[Edit by Eugene:
In a nearby thread Vsotvep noted that there is Play Mode. I thought “Ah, maybe we should publicise this” and moved it to this thread. Actually, I should have left it there and started a new thread, but … done is done, lesson learned… guess what… read on…]
My god, there’s a Play Mode?!
That’s amazing!
I found a bug immediately: I wanted to play again after my first joseki, but when going back through the move tree, apparently the game itself does not reset (the page does not refresh its url).
I’m pressing the arrow keys. By pressing “Play” again, it doesn’t reset the game either, but gives the same position on the board. Refreshing the page does not give an empty board (and thus doesn’t reset the game).
Perhaps adding a “Play again” button would help too.
“Play Mode” is defnitely a prototype - needs some love as shinuito says.
Funnily enough, it’s been in the awkward places of “not good enough to draw attention, not getting feedback therefore not getting love, therefore not good enough to draw attention”
I had thought to make it compelling gamishly in the way that Joseki Farm is: at the moment it is very utilitarian and serious.
Somewhere in the code there is a comment that says “Make this a fun game” or similar
You’re not supposed to be able to go “back through the move tree” in Play mode!
That’s why the “back” arrow button is removed. I’ll go and turn off backarrow as well immediately
The idea of Play Mode is to see whether you can play through a sequence successfully from start to end - it keeps stats on how often you succeed for each Joseki. If you could go back and forwards in the tree this would be rendered meaningless.
Hey, just recently discoverd the play mode on the JE and I love the concept. But sometimes I don’t want to test my general knowledge, but just a specifc area. For example just this pincer here:
My first Intution was to click on Q15, but this does currently nothing.
So my suggestion would be to add a button which resets to the postion, where the user started the play mode.
This would imo increase the usefulness of the tool, not just as a general knowlegde tester, but a specific learning tool.
I think this could still be the case with such a button
Interesting - the ability for OJE to recognise symmetrical positions was added after Play mode, if I recall correctly … so I think this is in the category of “dang, yeah, it should do that”.
Not that anyone really is going to care, but … couldn’t I just specify the second to last position and play it over and over again, to “bump up my stats”?
If there was a leaderboard that everyone could see, maybe this would be a worry.
But I can imagine preferring functionality and legitimate use, over illegitimate use, when there’s no real consequence. As in there’s no leaderboard, no xp gain or coin rewards etc.
Or at least, part of the idea … if only I were a Designer and not a Developer I might have had a clue how to gamify it
I kinda feel more inclined to “figure out how to make Play mode more valuable in this way” than to tweak it as it is.
OTOH, if there are actual users, and they’d like a little feature … perhaps I’ll get inspired to do that.
(As ever, what would be doubly inspiring is if there’s a front end dev who wants to do it, and I provide back end support).
Edit: you prompted me to go look at stats. For the first year or so it looks like Play mode was roughly 5% of clicks. More recently it’s up to about 10%, which is actually a fair bit, so perhaps the rejuvenation of this thread is timely!
