Game difficulty-why no choice
Anonymous
GUESTS
Why are the games I play in the daytime more difficult than those I play in the evening including the games-of-the-day?
Comments
This might be a little overcomplicated, but here's how new games work:
There are 3 kinds of games you can play: completely random ones, "games of the day" (GOTD), and "games that you haven't played that other people have" (we call them "unplayed"). When you load a Green Felt page you should get the GOTD. If you've already played the GOTD then you'll get a random game instead. 30 seconds after loading the page, the game will go get a list of 10 "unplayed" games. If you click New Game during those first 30 seconds you'll continue to get random games until that list has been loaded. Now, since we only calculate 10 games, when you exhaust those then there's another 30 second gap and the game will load more "unplayed" games for you.
So what's with the 30 second delay, you ask? Well, we noticed some people click "new game" repeatedly until they get a game that looks good. And it turns out calculating those "unplayed" games is a bit server intensive. So the 30 second delay is to prevent people who click "new game" a lot from accidentally overloading the server while it furiously calculates unplayed games for them. If you don't click "new game" a lot then you should never notice the delay (since almost all of the solitaire games take at least 30 seconds to play one game).
Back to your question: There shouldn't be anything that makes games in the evening harder than games in the morning (on our end). But perhaps your playing style changes? Do you click new more in the evening and therefore get more random games? Or perhaps it's the opposite. Next time you have what you consider to be a hard game, click on the "high score" button and see if anyone else has played the game. If there's no one in the list, you just played a random game, otherwise you either played the GOTD or an "unplayed" game.
So your other question, why can't you choose difficulty? The reason is that we haven't come up with a good way of measuring the game difficulty. We want that ability too, and so it'll probably happen eventually (but don't hold your breath). I made an attempt a couple years ago but it wasn't great. I believe there should be a way to estimate difficulty based on all the games we've recorded (accounting for whether the game was won or not and how long it took) but I've just never dived in and written all the code to calculate means and medians and standard deviations of the data. If anyone knows statistics (and it doesn't put them to sleep) we'd be happy to hear about ideas of classifying the difficulty of games, given our data.
-David