New High Score Option
Posted by david on 15 Jan 2014 at 11:23 pm | Tagged as: Uncategorized
We’ve added a new high score option today. It’s the checkbox at the bottom of the high score table that reads “Show a player’s first score, not their best.” The high score table shows only one score for other players (though it always shows all of your own scores) and this option allows you to set which score of theirs you want to see—the best or the first.
Before we added this option, the high score tables showed the first game for other players. Along with adding the option, we’ve changed it so that is no longer the default.
Why did we do this?
Because of the way the high score tables used to work, certain people were “gaming” the system—they’d play a game over and over anonymously (or with different alternate user accounts) and then log into their main user account and play it one last time to get a ridiculously fast run time. Jim and I talked about different ways to combat this but in the end we decided to cater to that style of play instead of trying to ban it outright. With the new default high score settings, there’s no need to log out, play, log in, play again. Just play a game repeatedly while logged in and your score will move up the ranks.
We’ve left the option to show the first score there for people who just want to see how well they can do against a level playing field.
So does that mean if they are playing anonymously then log in and play, that the anonymous score will still show?
Unfortunately, people are still gaming it. It can be very frustrating to play a game and though I don’t expect to be top of the table that often – when I see someone with a time of 13 seconds – you know that wasn’t their first attempt. The ‘show first time’ doesn’t have an impact then.
Still at least we can still sort by moves taken – I’d rather beat them on less moves than worry about fastest time really.
Ian, the only thing we can think of to get around people practicing is to not have a game of the day or to not letting people replay a game ever. Neither seem reasonable. People can always get around whatever we do by say using separate browsers to practice with and one to win with and we wouldn’t be able to tell. The one thing we *have* come up with that really works is Spider. Yep, run of the mill Spider Solitaire. Most of the shuffles are winnable, but you just can’t memorize the solutions. Give it a go. You won’t see 3bc winning there regularly. And you certainly won’t see a 12 second game (without actual cheating).