Hopeless: Top 10 _games_
DeusExMachina
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As @JackofHearts has alluded to, one of the main challenges of Hopeless is finding games with the potential for high scores. The High Scores board is of limited help because it often ends up being completely consumed by just one or two games—and it’s fairly common for the same game to keep resurfacing day after day. (Occasionally, too, a single player holds all ten slots, but that doesn’t matter to me.)
I’d like to see a version of the Top 10 list showing the ten games with the highest scores, ideally restricted to games that were first played that day.
Comments
I prefer finding new games and get tired of the same ones reappearing day after day.
All those in favor....
I know this won't happen, but when a few games keep dominating the top ten like today, I would really love to put those games in a separate game board so that if others really want to keep playing them they can do so without dominating the board for everyone else. I know there are some folks who want to learn to master those games and others who just want to sit on top all the time. Those games would need to be excluded from the current board somehow, then all could play the way they want without ruining the game for others.
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Totally agree. Until “old” games are somehow excluded from the leader board, the neighborly thing to do would be to use one browser for re-playing the same blessed game, and stay logged out on that browser.
Then when you want to play logged in, use another browser. That’s because the site stores all your scores while you’re logged out on a given browser, and when you log in all those scores are uploaded.
If a person inserted the game number in the URL it could automatically be sent to a separate game board and leave the main board alone. If that game came back up on the main board by chance no big deal, because how likely would that happen given the large number of games to be played?
Deus, That's why I stay logged off when trying to get a good game of the day score, trying to be neighborly! I could just kick my self when I plug the list up by forgetting. On the 'high scores' games I have started doing the same. I am not really that competitive on there (You fellows just kick this old timer's kiester!) so it doesn't matter that much but I think more people would come back to the game if they could see their progress with other people's, not just one player's 10 attempts at a faster score.
And I messed up and put a pointless score up. I'm going to play the old guy card in my defense!
I hear you, @far2old. I did the same several times back in my Freecell days while practicing the game of the day. Most embarrassing—especially when I posted a batch of identical times and just couldn’t improve on that time to effectively erase the slower scores.
Funny thing is that since switching to Hopeless, I scarcely care a whit about placing on the leader board—except for the purpose of sharing a high-scoring game with other players. I generally have no interest in replaying a game to improve my score on it. But I often wish I could save the link to a game or otherwise replay it after hitting a roadblock or just messing up.
For a few days, my strategy was to leave high scoring games 1 play shy of Done. Then at midnight GMT when the site resets, i’d make the last play on each of them. That way I could get links to my top games of the day, and others who were interested could play them. Alas, that stopped working yesterday—the all-but-complete games simply don’t survive. No clue if something changed on my end or on Greenfelt.
@david & @jim: why don’t you expose game numbers except for those that make the High Scores board? I saw in an old thread where one of you explained that you see Hopeless as a puzzle like Sirtet and that players should focus on their average score more than high scores. I totally get that for Sirtet because by its nature each game is a complete unknown. But the logic eludes me WRT Hopeless because the entire game is laid out. I’d wager that most if not all serious Hopeless players skip most game hunting for layouts that strike their fancy. The irony in my making this case is that I actually enjoy discovering a high scoring game much more than playing one that someone else discovered. But because game numbers are hidden and the board is typically clogged with one or two crazy high-scoring games, i’m generally unable to share the gems I find with fellow players who enjoy milking a game for the highest possible score.
Some days I like to just take my best shot and let that first try be it. Other times I like to see how well I can do and by opening a new tab for each try when I do get what I want I can log on and only have that attempt show up. The latter was what I did today with your game, I just wanted to play it clean on both ends on the same try.
It's really what we said before—I envisioned hopeless as a never ending stream of random levels and not as a game where you'd continually replay the same layout over and over trying to get it perfect (or at least maximal). In our source code we classify games as "score games" or "seed games". SIrtet, Hopeless and Asteroids are all score games. The solitaire games and sudoku are seed games. Technically every game starts with a random seed (the game number), even Sirtet, but it's not as interesting since it doesn't change the game as dramatically as a new shuffle in the solitaire games.
I can see that hopeless is kind of a corner case, but to my eyes it's closer to score game.
Although, perhaps the fact the high score table is dominated by a few easy games is direct evidence against this notion. We designed the card games to have high score per seed because it was intuitively obvious that easy shuffles would dominate a global high score table. I didn't foresee that with hopeless (but it appears to have happened).
Big thanks, David, for the thorough reply, shining light behind the curtain. As a quality engineer at one of the world’s big software companies, I know well how usage and user preferences in the real world often diverge from the designers’ & engineering team’s expectations and intended workflows. Or to paraphrase Moltke, no design servives contact with the user ;-) This fine site succeeds far better than most attempts!
I’m revisiting this thread because the Top 10 list is still getting clogged with the same pair of old games every &$*#@%¥§ day. Today, the logjam was complete within 2.5 hours of the daily reset. I’ll never understand the appeal of playing the same game over and over again, but I guess you have to admire the persistence of the handful of people who never miss a day of it!
Compounding the irritation, I keep losing high-scoring games that I’m waiting to finish & record after the reset. What happens is iOS memory manages often causes browser tabs to essentially die. When you return to the tab, the page refreshes, which results in a different game loading.
So I’m back imploring @jim & @david to either reclassify Hopeless as a seed game or massage the High Scores board so that Today, This Week, and This Month are constrained to games that were first played in that timeframe. Or at least make it possible to get the seed/link for any game. This last measure would allow those of us who enjoy testing ourselves on high scoring games to harvest and trade links through some channel. That would work much better if each game had its own High Score board.
@jim & @david, as long as we're discussing hopeless again, would there be a way to eliminate the one color games when they come up as the game of the day? Thanks
Thank you all for saying what I've been thinking for so long. The solid and the endless repeats. DeusExachina, thanks for finding all those games. It keeps me coming back at change over time.