I signed up for the upcoming “Botters of the Galaxy”. It will be my first contest.
Has anyone already thougt about creating a virtual CodingHup?
Possibly using Hangout or any (cheap) collaboration platform out there to work together.
Or, maybe, someone already tried and found it’s not a good idea at all?
I would surely love to exchange ideas and collaborate with others.
a lot of players are active on the general chat during contests. Some create private chatrooms. Not exactly sure what you’re looking for though.
I was thinking about a group of people wanting to share their thoughts/strategy on the game and collaborate to create a competitive bot.
Personally I don’t think I will be able to get the top spots, so instead of having a low “solo” performance, I would rather take pride in creating a better bot as part of a “team” (of course, assuming I can contribute with my skill 
).
I suppose the main difference between the general chat and a “virtual codinghub” will be the using of voice (discord, teamspeak, hangout, …).
I generally don’t have the opportunity to join a codinghub (because no one want to host a codinghub in the montains i suppose). A virtual codinhub is easier to join obvioulsy.
BUT ! My english accent is so bad it can trigger a nuclear war.
A CG discord server would have some success, I guess (and not just during contests)
Well, my English accent is not that good either
It would be fun but maybe there’s not enough time to organize something now.
I would love to see the “clan/guild” concept implemented on CG. with support for Discord or TeamSpeak, forums, etc…
I believe it would introduce a different dimension: would a team outperform “solo” players?
Also, one could have CG accounts for clans (where the jointly developed code could be posted) and even a separate leaderboard fro clans.
But maybe I’m going to far, I saw that others made this proposal in the past but it did not get much interest. Too bad 
I see:
Cheating or wrongdoing observed, such as in particular being assisted by a person or a machine, participating collectively, replacing on behalf of a registered Participant
But if a “Clan” was a recognized participating entity, it would be a different matter (I believe).
Now I’m confused about the “CodingHubs”. Are they just gathering of people that will participate individually? I thought they were meant to allow people to work together. it says:
Meet with other CodinGamers in your area, discuss the contest together and enjoy live coding.
Maybe they would be allowed to “discuss” together but not to “live code” together?
A little of live coding is harmless. But an entire team working on the same AI during all the contest will be ban from the final ranking. In a codinghub, everyone comes with it’s own AI.
But sharing knowledge is good and encouraged (we do that all the time on the general chat during a contest).
I get it. Contests are made for individuals to compete.
Would it be the same for past contests?
For example, I’m SIlver in both “Code4LIfe” and Coders “Strike Back” (pretty low in both leaderboards).
Would it be allowed to form a party with another programmer (creating an ad-hoc account for the party, with the participants fully disclosed), work together on an AI and having it competing with the others?
The reason I’m insisting on teamwork is because in real work you very rarely work in isolation; you get feedback and give feedback, you think of a nice algorithm, the other codes it efficiently, and so on. I feel it would be nice to recreate this way of working here on Coding Game.
If players were to work together and submit only one AI, we would have no way of knowing it. On this part, the rules would need some update.
What we want to avoid is having duplicate AIs in the leaderboard.
Now, it stills a competition where each player is supposed to represent an individual. How would you feel towards others codingamers who compete alone if your team beats them (and potentially wins a T-Shirt)?
During CodingHubs, players code their own AIs but indeed share strategies.
At the end of the day, I think that there is a great potential for knowledge sharing even if players compete individually.
I’ll think about the Discord server.
I completely agree on not having the same AI multiple times, that’s why I was thinking about about having “Party” accounts so that if my party submits an AI, I can’t do it as a solo player in the same contest.
Anyway, I got it. Idea rejected!
I still believe that for past contests it could be nice, but rules are rules.
Multiplayer games are different to contests, I don’t think you upset anyone as long as you don’t submit the same bot with different accounts.
+1 for the Discord; I haven’t had much success with getting a decent XMPP client, and it’d be nice to integrate it into something I otherwise use a lot (Discord). I’m already in a private Discord group but obviously that’s not the same.
That would be a reason for me to use Discord again, by now i didn’t find any usefull communities and use my own teamspeak server for communication with multiple friends …
The best thing about Discord is that you don’t have to host a server and you don’t have to worry when your friends are on a different server than you. You can still contact them I’d really appreciate a Discord server for CodinGame. Not only during competitions, but also as a place to hang out with people and maybe ask something about past competitions.
We’ve created a Discord server for CodinGame (credits: @reCurse). We’re still experimenting, but if you’d like to contribute and have a new space to discuss contests/games/puzzles/whatever, you’re welcome to join:
I’d like to help CodinGamers to host codinghubs so I’ve prepared a very quick survey for hosts (or those who tried hosting one) to better understand the issues with the current format: