When i code on Codingame, i’m alone. I’m not completely alone because i can chat with other codingamers but i’m still alone in front of my code.
When i’m at work, i’m never alone. When you work at school you are never alone (you always work as a team of 2, sometime more). At work if you are stuck on your code, you just ask help and a colleague come to help you. If your dev team must achieve a very complex task, you just do pair programming and code the sh*t out of it.
I love codingame, but i think this website miss a very big part of the developper life : the teamwork. If you want to be a professional developper, you have to know how to work in team. Help each others and support the team. Or you’ll just be slow and not very cost effective. The lonely coder in a cave is just a myth, it doesn’t exist anymore on the work market. If you want to be the best, you have to be a good developer and you have to make developers around you better.
That’s why i bring this suggestion to you : Do a contest with teams ! You have to find a partner before the contest and you register with him/her. It could be easy to make a “solo” puzzle for a team of 2, just make it very hard so you have to be 2 coders to achieve it in time. But it could be frustrating because very good developpers will still be fast enought to achieve the puzzle alone anyway (a 4 hours contest can be resolved in less than 1 hour).
But a multiplayer puzzle for teams should be pretty fun. For example you take Platinum Rift 2 but you are 2v2. We can also imagine more complex puzzle like 2 differents IA (with 2 differents roles) playing in a 2v2 game (or even a 2v2v2v2 game, don’t fear to see big !).
I know it would likely never happen. A team contest will be a colossal work for the CodinGame team and many codingamers will not enter the contest because they’ll never try to find a partner. I’m just a dreamer
I think the idea is great while I also think it should be handled carefully if it’s done, because of the reasons you pinpoint.
But one way it could work (in the first time) is when you register, you can choose to join or create a team and then with the people you share the code with (maybe a private chat channel on irc for the team?), you will be able to share the same code. That way even people that don’t want to join teams won’t be bothered, and people are already making teams IRL, so why not?
Another simple to do idea would be that team can be created in a more group fashion, which means you enter group “Coders from CG” for example, and each group compete against each other but in the end each member are doing the contest alone, it’s just a way to compare people, like when at school we say classA is better than classB. A similar grouping could also be done by country.
For other real 2vs2 games, I think it’s possible and fun, but will require a lot of thinking to make it work properly, what is your partner doesn’t show up on the contest? What if he is lame and you want to change of partner? What if a million other things? So yeah, careful planning and it could be awesome.
I’d take this a bit further and suggest there be some kind of guild/clan functionality on this website… and then have several puzzles “clan/guild only” in that they build up the clan/guild’s score… which is then added onto each member (balanced for how much they’ve contributed to said clan/guild… with just showing up getting you 1%).
This would allow some contests to be clan/guild targeted… and others to be targeting single parties.
I think it may be handled with care, because I don’t want codingame to turn into those MMORPG where if you don’t belong to a guild, you don’t matters. Solo play is fine too, and it’s an important part of Codingame, it would be a shame if it force all players to join a guild.
I just had the Idea of a guild, too, after reading Magus and Aries1 answers to my post.
I understand, that a MMORPG type of guild is unwanted. I wouldn’t like that either.
Maybe there is already a possibilty for it, I’m new here, but this is my idea.
So my idea is, that from your friendlist you could select up to X persons as a Team. Only if the other person acceppts, you will be linked as a team. By doing that, every player would have theire own team. And not every firend would be in the team. Not a guild at all, where X players would be a team.
You will see messages from your teammembers like the activity stream. It is ment to be used for helping each other finding funny bugs but will also allow you to chat with a smaller group to improve your knowledge about coding.
Any progress on this? I think, even simply adding a “team” field on the profile page and the same filtering option for Leaderboard would be great.
Here’s rationale for this: Many schools/universities may have several teams (for different departments/faculties), which may want to compare their rankings against each other.
