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Edit: proposal below was implmented in 0.5.1.
One worry I have regarding the current design of the game is that players
might not be sufficiently motivated to guard their notes.
This means they may be too quick to retire locks which secure notes, which
means locks may become public faster than they ought to.
Currently, the main reason to want to avoid your notes being read is that if a
lock has widely read notes, it is likely to be changed by its owner, hence
depriving you of the score you got from solving that lock.
That reasoning is rather abstract, though, and I fear it might be too easily
ignored.
So here's a proposal to directly use the scoring system to motivate keeping
notes secure.
Recall that currently, you get a point against another player if you can
access their lock, whether because you solved it directly or because you read
three notes on it.
I propose changing that formula to: you get a point against another player if
you have a note on their lock *which they have not read*, or if you have read
three notes on that lock.
The first consequence is that when you solve a lock, you want to make sure its
owner doesn't read your note on the lock. So you'll be sure to secure it
behind a good lock of your own, and then avoid retiring that lock until it's
really necessary (because then the note will be read by everyone, in
particular by the owner of the original lock).
The second consequence is that if someone manages to solve your lock, you have
the opportunity to negate the consequences by revenge-solving the lock they
put their note behind. This isn't the main aim of the proposal, but I think it
would be a natural and fun new aspect to the game, so a nice side-effect.
The only downside I can see is that it's a bit more complicated that the
present system. New players seem to find even the present scoring system
rather hard to grasp.
I'm not sure overall whether it's a good idea or not. Comments welcome!
Last edited by ZED (2015-06-21 13:41:17)
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NOI said (on the TIGS forums, because I screwed something up (hopefully now
unscrewed) such that sey couldn't post here):
"""
Hmm sounds good I guess. As for being hard to grasp as long as you add some
more explanation to the part showing your relative esteem against someone it
should be fine. Just adding text saying something like "esteem/score
breakdown" above the part showing it would make it pretty clear.
I'm not sure how I feel about all notes on retired locks becoming public
though.
I kind of wish I could keep some of the notes somehow.
Just selecting a single note to keep was the first thought I had.
But thinking more about it how about if the owner of the note hasn't read your
note on his lock you can keep it.
Or something like that not sure if I'm missing something...
Right, that'd make it so that it's better not to solve a lock since then the
note on it won't become public.
Hmm maybe the reverse could work, solve a lock with your note on it to prevent
it becoming public on retiring but hmm, well I don't see any obvious problems
with that and can't think of anything better for now so it could be good I
guess.
"""
My response:
Good idea about adding a text header to the score breakdown area. That'll be
in the next version.
To keep things simple, retired locks should be handled the same as locks which
are public because everyone has read three notes on them. So anything that
applies to notes behind retired locks should apply whenever a lock is
accessed.
So then what you're suggesting comes down to players burning notes on their
locks which they can access.
I have considered that idea, and it is appealing in some ways. But it
complicates things quite a bit. For one thing, currently it's quite easy to
tell who has what notes on your locks. You can tell who's read a note by
seeing who has access to lock securing it. But if there were also some other
notes which are now burnt, you'd want to know who read them before they were
burnt, and that would require an entirely new component of the UI. Then
there's the problem that there could be three public notes on a lock which
then get burnt; it seems like the lock should be public, but only until a new
player comes along who hasn't read the now-burnt notes...
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Hmm not sure if if I explained very well since you speak of burnt notes, I wasn't thinking the notes would disappear anywhere but you'd just have to pick a new lock for the notes you for some reason don't have to make public on retiring.
Oh right, I think I get it now. You're saying if a person solved a lock and then the lock was retired with some notes now behind a new lock it'd become unclear which notes you still had access to and such. Hmm...
Last edited by NOI (2015-06-19 22:37:40)
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OK, I see what you mean.
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What about to avoid potential confusion about which notes people have access to inheriting all of the notes and privys to a new lock? Probably should come with some penalty like your esteem dropping towards people who already solved it or something.
This forum doesn't have a new reply warning :( You posted while I was still editing my last post.
Last edited by NOI (2015-06-19 22:40:15)
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So why don't you like having all notes become public when you retire a lock?
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Hmm I wonder... :P
I guess it makes me a bit too reluctant to make improve a lock since I'll have nothing to put behind the new lock.
I can live with the current system but I'm not sure if it's good that the "correct" way to do things is not putting any notes behind a lock until you think it's the best lock ever.
Last edited by NOI (2015-06-19 23:07:35)
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Right, but I think that's a good thing!
Firstly, it's important that at least some notes get made public when a lock
is retired, because that's the only source of publicness so is needed to get
boring locks purged from the system. So players should be discouraged from
retiring locks, so other locks aren't made public prematurely.
Secondly, and I think more to the point, I don't want this to be a game where
players feel they have to be constantly monitoring the game, and as soon as
someone solves their lock they feel they have to come up with a fix and put up
a revised version. Once they've committed to a lock design by storing
important notes behind it, they should be happy to just leave it and not come
back to the game until they actually want to, rather than because they feel
they have to. This is the kind of game which could easily be unhealthily
addictive, and I'm trying to avoid that as much as possible.
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Hmm good points.
Just for the sake of it, if it'd somehow work nicely picking 1 or 2 notes to move to a new lock while rest went public might help a lot with making boring locks public and good ones not becoming public(thinking that it's a pity that I made all of my notes on good locks public was probably the main reason for wanting to keep some notes).
By the time my thoughts turned to inheriting all notes I mostly had forgotten why I wanted to keep them and was just thinking about how being able to improve a lock 1 or 2 times before making the notes behind it public would be nice, so yeah.
Not being too addictive sounds nice. But the difference between not coming back until they want to and not even remembering the game exist isn't huge so hopefully the RSS feed and maybe even email notifications about how there are X new locks I haven't tried will help with that.
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Yes, I see what you mean. Being able to keep a few selected notes over when you replace a lock wouldn't really break anything, and would slow the demise of the hardest locks. I'll keep it in mind, though I like the simplicity of the current system.
Edit: actually, it would break one crucial thing. It would mean that you're motivated to rush to change your lock once people start solving it, because you don't want too many to read your notes (or worse, for them to become public), and you could prevent this by moving them to a new lock. That puts a kind of pressure on players that I've been trying to avoid. I want this to be a game you can play at your own pace, without having to constantly worry about reacting quickly to what other players are doing.
I'll look into setting up a simple news feed. Email notifications would take more work, but might be worth doing one day (if we ever get more players to be notified about!).
Last edited by ZED (2015-06-21 13:51:03)
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I've implemented the new scoring system in 0.5.1. Let's see how it goes, but I think it's an improvement.
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