auto play

Anonymous

Game: sht
Game #: 2139266127

Can we have a choice of auto play on or off. I start to move a card or I move it but my somewhat arthritic fingers miss the destination by a mere millimeter (approx 2.5 64ths of an inch in American measure). The result is chaos as cards fly in all directions to achieve a configuration which I don't find in the least helpful.

Yes I am aware that I can immediately reverse it but my concentration has been shattered by the histrionic display. Why can't I just quietly switch it off and expect a missed destination to be equally quietly ignored.

Many thanks for Green Felt, mostly it's cool, great and a wonderful time-waster.

Anonymous

Here's what I don't like about auto play: it makes the games pretty much mindless, at least the ones I play - freecell and sudoku.

On freecell, I play the game of the day every day and I make the top ten once or twice a week. But as far as I can tell, the only way to get a top score (around 30-40 sec) is to use auto play like there's no tomorrow - just click on a row of cards and let auto-play figure out how to make it work, which takes 95% of the thinking out of the game.

On sudoku, the fact that you can click on a number and see all the places that number could go makes it completely mindless. But I think it's impossible to get a top score (1min 30 sec - 3 min 30 sec) without using that feature, otherwise it takes me around 7-8 min.

I know that I could choose to play without utilizing auto play, but then I'm putting myself at a huge disadvantage.

A few things I can think of would be:

1) disable auto-play on the game of the day
2) allow players to use auto-play if they choose, but only post the high scores of players who opted out of auto-play
3) have a separate high score list for people who opted out of auto-play.

Am I the only one who feels this way about auto-play? Are there any players out there who get the top scores without using it? I just don't see how anyone could get a freecell game done in 34 seconds if they took the time to figure out where each card is supposed to go. There are 52 cards!

evanbrimstone

That previous post was from me, I wasn't logged in.

jim

Hi evanbrimstone,

Thanks for taking the time to write.

Here are some of our design maxims for auto-play.

• Only do obvious moves.
• Never think ahead.
• Never make a decision unless it's universally accepted to be better.
• Never do moves without being asked.
• Avoid wasting the player's time.

It should be clear from the above list that the main point of auto-play is to avoid drudgery, not to provide an advantage. It's true that auto-play allows you play faster, but it doesn't allow you to do notice or do any moves that careful¹ person wouldn't immediately notice or do.

While it's true that for certain games like Free Cell and Sea Haven Towers, you can't really expect to get to the leader board without Auto-Play, it's just a minimum bar. All the fundamental decision points are still there. If Auto-Play, as you suggest, takes 95% of the thought out of the game, then to me good riddance to it. The 5% that is left is then the true kernel of the game and the part I would like to spend my time thinking about.

You might even say that the tag line of Green Felt should be: Efficient Time Wasting™. We strive to allow you explore the decision space of each game as efficiently as possible.

Along those lines we have added many other features that make playing the game faster without making decisions for you. Maybe some of these might be what allow people to make fast times? In no particular order (and including Auto-Play for completeness), here's a list.

• Auto-Play
• Undo/Redo
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Super Moves

I usually make the top 10 of Sea Haven Towers when I play, not because I'm great, but because I have internalized these. In my opinion, to get to the top of the leader board you have to take advantage of all of them. I could be wrong and I'd love to hear from fast people who don't use any one of the above.

-Jim

¹ Admittedly, I'm not careful, so maybe I designed it make up for my carelessness?

jim

The main feature that I think would make up for things like Auto-Play, Undo/Redo, Keyboard Shortcuts and Super Moves, and it has been often requested, is to allow sorting the high score table by moves (counting undone and redone moves) instead of by time.

This really is the solution. I'll try and prioritize this feature above any others.

-Jim

Anonymous

Keyboard shortcuts and super moves ? As a relatively new player of Freecell I have no idea what these are - can someone explain what is meant by these?

evanbrimstone

Thank you for replying Jim. You mentioned that you use auto play on Seahaven Towers, because it's so much more difficult than freecell, mashing the autoplay button without much thought won't get you very far.

On freecell it's a different story. If you want to see how autoplay takes the thinking out of the game, play game # 99436995. I did it in 17 seconds, other people have done it in less.

Here's how to win the game with 18 clicks, using auto-play:
AC
2C
4D
9D
8C
4S
felt
9H
2H
8S
JC
6S
KH
QS
7H
felt
5H
felt

I went through the game clicking only one card at a time, or dragging a few cards at a time, and it took about 60-70 moves. Try it and you'll see what I mean.

Basically, being able to click at the top of a row of cards, and have auto-play figure out where they all should go is what is taking the thought out of the game. You say auto-play is designed to make only obvious moves, but making seven cards go to the "obvious" place with one click means it's doing things that are not very obvious, at least not without taking a minute to figure out where each of those cards should go.

Maybe auto-play shouldn't work for a stack of cards, just one at a time.

On sudoku, when you click on a number and it shows all the places where that number could be, that just makes the computer do all the thinking, I don't get how that makes it fun at all.

jim

Sorry for the slow response. I've been off implementing sorting-by-moves instead of by time. It's ready now, but it's only on high-score pop-up and not the leader board yet. Our current accounting of moves is not quite right yet as we still don't count undo/redo nor the individual moves that really must occur when you say drag a stack in Free Cell (up to / down from the free cells). Slowly we'll get there.

Of course there are still other issues. Thanks "Derek", for reminding us of our anonymous conversion problem[1]. We know that is how many people get on the leader board. We'll see if we can make that slightly harder than it is now. Be aware than learning/memorizing/practicing the games is really hard to beat completely. One way we can do it is to only allow a particular shuffle to be started during a given one minute interval. That way there is not enough time to try again before the time to start expires. That takes a lot of players at the ready or games that only start on say the :15s.

For the record, what you are referring to as Auto-Play, we call "super-moves" and leave Auto-Play for the effect of pressing the Auto-Play button / key sequence.

As for your 17 second play, was that a legit "first time" play or is that a replay time?

-Jim

[1] For those not paying attention a user who plays over and over and then logs until they get a good time can just log in an get a high score as demonstrated recently by Derek Cheater and historically by many others.

evanbrimstone

That 17 second game I mentioned was one I played first-off. I created the list of moves after the fact just for this forum, it wasn't something I practiced. I'll leave that to the likes of derek cheater.

My whole point of bringing it up is, a 17 second game (without practicing beforehand) just shouldn't be possible, but the "supermoves" as you call them, make it possible.

Because freecell is a fairly simple game to beat, there are a lot of games where you can win very quickly and with almost no thought with mostly all supermoves by first clicking any rows where you see aces, then wherever you see 2's and 3's and so on, all the while clicking the felt (to activate autoplay) in between supermoves to send any cards to the foundations that can go.

Today's game of the day was a good example. The 35 second score I got was a first-off, not practiced. Almost every click I did on that one was a supermove though. And if I can do that, I imagine those scores in the 20s were probably legit.

Any game where that has a row with more than one ace is probably going to work if you "button mash" the supermoves along with autoplay.

It's not that the whole supermove technique doesn't take skill, it's just that most of it is eye-hand coordination and very little is about thinking logically.

Also, without supermoves, derek cheater would probably have too many moves to memorize to make practicing the winning moves effective. He certainly wouldn't get a 10 second score anyway.

I appreciate that I don't have to move a stack of say, 3 or 4 cards by sending each one to the free cells one by one and then stacking them in the new location one by one, so I see a place for supermoves. Maybe if supermoves were limited to cards that can be moved together, that would bring the "thought" back to the game.

Also on the subject of autoplay, here's something that bugs me -- in my personal style of playing freecell, I don't necessarily send a card to the foundation just because it can go. Autoplay assumes you want the card going to the foundation, but I end up having to undo a lot because I wanted the card to remain in play. My personal rule is, don't send a card to it's foundation stack if that would make the stack more than 2 cards higher than the highest stack of the opposite color. For example, if the two black stacks are only as high as 3, I won't make either red stack higher than 5. This is because if I send a red 6 to the foundation, I might have needed it in play because I have a black 5 with nowhere to go. Sometimes I break this rule if necessary. Just thought I'd throw that one out there, but there's probably no way to please everybody on that one because people's opinions on this strategy will differ.

This is really fun to be able to bat ideas around on this forum, thanks for doing this.