Feedback

• (Lexicon) I find forgetting what color you are to be a common problem in many games here. You get in a rythem playing a game with an opponent, then a new game leaps in, and suddenly you've made a tragic error. Undo is only usable in some games. I suggest that your color be more prominantly displayed on the game page on most/all games, though not too prominantly as that would clash with the color scheme. Perhaps the field which lists player names and colors should have a background lightly tinted your color, or your color indicator should be bigger.

• (dralius) Rank Filtering for each game so that players may restrict others from joining if they are too far apart in skill level.

• (jeep) I'd like to see a list of my active challenges in my home page. Maybe a section under active games? -JEEP
  • (Aaron) Doable. Added to the TODO list.

• (jeep) Oh, and how about a way to see just the PGN for a game. Sorting through the chat history is sometimes annoying. ;)
  • (Aaron) This is possible for some games, but not for others. PGN reports are only available for “2nd generation” games, or games on the new API. For such games, I will add this feature though. Added to the TODO list.

• (jeep) Whenever a game ends, I'm getting two e-mails. One is just a note stating it ended an shows the ratings change and the other with the report of the game. Can we consoidate those two together into a single e-mail?
  • (Aaron) Not easily, no. The 'gameover' alert gets sent only to the participants whereas the game report also gets sent to system admins, tournament directors, etc… I will see if I can come up with a workaround.

• (ts52) It would be nice if you could continue to add comments to completed games. Especially for the games where it may not be obvious that they are about to end.

• (lambda) This is a completely frivolous suggestion, but this is a gaming site after all, so frivolity isn't too out of place. I've been trying out Yucata.de recently, a German play-by-web site. One kind of nifty feature about it is that it has a global rating system for all games, that gives you a title based on your rating. Since Yucata is themed around the Mayans, their titles are things like Priest, Temple Servant, Worker, Farmer, etc, and are based on you winning lots of different games against lots of different opponents. On SDG, I was thinking that maybe there could be titles based on your best rating in an individual game, or your average rating if you're in the top 10 or 20 average ratings. Stuff like, if you're the top Byte player, you would be called “Master Control Program MarkSteere”, and if you were in the top 10, you could be “Kernel foobar”, or if you were the top Homeworlds player, you could be “Fleet Commander Jesse”, or in the top 10 you'd be “Admiral foobar” (or, maybe Jesse would be “Super Duper Gamer Jesse”, since he's got the top average rating). Some suggested titles: Fleet Commander, Admiral, Captain, and Midshipman for Homeworlds, Master Control Program, Kernel, Daemon, and Process for Byte, ICBM, B52, Mortar, and Grenade for Blam!, Queen (or King), Knight, Drone, and Pawn for Martian Chess, and maybe Super Duper Gamer and Super Gamer for the top average players.

• (gigaclon) How about just one email saying “One or more games need your attention” instead of an email for each game, because you will see all the games in that you can move in from any game.
  • (Aaron) This is possible, but it would require digesting these messages. As it stands they are generated the second your opponent has moved. What are your thoughts?

• (Lexicon) On either the games page or on a separate page it would be neat to have some statistics which characterize each game. Asside from being neat, it might help people pick which games to try out. Some characterization ideas are below, other suggestions are welcome:
  • Average length of a game in days
  • Time to make a move: the time from when you last loaded a page to see the current position of the board and the time to execute your move.
    • Given the PbEM nature of the gameplay, I'm not sure what the above statistics would show.
    • I probably didn't explain well what I meant. When you know it's your move, you go to the web page and view the board. You decide what your move is and enter it. I would measure the time between this initial viewing and the subsequent submit. On the other hand what happens if someone loads the page and goes to dinner. This would be interesting, but probably highly inaccurate.

• Learning curve: I'm not sure how to represent this one. If we assume a first time player will lose their first few games, perhaps we can measure the average time it takes for a new player's score to rise back above 1600.
  • I'm afraid this is impossible as currently coded rating histories are not kept. All that is recorded is your current rating and the total number of rated games.
    • This could be incorporated with a “beginner-at-a-game” flag for each player, which we sort of talked about elsewhere. Perhaps a player is marked as a beginner until their rating rises above 1600 (bad if a player wins their first game). Or perhaps wins a certain number of games? It'd be interesting to find a decent metric to see when someone passes beginner level; I don't think either of these capture it, but they're doable with the information we have.

• Complexity class: We know chess and go are EXPTIME-complete, for instance. It might be amusing to prove (or estimate) the complexity classes for various games here, or otherwise characterize their difficulty (which can be done experimentally with the average length of a move statistic).
  • Perhaps I could add this to the Keywords area?
    • Sounds great!

• Date each game was added to the site and or index of order of game create (1st game created, 2nd game created, …)

• Others?

Forgive me for being dense, I feel like the answer should be obvious, but I'm not seeing where I can change my password or any other information connected to my Wiki Profile. Where is that accomplished? — Dean McKenzie 2005/10/13 11:13

I'm sorry, Dean, but actually that is not currently possible in Dokuwiki, for various reasons. What I hope to do very soon is detach the SDG wiki from the rest of the FDASSC Empire and give it its own space, then I would like to link the authentication to the existing SDG database so you don't have to create a 2nd account and password. I would ask some patience while I attempt to do this. Thanks! — Aaron Dalton 2005/10/13 14:01

The wiki and SDG account database has now been merged. Changing your SDG password will also change your wiki password. Just click the “Login” link at the bottom right of any wiki page and enter your normal SDG username and password. — Aaron 14 Oct 2005 21:16

• (Lexicon) (completed 17 Jan 2006) Each player in each game should have a private notebox. Here the player could write their general strategy for a particular game, instructions to themselves for the next turn, notes about what cards/secret pieces another player is suspected to have, etc… The impetus being that it's hard to keep track of a long term strategy over multiple days and multiple simultaneous games here. At the end of a game these noteboxes could either be made public or just deleted from the database.