Varius ideas, thoughts, suggestions
Posted:
Sep 15, 2017, 1:43 AM
I'll attempt to list these in something resembling order of importance.
1) Is there a reason to have turn-based games in progress visible? I can think of some drawbacks to this, and I'm not clear on the positives. Perhaps someone can shed some light on this?
2) Has there been consideration for adding "turn-based / live game" filters for the database? This feature would provide great value for the study and analysis of the game.
3) Would it be possible to add a "captures stones" numerical counter to the database identical to the one on the active game board? For Keryo-Pente, I've had to manually count the captures stones hundreds of times; it cannot just be eyeballed like it can in regular Pente variations.
4) It might be a good idea to allow users to filter their dashboard with regard to game results, for example, at minimum, I think it would be helpful to have a toggle filter to hide real-times games (mainly because they are all ten years old, and no one seems to play real-time any more. I'd rather just see the results of my current turn-based games, but with the option to display the other games if desired)
5) The default leaderboard at the top right seems to be regular real-time Pente, which doesn't reflect the current state of the game on this site/app. Turn-based play is what the site/app is all about now, and I think the default leaderboard would be more informative if it reflected that change. As it stands now, when it is displaying the default of real-time Pente, there are only 3 active players and only one of them has a red square rating.
6) When using the mobile app, is there a way to access the leaderboards, or the part of our dashboard page that has our lifetime W-L records for each game variant? I cannot seem to figure out how to do either one of those things.
7) As has been discussed in other threads, I like the idea of adding Go to the games mix. It's a stone-based game played on the same board, so why not?
8) I find Connect6 somewhat interesting, but I wish to study the game and the opening sequences. Is there a reason the drop-down menu in the database has every game except Connect6?
9) Lastly, when making a post, I need to click an endless display of boxes with cars or street signs. Is this really necessary? Are people trying that hard to come onto the Pente forum and make robot spam posts? I've never had to go through such a lengthy verification process, and that includes websites for banking and other such things of greater importance (no disrespect to this site or Pente, of course; I'm just trying to keep things in perspective and I find it really frustrating to keep clicking those images, many of which seem to have a trace of a car or road or sign, which makes it difficult to click accurately on the correct images.
All my real-time games are from before the ratings and W-L records were based on two-game sets. SO, for COnnect6, I am listed as 1-3, which under the current system would mean I played 8 games (4 sets), winning 11 and losing 3, but back when I played those games, the scoring was individual-game-based, so I actually only played 4 games, winning 1 and losing 3.
Perhaps a useful feature would be a toggle filter to include or not include all games pre or post "set-based" scoring.
1) That was an attempt to make the website a bit more social. I started with opening only the turn-based tournament games for viewing, but ended up with making all (non-private) games public. I also implemented a way to follow other players or be followed but, aside from being able to ping your followers when you wanted to play live, haven't figured out what to do with that yet.
2-6) Most of those things are on my mind, but development has stalled a bit since I found it no longer rewarding.
7) I did get started on that and got to the point where I figured out simple ko and captures. But I got a bit lost with respect to the different sets of rules and the counting at the end seems to need some back-and-forth user interaction that I wanted to avoid by using a computerized way to count territory. I didn't find an algorithm so got stalled a bit there. As for Renju, the complicated/varied opening sequences that exist put me off in a similar way.
8) Connect6 seems to be hashed into the database so at first glance it might be possible to search by position, I haven't familiarized myself with the code enough to guarantee it. I speculate it was on dweebo's todo list but the current code needs a few changes to be able to reflect c6's stone placing.
9) The captcha was put in place at a time when spammers did cause a bit of ruckus. The current captcha only requires you to check a box that says "I'm not a robot" most of the time, if it does ask for more verification then Google somehow thinks you're a robot, but I suspect/hope they don't do it very often afterwards.
4) Done for Android. iOS is on the way pending Apple approval.
5) Should be fixed now.
6) There is no immediate way yet, I'd have to figure out where to cram all that information in the app on a tiny screen. For now you can access your past games from the ratings overview. I might enrich those pages in the future with the stats for that game.
8) Connect6 database searches seem to work now. Android update should be live soon, iOS will probably be available by the end of the week, pending approval from Apple.
> 2) Has there been consideration for adding > "turn-based / live game" filters for the database? > This feature would provide great value for the study > and analysis of the game.
This is going to be tricky, I think I can filter out the turn-based games played on this site, maybe even the live games too, but there's also a whole bunch of games from other sites in the database that are going to make things tricky. The long-term storage of games was not particularly designed to separate turn-based from the rest. I'll see what I can do.
While you wait for this, note that when you set the website in the search parameters to pente.org, the dropdown box for "Event" has a listing for both "live game" and "turn-based game", that might help. Note that "live game" would also exclude all live tournament games.
"While you wait for this, note that when you set the website in the search parameters to pente.org, the dropdown box for "Event" has a listing for both "live game" and "turn-based game", that might help."
I feel very silly. That's exactly what I was suggesting, and it's already there
All of the games in the db from other sites are turn based, so if live games from this site can be filtered out of the db, that leaves only TB games and tournament games which are often as interesting to study as TB games. Getting only the live games is trickier unless one wants only the non tournament live games.
Message was edited by: watsu at Oct 11, 2017 8:36 PM
Retired from TB Pente, but still playing live games & exploring variants like D, poof and boat
