between how much you deposit and how much you can make. In fact, it's the players who have deposited the most who have lost the most. I'm not really sure if there is any way to fix these issues.

Cobblestone · 2015-05-13 06:17:34

I could actually see that working on Steam, but I have a few questions: would you allow Steam players to recharge their play money with micro-transactions? Do you think Steam would consider letting players cash out their CM balance into their Steam wallet, so cash is essentially only flowing into Steam?

jasonrohrer · 2015-05-13 08:44:03

Money cannot flow back into Steam Wallet. It is simply not supported by Steam.

But yes, I would allow players to buy more play money with Steam Wallet. ($1 buys 70 cents worth to account for Steam's cut).

I sent an email to my contact at Steam about this. We'll see what they say.

ukuko · 2015-05-13 10:01:14

For a while now I've been trying to work out why I can't get into CM. Everything about the game appeals to me, but I just don't have that much fun playing it. I think your post up there helped me figure it out, though.

I enjoy poker and used to play it a lot, both face-to-face with friends and online against strangers. I think I was OK. I rarely lost money. However, whenever I was faced with a duel situation I would lose all motivation to play, even if the odds were stacked in my favour. It's no fun (for me) to slowly beat a worse player or slowly lose to a better player. And if you're evenly matched then it ends up feeling like a coin toss.

I guess I prefer sharing a fish to squaring off with a shark. And I am definitely not a CM shark.

.. · 2015-05-13 10:16:25

There's certainly a critical mass problem, but only for higher stakes players. Because you can play 1c games for essentially free, and the game has been mostly marketed to gamers rather than gamblers and poker players, the large majority play low stakes. Right now there's no problem if you want to play 1 cent games. I don't think I've waited more than 10 seconds for one of those since release (I only do that as a gag). So I think a steam release with fixed initial $7 balance would do little to directly fix that, other than some tiny fraction of those players deciding to go in for real money. How much does the steam userbase overlap with poker players?

If you had a steam version of the game, would Valve still disallow having the money withdrawable or depositable through external means (going to the website or downloading the real client?) There's the issue that if someone starts with $7 on steam and ends up with $1000 (as happens), they'll be upset if they can't switch to a "real" account. It might be play money to them, but it's real money to everyone else (though it would make sense to make them ineligible for prizes).

I have to disagree on some points. I don't like playing the worst players. They act randomly and irrationally so I actually have more trouble predicting them than a better player, and they're just not engaging in the mind-reading game. They're challenging in a different way to good players. I prefer to play players better than me, because I play reltatively low stakes and have a negative profit, and want to prove myself rather than make a big profit.

AnoHito wrote:

The way I put it in the chat, was that the game just doesn't offer anything for casual players. If you are not making money, it's not fun, and you will probably quit before you lose very much

Are you trying to exclude the existing playerbase, most of which are apparently playing for fun rather than profit, with the "casual" quantifier? I think the game is fun even if you're losing money, though I admit if you're losing nearly all your games you'll probably be quite demoralised.

Last edited by .. (2015-05-13 10:22:12)

joshwithguitar · 2015-05-13 12:07:02

Personally I quite enjoy the game as it is and if it was designed to appeal to the masses I probably wouldn't. People seem to really enjoy the ability to play low stakes and I'm glad there aren't people playing and losing their life savings.

Of course this in the end makes the game less profitable and I hope it hasn't been too much of a financial loss for you.

One thing that I believe works against a lot of people picking it up is the Satanic theme - it is going to turn away many people who are religious, superstitious or don't want to be seen playing a 'satanic' game.

In the end if you want lots of casual players you would probably have to make it aesthetically a lot less interesting. You know, bright colours, fireworks when you win money, cheezy noises etc. Things to emphasise the good feelings of winning and de-emphasise the bad feeling of losing. The kinds of things that slot machine makers put a lot of effort into refining.

jere · 2015-05-13 12:36:51

Worrying about long term issues at game launch seems like putting the cart before the horse. Yes, you want a a low churn rate, but having a low churn doesn't matter if you start with a small playerbase and have no way to get new people into the system!

Therefore, the Steam thing is the single best idea in this thread. I would do whatever you could get away with. If that means depositing money that can only be withdrawn with the real client, so be it. If it means funny money on a separate server that serves as training wheels for the real thing, consider that as well. Either way, Steam would bring a lot of exposure and people might be more willing to put their CC into Steam than your game client (I've heard this concern expressed many times).

There is no way to extend 2-player CM into 10-player CM.

Are you absolutely sure? You sit at a table. Each person has an alias (A, B, C or more lively names like Bobcat and Dictator) and a color. You rotate opponents. The number has to be even obviously, so you can restrict to even number of players or fill in with a unknown bot that plays a set strategy (not random because that introduces luck). You're playing the column picking parts with a single opponent each round, but the betting includes everyone at the table. You see X number of scoreboards (each with the player's unique colors). You have to work out some issues like what to do when somebody leaves, but I don't see any huge roadblocks.

Then again, I really don't understand the appeal of making the game more boring.

You're saying CM's big problem is that it's too hard for pros to keep making money. AnoHito is saying that it's too hard for beginners to make money. Really?

Is this really the reason that poker has remained a popular pastime for over a century? Because people make money off of it? Sure there's the fascination with watching pros play, but I'd assume some of the popularity comes from it just being a fun game for people to play.

This isn't Vegas unfortunately. You don't have weekenders just passing through.

LiteS · 2015-05-13 13:59:31

I've been thinking about a pay-once standalone version of CM as well.
Modified server rules could work something like this:

Everyone gets 500 play points (dollars?), and if at the end of the day your total is less than 500, your 500 starting points are returned to you. Or return 100 points every hour up to 500 if you want the game to be playable more often. There's no need for a rake, since the money isn't real, but unfortunately, this game doesn't "matter" as much. But it fixes the fundamental issue of "I paid $2 for this game, but I can't play it anymore because I ran out of money". Even Castle Doctrine let you keep playing after you died.

If you want to offer "dlc" you could say "Pay an extra dollar, add an extra hundred points to your daily maximum points" or something like that.

But would anyone play a pretend money game? I'm not sure. I think one of the big problems here is although the audience for indie games is large, and the audience for real money games is also large, I'm afraid the intersection between those two groups is small.

Edit:
This could still work in-theme with a reskin. Give the play-money players cute Hello Kitty/Lisa Frank style board choices or whatever, then if they want to play for real there's the occult version available at Cordialminuet.com

2nd Edit:
Heck, if we want to attract the f2p crowd, we could say "Everyone gets an account for free that refreshes to 50 coins every hour, 10 coins every 6 minutes", then pay a dollar, get an extra hundred added to your daily maximum. There are a ton of ways Jason could incentive people to pay for an increase in daily maximum, but I'm not sure that's a game design space that interests him. This way people can find out if they're good at this game before they invest any money.

Last edited by LiteS (2015-05-13 14:22:17)

computermouth · 2015-05-13 15:34:14

joshwithguitar wrote:

One thing that I believe works against a lot of people picking it up is the Satanic theme - it is going to turn away many people who are religious, superstitious or don't want to be seen playing a 'satanic' game.

I can attest to this. [I'm not religiously committed, and don't take offense to another person's stance.]

But when I saw the original Kotaku post, I thought yeah, whatever, let's just see the game. If anything the occult stylings were a detractor to me, just because I think it's silly (sorry occultist folks). But I do have friends who are religious and who gamble but express exactly no interest in CM. As was mentioned in the poker subreddit, the theme doesn't exactly instill confidence for the wary.

Seeing the attributes of the game as filters, we're looking for (gamers) > (outside of service providers eg. Steam/Desura/GoG) > (gamblers) > (people at least not-turned-off-by-occult) > (people not afraid to deposit money). Poker players seeing it as a video game, gamers seeing it as gambling, both potentially scared off by the back-door-of-the-tavern vibe.

Anyway,
+1 for NewellBucks version.
+1 for table play discussion.

Cobblestone · 2015-05-13 15:47:57

Maybe I'm an odd duck, but the occult theme and the back-door-of-the-tavern vibe are actually what got me interested in the game enough to try it. I like the underground feel of the game and the community, but I understand that's difficult to maintain for the longterm health of the game.

LiteS · 2015-05-13 16:25:13

On the bright side, there's no shortage of Cordial Minuet anagrams that could easily be used to reskin or re-theme the game. I mean, would you play Orca Unlimited? Maybe put a scallop in a graduation cap and call it Clam Erudition. Add some knock-off tetris music and some 8 bit background and you've got Comrade Uliti. The core game is solid, it's just a question of how much work should go into dressing it up in a cute wrapper.

Professor Chin · 2015-05-13 16:46:39

When I joined CM I was much concerned about my ability to avoid to loose all of my balance before starting having a grasp on the game.

Of course it sounds silly to anybody who knows about bankroll management (or read Jere's and Asminthe's posts), but I came from a poker experience in a club as a newbie where I was often out of the game before understanding what was happening.

The very day I joined there was a tournament with i think a 10c entry fee and 1c fixed stakes games.
That was the warmer welcome to me: the fixed entry fee a playing stakes made me feel like things were in control...

I think that in the post-amulets era small-stakes tournaments might be considered as a "safe" space for beginners. A way to nurture the players base

Incidentally: a good old round robin tournament is almost an implementation of a CM table game.

On the other hand high-stakes tournaments might be a motivation for "pro" players which might have difficulties in finding opponents.

jasonrohrer · 2015-05-13 19:55:03

It's true that the tournament format does kinda solve the parity issue and the 50% chance of being the loser issue.

I also get that the Venn diagram for this game's demographic is horribly small. That's not my concern so much. It's more about, well, we have over 1100 players now, but only 130 of them play each day, and it's slowly dwindling, even during the launch contest. These are people ALREADY IN the center of the diagram, and there's something about the game that makes them drop it after trying it. Where, once you try poker, you pretty much never drop it (assuming that you play long enough to get dealt AA at least once).

Another part of the problem is that playing the game well, and then really well, is very subtle and deeply complicated. For example, say you know you're opponent is playing randomly (rolling d6). Like, for sure. Well, optimal play in that case requires a game tree search through a tree with 500,000 leaves.

There are some rules of thumb for beginners, but they don't really work that well, in that they don't drastically improve play that much.

The people who are good at this game can't tell me what they're doing to be so good. They can try, but they can't really explain it.

In poker, you can print out a little fold-call-raise table for various starting hands, and by using that table, you will become something like 200% better as a poker player. You could even tell someone something simple like, "Fold to any raise unless you have AA, KK, QQ, or AK" and that would make them way better than a naive beginner who calls a raise with Q9 suited. I placed 4th in a live tournament, and I only played two hands the whole night, and they were both KK. I won both hands.

Even simpler advice like, "Play fewer hands," or "Fold more," helps a whole lot in Poker. Well, actually, these kinds of tables and advice are pretty much useless in heads-up poker, because the blinds will grind you down unless you play a lot more hands, which means reading your opponent is way more important, as are the subtle differences among the trashier hands. Thus, maybe heads up is way harder, which is also why more people don't play poker that way.

The bigger the table, the fewer hands are playable, making good play much easier. At a 22-handed poker table (the limit), perhaps nothing but AA would be playable. It can't get easier than that.

jere · 2015-05-13 20:54:50

^To your point (and I was thinking about posting this anyway): http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/05/10/ … lay-poker/

There's a 1 page cheatsheet in there.

card · 2015-05-13 21:03:33

jasonrohrer wrote:

The people who are good at this game can't tell me what they're doing to be so good. They can try, but they can't really explain it.

I don't think this is true. There are a few strategies that I've figured out that are easily describable, and I think that is probably true for anyone using a strategy.

jasonrohrer · 2015-05-13 21:13:53

I didn't know he was a poker player.

Of course he's a poker player! That dude is everything.

AnoHito · 2015-05-13 22:41:53

jasonrohrer wrote:

The people who are good at this game can't tell me what they're doing to be so good. They can try, but they can't really explain it.

I think I can explain it for the most part. I usually start by playing a strategy that exploits column variance in order to create the highest probability that I will have a higher number than the other player. I also take into account how my picks will affect the future board layout, in order to determine how good/bad the number I was given really was. Beyond that, I have a simple betting strategy that involves doubling up when I determine my chances of winning are significantly higher than the other player's, and occasionally bluffing in situations where I determine the probability the other player has a good number is low. Beyond that, I look for bias in the other player's picking and betting strategy, and try to exploit it as much as possible.

So I can more or less sum up my entire strategy in one paragraph, but as they say, the devil is in the details. I could probably go into a lot of depth to describe all the various things I take into account when playing. Maybe even write a book about it or something. But I think I could explain pretty much everything I do if I needed to do so. And actually, when you compare the strategy of Cordial Minuet to more complex strategy games like chess or go, it's really not that deep. One of the reasons I think I play Cordial Minuet a lot less now that when I first started playing, is that once you understand the finer details of the game's strategy, it's really more about following a process than anything else. Originally, I didn't think it would be possible to write a successful bot for this game, but now I actually think it might be possible. The hardest part would be getting it to recognize and exploit bias, but I think it's doable.

Cobblestone · 2015-05-13 23:39:33

I feel that any strategy needs to be complemented with a balance of intuition and confidence. When I overthink or doubt myself I tend to do worse, which I imagine is probably true for poker too. Of course, new players learning the game are probably lacking in both or maybe they have too much of one and not enough of the other. This only improves by playing.

Maybe going the MMO approach and having an area where only new players can enter would help with player retention? After 20 games (when they move off the provisional ELO chart) a player can't enter that area anymore and are part of the general player population. I know that the stakes act as sort of a matchmaking system, but creating a fence that the sharks can't cross might make new players feel like there's less risk to learning the game.

card · 2015-05-14 03:16:35

Cobblestone wrote:

I feel that any strategy needs to be complemented with a balance of intuition and confidence. When I overthink or doubt myself I tend to do worse, which I imagine is probably true for poker too. Of course, new players learning the game are probably lacking in both or maybe they have too much of one and not enough of the other. This only improves by playing.
Maybe going the MMO approach and having an area where only new players can enter would help with player retention? After 20 games (when they move off the provisional ELO chart) a player can't enter that area anymore and are part of the general player population. I know that the stakes act as sort of a matchmaking system, but creating a fence that the sharks can't cross might make new players feel like there's less risk to learning the game.

A problem with this is that there needs to be a significant player volume to ensure that there are enough games available in the new player area. Otherwise they will just become frustrated that they can't play games / see games in the regular player area that they aren't able to play. Also I don't think that losing too frequently is scaring many people away - I could be wrong of course. At $0.01/game I feel like the stakes are fairly low for losing anyways.

jasonrohrer · 2015-05-14 06:43:50

Yeah, with so few players currently, cordoning off any players from each other is not a viable solution.

The_Doctor · 2015-05-14 13:42:30

A big problem I see at the moment is, that there are practically no people streaming / "Let's playing" the game. If you do a search for Cordial Minuet on YouTube you basically find nothing. Streams / YouTube videos could potentially spark more interest for the game.
So I'd encourage everyone who does streaming or maybe wants to try it to stream CM or upload CM videos to YouTube.

Apreche · 2015-05-14 14:35:03

The_Doctor wrote:

A big problem I see at the moment is, that there are practically no people streaming / "Let's playing" the game. If you do a search for Cordial Minuet on YouTube you basically find nothing. Streams / YouTube videos could potentially spark more interest for the game.
So I'd encourage everyone who does streaming or maybe wants to try it to stream CM or upload CM videos to YouTube.

I was thinking about doing a stream, but there are some issues with that. I'd want to put in an extensive delay so any potential opponent watching the stream couldn't cheat me. Also, to make the stream interesting for viewers I would have to discuss my line of thinking. Any opponent watching the stream, could figure me out, and then beat me in a subsequent round. Also, there isn't a critical enough mass of players to make it so people wouldn't know they are playing against me.

That said, I'll give it a go anyway.

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