With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

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1180 days, 13 hours, 11 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging, the Planets Nu Matchmaking Pool is now open to the public.

The Matchmaking Pool accepts player applications for a game type (currently only Classic) using one (or two) race choices. As the pool grows in size, it matches up random players against each other and creates games. With this project, pre-game alliances are much less likely to occur, as players do not know whom they will be matched with.

Learn more here: http://cssolexp.mygamesonline.org/scripts/nupool/

If you have any questions about the newly released project, feel free to ask.

1180 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Interesting project... will check it out

1180 days, 5 hours, 37 minutes ago

captain storm

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

So how we send the confirmation code to the host?

1180 days, 4 hours, 4 minutes ago

nebulon

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Looks good, how many signups needed to start? - the first 11 could all be mates?

1180 days, 3 hours, 17 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

@Captain+Storm: I believe the service includes a direct link to my profile on "planets.nu". If you are currently logged in using play or test, you will need to make an adjustment.

@Nebulon: Your concern is understandable.

Right now, the minimum number of players is currently set to 11 without Flexible Matchmaking, and 8 with Flexible Matchmaking. Either way, the races need to be different, although whose to stop a "team" from coordinating their races, or from queuing all as Random.

1178 days, 17 hours, 9 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Made a small style tweak to the project. Non-button styled links should be a little easier to distinguish from text.

1178 days, 16 hours, 20 minutes ago

viral darkness

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

I tried to join queue but received this message while submitting

Fatal error: Cannot use isset() on the result of an expression (you can use "null !== expression" instead) in /srv/disk11/1158903/www/cssolexp.mygamesonline.org/scripts/nupool/joinDone.php on line 48

1178 days, 16 hours, 0 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Thanks for pointing that out. I learned that I was not using sanitation functions in the correct location, thus causing the fatal error.

1178 days, 15 hours, 50 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

...suddenly, I have absolutely no desire to read the posts that came before that last one.

No; don't clarify. I'm fine.

1178 days, 14 hours, 13 minutes ago

talespin

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Is this a dating tool for Planets? :D

1178 days, 14 hours, 4 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Good try, Talespin.

While this does match up random players with each other, it is with the intent of creating matches comprising of random players.

1178 days, 12 hours, 58 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Can I also join passively? I'd like to support the effort, but I have no desire to join an extra game right now.

1178 days, 12 hours, 25 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Good idea, Dazdya. I will work in a function to reserve an account without joining the pool.

In the mean time, players can remove themselves from the pool before being selected without penalty.

1178 days, 11 hours, 12 minutes ago

nebulon

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

What about if you can't get first choice then random could be offered as an option? That's what I was thinking about.

1178 days, 10 hours, 41 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

I have no idea how well that would work out with the code already in place.

In any case, if you do not get picked for a game for whatever reason (it is random), you will simply stay queued for a future game.

1175 days, 1 hours, 6 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Bump: Quite hard to attract new applications when visibility is limited

1168 days, 22 hours, 15 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Bump: I wonder if I should unlock the 'Standard' game type anyway despite the very limited following...

1167 days, 7 hours, 39 minutes ago

psylent knight

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

I'm shocked that so few people have signed up for this so far. I thought lots of people talked about or agreed with how it would be nice to match up players randomly. Is there something holding people back from registering? Although I'd prefer Standard instead of Classic, I registered anyway just to help get the ball rolling. You can register without actually entering the queue to join a game.

Challenge Spaceyard put a lot of effort into setting this up based on perceived demand. You may not want to join a game now, but consider at least registering so he sees the potential interest out there. And if you have any suggestions, please let him know. Thanks!

Regards,
Psylent Knight

1167 days, 7 hours, 4 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

I would join, but all my slots are busy ... and as far as I checked the rules a game can start instantly.

So I will join for sure ... when one of my slots gets free.

1167 days, 6 hours, 50 minutes ago

emork the lizard king

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Hi CSY, great project! After my current games and the then desperatly needed Planets sabbatical I'll surely join. Might take a year, though.

1167 days, 6 hours, 18 minutes ago

psylent knight

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

If you don't want to join the queue for a game, click "Register account" instead of "Join queue". That will let you create an account only without joining a game. That's what I did. If we can get more people to at least register, then this would let CSY see that people support the project. Thanks!

1167 days, 5 hours, 47 minutes ago

emork the lizard king

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Bug when trying to register:

Submission feedback

Error: [2] include(../handleForm.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /srv/disk11/1158903/www/cssolexp.mygamesonline.org/addons/nuPool/registerDone.php at line 33

1167 days, 5 hours, 44 minutes ago

psylent knight

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Emork, thanks for attempting to register. I guess we'll need to wait for CSY to look into it. Which browser were you using? He might need to know that.

1167 days, 5 hours, 41 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

I tried it with FF 42 and Chrome 51.

Identitcal error message

1167 days, 5 hours, 37 minutes ago

psylent knight

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Frostriese, thanks. I had registered successfully with Chrome last week, but maybe he's made some changes since then.

1167 days, 1 hours, 3 minutes ago

quasimodoh!

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Same error for me on FF

Error: [2] include(../handleForm.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /srv/disk11/1158903/www/cssolexp.mygamesonline.org/addons/nuPool/joinDone.php at line 33

1166 days, 23 hours, 55 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Blast it! I broke something when I relocated the files. Can you folks try again?

I have decided to unlock the Standard Remix game type as well, and have renamed the Classic game type to accommodate the intentional differences.

1166 days, 23 hours, 21 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

It works with FF again!

Send my Registration code by PM.

1166 days, 23 hours, 6 minutes ago

quasimodoh!

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

All works with FF for me and I've joined a queue

Thanks!

Q

1165 days, 9 hours, 46 minutes ago

psylent knight

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

@Challengespaceyard, thanks for adding the Standard game type. I see you're also working on other changes. The login is a good idea. Keep up the good work!

Regards,
Psylent Knight

1164 days, 19 hours, 46 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Supporting this good idea by registering an account for now - could join the queue itself later in the season... also, please consider Campaign as a game type to complete the offering and satisfy most game needs.

1164 days, 19 hours, 33 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Thank you, @Ecatoncheries. Activation successful.

I intend to unlock Campaign [Remix] as the project grows, as it will be a moderately restricted-entry game type. As in, you will need to be at least a Silver-leveled player before you can even queue for this game type.

1161 days, 17 hours, 59 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Even when facing turbulence, this project is still receiving new enhancements.

I would like to point out that the database currently has two inactive Matchmaking accounts at this time.

1161 days, 16 hours, 12 minutes ago

psylent knight

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

@Challengespaceyard, you may want to display the number of players in the queue for each game type on the main page. Possibly in that box for the list of new games. I can see the numbers when filling out the form to join a queue, but it would be nice to see them more prominently.

1161 days, 14 hours, 30 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

I believe that is a good idea, @Psylent+Knight.

I even considered doing a detailed "breakdown by race", complete with intentional mistakes to keep the suspense going.

1161 days, 13 hours, 47 minutes ago

psylent knight

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

@Challengespaceyard, looks good! Now I can more easily check if a game is coming up soon. Thanks.

1161 days, 13 hours, 1 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Glad to hear. In the mean time, I welcome three new registrations today.

Welcome aboard, Erku, Tomprime, and Qinic.

1161 days, 4 hours, 53 minutes ago

nanning

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Registered - now I first have to finish my current game set.

1160 days, 18 hours, 5 minutes ago

erku

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Looking forward to some interesting games. But like Nanning I first need to end my current game set.

1160 days, 17 hours, 39 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

It is very fair to wait until your situation eases up. Better to take it easy than risk getting a suspension lasting up to 6 weeks.

1158 days, 11 hours, 16 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

I still have two inactive accounts I never received an activation code to bind them. One of those two inactive players is also queued, and I would rather not remove the inactive player from the queue if I can help it.

I fixed a fatal error in the queuing process while I was at it. Not entirely sure how that got missed...

1152 days, 13 hours, 32 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Matchmaking Pool has gained the "Intelligence Center". Now, it is possible to estimate queue counts by race.

Watch out, as the Intelligence Center has some intentional weaknesses to prevent it from being completely trustworthy. The counts by race could vary from day to day even with no player activity.

1151 days, 14 hours, 27 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Tried to check it out just now and only get this error:

Error: [2] mysqli::__construct(): (HY000/1040): Too many connections in /srv/disk11/1158903/www/cssolexp.mygamesonline.org/authDb.php at line 3

1151 days, 13 hours, 4 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Regrettably, such is a disadvantage of the service being hosted on a
free shared web server.

I was able to get what little of the service back up, but database connectivity problems are still occurring, so available actions are very minimal until connectivity is restored. As long as I keep the webspace at its current package, we can only wait out this problem.

1147 days, 11 hours, 9 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Seriously? At least three days in a row the webspace acts up!

Very hard to promote the Matchmaking service if this keeps up.

1141 days, 13 hours, 51 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

In response to the release of the Horwasp Plague, I have opened a survey asking for input regarding the availability of the new race in the Standard Remix game type.

Hopefully, the PHP server will be more cooperative this time around.

1138 days, 22 hours, 13 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Not getting many votes yet. I may wish to increase the visibility of the survey.

Here is a direct link: http://cssolexp.mygamesonline.org/addons/nuPool/survey.php

1137 days, 0 hours, 2 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

My webspace endured a major outage in the database server(s), which pretty much broke the Matchmaking Pool's functionality.

Thus, I have extended the deadline of the survey a few days to counter this outage.

1135 days, 3 hours, 25 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Are these games hosted on Nu so they join my list of games?

1135 days, 2 hours, 15 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Yes, they will be hosted as public games on Nu.

1134 days, 9 hours, 34 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Just fixed a bug in the join form. The Flexible Matchmaking flag was not being recorded when a player joined the queue.

Since I have no record of who wanted to queue as a Flexible player, it is safest to assume that none of you were opted to be Flexible in the first place. If this is not correct, you can simply update your entry in the queue.

1130 days, 23 hours, 22 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

In addition to a handful of votes recorded so far, I have seen a few interesting comments left behind as well.

1125 days, 23 hours, 33 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Votes seemed to have slowed down quite a bit. At least the survey still has a little more than a week left before it expires.

1120 days, 20 hours, 45 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Bump: Results seem to be mixed. Queue sizes have also been stagnant lately.

1113 days, 1 hours, 23 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

A returning player's beef with the tenacity system reminds me of earlier designs before I made this project public.

I actually considered imposing 80-90% tenacity requirements throughout the time someone was queued. I decided against it as a whole, believing the suspension system should suffice.

That being said, because player compositions will be random, I still cannot guarantee that a game will match a specific difficulty level.

1098 days, 23 hours, 32 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Overdue bump: I have been fairly busy polishing the project. A lot of the polish was behind the scenes.

1091 days, 23 hours, 36 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Bump: Been debating on whether I should poke players that STILL are unaware of a major security issue I discovered on June 20.

I would rather ditch support for the insecure algorithm sooner rather than later.

1082 days, 19 hours, 10 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Bump: Been wondering if there is anything I can come up with that could give an extra incentive to play without knowing who your opponents will be in advance...

In the mean time, I have done more back-end work. Inactive users can now enter the queues once more, now that additional effort has been put into their handling. Hopefully I did not break something in the process...

1082 days, 18 hours, 43 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

This is a pretty cool idea.

1072 days, 21 hours, 56 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Bump: Still seeking new blood. Who likes to play "surprise games"?

In the mean time, I am starting to feel sorry for those ill-fated players who registered before I noticed something seemed amiss with the old hash system on June 20.

I have a transition system in place, and a few players have updated themselves this way. Still, I need to deactivate the old system soon. The cutoff date is September 30, which is less than 2 weeks away.

I have considering making the list of names (7 remain) public, but I am not entirely certain if I should do that. I definitely will not describe the weakness while it is still open.

1066 days, 11 hours, 9 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Update: This faulty PM system is making me wonder if the Matchmaking Pool is even viable with the current situation. Two registrations came in last week, and I received activation codes from neither of them.

With dependence on multiple faulty systems, this does not bode well for the young project. Still, I will keep it going for as long as I can.

1051 days, 20 hours, 25 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Bump: Seeking new players willing to queue and (eventually) play without knowing who their opponents will be, minimizing the possibility of pre-game alliances.

Meanwhile, I have left some terrible news on its front page. In short, six (6) older Matchmaking accounts were disabled as a consequence of ending the password transition. I hope to restore as many of those disabled as possible, but this will not be easy.

I look forward to to seeing the project grow, despite the situation it is in.

1049 days, 19 hours, 55 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Is this what was requested in https://planets.uservoice.com/forums/136520-general/suggestions/6762305-use-request-game-pools-rather-than-direct-game-sig#comments

1049 days, 18 hours, 57 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Yes, this project was pretty much started in response to the Uservoice request. The subsequent complaints I continue to see about pre-game alliances in non-team games do not help.

The Space Empires community I visit from time to time also considers them a "gamey tactic", so that has also played an influence as well.

1041 days, 8 hours, 8 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Update: Rumor has it that something is brewing within the Matchmaking Pool. Probably a risky gambit, but who knows...

1033 days, 18 hours, 22 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Update: As much as I wanted to keep the name of the new game type hidden, it appears that I can not do that and allow testing to take place at the same time.

The weekly Blitz Challenge is now ready for public testing. I look forward to see how this pans out.

1020 days, 21 hours, 39 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Bump: I wonder how balanced some of the matchups are in blitz games. The topic of the week deals with a war between the Evil Empire and the Rebel Confederation.

1020 days, 21 hours, 19 minutes ago

emork the lizard king

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Blitz answer: EE loses 100% against Rebels

1020 days, 20 hours, 39 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

With the Rebel tactics having evolved significantly, I would not be surprised if this topic ended up being one-sided.

Because such one-sided games conflict with the goals I have in mind, I will definitely be phasing this topic out of the rotation. Right now, I am leaning on doing so after Saturday ends.

1007 days, 11 hours, 0 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Bump: I am beginning to wonder if the weekly system is even viable with the current counts.

This week's topic is probably the least interesting of the bunch. You just pick a race, and you be matched with an opponent, without knowing who your opponent's race will be until you are selected. Closest thing to a restriction is that "Random" will roll neither Cyborg nor Horwasp.

998 days, 20 hours, 28 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Update: Time flies fast, especially while I am worried about players caught in the password weakness that was closed on October 1, 2016! I figured I would make it easier to identify players who could not escape the weakness before the first transition ended.

Still, I can not allow disabled players to remain queued indefinitely. If the passwords are not reset before year's end, I will perform house keeping, resulting in decreased queue sizes.

973 days, 9 hours, 35 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Bump: Considering how long it has been since the project first opened, now might be a good time for players who have queued for this project in the past to verify that they still want to be queued for those games. Players do this by viewing their profile after logging in.

This will likely be a final reminder for disabled players to coordinate a password reset. Once the year ends, house keeping will almost certainly result in decreased queue sizes.

970 days, 12 hours, 33 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Just bumping for CSY:

"Considering how long it has been since the project first opened, now might be a good time for players who have queued for this project in the past to verify that they still want to be queued for those games. Players do this by viewing their profile after logging in.

This will likely be a final reminder for disabled players to coordinate a password reset. Once the year ends, house keeping will almost certainly result in decreased queue sizes."

967 days, 12 hours, 2 minutes ago

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Just bumping for CSY:

"Considering how long it has been since the project first opened, now might be a good time for players who have queued for this project in the past to verify that they still want to be queued for those games. Players do this by viewing their profile after logging in.

This will likely be a final reminder for disabled players to coordinate a password reset. Once the year ends, house keeping will almost certainly result in decreased queue sizes."

966 days, 13 hours, 2 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Update: As was posted on the Project News, disabled players are no longer in the queues. I am considering another change which will serve to counter balance this facet.

Hopefully the decrease in players (2 for each game type) will not scare away new entries for the queues.

947 days, 20 hours, 43 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Small update: I made a small adjustment to the minimum queue sizes needed to start. The size starts at 20, but decreases as time passes by without a successful match. Currently, the rate of decrease is at 1 per month, to a minimum of 8 players.

I have also sneaked in a new mutation for the Weekly Blitz Challenge. It has not yet appeared, but we will let you know when it goes live.

942 days, 20 hours, 53 minutes ago

william marshall

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

How do I reset my password on the matchmaking site?!

942 days, 20 hours, 23 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Regrettably, the best I can do within the limitations that are in place is a semi-automated mechanism.

I have sent (via PM) a new password you can use to log into the Matchmaking Pool.

935 days, 22 hours, 44 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Update: New month, new improvements. These improves are noted in the site news due to the large variety of the changes.

908 days, 11 hours, 26 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Small update: Not much changed this month. Nonethless, Blitz Challenges now disallows the most recent four mutation topics when rolling a new topic for a given week.

I am wondering if I should create a mutation reference sheet...

856 days, 22 hours, 16 minutes ago

challengespaceyard

RE: With roughly five (5) months of preparation and debugging,...

Whelps... I have posted a rather grim update. Regrettably, I have multiple issues that hold back this project.

These issues have all been pointed out on the website itself, making me wonder if this project is even viable in the first place.

Depending on the feedback I receive when we reach the end of May 2017, I can unlock Co-op vs. AI, or just close the project altogether and clear the queues.