The "Leader Board"/"High Score"

Anonymous

First off, I appreciate your attempts to make the high score list more relevant for those like me who would like to see how I compare to others, but have no interest whatsoever in practicing a board so that I can log onto my "speed username" and run through the game as fast as possible. I guess some find that satisfying/fun/????, but I would only be interested in comparing how I do vs. others when presented with an unfamiliar board. With the current lists it seems the only thing you could do (if it is actually possible) is to only allow one score per IP address or something, and even then, if they really wanted to show they can clear a board in 10sec, they would just find another computer somewhere...

Anyway, the thought I had was perhaps to have a challenge game that would start at a certain time with a given board and not let anyone see the board until a "start" time and then list the users in order of finish from that start time. It seems to me that this would give a far better ranking of skills than the current system.

Would anything like that be possible for you to implement? I know you have users all over the world, but if you had a few of these contests each day, users might be able to pick one that fits their schedule and then have a decent way to see how good they actually are against others.

Dave

jim

Dave,

dbwoerner wrote:

if they really wanted to show they can clear a board in 10sec, they would just find another computer somewhere...

Yes, you are correct, there is always a way around this, so we have avoided trying to have an arms race. It's not worth our time and we don't want to discourage people who like play over and over to optimize a particular game. We think it's fun to see that a Free Cell game can be finished in 10s!

dbwoerner wrote:

Anyway, the thought I had was perhaps to have a challenge game that would start at a certain time with a given board and not let anyone see the board until a "start" time and then list the users in order of finish from that start time. It seems to me that this would give a far better ranking of skills than the current system.

We have discussed this in the past, but it really only makes sense if you have enough people to play each game during that time interval. Let's say that a "fast" Free Cell game takes less than 2 minutes, then to have some margin we'd like to start a game every minute or every 30 seconds. That didn't used to make sense because we didn't have 10 people playing every 30 seconds. It turns out that for Free Cell and a few others we often do now, so we can start to implement this.

Thanks for your thoughtful suggestion,
-Jim

jim

In particular to get 10 games every 30s, we'd need 1200/hr. You can see below that for Free Cell, Klondike and Forty Thieves can support that for most of the day. We'd need to setup different times scales per game. Spider, for example, would hardly need a new game every hour.