dresali: If it refutes your best move, how couldn't it be your opponents best move? IMO, you still have perfect information. You know all the pieces your opponent still has in his hand, and you know all the moves he can play. Sure, you won't know what his next move will be, but then, you neither know with go or with chess, do you?

danheg: I think the problem with Cheversi is that having the last move is quite a big advantage. That doesn't go away with rolling a dice, while it gives the player moving first a chance, odds still favour the person moving last. Swap rules have also been proposed, but that won't work either. Swap rules are there to level out the advantage of moving first.

I think Cheversi ought to be played in such a way that both players move simultaneously. Obviously, this requires rules to handle the situation where both players want to move to the same spot (i.e. Both pieces are not placed and out of the game (possibly with the spot turning into a black hole); or both pieces sharing the same spot; or the highest piece wins or the winner of a coin flip gets to place his/her piece (and the other out)).

danheg: That would only be a problem if you're a pawn and January is the first month you play. Otherwise, January is like any other month: if you want to take a three week vacation, you use your 15 (or 21 if your games don't have weekends off) vacation days you've accumulated the months before. In the system I propose, vacation days don't expire.

You can also look at it this way: if you take vacation days, you don't have to wait till December 31 before you get them back. You get them (or some of them) back at the end of the month.

Fencer: It very well may be that feature 11 (reject all invitations) is already implemented, but if it is, I can't find the setting for it.

Mancala games are a class of old and well-known games. Many variants are played in Asia and Africa. It might be interesting to see them on Brainking as well.

Advantages:

• The rules are simple, not only does that mean it's easy for players to learn, it also means that it's relatively easily to program.
  
• Unlike yet another chess variant (don't read this as a complaint against chess variants...), it adds a totally new game.
  
• There are many variants, all with similar rules. So once a frame work for "sowing games" has been set up, the number of games available on Brainking can be increased quickly.
  
• It may attract a new set of players (next to the chess, checkers, backgammon, pente, lines, and army types...)
  
• The games have been played for a long time, and by many players, so they are probably quite enjoyable.
  

Disadvantages:

• If Fencer starts implementing yet another game, it takes even more time before there's a doubling cube in backgammon. ;-)
  

Andersp: To me it means backgammon players are more satisfied with Brainking than Chess players. There are more of them, and relatively more of them pay. So, Fencer needs to work harder in the Chess department to attract more players. ;-)

Andersp: What does that prove? If you look at the statistics, you'll see that of the top 50 backgammon players there are a lot more paying customers than there are in the top 50 chess players.

No wonder Fencer pays attention to chess: there's more marketshare to gain. ;-)

Personally, I prefer adding more chess variants than backgammon variants. There's less variation in play with the backgammon variants than there is with the chess variants.

tycho: "International checkers" is big in Russia, The Netherlands, France, and certain parts of Africa (Senegal for instance).

There are a few ways of dealing with time-outs in multi-player games. One could implement games where "pass" is a valid move (not necessarely a good move), and someone timing out means the person passed. Or, instead of a pass, there's a default move, or the previous move is repeated (ponds work that way, don't they?) For instance, an implementation of 'Uno' might cause a timing-out player to draw a card from the draw-stack, as if (s)he couldn't play a card from their hand.

There are also games where players are eliminated one-by-one, monopoly or ludo are classical examples of such games. In such games, time-outs can be dealt with in the same way as they are dealt with currently: elimination of the player timing out.

But there are a lot of games left I don't see a solution for.

Fencer: Yeah, and don't forget the created, but not started tournaments. They should be updated as well.

Fencer: Neat!

A week or so ago, there was a request to replace the arrows in Amazons with something more stone-like, and Fencer responded with a counter-request, a suitable image. I think the stones used in PahTum would work well in Amazons.

Bry: Yeah, but what about the people not visiting the Espionage board? I'd say, people not visiting this board are not interesting in discussing possible new features, and we shouldn't take feature request discussion to board not dedicated to feature requests.

Or else, we'd be like people plastering their tournaments on boards not dedicated to announcing tournaments.

WhiteTower: Here I am thinking the main thing separating espionage from chess is the fact the piece values are initially hidden. And now it turns out, the most significant thing is the presence of the vulcanos. Despite the river in Chinese chess.

grenv: Checking words for their existance in a dictionary is trivial. Just stuff the dictionary words in a structure that's optimized for finding exact matches - of which there are many: a database, a DBM file, or something simple as a Perl hash, Python dictionary or AWK associative array. You just want to avoid re-reading the entire dictionary from disk for each lookup.

I would settle to use the checkers pieces - but preferably in a different colour than black or white, as those are the colours of the players.

fungame: I second fungames wish. I have wished for the same functionality for a long time -- however, it works best if one can define their own categories. I would like to group games whose main difference is the starting position, or first couple of moves, so I'd group all the backgammon variants, I'd group pente/open pente/small pente, I'd group five in line/pro five in line/swap five in line, but I wouldn't group line4 with linetris or anti-line4, and I'd certainly wouldn't group all the chess variants.

playBunny: Anything you do on the client side cannot be trusted. I could simply modify the incoming Javascript to not send a time out to the server. Of course, you could be checking at the server as well, but if you're going to do the checking for time-out on the server, there's no need to do it in Javascript on the client side.

playBunny: You can't check time outs with each move. You want the time out to happen approximately when it happens (and 10 minutes after is close enough when you have a few days per move). But if you check the time out when someone moves, games that are being played by people never returning to the site would never time out.

WhiteTower: Well, you shouldn't be playing during work time anyway. ;-) Or work at a place where they've configured the firewall to allow connection initiated from the inside.

playBunny: For a Fischer clock game with a length of only an hour or two, shouldn't there be a bonuses in minutes available?

I don't think so. Considering the server only checks every 5 to 10 minutes for timed out games, having increments of mere minutes don't make sense. Remember that this is a turn based site - not a live site. There are live-backgammon servers (and chess servers) out there.

playBunny: 6 moves/day would be totally unworkable, because you do not know when your opponent will move. Imagine a player from Europe (say Germany or France) vs someone from California. Say both players are both online from 9 AM till 9 PM, their local time. Player in Europe moves first, at 9 AM his time. Californian player moves as soon as he logs on. Now the European player plays his second move. But it's already 6 PM *his* time - three hours to go and five moves to play. If the Californian player plays at a rate of 1 move an hour, the European play will time out.

With players scattered around the globe, it hard to make fair time controls. And time controls that gives less than 24 hours/move will be unfair to one of the players.

nobleheart: A four player game, with players who move at the last moment out of principle or because they insist on playing more games than they can manage (yes, you know who you are). Your 5 days/move game, with normal weekends and holidays move at 1 move/month. With four months of vacation a year. A 40 move game could last 5 years.

In Halma, if you can make a long sequence of jumps, you have to click on each intermediate spot. Since it doesn't matter how a stone moves from its starting point to its endpoint, it would be convenient after you've selected the stone you want to move with, you can click on any possible spot the stone can end its move in.

Vikings: So, it's more important to catch a throw-away account then have the post containing the trouble be removed? Sounds odd to me.

Vikings: There is a reason that pawns can't edit, it keeps them from being able to delete trouble post

I don't get it. I'd say that being able to delete "trouble posts" is a good thing.

playBunny: N games per year? I'm not sure where that idea came from.

Fencer, in his posting earlier today. With N == 14.

playBunny: The same applies but to a diluted degree if a player restricts themselves to a small group of opponents who may pr may not play more widely themselves. That's the issue that I think Fencer is looking at and it's a fair one from the game pool/rankings perspective.

That's a fair one, but IMO, that also isn't solved by only counting the first N games played against each other in a year. You're not getting a more accurate rating by giving more weight to games played in January than the games played in December.

If you want to restrict the influence of a large number of games a pair of people played against each other on the BKR, perhaps something can be done to "normalize" the results. Say you want to count all the games as "as most 14 games", and a pair of players, say A and B, have played 48 games, with 30 wins for A, and 18 for B. Then normalize that as 8.75 for A and 5.25 for B. (30 / 48 * 14 = 8.75 and 18 / 48 * 14 = 5.25). Of course, this is simpler said that done, as the in the current system not only the number of wins/losses matters, but also the order in which they were made, and what the ratings were at the moment games finished.

rod03801: Yeah, <AOL>me too</AOL>. Even in games with a large pool of players, like Hyper Backgammon, I play some people over and over again. Even with almost all the games I play being tournament games. I've played some players more than a dozen times (out of almost 700 games HB games). It would be quite strange that the more games you play against someone, the less it counts for BKR. After playing 14 times against someone, it no longer matters whether I win or lose? My BKR stays the same?

Besides, it won't solve the "problem". Someone willing to cheat to inflate his/her rating could as easily create another account, and drain BKR from that person. Which is more efficient in the current system anyway - after several loses, the BKR has dropped and less BKR can be gained.

I've been involved in on-line games since the early 1990s, and many years ago, I've come to the conclusion that implementing rules/procedures against cheating with multiple accounts aren't worth the trouble. New automated rules (like the proposed rating chance) will hurt legitimate players, while cheaters will work around them.

Ask yourself, how often does cheating happen visibly (if someone cheats to bring his rating from 400th position to 200th position, do we really care?). I don't get the impression it happens that often, and the few cases can probably dealt with manually.

pauloaguia: Game time left can only be determined for games with a Fisher clock, and a 0.0 increment/move, can't it? Since a lot of players will not play any such games, using another column takes, IMO, too much screen estate for its return. OTOH, if Fencer also added another configuration parameter, which indicates which columns you see on your running games lists (for instance, I personally don't care to see the name of the tournament - and with it gone I can see more games without scrolling as many tournament names are long enough to cause wrapping).

Czuch Chuckers: We (the US) has more people on this site than from any other country!

True.

When you have more than someone else you have a type of majority.

True, but only in the union of those two sets. That is, if you take all the players from France and the US together, the US players have a majority.

The percentage of players on this site from the US is higher (more) than from any other country!

Also true. That still doesn't mean the US players have the majority of the players on this site.

Proof: take a list of all player names. Take two pieces of paper, one labelled "US players", the other "Non-US players". Put all players from the US on the first page, every one else on the other. Count the names. Whoever has the highest count has the majority.

Czuch Chuckers: Please pay attention..... we are not comparing the US to all other countrys combined.

You're not? Ok...., but you also write The majority of users on this site are from the US. So, who are the the users on the site that aren't from the US, but aren't in all the other countries combined?

You can't have it both ways. You can't compare "the people on this site from the US vs. the people on this site not from the US" and "the people on this site from the US vs. the people on this site from a single other country that isn't the US".

For every person on this site that is from the US, there are three that aren't in the US. Outnumbered three to one isn't a majority.

rod03801: From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority: A majority is a subset of a group that is more than half of the entire group. This should not be confused with a plurality, which is a subset having the largest number of parts. A plurality is not necessarily a majority, as the largest subset may be less than half of the entire group.

25% is not a majority.

Czuch Chuckers: With at least 15 different countrys represented on this site, having over 25% of users from just one country is a huge majority.

What kind of definition of "majority" is that? Care to quote a definition? In my book, being outnumbered 3 to 1 doesn't account for "majority".

playBunny: Well, it's only hyperbackgammon, which is often played in about a dozen moves. Just be glad it isn't anti-backgammon tournament.

rabbitoid: Big pictures take more screen estate, which leads to more scrolling. If I go to a profile page, I'm interested in the numbers, when did a player last move, how much vacation days left, how many running games, ratings, wins, losses, etc. I'm not really interested in their pictures, and certainly not a second time. Little pics is more than enough for me.

grenv: How many moves I play is mostly determined by how fast my opponents play. If I have 100 games going on, it's my turn in 20 games, I make 20 moves, and it takes many hours before my opponents play again (for instance, because they're in a different time zone), I only make 0.2 moves per game. But that's not my fault, is it?

One can only make 10 moves in a single game on a day, if your opponent moves as fast and around the same time as you do. With players from America, Europe, Asia and Australia, being able to move more than a few times a day in a single game is an exception - not the rule. And certainly not determined by the number of total games one is playing.

playBunny: How fast I'm playing my moves does NOT depend on the number of games I'm currently playing. It's not uncommon for me to play 250 games, or more, at once. But it happens only rarely that in more than 50% of the games, it's my move. Typically, when I give brainking my attention (and usually, that's a few times a day), I make moves in all the games in which it's my turn - and if opponents are active as well, in such a session, I play several moves per game (how many will depend on how fast my opponents play).

Of course, it sometimes happen that I'm away for a few days, so I will not make any moves. But that's independent of the number of games I'm playing. 10 games, 50 games, 300 games.

BIG BAD WOLF: If that hour is up, and vacation day is set - does the vacation day add just 1 hour or a full 24 hour day to the game? If it's just an hour, if for some reason they have to leave quickly, they could easly go through a lot of vacation days in just a few hours.

Considering you don't get another 7 days if your time is up in a tournament with a 7 day time limit when you use auto-vacation, I'd be surprised if you only get another hour if the time limit is set to 1 hour.

Andersp: someone said my argument was flawed so it seems as this someone knows better than me what I can see

Noone was claiming to know better on you can see. The argument was about could conclude from what you saw.

Andersp: If you plan to make a move

If my move is 'planned', that is, between selecting the move and hitting the send button, all you need to do is wait for a full second, and it's your move. Easy, isn't?

Andersp: Suppose you were playing me, and I wasn't using "cloak". It says the last page I visited was the feature requests board. Does that mean I won't make a move against you in the next 30 seconds? BK won't show what's in my other tabs, or what's reachable with my back button. Or suppose the last page I visited was your game. How do you know I will actually make a move, or just decided that it's enough for today and that I went to bed?

Lamby: youre only playing a game on a computer!

Indeed. So, why the urge to know? It's only playing a game on the computer, and you're getting all worked up if someone actives cloak.

grenv: So you had to have a reason for doing it didn't you?

Indeed. I don't like it being watched.

Lamby: why does anyone need to hide on a games site?

The question is, why does anyone feel the urge to peek? And don't give me the argument of "finding out whether someone is actively playing me" - I've refuted that argument already. You cannot determine whether I'm actively playing you based on the last page I viewed - so what makes you think you're entitled to know?

playBunny: Hiding irrelevant stuff would be my main purpose of stylesheets as well. I really don't have the need to see the time and date displayed - the clock on my computer is more accurate. I don't have a frieds list, I'm not switching between languages, enable/disable tips of the day or switch to/from column layouts nor do I belong to fellowships, so I don't have the need to show links for them on every page. And it could be used to increase the tiny box I'm typing this in.

Oh well. It isn't going to happen judging from Fencer's response.

grenv: On the other hand, would this really be useful?

If you mean "personal style sheets"? Yes, I think that's really, really useful. But that's just my opinion.

chessmec: i meaned, that in some fields there is fixed <font color=red>blahblub</font>

Obviously, for such a thing to happen, all pages need to be revisited. You'll be needed SPAN and DIV elements, and add CLASS and ID attributed to new and existing elements. It wouldn't be much of a problem to remove the FONT elements while you're doing that. Of course, for the one person out there who managed to survive with a browser from the last century, you can keep the FONT element:

<FONT color='red'><SPAN class='unread-messages'>1234</SPAN></
FONT>

chessmec: some colors are fixed, e.g. the red color of the amount of unread messages. will be not so easy i think

That would be rather trivial. Put the amount of unread message in a SPAN element, with a CLASS attribute - and say this attribute has value "unread-messages". In the default style sheet, you say:

.unread-messages {color: red}

This will make the amount of unread messages red. However, someone who wants the number to be yellow puts

.unread-messages {color: yellow}

in his/her stylesheet.