Serpentine Blog

One other small change is that now, instead of having two 5x5x4 rooms, I've changed one of the rooms to be a 5x5x5, meaning there the board is 5x5 and the minimum word length is five letters as opposed to four.

Here is a quick update on where things are with premium memberships. I'm the kind of guy that generally will come up with an idea and then immediately rush in and try to implement it, and that almost happened with the premium memberships idea. However, I realize that going forward with premium memberships is a big deal and affects more than just myself. So I've decided that what I'm going to do is continue to think about it and maybe spend some time making donating more streamlined and more visible instead. I'm not saying the idea is dead, but it is on hold for now. I appreciate everyone's encouragement and the ideas they provided regarding this issue.

FYI, you may need to refresh your browser in the lobby and in the game. Otherwise, the game will not work.

Update: We ran into some unintended snags and I had to revert the changes back, so the word chart is back to being buggy.

One idea that I have been kicking around for a while is the possiblity of creating premium memberships, where a user would decide to pay a small monthly fee and get additional features and privileges that normal users wouldn't have access to. I want to make clear that I'll never require users to pay to play Serpentine. This change would only layer on additional features that are not a core part of the game. Some things that only premium users could do are:

* Create your own room with your own rules
* Initiate voting to kick a person out of a room
* Instant message other users in your own private window
* See detailed statistics and information from your games
* Access a premium-users only room in the forum
* Ignore selected players in the chat window
* Get an icon next to their name in the players listing

There is definitely room for that list to grow and to become more enticing, it really depends on your reaction and feedback. And it is possible some of those features will be available for normal users as well. However, before I start working on any of this I want to see what you guys think. Would you be willing to pay a small amount per month (around $5 I'm thinking) for extra features? If so, aside from the list above, what are some key features you'd like to see? Please let me know your thoughts in the discussion section.

To try to keep you from coming to my house with torches and pitchforks, I've made a couple changes which I think people will enjoy.

• I fixed the chat window scrolling issue. If you have scrolled up, it won't force you down again
• During the game, it now predicts how your rating will change. And if you are behind, it tells you how many points you need in order to break even
• I tweaked the interface in to use the space more efficiently

With that said, here are the new rules:

• Winning players get a two point rating bonus
• Players under 800 rating get a three point rating bonus
• Players between 800 and 999 get a two point rating bonus
• Players between 1000 and 1199 get a one point rating bonus

I'm hoping not to get tarred and feathered for this, so if people hate it I will definitely consider reverting back to the old system.

Update:

I've made some small changes on the game server code that should help out with resource usage. While most users probably won't directly benefit from this change, it helps me out quite a bit. And anything that helps me also helps you ;)

- Changed QUOTE tag layout.
- Made a lot of the text slightly smaller.
- You can now highlight text and then click on a tag to put the tag around the text.
- Differentiated between thread starters and posts within threads.
- Experimental: New posts are now automatically placed at the very bottom of each thread.

I'm still unsure of the last point, so if anyone has any complaints then I may change the functionality back if it's valid.

I made a few bug fixes this morning, nothing major.

• - Fixed issue where word chart showed NaN and incorrect amounts
• - Fixed issue where word entry was case sensitive and capslock or capitalized letters invalidated a word

So if there are any emotes that you'd like then feel free to post them by following the link below this post and I'll consider all of them for inclusion. They can be pretty much any size, but only small ones will be allowed in the Serpentine chat.

Thanks!

This is yet another awesome feature from alex.

• Fixed player info to only show up when you click on a player's name
• Fixed player info so it doesn't show peoples' real names

• Fixed bug that disallowed nested tags.
• Fixed regressions caused by svn346 in which a user could not see anything but the forum list until visiting a forum.
• Cleaned up layout for users of IE6/7
• No more outstanding bugs!

I also added a keyboard setting so that you can now press the left or right buttons on your keyboard to rotate the serpentine board. Let me know how this works out for you all.

I decided to do a test and change the way the game client (your browser) connects to the game server. I've switched to what I think is a more rigorous mechanism for connecting, and I hope that translates to better connectivity for people. However, bear in mind that I don't know if this will fix anything. It's just an experiment. But if you were previously having issues and you no longer are, please let me know!

I've also made a couple other small changes: The game now kicks you to the lobby again, instead of the homepage, and I've tweaked the sounds and removed the word-related sounds, and kept the round-related sounds. Also, I've changed the round-sounds to a more pleasing ding. Finally, I think I've finally fixed everyone's favorite bug, the word box should no longer be scrolling to the top every two seconds. UPDATE: Found out quickly that the new mechanism needs some more testing before I put it up live. So for now we still have the old connecting mechanism.

Please don't kill me! ;)

P.S. It's Alex's birthday today! Our brave little guy is turning 22! Everybody wish him happy birthday ;)

Connection Problems Survey/Suggestions Thread

• I finally fixed the blue words issue
• I tweaked the rating group colors several times over the week and didn't really mention it
• Added a new "times up" note to words when entering words too late
• Forum threads now show all messages, instead of just one at a time (this is changeable in the options)

I'm looking into adding sounds to the game as well, and I wrote a post about this in the Serpentine forum. I'd like peoples' opinions on what they'd like for game sounds, and if possible, the actual sound clips themselves.

Paco and some of the other tanglers will probably plateau around 3000 to 4000 and never get any higher, which is alright. Once they get up there, normal folk like you and me will have a much easier time of it. I hope your frustrations aren't causing you guys to leave the site. But if you are considering, send me an email and I'll talk you down ;)

Update much later: You may have noticed the server is back up, well that's because I forgot to update this entry.

Major updatage of the ratings system.

• Made fixes to the serpentine chat window and words list windows, they now should scroll better, and more naturally
• Changed the Journeyman color to a shade of orange
• Now keeping track of the last time you logged in (part of a larger set of changes that will come later)
• Added an email confirmation field when registering, will prevent email typos
• When a newly registered person tries to log in without validating their account, they now have a more informative error message.
• Some administrative tools have been improved.

Sometime soon I will be changing the ratings algorithm in a major way. It will be simpler, more volatile, and there will be a more direct connection between your rating, your score, and the ratings and scores of the others you play with. I won't get into the exact algorithm currently used, it is too convoluted, but I will talk about the new one, and how you can calculate it...

Let us say there are three people playing in a room. After a game, but before recalculating their ratings, they have the following ratings and scores:

Based on their score and rating, and the respective scores and of the others in the room, each player gets an "expected" score. This is the score that they need to get in order to have their ratings stay the same. If their actual score is greater than their expected score, their ratings will go up, otherwise their ratings will go down. Expected Scores are calculated by dividing the sum of scores (40+90+70=200) by the sum of ratings (1100+1600+1300=4000). The resulting quotient, .05, is multiplied by each person's current rating (i.e. 1100 x .05) to get their expected score. Here's a table...

You can see here that both Alex and Jenny did better than expected, but poor Adam did worse. Therefore, we know that both Alex's and Jenny's ratings will go up, but Adam's will go down. But, how much?

Here is where things get a bit tricky. There is no one perfect way of determining how much their ratings change, because it is mostly arbitrary. It is simply a matter of making up some rules for what the maximum amount of change per game will be, and how much over or under the expected score the player has to be in order to get that maximum. In our case, I've decided that the maximum change in points one can get per game is 16 (the current number), and in order to get +/- 16 points per game you either have to get a score that is 75% greater than expected or 75% worse than expected. For example, Jenny's expected score is 65 points. But if she get's 75% greater than that (or 1.75 x 65), which is 114, then her rating will improve by 16 points. However, if she get's 75% worse than expected (or .25 x 65), which is 16, then her rating will decrease by 16 points. Anywhere from 25% of the expected score to 175% the expected score will bring a range of -16 to +16 points. If you fall outside of that range, your rating will be limited to the maximum change (+/- 16). Also, there is a mimimum allowable rating of 100 and a maximum of 9999, so players will never exceed those amounts.

Let's look at how the players' ratings changed:

I hope this will help you all understand how things are going to change. If you have any questions, shoot me an email and I'll do my best to answer. This new algorithm won't come into effect until probably tomorrow morning.

Update: Back up! (9:41 EST)

Here are the changes you can expect to see:

• No longer keeping track of score stats (still keeping word lengths and rating changes), as well as numbers of words in a game. Keeping the stats like I have been takes a lot of resources, and I'm figuring out what I can keep and what I still need to throw out.
• Fixed a bug in the word chart where it sometimes displayed the wrong numbers
• Now, the word list on the left shows the "Top Words" of that board, showing the top 150 words findable on the board (not just what people got). It also shows how many people got each word

• Word chart now gets reset to zero every round
• Removed some wasted white space above the game board
• Changed "Words others got" wording to "Words everyone got"
• Sometimes, if you ejected yourself from the game and came back, it would show an old game board, and wouldn't update until the next round. This is fixed.

This system seems to be working reasonably well. However, because so many current players are old pros from the tangleword days, there are players that should have 3000+ ratings (according to their scores), but are still stuck down in the 1600s. In my opinion, the ratings system is about accurately measuring the abilities of a person relative to the other players in the room. And it could be doing a better job.

The alternative rating system I'm thinking about is (I believe) based on the tangleword approach. Add each score in a room, then add each rating in the room, then divide the sum of the scores by the sum of the ratings. Then to get each person's "expected" score, multiply that quotient by each person's rating. If a person's score is higher than this expected score, it goes up, and it goes down if it is lower. Indeed, this seems like a good plan and ratings are directly tied to relative scores, which is a good thing. I'm still mulling over whether I want to make the change, but it could happen. If it does, then ratings will become MUCH more volatile than they currently are. Some people will go way up and some will go way down. But it will be fair.

Edit:

The game server is back up.

Here are the changes since last time:

• There is now a word chart that shows how many words of differing letters there are
• The "Words Others Got" list is now sorted in order of largest to smallest
• Mousing is changed and hopefully improved. The new action is to click on the first letter of a word, mouse over the word, then click on the last letter to send the word. It also now keeps the word that you're working on highlighted.
• Improved the efficiency of the chat window, hopefully removed some bugs
• Ratings are now a bit more volatile for players with a lot of games.
• Tweaked some rules for some of the rooms

In forum news, Alex is working hard and he's shown me some previews: they look great! I can't wait to get that up and live for you guys because you're going to love it!

Update:

The game is back up. Here are the changes for today:

• Now keeping some statistics about players and words. You can see the current reports by clicking on the stats links on the homepage or the lobby pages
• Now, when you rotate the board, the word entry box is immediately focused.
• Now, at the end of each round the chat entry is focused. At the beginning, the word entry is focused
• Added two new Serpentine Rooms! One is a 5x5, 5 letter-min board, the other is a 4x4, 3 letter-min quick round (30s each)
• Various small tweaks on the server

I made a few changes to the site this morning as well:

• Moved the Leave Game button to underneath the words box
• In the lobby, the rating that appears at the top of the page for each player is no longer cached (it will now always be correct)
• Added a new Ratings page that will let you look at all the players' ratings and # of games played. You can get there by clicking on the More link underneath the top ten in the lobby.

Since the server crashed last night, I was able to find the culprit: python's _mysql module. Not that the module itself was to blame, no, it was more my ignorance. Apparently, a mysql connection cannot be used between threads, which is something I'm pretty sure I was doing. The result is that I've made some changes that should make the mysql calls thread safe (I hope). I'm pretty new to threaded python programming, so there will probably be a few more bumps along the way, but things will eventually get better.

• Drag-style mousing works. Still isn't quite perfect but it's workable
• Board rotation
• New ENABLE2K dictionary
• Fixed bugs where Words others got and word-at-last-second doesn't show up at the end of rounds
• Improvements to the game server
• Fixed scrolling in the chat window so you can go back to look at previous char remarks