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Caravel Forum : DROD Boards : Feature Requests : Help for stuck players (A simple algorithm)
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disoriented
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icon Help for stuck players (+1)  
IF (player has died or restarted a room > 100 times)

AND

IF (player has CaravelNet account)

THEN

player can press F6 and click a button named "Help me solve" which downloads the worst demo for that room available. "Worst" can mean the most moves, or it can be an architect-defined demo.

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08-04-2015 at 12:04 AM
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Insoluble
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icon Re: Help for stuck players (0)  
disoriented wrote:
IF (player has died or restarted a room > 100 times)

AND

IF (player has CaravelNet account)

THEN

player can press F6 and click a button named "Help me solve" which downloads the worst demo for that room available. "Worst" can mean the most moves, or it can be an architect-defined demo.

This is a really cool idea. But what to do about holds like, say Buried Dungeon, where the "worst" demo for many rooms is by default also the "best" demo (since only one person has solved to room)?

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08-04-2015 at 01:31 AM
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disoriented
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Insoluble wrote:
what to do about holds like, say Buried Dungeon, where the "worst" demo for many rooms is by default also the "best" demo (since only one person has solved to room)?
Then...the room was probably too hard to begin with :D

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08-04-2015 at 02:33 AM
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Dragon Fogel
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icon Re: Help for stuck players (+2)  
Also worth noting, the "worst" demo in terms of moves may waste a lot of time in ways that end up making it very unclear what's actually important in solving the room.

For instance, I downloaded a really inefficient demo for the force arrow room in City of Queens and it involved so much moving around that it was hard to see which moves were actually important.
08-04-2015 at 02:40 AM
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Pinnacle
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Not too sure about the 100-restarts implementation, it's pretty trivial to just hold R for a few seconds and get to that point. Something like this (if it should be implemented at all, I have some pretty major objections to it from a game design philosophy standpoint) would have to be an absolute last resort, for example only being available if the player has spent at least 1 hour on a single room.

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08-04-2015 at 03:11 AM
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disoriented
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Pinnacle wrote:
only being available if the player has spent at least 1 hour on a single room.

I'm good with that. Although I suppose the player could move their system clock ahead, if they really wanted to. ;)

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08-04-2015 at 04:52 AM
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Jeff_Ray...
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icon Re: Help for stuck players (+1)  
I believe the system should push the player to find the H&S topic instead of outright giving them the demo. That said, the idea of giving the player a little push of help would be good. That way, frustration is avoided, and everyone is happy!

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08-04-2015 at 03:23 PM
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blorx1
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I can't tell if this is a joke.

It lacks the public shaming element of H&S though.

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08-04-2015 at 03:27 PM
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Jacob
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I had an idea a while back, regarding UU:
You can use UU if you want, but doing so means your demos for the room in which you used them can't be submitted to Caravelnet for scoring.

Similarly:
You can view the existing caravelnet demos for the room if you want, but doing so means your demos for this room can't be submitted to Caravelnet for scoring. (In this case, you click a button saying "View Demos" and a warning box pops up saying, "Are you sure? Doing so will invalidate your victory demos")

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08-04-2015 at 10:31 PM
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Jacob wrote:
I had an idea a while back, regarding UU:
You can use UU if you want, but doing so means your demos for the room in which you used them can't be submitted to Caravelnet for scoring.
But what would be the point of doing that? To give a sense of artificial validation to people who choose to play the game without UU? To show that players using UU are tolerated, but not accepted?

It's not like limiting the amount of undos actually increases the difficulty of a deterministic puzzle game on an intellectual level. At best it makes the game punish a lack of focus and foresight, at worst it rewards mindless repetition after a small slip-up and being resistant to frustration.
Is there a really a need to not just let people choose which style they prefer without forcefully nudging them in one direction?

I suppose this is at its core an issue of how important one sees the factor of competition with other players to be to the overall experience when playing DROD. I fully understand where you're coming from, but I don't think detracting from the fun of others by forcing them to deliberately ignore a quality of life option or to miss out on a feature of their CNet membership is a good idea.

A complete DROD purist might similarly propose that there should be an option to disable orb effect highlights and that people's scores are invalidated if they use the highlights. This makes as much sense to me as punishing UU users.

Similarly:
You can view the existing caravelnet demos for the room if you want, but doing so means your demos for this room can't be submitted to Caravelnet for scoring. (In this case, you click a button saying "View Demos" and a warning box pops up saying, "Are you sure? Doing so will invalidate your victory demos")

I don't feel as strongly about this one, but again, this may limit players for reasons of (to me) questionable value. I (ignorantly?) assume the majority of score hunting optimizers have watched the demos of other people to get an outline for how to approach a room or to see how their score in a given room has been beaten. Or maybe a diffeerent player just wants to see how they could have tackled the room they just had trouble with differently.

I'm not quite sure whether you suggest that demos simply become invalid if a player watches a demo from CNet before they first conquer a room (instead of having to conquer a room before downloading a demo, as the system works currently) or if you want the game to disable your demo upload for a room if you view a CNet demo at any time, even after you've already cleared it.

If you're talking about the latter, I don't really see a lot of reason for the whole CNet demo download feature to exist at all, if that were the case. Unless, of course, it would somehow result in people buying a second Caravel membership so they could watch demos on one account and upload their own ones on the other. :D

I'm sorry, this is a wall of text about something that's not even the original thread topic.

Edit:
Also, my opinions are usually garbage, so yeah.

[Last edited by Aquator at 08-05-2015 03:49 AM]
08-05-2015 at 03:45 AM
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disoriented
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icon Re: Help for stuck players (+5)  
Please, let's not reopen the UU debate/can of worms... :facepalm:

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08-05-2015 at 05:06 AM
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Pinnacle
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One other aspect of this that's a major problem is the fact that it bypasses the community aspect of H&S. It's fairly common for someone to register for the forum in order to ask for help, and they end up as a full-fledged member of the community. This would prevent that from happening, essentially replacing the H&S forum with an automatic system that doesn't involve any community interaction.

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08-05-2015 at 05:19 AM
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Jacob wrote:
I had an idea a while back, regarding UU:
You can use UU if you want, but doing so means your demos for the room in which you used them can't be submitted to Caravelnet for scoring.

Except the only ways of implementing this are useless or actively harmful to the community?

If only demos recorded while UU is active don't count, I just make my super #1 demo using UU, then turn off UU and repeat my solution.

If completing a room with UU active means the player can never submit a demo for that room to CNet, everything becomes awful. I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to why.


On the main topic, I don't really agree with it. There's the fuzziness of what counts as a restart, and it's probably better to send the player to H&S, rather than giving them the solution. Especially for super high-end death holds where only 3 people have completed them.

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08-05-2015 at 10:39 AM
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I don't know how helping players turned into punishing players.

We're certainly not going to punish players for using UU, or tar transparency, or checkpoints, or any features that we added to make execution of a solution easier. That's just silly.

Years ago we tried a much less intrusive way of punishing players for downloading demos and using them to beat high scores. That didn't turn out so well, let's not try that again.

As for the original FR.... I dunno. Probably not, but years ago we thought UU would probably not ever be a feature. ;)

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08-05-2015 at 02:02 PM
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Jacob
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You're right - the UU idea was not really relevant. It was just an example of a similar idea, used as a preamble to my other point.

Many people at the time complained that those who opted to use it would have an unfair disadvantage competitively over those who didn't. (Personally I don't have strong feelings re: UU, and don't play drod to optimise anyway)

Anyway, this is a moot point and, as I say this was just a preamble. Please let's not rediscuss UU here - I'm sorry for bringing it up.

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08-05-2015 at 10:21 PM
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Dischorran
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But undo really should be limited to two and a half moves.

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08-06-2015 at 02:54 AM
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Dischorran wrote:
But undo really should be limited to two and a half moves.
I couldn't decide if I should downvote or upvote you, so I did half of both.

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08-06-2015 at 08:41 AM
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...actually I'd be super okay with an undo that didn't actually undo so much as played my last move in slow motion.
08-07-2015 at 11:30 PM
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disoriented
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Banjooie wrote:
...actually I'd be super okay with an undo that didn't actually undo so much as played my last move in slow motion.

I guess I'd also be okay with a "Play Banjooie's Last Move" button.

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08-07-2015 at 11:33 PM
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You do not want that button, as my moves are all generally hideously unoptimal.
08-08-2015 at 06:58 AM
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skell
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Five years later does anyone have any cool ideas here to help stuck players?

My opinion is that I don't care about people seeing CNet demos before they complete the room. It's up to them if they want to spoil their fun - at the same time I don't want to make it too easy, to encourage them to have the intended fun!

Here is one suggestion that goes in a different direction. At some point an angry player asks for help and here is what happens:
- A browser is opened that opens a link to the forum.
- If there is a H&S thread for this room, the oldest one is immediately opened.
- If there are multiple H&S threads for a room, there is a fake post added at the end which displays links to other threads for this room (this would also work on the regular forum)
- If there are no H&S thread for this room it immediately opens a page for creating the thread, with some template text typed where all the player has to do is to add a few details
- Ideally, allow players to create the thread even if they have no account, or incorporate registering a new account as part of creating the thread, to remove the friction as much as possible.

On the other hand I am not sure if there is much worth in doing anything here.

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skell wrote:
Five years later does anyone have any cool ideas here to help stuck players?
For me, the biggest help would be to allow non-CN people to see room images in H&S threads.

The in-game help could be better organized, and maybe we could add a search box and index. It often takes me a couple tries to find the page with the info I want. I might start a FR for this.

Beyond that, H&S (both the forum code and community) is really amazingly good.

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