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        Arimaa >> Site Discussion >> Client questions (and first impressions)
        
(Message started by: DonEsteban on Jan 4th, 2011, 5:11am)
Title: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by DonEsteban on Jan 4th, 2011, 5:11am
I have a few questions regarding the client (JavaScript and Flash) in general and time controls in particular.

Is there a documentation on the client somewhere? I didn't find it anywhere I would expect it. It's not in the learn menu, and clicking the H button in the client yields nothing. Nor is it in the Wiki. Most of it is pretty intuitive, but there are a few non-obvious things. How to set up your pieces is one of them, but eventually I found out how to do this.

When starting a game, what does "interactive" mean? Am I supposed to change the time control in the client? If so, where? Clicking on the time limit (as the tooltip suggests) yields nothing.

What is "expert mode"? I see no difference.

I think I heard something mentioned about an option to give your opponent more time during the game. Maybe I misremember, but if not how can this be done?

I also missed a short introduction on the game room in general (aka "first steps"). The welcome section covers some, but not all of it. It talks much about bots and playing against them, but not about playing against humans. Is this site not intended as a site for people playing with people? I think such a thing would make it much easier for newcomers to feel themselves at home. Darn, I should have started a different topic for this. But I'm too lazy now.

Thanks for your patience.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by Fritzlein on Jan 4th, 2011, 9:55am

on 01/04/11 at 05:11:16, DonEsteban wrote:
I have a few questions regarding the client (JavaScript and Flash) in general and time controls in particular.

Is there a documentation on the client somewhere? I didn't find it anywhere I would expect it. It's not in the learn menu, and clicking the H button in the client yields nothing. Nor is it in the Wiki. Most of it is pretty intuitive, but there are a few non-obvious things. How to set up your pieces is one of them, but eventually I found out how to do this.

There is no documentation.  Ideally the necessary documentation would be within the client, because even if you have instructions, people never read them.  An astonishing number of newcomers don't even read the rules to Arimaa before starting a game and trying to play.  If people can't even be bothered to read the game rules, they surely won't click on a "how to use the client" link.  Omar has done a decent job of making the client intuitive, but I think a pop-up tip on piece setup would help.


Quote:
When starting a game, what does "interactive" mean? Am I supposed to change the time control in the client? If so, where? Clicking on the time limit (as the tooltip suggests) yields nothing.

"Interactive" is the opposite of "Postal".  Some other game sites use the terms "live" and "turn-based" instead.  You are supposed to select a time control when inviting another human player to a game, but when you play a bot you have no choice about the time control: it is fixed for each engine.


Quote:
What is "expert mode"? I see no difference.

Expert mode allows you to play forward moves for both sides without sending your move.  It is a way to analyze without opening another window.  An obsolete but still-available alternative to expert mode is to open a "plan window" on which you can play out variations.


Quote:
I think I heard something mentioned about an option to give your opponent more time during the game. Maybe I misremember, but if not how can this be done?

There is no "moretime" option.


Quote:
I also missed a short introduction on the game room in general (aka "first steps"). The welcome section covers some, but not all of it. It talks much about bots and playing against them, but not about playing against humans. Is this site not intended as a site for people playing with people? I think such a thing would make it much easier for newcomers to feel themselves at home. Darn, I should have started a different topic for this. But I'm too lazy now.

We all would love to have more human vs. human games, and many people have suggested ways to encourage it.  Apparently it is a very difficult thing to bring about.  Contrary to your intuition, most people feel more comfortable playing their first few games against a bot rather than against another person.  When the bot ladder was first introduced, the retention rate of arimaa.com spiked.  If the goal is to get more people hooked on Arimaa, then having always-available computer opponents is essential.

The best way that you personally can increase the number of human vs. human games is to leave your "invite flag" always on.  The flag defaults to on for all newcomers, but almost everyone soon finds out that they can turn it off, and they all do so, indicating a desire not to play other humans.  It seems to me the phenomenon of having primarily human vs. bot games is mostly cultural rather than a consequence of interface or presentation.

That said, there has historically been human turnout for special events like one-day tournaments when some player takes the lead in organizing a tournament, announcing it, recruiting people to play, and running the tournament when it happens.  Not long ago Nombril was bemoaning the dearth of HvH games, and I encouraged him to organize his own events.  He ran two quickies and both were successful at generating HvH games that wouldn't have otherwise happened.

One (misguided) way to encourage more HvH play would be to shut off the bots.  If the sluggishness/timeout problems continue to get worse, and we find no better way to deal with the problem, turning off the bots will become the default solution.  Indeed, Omar has already set the bots to be unavailable during event games, so that we don't have HvH games timing out due to resource-hogging bots.  Given the 16 scheduled World Championship games this weekend, bots will be unavailable most of the time.  But I am not sure to what extent this will encourage more HvH games as opposed to inducing people to leave and come back to play later.  Arimaa has had such a hard time getting up to the mass of players that it now has, I am opposed to doing anything that drives players away in the name of trying to transform the site into something different.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by Nombril on Jan 4th, 2011, 11:21am

on 01/04/11 at 09:55:51, Fritzlein wrote:
It seems to me the phenomenon of having primarily human vs. bot games is mostly cultural rather than a consequence of interface or presentation.

Actually, when I started playing, I was discouraged from playing HvH games by the gameroom Welcome message:  "Beginners, please start by playing the bots on the Bot Ladder and see how high you can climb."  For months I had the (wrong) impression that I should finish (or plateau on) the ladder before playing other people.

I do think it is worth beating at least a few bots to get the hang of the rules and interface.  After that it certainly is a good learning challenge, but it shouldn't be to the exclusion of playing HvH games.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by DonEsteban on Jan 4th, 2011, 11:32am
Thanks for your answers.


on 01/04/11 at 09:55:51, Fritzlein wrote:
Ideally the necessary documentation would be within the client, because even if you have instructions, people never read them.
I wasn't going to suggest a full-fledged documentation. I myself haven't ever read any software documentation since the late 80s, even for complicated things like eclipse. I guess what I meant was more something like tool tips, a "What's this" function or a FAQ section. But I think a very short introduction to what each button does and how to start a game would be helpful to many users. It's hard to tell what people need, because usually you hear only of the people who eventually get along. I guess some (very few?) might leave silently after a "I don't understand what this is all about" shock.


Quote:
"Interactive" is the opposite of "Postal".
Ah, now I understand, it's a heading. It's surprising that you can select "Interactive" as time control and still start a new game without selecting an actual value, but okay.


Quote:
Expert mode allows you to play forward moves for both sides without sending your move.
So maybe the tooltip should say just this instead of "Turns expert mode on".


Quote:
Contrary to your intuition, most people feel more comfortable playing their first few games against a bot rather than against another person.
Actually this is not contrary to my intuition at all. I feel like this myself. Many people just don't want to make a fool of yourself when they play the game for the first time, that's only natural. I also think the bot ladder is a great idea. I'd just like to suggest that /additionally/ there would be short note saying "Hey and if you get fed up with playing against bots all the time do this  and that."


Quote:
...leave your "invite flag" always on. The flag defaults to on for all newcomers, but almost everyone soon finds out that they can turn it off...
Actually, I don't think this is true any more. Mine is off and I can't remember turning it off myself. Took me some time to realize that clicking this tiny symbol next to your user name would achieve this. One more example of a useful but not so obvious feature.


Quote:
It seems to me the phenomenon of having primarily human vs. bot games is mostly cultural rather than a consequence of interface or presentation.
Yes, I wonder if only sociopaths like me arrive at this page ;) But it doesn't mean that you should take any effort (or at least some effort) to encourage HvH. As you already do.

I agree that turning off bots would be the totally wrong way. A solution for the problem would be client side implementation of the bots, but I suppose this won't be easy the way the site is set up. But on the other hand I don't see any other way should the site ever become really popular. Unless you find a really benevolent sponsor who pays for all the high-performance servers!

Edit:

on 01/04/11 at 11:21:55, Nombril wrote:
For months I had the (wrong) impression that I should finish (or plateau on) the ladder before playing other people.
I remember now that I had the exact same impression at first!
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by Fritzlein on Jan 4th, 2011, 11:58am

on 01/04/11 at 11:21:55, Nombril wrote:
Actually, when I started playing, I was discouraged from playing HvH games by the gameroom Welcome message:  "Beginners, please start by playing the bots on the Bot Ladder and see how high you can climb."  For months I had the (wrong) impression that I should finish (or plateau on) the ladder before playing other people.

OK, I can see how that comment alone would discourage beginners from playing other humans.  I would support changing it.  Suddenly I have a vague memory that we decided some time ago that we wanted to force newcomers to play a few bot games before playing humans.  Why did we do this?  I think we may have been reacting to some reported negative experiences.

Was that somehow related to the Player of the Month contest?  If so, it is very ironic, because the Player of the Month contest was specifically designed to encourage more HvH games.  However, in order to win the contest, there was a certain contestant who would pounce on all newcomers, immediately inviting them to games and crushing them for PotM points.  Perhaps we then over-reacted by encouraging people to play their first games against (friendly) bots?


on 01/04/11 at 11:32:55, DonEsteban wrote:
But I think a very short introduction to what each button does and how to start a game would be helpful to many users. It's hard to tell what people need, because usually you hear only of the people who eventually get along. I guess some (very few?) might leave silently after a "I don't understand what this is all about" shock.

True, the people who give feedback are very self-selecting and therefore probably unrepresentative.  Ideally we would find a way to observe the confusions and frustrations of random first-time users.


Quote:
So maybe the tooltip should say just this instead of "Turns expert mode on".

Yes, "Turns expert mode on" is a relatively unenlightening tooltip.  :-)


Quote:
Actually, I don't think this is true any more. Mine is off and I can't remember turning it off myself.

Oh, I wonder when that changed.  Defaulting to have invitations on would indeed be another innocuous way to encourage HvH games.


Quote:
Unless you find a really benevolent sponsor who pays for all the high-performance servers!

Heh, Omar's past and present benevolence is the main reason Arimaa has become as popular as it has.  Without his years-long donation of money and time, the strategic glories of Arimaa would likely have lurked undiscovered in perpetuity.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by DonEsteban on Jan 4th, 2011, 1:55pm
I should have said "very benevolent and very rich"! ;) I have no idea if this still applies to Omar.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by Fritzlein on Jan 4th, 2011, 2:40pm
I think the server may be currently set to prohibit newcomers from inviting other players to games.  The newcomer must first complete two bot games or something like that.  Perhaps this was implemented to make it harder for someone to create nuisance duplicate guest accounts and annoy established players?
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by Sconibulus on Jan 4th, 2011, 9:12pm
The tooltip on expert mode is more informative now, however, could I request that the popup upon expert mode click be turned off, or at least have an option to be turned off? I ask because I often use the mode to play a few positions while watching games, and when you have a move on the board and another move gets played, expert mode is turned off, and needs to be turned back on, this leads to the popup popping up quite frequently.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by omar on Jan 4th, 2011, 9:53pm
Thanks for the suggestions guys.

I changed the tool tip for expert mode and gave a pop-up with some info on how to use expert mode. The pop-up should only appear once now.

Also gave a help message about clicking on two pieces to swap them during the setup move.

Also modified the Welcome message to add:

"To play against other humans, turn on the invite flag next to your username. Or just invite someone who has their invite flag turned on."
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by omar on Jan 4th, 2011, 10:12pm
I would like to map the 'H' button of the JavaScript game client to a page with video showing how to use the game client. People are more likely to watch a 3 minute video than read a page of text. Could someone take a crack at making such a video and post it to YouTube?
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by megajester on Jan 5th, 2011, 1:14pm
I would be happy to make such a video. I've opened a thread about it.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by DonEsteban on Jan 6th, 2011, 5:58am
Thanks for the quick response, omar. The popup is helpful if a bit naggy and it still comes up everytime you open a plan window. I can certainly live with it, but would changing it to a message (of the yellow sort) be feasible?
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by omar on Jan 6th, 2011, 12:24pm

on 01/06/11 at 05:58:53, DonEsteban wrote:
Thanks for the quick response, omar. The popup is helpful if a bit naggy and it still comes up everytime you open a plan window. I can certainly live with it, but would changing it to a message (of the yellow sort) be feasible?


It's going to be a little harder to intelligently show or not show the pop-up when the a new plan window opens. Putting it in the yellow window would cause the message to be displayed for a preset amount of time rather than letting the user close it after reading. But, I'll see what I can do.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by Nombril on Jan 6th, 2011, 1:23pm
Regarding the pop up:

Can there be a 'don't show this message again' check box, that goes into the user's settings?

I open 5-20 plan windows (1 at a time, not all at once!) when I'm doing a postmortum on my games, trying to figure out where I've gone wrong.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by megajester on Jan 6th, 2011, 2:55pm
By the way, when I click on the link in my email for a postal game, thus opening a new tab, could it possibly not resize my window?
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by rbarreira on Jan 6th, 2011, 5:13pm

on 01/06/11 at 14:55:08, megajester wrote:
By the way, when I click on the link in my email for a postal game, thus opening a new tab, could it possibly not resize my window?


Seconded, I also don't like it that my browser window often gets resized while using the Arimaa site (especially since it's unneeded, the pages work fine after getting maximized again). I think the planGame window does the same thing BTW.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by ginrunner on Jan 7th, 2011, 2:48am

on 01/04/11 at 11:21:55, Nombril wrote:
Actually, when I started playing, I was discouraged from playing HvH games by the gameroom Welcome message:  "Beginners, please start by playing the bots on the Bot Ladder and see how high you can climb."  For months I had the (wrong) impression that I should finish (or plateau on) the ladder before playing other people.

I do think it is worth beating at least a few bots to get the hang of the rules and interface.  After that it certainly is a good learning challenge, but it shouldn't be to the exclusion of playing HvH games.


Ya I had the wrong impression too. I beat the bot ladder before I was comfortable playing HvH games because I thought the bot ladder was kind of a warm up instead of something more. When I got into non postal HvH games I was surprised at how easy opponents at my rating were.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by rbarreira on Jan 9th, 2011, 1:51pm

on 01/06/11 at 17:13:42, rbarreira wrote:
Seconded, I also don't like it that my browser window often gets resized while using the Arimaa site (especially since it's unneeded, the pages work fine after getting maximized again). I think the planGame window does the same thing BTW.


I just found that there is an option in Firefox to disallow pages from resizing windows:

http://osxdaily.com/2007/04/11/disable-browser-window-resizing-in-firefox/
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by megajester on Jan 10th, 2011, 3:34am

on 01/09/11 at 13:51:31, rbarreira wrote:
I just found that there is an option in Firefox to disallow pages from resizing windows:

http://osxdaily.com/2007/04/11/disable-browser-window-resizing-in-firefox/

Thanks for the heads up Ricardo.

I still hope Omar changes the setting. I don't see why it's there in the first place, and in principle I don't think expecting people to change a global setting is a very reasonable solution.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by omar on Jan 11th, 2011, 9:31am

on 01/06/11 at 14:55:08, megajester wrote:
By the way, when I click on the link in my email for a postal game, thus opening a new tab, could it possibly not resize my window?


This was written before browsers had Tabs :-) It was intended to be opened in a new window and not in a tab. I noticed that Chrome ignores the resize request if it opens the window in a tab instead of a new window. I wish FireFox did this also. In FireFox you can still right click on the link and choose 'Open in new window' and that should fix it.

I also added a hook to not resize the window if 'auth' is set.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by omar on Jan 11th, 2011, 10:00am
Using a session cookie to prevent the plan window from displaying the expert mode help message.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by DonEsteban on Jan 11th, 2011, 5:09pm
Cool. Except that it's somehow not working for me right now. The popup tip still pops up every time a new plan window is opened :'(

I know tweaking this kind of stuff can be time consuming and tedious and it's not worth spending much time on these kind of things, but I thought I'd say this anyway just in case:
It is a bit confusing how different pages open the game viewer in different (at least three) ways:
- The game room page opens it in a new window (using some javascript vodoo) and resizes it. -- Fine for me but a bit unnecessary, a new tab would be just fine.
- The "Recent Games" page (among others) opens a new tab (for me, I guess it's a new window for others) and resizes it. -- The resizing part is a bit annoying, but it's necessary if opened as a new window.
- The email link -- well, I'm not sure what it does, because for the life of me I can't get Firefox to open links from thunderbird. But I guess it would also open a new tab. When I do this manually the window is now not resized, so the change is obviously working. Nice.

But: For other users, who open new windows instead of tabs the new policy to not resize it might be just as annoying as resizing it is for us now. The real problem seems to be that the new window is too small in the first place and thus needs to be resized. I'm not sure why. Maybe putting some kind of placeholder into the initial window that somehow forces it to the correct size would help?

BTW, the player details page is opened in a new window (javscript again), but then the "Recent Games" link opens a tab in the first window (for me). -- A bit confusing, but okay, I don't mind.

Let me point out again that all this is not a big thing and not worth wasting much of anyone's time on it that could better be spent playing the game. So feel free to just ignore me.
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by omar on Jan 11th, 2011, 8:50pm

on 01/11/11 at 17:09:10, DonEsteban wrote:
Cool. Except that it's somehow not working for me right now. The popup tip still pops up every time a new plan window is opened :'(


Your browser might still be using the cached version. Right click in the client window and select 'Reload'. Check that the version number in the top left is 0.7.22a
Title: Re: Client questions (and first impressions)
Post by DonEsteban on Jan 12th, 2011, 5:16am
Hm, it's working now without me changing anything. So... yeah, must have been a cash problem.


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