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Last night my email account was victim to hijacking from people in Nigeria. They were able to send out an email to all my contacts posing as me saying that I was stuck in England and had just gotten mugged and needed money. I've taken back control of my account, but if you have received such an email, please disregard it and don't send any money. As far as I know, your email accounts should be safe. Sorry for the trouble.

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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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Will update soon...

Update:

I've made some small changes on the game server code that should help out with resource usage. While most users probably won't directly benefit from this change, it helps me out quite a bit. And anything that helps me also helps you ;)

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Hi all,

I hope there wasn't too much of an interruption in your gaming, but this afternoon I made a switch from the apache webserver to the much lighter lighttpd. The reason for the move is that the RAM resources on this server are somewhat constrained and lighttpd uses fewer than apache does. While you may not see much change in your user experience, it helps me out quite a bit as I now don't have to be nervous that the server is going to get overloaded.

Happy Gaming!

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I've been postponing the inevitable, but the sad fact is that I can't keep the Stats page up. The way the stats work now is not efficient enough and stores too much data for me to handle, so I'm giving it the axe for now. In the future I may try to add a simpler form of stats (like each person keeps their longest word, their average word length, etc) but it won't be as extensive as it has been up to this point.

This doesn't mean the game is over or no fun anymore, though. It is still going to play exactly the same and still be fun ;)

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