The challenges list is growing and growing. We need more filter options and information. We need ‘Date Submitted’, ‘Filter by age’ (1 Week, 1 Month etc), ‘Game Version when submitted’. Any more?
Absolutely need filter by age now that it doesn’t seem to do so by default.
Also – what about local challenges (i.e. when I challenge myself to test out some ideas). Seems a bit wasteful to clog the main server with them. At least an option where I can permanently delete the challenge to myself would be useful.
[Ahriman] Yes a local challenge would be pretty cool I think. Maybe one should even consider an option where a challenge that’s been beaten by more than 10% by the creator themselves is tagged differently than a challenge that their own creator can’t defeat … It would feed into fixing the problem I see with the challenge system as it is.
It’s true to say that a fleet which depends on impossible to hit super-fast fighters (which thanks to the much-needed but perhaps flawed ‘armor fix’ can now quickly kill ANY ship without the need for bombers) backed up by a bunch of slow pure-plasma cruisers, is a very difficult challenge. A bunch of densely-packed ion blaster frigates is also an extremely difficult challenge, especially when paired with the aforementioned nigh-(with tractor beams)-unkillable fighters. So if we’re entirely honest, they’d dominate the top of the ranked list, which only allows us to search by Difficulty right now.
But are they fun? I’d say no. I’d say a balanced / varied / interesting fleet that someone put a lot of time into is a great deal more fun to encounter and challenge than a wank fleet. A fleet that’s hard to beat but is beatable is the core of GSB’s fun, I think. So, being able to search fleets by Fun and not just Difficulty would be a big improvement right now.
Or there could be a ‘glitch fleet’ tag, for when a challenge is based purely around wanking with some obscure balance problem to make it essentially unbeatable. If we don’t want to see glitch fleets, we uncheck that option and don’t encounter old glitch fleets, just new ones that not enough people have tagged. This should be coupled with a decent check for ‘stalemates’ when taking on an encounter-- I understand why we’d want people to actually properly win or lose before they rate a challenge, but bugged / glitched / wank fleets are probably going to result in a great number of stalemates and we’re going to have to let people flag these things somehow.
I just deleted 230 of the older challenges, especially those that have no map, and were open (ie: not aimed at a specific gsb player).
in future I hope to get better filters in there, and a better UI for browsing and organizing stuff. It’s on the list!
How about an option to post a challenge for a limited time (30 days for instance)?
You can now delete any challenge that you posted, or was addressed to you. Those delete buttons actually work now. It was a server-side screwup that was stopping them actually working.
Any chance you can stamp challenges with a version number? And perhaps add an option to hide outdated ones?