I made a chrome extension

[bwt1213]

Well, Spike, you're not the only one who accidentally clicks past the board they've been looking for. I do that often enough and always get angry with myself. As far as the Chrome extension is concerned, I see one downside -- if it works, it will tie up the good boards and players without the extension will find it harder to play them. Note: it WON'T stop everyone from having a chance at every board. It will just give those with the extension a better chance at certain boards, and therefore those without the extension will have a smaller chance. For that reason alone, if I were running the site (I certainly am not) I would want to outlaw the extension if I could. I can't see any way to do so, however. The site's best defense would be to greatly expand the pool of games available, which wouldn't be bad for players in general in any case.

[Spike1007]

Originally Posted by zolorbowl

I just wanted to see if I could build it.

All controversy aside, I do see why you tried this. Once, I decided to write a program to solve Sudoku puzzles. It's fairly basic (written in Fortran, no GUI or anything), and just used straightforward elimination of possibilities, applied row, column & 3x3 square-wise until it couldn't go any further. It couldn't deal with puzzles that required trial-and error or more advanced techniques like X-wing, but it worked pretty well. I never used it in practice anywhere. It was just a fun exercise.

[pdiddp]

I'm not sure that having an extension like this would be good for the game in general. As bwt1213 said, it would give players who chose to use it a certain advantage over the players that didn't, or didn't know the extension even existed.

And once a program like this came into general acceptance, what would stop a player with the know-how from creating an extension to, say, hunt down unplayed boards or some other criteria? It still wouldn't be cheating in the sense most people would think since the program(s) wouldn't find words, just the boards.

I guess that could be one of the genies, the game could slowly degenerate to the point where which side-program a player used would be as important as the players word-finding skills.

Still, not having to click through game after game is rather tempting!

[lalatan]

Originally Posted by Spike1007

I am sympathetic to RussDNails take, but from a purely selfish perspective, it's not really the time I spend clicking (which I assume would not really be that much more than the time the extension would take), it's the fact that, once I get into clicking mode, I'll watch myself (horrified) click past the board I was looking for. I'd love for something to stop me. I come up with tricks to slow myself down so that it registers before I click again. (It works sometimes.) Then again, I see this as part of the game.

Yesterday I clicked past 2 42 pt and 1 41 pt games. Happens at least once every session I play as thinkbig. Irritating of course but I've come to accept there will be such casualties. Once I start thinking about other things while clicking I know I become vulnerable to it.

[erakis17]

I play every board, because I like the variety and challenge. The idea of clicking through a zillion boards sounds really dull, but then I'm not competing for points/word trophy (or any, really). My gameplay barely intersects lalatan or Spike, so it hardly matters to me whether they click through boards manually or have an extension that does it. I'd say it's up to people competing in that style. And same for people competing in avg points/game.

I wouldn't go as far as RussDNails to say that the manual board selection process is part of the challenge of the game. I think that ship sailed with the ability to skip games at all, which allows you to exchange time-wasting clicks for improved stats. I'm leaning towards lalatan's comment that automating the process would at least increase the number of people effectively competing for those trophies, even if I wouldn't be one of them.

I guess the fact I don't compete for trophies is partly because, given the ability to skip boards, they all feel pretty artificial. Not that it doesn't still require tremendous skill to snag them!

[Spike1007]

Originally Posted by lalatan

Yesterday I clicked past 2 42 pt and 1 41 pt games. Happens at least once every session I play as thinkbig. Irritating of course but I've come to accept there will be such casualties. Once I start thinking about other things while clicking I know I become vulnerable to it.

I definitely feel your pain, having been there myself. I get the feeling that zolorbowl would have a lot more support for his extension if it would just stop you from clicking (under the right conditions) as opposed to doing the clicking for you.

[bwt1213]

I wrote my first compiler that way, just for fun. And I wrote a floating-point math package the same way.