It’s probably been suggested in the past, so please forgive me if they sound familiar.
Blind challenge. Could you put a check box on the challenge dialog that causes the “cant see deployment” effect on a challenge? I would love to issue a challenge to someone and have them not see what they are up against.
Single shot challenge. (also a checkbox). You can only play it once, and thus deletes itself when a person downloads it. Obviously this should only apply to private challenges.
Map challenge. ( this would be a mode from the challenge screen ) This is more involved. You challenge a map, and each time you play you fight randomly one of the x most successful builds for that map. So its blind deployment. When you win, then the deployment you played with goes up as a challenge and competes as a x most successful build. Every once in a while, the servers drops the least successful deployments from the x most successful builds to prevent the list from growing too big. The random algorithm should skew moderately towards maps with the best win/loss ratio and a lot of games played. This will prevent a lot of additions to the x list, and also weed out new comers that have a 1-0 record quickly. The net effect is that only the hard deployments to beat remain, and this becomes a quasi king of the hill. Obviously, you also need to set this up so duplicate deployments and no more than z from any one person cant exist in the list.
Tourney Challenges. Someone sets a tournament on a specific map, to happen at a specific time. Players then submit one challenge to the tournament, if they are interested. The servers at the specified time play a double elimination or single elimination tournament and sends you back a private challenge on the deployments you lost to, and described with what rank in the tourney this fight was on. It also posts the top 3 deployments as generic challenges for a while. The winner would get sent back the final fight he won against, so he can see that fight too.
Random map challenge. Instead of picking through the list, it randomly selects a challenge filtered on what map you pick. I’m too lazy to go search through the list. I bet this would be really easy to set up.
Thats a very interesting idea. It means changing the way challenges get issued and stored, and I’ll probably thus save it for when I spend time seriously overhauling all that stuff.
I would like to make a suggestion too: a challenge where the all the ships are predefined, so that you have x number of ships readily deployed, or have only certain ship designs available. The purpose would be to test your ability to give orders and use the right ships.
A simple version just using a flag in the challenge data would be enough for my needs. Though I could see how the more involved process of not downloading the fight till after you pick a deployment would be desirable for others. After you fight the challenge once, you know what’s in it after all.
On a slightly different note, but somewhat related, perhaps store how many tries it takes another person before they first beat a challenge. It could be a good indication of how hard a challenge is rather than the user-voted difficulty level. A challenge that averages 5 attempts by the same user before they defeat it is going to be more difficult than one that only takes 2 tries on average.
I suppose that this can be calculated in a way from attempts/victories, but it differs in that if someone beats the challenge on the third time, and then the fourth, fifth and sixth, you will see 2 attempts and 3 victories, rather than the above method showing 3 attempts to be able to beat it.
This could probably just be a matter of selecting the map from a dropdown, and clicking on random challenge or something of the sort. It might be quick to implement, and a good way to test your fleet against various opponents without going through the list.
I’m pretty sure that was posted by a spam bot. That usually what’s going on any time you see nonsensical text with a link at the end. Unless you have very good virus protection and a fully updated browser I wouldn’t follow the link in althea06’s post.
Of course I might be wrong. If althea06 is a real person who does not natively speak English, he or she she will have my apologies.
I was thinking that it was a spam bot too, but he was talking about challenges. Which I now realize a good bot would use words from posts. Spam bot about chiropratic seems kinda way out too.
I’m sure it’s just a bot: no person would speak in such a broken english and advertise an english speaking website, without ever referencing it in the post.
The bot probably just has some banter programmed to it so that it picks up keywords and posts a generic response. Or it’s just a coincidence.
Also, althea06: do you guys deliver to Finland? My back is killing me.
