A multi game is IMHO a serious thing. The question is what do we (or you) want ? Many many multi games with the same validation process as for CoC and puzzle or a limited amount of multi games validated using a much more robust process in order to guarantee their quality ?
The actual validation process has shown its limits a long time ago on CoC. The validation process is more a click rush than a valid review process. This lead us to reject subjects which probably can adapted to real valid subject but are not valid in their current state just to prevent their validation in their current state by people who just click validate because they found (or not) a solution (possibly hardcoded). This phenomenon has migrated recently on puzzles even if its less visible at this time and I predict it will appear soon on multis.
An other drawback of the multiplication of multis will probably be that people won’t even try to solve them. Bender - Episode 4 has 17 participant, Vindinium 135, BitRunner 147, Cultis War 34 … The community has not enough time to fight on all those multis.
At this time, as far as I know, all the gurus have stopped to play CoC (at least with their official account). Many have stop to solve puzzle. I think it will be a pity if the also stop to play on multi.
Allowing the community to participate by proposing ideas and code is IMHO a good idea. Allowing us to participate to the validation process also. Allowing us to validate using the same invalid process as for CoC is not.
My point is i don’t think the validation process is bad. Maybe the process is too easy for multiplayer puzzles, you can add more validators or maybe force number of player during the draft phase. But it’s not the main issue.
For me, the main issue is that creating a multiplayer puzzle is hard, very hard. Learn how the SDK works (sometime even learn java and maven), creating new javascript modules, dig into github projects to grab some examples …
When you create a puzzle for a community contest, you are “rewarded” because you know that at least 1000 players (sometimes 2000) will play your game. Because Codingame use its community networks to bring players. You’ll have a real league system, real bosses, real competition during 10 days around your game. (you also have 2500xp).
When you create a community multiplayer puzzle, you’ll have 100 players (more or less), no league system, no access to the entire community, probably no real competition.
And both requires the same amount of work.
For me (i don’t want to talk about others), CoC was fun at the beginning but the replayability is very low. In the end you remake clashes that you already know.
I did all official solo puzzle but i don’t have the time to make all community puzzles.
Same thing. I play all community contests. But i don’t have time for all community multiplayer puzzles.
Just to let you know about the upcoming things we are preparing to solve these problems:
In our opinion, whatever review process we can create, there will always be some biais, or misused of the system. What we prefer to do is to keep the moderation system as it is but we will introduce a mechanism that will automatically remove less appreciated contributions. We’re digging in the analytics at the moment to find the best rules. Based on the community feedback (the 5 stars system used in puzzles and clash of code after players (and not moderators) have submitted their game), we will automatically disabled some contributions. With that, it will automatically clean with a second “moderation” wave the contributions. This system has the advantage to give voice to different codingamers (moderators, players) to judge if a contribution worth it or not.
Then, about the point that multiplayer games are not played enough, it will be bumped by the new homepage that will have a “featured” game that will be chosen quite randomly (there are some rules, but the fact is that all games will be featured dispatched on all the community). This way, all puzzles will be suggested to the community quite equally (and remember, removed if the community don’t like them) giving them more visibility.
I hope it will help with the current problems.
Let me know if you have any feedback about this or don’t hesitate to chat with me on the discord
Giving more visibility will not bring many players to community multiplayer puzzles (in my opinion). People still don’t have the time to participate to all multiplayer puzzle and we all know that at least 1000 players will always participate to contests only.
And at the moment, community multiplayer puzzle don’t reward any CodinPoints. I know it’s temporary, but that doesn’t help.
I know the issue probably can’t be solved. Creating a contest or a community multiplayer puzzle requires the same amount of work but the reward are not even remotely close.
What about proposing community multiplayer games as “unofficial” contests, just like bit-runner, when they are released?
A puzzle would be put forward and have more visibility for something like one week or two, giving more time to participate, maybe not as “competitively” as in a real contest, but it could increase a bit the number of players. If a random community multiplayer is put forward like that every two months or so, maybe it would be interesting and make us be more patient between every real contest .
Sorry this is a bit out of the subject, which was about validation. But this could also be a sort of validation phase as more players means more chances to find bugs and help improve.
I strongly disagree with the notion of removing a multi after it has been published. Writing a bot is a major time investment, and it would be rather upsetting to lose an unpopular game but still appreciated by few because of that.
It really is the bar to publish that must be made much higher. Once it’s out it should stay. And on that, I agree with Boulet, the process is broken.
On the other hand, given the major time investment also needed to create a multi, I always thought it’s a bit weird to not at least try to make a community contest out of any good multi first. Especially when you know there is currently none in preparation (afaik?), and there already was maybe one good candidate in the form of Cultist Wars, that might never get the spotlight it could have had.
EDIT: I have also given low ratings to multis I don’t like for various reasons, but that I absolutely don’t think should be removed. If it was to become the case, I would probably stop using the rating feature save for a few exceptions.
Julien and I actually discussed with @Nixerrr about Cultists Wars but the game had already been out for a few days, so we ultimately decided not to use it as contest game.
We could try to make it clearer that any unpublished game/puzzle can be content for an official contest. I’m not sure the current documentation is enough.
With the current limit we’d like to fix, no multiplayers games would be removed. If I understood well your point @Boulet & @reCurse, you believe that one multiplayer game (or more) shouldn’t have been validated as is.
Why do you think so (all current multis have decent (> 4) ratings)? And, according to you, how could have this been avoided?
Could the WIP feature help? Should the moderation conditions be more strict?
Bandas, for instance, has been published while there were still concerns on its design and balance. I believe the problems were eventually fixed, but not before it was published, which further highlights how the process is a trivial, almost useless obstacle. It is also problematic to do so post-publish because any change can break existing bots, which is a big no no in general.
Several ideas come to mind to fix it, but at the very least there should be a minimum time enforced for everyone to have time to do a proper review (a few days, maybe even a week). If something globally had a 10% approval rate, you would still need only 3 people to get it through, while 27 would think it shouldn’t be published yet. So it should also scale somehow with the number of persons participating in a review to be more accurate.
The WIP feature is nice, but is author-sided. I think it is the community-sided features of the process that are lacking.
It should also be strongly encouraged to submit a multi as a contest before making it public.
Hi @TwoSteps, my point was not really on the past validations but on the process itself.
Using the CoC process to validate multis will rapidly produce many multis.
The CoC validation process has shown its limits: poor contribution quality making many us to stop clashing. If one translate this on multis, in a not so far future, we will have dozen of multi (too) quickly validated to be well balanced and bug fixed. I do not have a real idea on the quality of the already validated multis since I haven’t been able to find time to really code them.
Moreover, as long as the number of multis is reasonable, we will have many participant to each of them. If we arrive to a situation with dozens (or more) multi, I guess that each of them will have at most 100 participants and I’m not sure that’s what I want to see.
Once again, from my point of view, CG may ask us to participate to the multi/contest review/validation process but should not let us (at least not all of us) decide at the end.
I just want to highlight the fact that i don’t do clashes because of the concept of clashes. Replayability is very low. Good contributions will not makes me comeback.
(@G-Rom sorry I haven’t seen your post before my previous answer)
This is announced for more that one year now and nothing seems to happen
That’s why you cannot let the (whole) community be the final judge of contribution. Maybe you can define a subset of really competent and interested users to help you.
This can work (or not) for CoC but not for solo games (problems with CP and/or XP) and not again for multis.
Moreover, what a “less appreciated contribution” is ? One which allow the player to learn something or one which have many 5 stars because it can be solved in half a line like onboarding (which is a bad example here since it has its interest to introduce the system).
in real life I’m a fanatic of democracy not here. All users are not equals in their capacity to understand what a good contribution is.
If you have in mind something like “multi of the week”, it won’t solve any problem. The problem is not a visibility problem but a time problem. We simply do not have time to fight on all the multis. Thus we do not fight at all. Thus, whatever the contribution will be, no one will play them.
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