How are the boards generated?

[hazelwood]

I noticed that I have played the same board more than once. Therefore, I thougth that now would be the time to ask how this game really works.

1) Are there a finite number of boards? How often should we encounter a board we have already played?

2) Am I playing the board solo or am I playing the same board with other people at the same time?

3) Occasionally I will complete a board and get a zero score and a message
"Error: This game has already been completed and scores tallied. Would you like to play another?" What does this mean?

Otherwise, I think I understand what the deal is. If anybody could answer these questions, I would be in your debt.

- Hazelwood

[admin]

1) Are there a finite number of boards? How often should we encounter a board we have already played?

There are currently upwards of 15,000 boards in rotation. This number varies because we "retire" boards where players have uncovered 98% of all playable words, while on the other hand we're constantly creating new boards at varying rates depending on need (sometimes dozens a day, sometimes hundreds). Ideally, you should rarely, if ever, encounter a duplicate board. But yes, it can happen, particularly if you play a lot. There used to be a log enabled to prevent a player from being served duplicate games, but this feature ate up a lot of resources and was canned during the last rebuild. If the need is there I'll look to re-engineering this in a future build.

2) Am I playing the board solo or am I playing the same board with other people at the same time?

Currently, everyone plays on their own, solo. You're playing boards which other people have played at various times, and playing against their previous high scores, best words, etc.

In the future we may put out a real-time challenge where players will be able to compete against each other on the same board, at the same time, but with server resources currently close to being tapped this will have to wait until we've got a bit more oomph in our equipment.

3) Occasionally I will complete a board and get a zero score and a message
"Error: This game has already been completed and scores tallied. Would you like to play another?" What does this mean?

This can happen if a player uses the back button or refreshes their screen accidentally, or sometimes a browser (notably Firefox) will choke on a half-loaded page, then refresh it on its own accord. Its an issue I'm working to prevent, but hopefully now it happens only on very rare occasions. The "good news" is that your real scores aren't lost, they're tallied to the system. You just can't see the final tally results page when this happens.

[hazelwood]

Thanks Admin!

I want to commend you and your team for creating a great site. As I am sure you are aware of the catastrophe at Atari, I am one of the dispossessed that have strained the resources for this site. Just wanted to let you know that you have helped me find my online friends again and provided us another venue for competing with eachother. I am humble enough not to make any demands for change of your good work. But I offer my opinion and suggestions if ever you need them. We from the Atari community can give you great insight into what was magical about our time there and directions you can take Boggled.org to enrich the experience.

Feel free to call on me at any time and thanks again for providing us with refuge.

- Paul

[elif]

i've just started playing on this site, have played about 150 games so far.... and have already noticed TWICE playing a duplicate game board..... so in other words, I think the rotation scheme isn't working quite right. And these are just the times I noticed, because the same game board came up again just one or two boards later... it's probably happened more than that.

[admin]

Hi elif -

Right now there's no code in place to prevent folks from playing duplicate games - there are over 15,000 game boards in the system, with new ones being added every day, so duplicate plays should be at a relative minimum. I'm hoping your two duplicate games were just a stroke of bad luck, but if it turns out you're playing way more duplicates than a random sampling should allow, please let me know.

If it becomes an issue I will be happy to implement some duplicate-prevention measures. We had them originally but the server load was too great and I had to remove it.

[elif]

Hi, I've gotten SEVERAL more duplicate boards... I was wondering if maybe they were "ALMOST" duplicates with just one letter different or something... until I started gettting boards where the registered high score was my own! That has now happened at least 3 times.
So I don't think the board generation is random! I shouldn't get a duplicate board so often.

[bionicflutist]

I sometimes get duplicate boards too, but I kind of like it because then I can try to beat my previous score. :cool:

[one4love4truth]

Hi, I've gotten SEVERAL more duplicate boards... I was wondering if maybe they were "ALMOST" duplicates with just one letter different or something... until I started gettting boards where the registered high score was my own! That has now happened at least 3 times.
So I don't think the board generation is random! I shouldn't get a duplicate board so often.

I've found some of the same boards with my own high score also.

However, I do feel like I'm getting a lot of duplicate boards. I just got the same board within about 10 games of each other. Maybe I'm just playing too much! :p

[elif]

yeah i suppose it's a sign of playing too much. i just take the duplicate games in stride now... seldom do i better my originl score though! [i would guess that for every 100 games I play, about 5 to 10 are duplicates, which seems a pretty high ratio]

[Glebson]

elif: You know, sometimes it looks like it is the same board again, but still it isn't, just the changes might be not so visible at once :)
Statistically, you can't have 5 duplicate games out of 100. Impossible :)

[Glebson]

Besides, isn't it a challenge to have one more go at the same board, having already seen the words that you missed? It's quite challenging to see how many you can get having already played the board, in my humble opinion.
It also increases your personal stats, by the way :cool:

[NoahWebster]

Statistically, you can't have 5 duplicate games out of 100. Impossible :)

If you play the same game five times, then play 95 different games, how many duplicate games out of 100 do you have?