On the absurd and meaningless Klondike scores
Anonymous
GUESTS
One Sunday afternoon playing our usual rowdy game of croquet, amid the drinking, cussing and wagering, a player familiar with the ongoing flap over the fake scores on Green Felt’s Klondike game missed a simple shot. He asked everyone to look away while he practiced making the shot to get good enough to win the match. Naturally we understood and laughed our ass off. He couched his reasoning in comparison to trashy’s, our shortened nick name for the woman called tasha, trisha and stacy on the score board, obvious attempt in her hollow show of ability.
This threw open a wild and sometimes hilarious debate on the merits of what level of cheating our society will stoop to and how we justify to our greater audience such behavior. This ranged all the way from athletics to tax shelters. We were drunk and hardly millionaires, you know…
Anyway, we came to a consensus or solution as well as any drunken crowd could muster, in that the cheating on this particular website could be exposed for what it is by just posting all scores, anonymous and all. Imagine someone who is looking for self gratification in a score to beat facing a long list of ‘anonymous’ winners. Where would there be any glory in that. I interjected that the scope of reprogramming the game might be outside the time-frame of the creators of the game (you know they may have real jobs…) and strike terror into the hearts of the more timid registered players causing much confusion and angst. A ladies suggestion that it be done for just a week or so didn’t alleviate the inherent problems that would surely arise. I put it down as some pipe dream to muse over on an afternoon of conviviality and dismissed it. Much later I thought it might shine a little humor into the forum on this subject.
So much for the tweaking of societies cumulative noses…
And to the guys that created this website, a giant ‘thank you’ for your creativity and generosity. The world needs more people like you.
This threw open a wild and sometimes hilarious debate on the merits of what level of cheating our society will stoop to and how we justify to our greater audience such behavior. This ranged all the way from athletics to tax shelters. We were drunk and hardly millionaires, you know…
Anyway, we came to a consensus or solution as well as any drunken crowd could muster, in that the cheating on this particular website could be exposed for what it is by just posting all scores, anonymous and all. Imagine someone who is looking for self gratification in a score to beat facing a long list of ‘anonymous’ winners. Where would there be any glory in that. I interjected that the scope of reprogramming the game might be outside the time-frame of the creators of the game (you know they may have real jobs…) and strike terror into the hearts of the more timid registered players causing much confusion and angst. A ladies suggestion that it be done for just a week or so didn’t alleviate the inherent problems that would surely arise. I put it down as some pipe dream to muse over on an afternoon of conviviality and dismissed it. Much later I thought it might shine a little humor into the forum on this subject.
So much for the tweaking of societies cumulative noses…
And to the guys that created this website, a giant ‘thank you’ for your creativity and generosity. The world needs more people like you.
Comments
Still scratching my head...
Second: The lady that suggested a week was overestimating. Showing all the score including the anonymous ones is very very easy. In fact, it's harder to filter the anonymous out (not much, but still). It's even harder (and slower) to do the leader board style query that only shows the first game at a particular score. What I'm getting at is that it is a 5 minute or less job.
We've looked at including the anonymous people in the high score list, but I guarantee the top 10 would all be anonymous. We have a huge amount of anonymous players. Check out our blog post about statistics. Those graphs are not static, the pictures will always show current data. Note the bottom 2 graphs. The orange are anonymous games and the green are registered users. Notice that 95% of our players are anonymous! Ok, I just checked and Anonymous doesn't do nearly as well as I imagined though they still dominate. Here's a Game of the day high scores for Sea Haven including anonymous:
In the full table there are 337 scores for this particular game and 218 of them are anonymous (119 played by logged in users).
So, we think it's better to hide the anonymous users and give some incentive to create an account to people who want their score seen.
I think I mentioned this to Badly in an email: We'd have fixed it by now but we are mired in a large behind-the-scenes rewrite. We have 1800 individual changes in our source code control system. 242 of them have not made it to the site yet. That's roughly 10% to give you an idea of the scope of the rewrite. The problem is that we have to push through and finish our big changes before we do any high score changes (technically we could do it now but it'd mean we'd have to do the changes twice and deal with merge issues and that annoys us).
My rambly point is, we want to fix this just as bad as you but because of other things we're in the middle of, it may take a little while. We've begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel for our infrastructure changes but I don't want to guess a time frame yet. It suffices to say it's probably not going to be sooner than 2 weeks away.
Believe me, I get annoyed every time I play Klondike and see the wall of crazy fast scores.
Yeah, that's another thing we want to fix. Currently the blog and the forum are standard open source programs with their own independent user systems. It's particularly hard to integrate them with our main game user system as it stands now. The infrastructure change I mentioned should help make that integration much easier--yet another reason we've been wanting to get it done.
-David
ps.
If you are curious about what an entire unfiltered high score table looks like, here is Sea Haven Towers (game number 2366684758):