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hi all, the game went down for a bit, but it is back up. I found a bug in the code that might have caused the issue and that should be fixed now. So hopefully we'll have fewer of these sudden crashes.

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I've gotten some requests recently for information about how the rating system works. Here is a quick overview:

A user's rating is meant to represent and distill a user's skill level into a single number. In fact, your current rating tells the game what your "expected" score is in each round you play. And if you don't match up to your expected score, your rating will go down. If you surpass your expected score, your rating will go up. It's as simple as that.

Let us say there are three people playing in a room. After a game, but before recalculating their ratings, they have the following ratings and scores:

Name	Score	Rating
Adam	40	1100
Alex	90	1600
Jenny	70	1300

Based on each of these players' scores and ratings, each player gets an "expected" score. This is the score that they need to get in order to have their ratings stay the same. Expected scores are calculated by dividing the sum of scores (40+90+70=200) by the sum of ratings (1100+1600+1300=4000). The resulting quotient, .05, is multiplied by each person's current rating (i.e. 1100 x .05) to get their expected score. Here's a table...

Name	Expected Score	Score
Adam	55	40
Alex	80	90
Jenny	65	70

You can see here that both Alex and Jenny did better than expected, but poor Adam did worse. Therefore, we know that both Alex's and Jenny's ratings will go up, but Adam's will go down. But, how much?

Here is where things get a bit tricky. There is no one perfect way of determining how much their ratings change, because the amount of change is mostly arbitrary. It is simply a matter of making up some rules for what the maximum amount of change per game will be, and how much over or under the expected score the player has to be in order to get that maximum. In our case, I've decided that the maximum change in points one can get per game is 16 (the current number), and in order to get +/- 16 points per game you either have to get a score that is 75% greater than expected or 75% worse than expected. For example, Jenny's expected score is 65 points. But if she get's 75% greater than that (or 1.75 x 65), which is 114, then her rating will improve by 16 points. However, if she get's 75% worse than expected (or .25 x 65), which is 16, then her rating will decrease by 16 points. Anywhere from 25% of the expected score to 175% the expected score will bring a range of -16 to +16 points. If you fall outside of that range, your rating will be limited to the maximum change (+/- 16). Also, there is a mimimum allowable rating of 100 and a maximum of 9999, so players will never exceed those amounts.

Let's look at how the players' ratings changed:

Name	Expected Score	Score	Old Rating	New Rating
Adam	55	40	1100	1096
Alex	80	90	1600	1602
Jenny	65	70	1300	1301

I hope this shines some light on the ratings system. If you have any questions, shoot me an email and I'll do my best to answer.

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Hi all, I'm sorry for the downtime. The game should be back up again now.

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Hi all, I was recently made aware of some timer issues in some of the rooms and some people getting kicked out of rooms, so I've restarted the game server and that should sort the issues out.

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hi all, I made a small update today that should fix one of our more long-standing bugs, which is that people will not get the word chart at the end of the game, or they only get it sometimes. Let me know if you are still not seeing the word chart after games. FYI, you may need to do a refresh in the lobby and/or in the game in order to connect to the game or lobby.

One other small change is that now, instead of having two 5x5x4 rooms, I've changed one of the rooms to be a 5x5x5, meaning there the board is 5x5 and the minimum word length is five letters as opposed to four.

Here is a quick update on where things are with premium memberships. I'm the kind of guy that generally will come up with an idea and then immediately rush in and try to implement it, and that almost happened with the premium memberships idea. However, I realize that going forward with premium memberships is a big deal and affects more than just myself. So I've decided that what I'm going to do is continue to think about it and maybe spend some time making donating more streamlined and more visible instead. I'm not saying the idea is dead, but it is on hold for now. I appreciate everyone's encouragement and the ideas they provided regarding this issue.

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Before I make any decisions about premium memberships and all that, I decided I needed to make Serpentine run better for people. The game should be less laggy, the words chart should show up every time, and mousing should work better. So today and yesterday I rewrote parts of the server and the game to be more efficient, hopefully fixing some of the lag issues and the word chart issue. Please leave your feedback in the comments section and let me know if you notice any difference, good or bad.

FYI, you may need to refresh your browser in the lobby and in the game. Otherwise, the game will not work.

Update: We ran into some unintended snags and I had to revert the changes back, so the word chart is back to being buggy.

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I hope everyone has settled down after this week's flurry of activity. It has been an interesting week and I've enjoyed spending time on the project. I worked on overtime almost constantly last year, and as such, I didn't have much energy for fun projects like Serpentine. But I have taken a break from work for a few months and would like to invest some time into making Cobra Dragon Games better.

One idea that I have been kicking around for a while is the possiblity of creating premium memberships, where a user would decide to pay a small monthly fee and get additional features and privileges that normal users wouldn't have access to. I want to make clear that I'll never require users to pay to play Serpentine. This change would only layer on additional features that are not a core part of the game. Some things that only premium users could do are:

* Create your own room with your own rules
* Initiate voting to kick a person out of a room
* Instant message other users in your own private window
* See detailed statistics and information from your games
* Access a premium-users only room in the forum
* Ignore selected players in the chat window
* Get an icon next to their name in the players listing

There is definitely room for that list to grow and to become more enticing, it really depends on your reaction and feedback. And it is possible some of those features will be available for normal users as well. However, before I start working on any of this I want to see what you guys think. Would you be willing to pay a small amount per month (around $5 I'm thinking) for extra features? If so, aside from the list above, what are some key features you'd like to see? Please let me know your thoughts in the discussion section.

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I apologize for jerking everyone around the past couple days with regards to the rating system changes. I assure you, while I do want to please people and have them be happy with the game, I also want to be fair to everyone. And unfortunately, the bonuses were not really fair in the long run.

To try to keep you from coming to my house with torches and pitchforks, I've made a couple changes which I think people will enjoy.

• I fixed the chat window scrolling issue. If you have scrolled up, it won't force you down again
• During the game, it now predicts how your rating will change. And if you are behind, it tells you how many points you need in order to break even
• I tweaked the interface in to use the space more efficiently

Again, I'm sorry for messing around. As they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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I overlooked an obvious loophole in the bonus-giving, which is, if a user plays on their own in a room they will get a winner bonus every time. The way I've fixed this is that there now needs to be at least five people in a room for anyone to get a bonus (including the lower rated players).

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I'd like to try an experiment with the ratings system to see if we can make it a little bit more exciting. As it is now, I believe the system does a pretty good job of nailing down how good you are relative to the other players. For example, if you have an 1100 rating and someone else has an 800 rating, then you will consistently beat them by 30-40%. And from what I have seen playing this game, this seems to bear out in practice. However, I'd like to see if we can mix things up a bit and make our ratings more fluid and volatile.

With that said, here are the new rules:

• Winning players get a two point rating bonus
• Players under 800 rating get a three point rating bonus
• Players between 800 and 999 get a two point rating bonus
• Players between 1000 and 1199 get a one point rating bonus

In addition to this, I've added a new element to the player's listing that shows how much your rating changes each game.

I'm hoping not to get tarred and feathered for this, so if people hate it I will definitely consider reverting back to the old system.

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