forty thieves scoring

megalomaniac

Hi There, I'm enjoying playing forty thieves on your site. I just wanted to say that I thought that making it into a "speed" game, basing high scores on elapsed solving time, is a little strange to me, and not a very good measure of skill. There is considerable skill to this game but since there is also a large random element, each game is unique, and there is a very large variance in difficulty. Therefore comparing solving times is not really meaningful. A better way to measure skill is to perhaps keep track of how many people are able to solve each particular puzzle, perhaps as a percentage of attempts (you seem to have a tracking number so this shouldn't be too difficult). Puzzles should be graded by their difficulty rather than giving a time score (though if you really want it to be a speed game you can do both and have competitive times for equally ranked puzzles - though personally I don't need or want the time aspect). Another suggestion is to keep a database of difficult yet solvable puzzles and grade them accordingly to give people challenging games based on their skill level.

Anonymous

I completely agree with these suggestions. I don't find solving times on Forty Thieves at all useful. I just ignore that and compare my score with the high scores to decide how I am doing on the game.