World of Card Games

There was a bug in the update to the Hearts ratings last week which caused the losing players to get more points deducted from their Elo ratings than they should have. My apologies, I know some of you take the ratings very seriously!

I've applied a fix to the problem this morning. Anyone who would like to get their Elo ratings set back to where they were last Wednesday need only write to me and ask (marya@worldofcardgames.com). To do this, just make sure that you send me the email from the address that you registered with, so I know it's you. I will do this for people up until the end of November.

[Edit on Nov 24 2015: Only a small number of requests to reset Elo ratings have come in. After receiving negative feedback on the way this was being done, I decided to just go ahead and do the work to perform a bulk update of Elo ratings. Anyone who played at a ranked table prior to Nov 17 has had their Elo rating reset to the value from Nov 11, before the bug was introduced. To be clear, this was only done if it led to an increase in their ratings - I did not reset values that were lower.]

I've written a page about how the Elo ratings are computed at World of Card Games, so you can always check for yourself to make sure you are getting the correct results.

I've also applied a fix for the "list of tables", which had a bug that caused the list to stop updating. Third times the charm? I hope so!

This morning, the server was updated to repair a bug in the "list of tables". It's supposed to update every few seconds, but had stopped. This is now fixed.

list of tables updates every few seconds

I've spent a little bit of time updating the bots in Pinochle, based on feedback. They'll still need more work, but overall should be a little bit better in playing their cards now.

This morning, the server was down for a brief time in order to apply some updates.

Registered players can now chat after their game has finished at World of Card Games! After the game finishes, you will now see three buttons: "Home", "Chat", and "Play ..." (see screenshot below).

Click Chat button to chat with the Registered players after your game

Clicking the "Home" button takes you back to the main home page, where you can decide what new game you want to play. Clicking the "Play ..." button takes you directly to a new game of the same type that you just finished (for example, Hearts or Spades).

Clicking the "Chat" button takes you to a "chat" table where only the registered players from the game you just finished are invited. This gives you time to discuss the game in as much detail as you like, should you care to do so. The "Chat" button goes away after 30 seconds, so be sure to use it as soon as possible if you are interested in a chat with your group of players. Caveat: No one is obliged to go to the chat table, so you may find that no one joins you there.

If any who played with you goes to the chat table after your game is finished, this chat table will show up in the list of tables. Here's a screenshot of how to recognize it:

"chat" table shows up in the list of tables

Another new feature is the ability to save your "hand history" in Spades. The hand history is already familiar to those who play Euchre. Registered players can download the history of their previous hand, and replay it in the browser to review all the cards played, one step at a time. In Euchre, this feature can be a nice tool to discuss strategy. It is also very useful to report bugs in the bots to me. I'm hoping Spades players will find it useful as well. Sometimes, people report problems with the bots, but it's too time-consuming for me to figure out just what happened. With this new feature, if the bots make a boneheaded mistake, you can grab the hand history and send it to me with a description of what went wrong. I will be more likely to fix a problem when I know exactly what happened, and can reproduce the issue.

To download the hand history, click the old-fashioned "floppy disk" icon that appears next to your avatar after a hand has finished. You can see what it looks like in the screenshot here.

Click the floppy disk icon to download the hand history in Spades

Hm, I can't believe I just called a floppy disk "old-fashioned"! :)

Another important change: at ranked tables, the Elo ratings now reward the first-place player only. Elo ratings in Hearts was discussed in the previous blog post. I did not receive a lot of feedback, one way or the other, about this... but most players appear to like the idea, so I've made the change. I will continue to keep track of any feedback on the issue. Please post to Facebook or Twitter or here on the blog if you have comments. (FYI: anonymous posts are not treated very seriously; anyone can post anonymously multiple times, so I don't consider them to be so useful.)

This morning, a change was made to Double Deck Pinochle at World of Card Games. I did this because I had enough feedback to think it was necessary.

According to Pagat's Double Deck Pinochle page, Pinochle "is won by the first partnership to achieve a score of 500 or more. If both sides reach 500 on the same hand, the bidding side wins." Some people call this the "bidder out" rule.

I've consulted with some Pinochle experts - by asking about it at Stack Exchange, Power Pinochle forums, and Board Game Geek - and they all tell me it is true: if both players reach 500 or more on the same hand, it is not the high score that decides who wins. Rather, the win is awarded to the bidding team.

This makes the game a little more intense towards the end if the scores are close enough. It might encourage each team to take a little more risk in winning the bid, in order to win that last hand and thus the game.

I had not implemented the game this way when I introduced it. However, it is now the default option. If you feel strongly enough, you can change your settings so that the high-scoring team always gets the win by unchecking your Pinoche "Bidder Out" option. I hope you like the change!

Bidder Out option for Double Deck Pinochle is now the default

Yesterday, special ranked tables were added to the Hearts card game. Ranked tables were intended to be exceptional in having strict rules: no robots allowed, and registered players only. Penalties were applied to those who left a game early.

Some players found that the "no robots allowed" policy was making it impossible to finish their games. After someone dropped out (deliberately or accidentally), they'd be stuck waiting for a long time before the game could continue. This was true even though human players are allowed to substitute at ranked tables... so such tables do show up in the "list of tables" (they don't show as ranked once a player leaves because you do not get ranked if you join such a table after it starts). Apparently, tables where "no robots" applies are especially unappealing to Hearts players.

People are not dropping out from ranked games very often, so that's good. Even so, when it happens, it leaves people waiting indefinitely for fear of losing in the rankings, which is no fun. To correct this, I've now changed the rule so that bots may replace a human who left the table. This is only permitted after the game starts. And in case it is not obvious, winning or losing to a bot does not count towards your ranking!

It is still necessary to get 4 humans together to start a ranked game... currently this involves a wait. It appears that most people prefer to start a game with bots. For those who want to play a Hearts game with humans from start to finish, ranked tables are the best way to go. I hope the wait time will lessen as more people discover rankings.

For those who are curious, a description of how "Elo ratings" are computed is given at the site.

Registered players can now "replay" a hand of Euchre at World of Card Games!

At the end of each hand, you will see the image of a floppy disk appear next to your avatar. It looks like this:

replay Euchre hand history

When you click on that icon, a file will be downloaded to your computer. The file contains a link to the replayer at World of Card Games. When you paste that link into your browser address bar, you will be taken to the Euchre replayer at World of Card Games. With the click of a button, you are taken through every step of the hand, with all the cards shown.

Here's a sample link so you can try it: a case where I got lucky and our opponents were "euchred".

I've made this change along with a few bug fixes today. I hope the Euchre players will enjoy this new feature!

A few weeks ago, I modified the Spades layout so that cards would be fanned more widely. I'd already done this for Hearts, at the request of a player who was having trouble playing cards using a stylus on a tablet.

After the change, several players wrote to tell me that they liked it better the previous way! Now you have a choice (in Hearts and Spades only): you can "Fan Cards Wider" or more compactly; it is up to you. The screenshots below demonstrate how to do this: Just uncheck "Fan Cards Wider" in the Settings panel. This panel appears when you click your user name in the upper right corner:

default card fanning

compact card fanning

In the screenshot, you see another new setting. You can now select which card games you want to see in the "list of tables". If you never play Go Fish, and don't want to see it in the list, just uncheck that box in the "List of tables" user setting.

I hope you enjoy these new features!

I applied some fixes and updates to the server this morning.

First, it is now possible to store up to 4 extra private table names. I've written a separate blog post about this.

Double Deck Pinochle was recently introduced at World of Card Games. Immediately, I got some reports of performance issues with the game when played on Internet Explorer! I believe I have fixed this. If you had trouble before, give it a try and let me know if you still have trouble.

I also got comments that the cards in DD Pinochle are usually sorted with the high cards to the right. I've changed the game accordingly. I hope it will not be too confusing to beginners who may have become accustomed to the old sort order!

Also for DD Pinochle: if you click the "Show Meld" button, you are now shown the total of your meld:

Show Meld view now displays total meld points

This should speed up the bidding process. Please remember that when clicking the "Show Meld" button, you are only shown melds in your hand that do not require a trump suit to be chosen. This means you will not see "royal marriages" or "runs". It would get confusing showing runs - what if you had a run in two different suits? It's the same for royal marriages.

I've made some elements of the "Meld View" larger. This is what you see once trump has been chosen. Here's an example:
Previously, all types of melds were listed to the left of the "mini-cards", even if you had none of those melds. Now, as you can see, meld types are shown only if you have them. For example, in the screenshot above, Guest #48 has 1 run, 1 clubs marriage, and 1 kings around. Aces around, etc., are not listed because she has none. Please let me know if you have any trouble with this new, larger format.

I've had a few players suggest that it would be nice if more than one private table name could be stored. For example, a player might have one private table name that they share with their family, and another with a group of friends. Wouldn't it be nice if they could see both private tables in the "list of tables"?

Now they can! Caveat: you must be registered for this feature to be available to you.

First, click the Options button to bring up your options settings, and click the  "(more)" link next to your primary private table name:

more link

This brings up a new small panel. You can enter up to 4 different private table names here:

Up to four extra private table names allowed

In the example above, a player has selected private table names 'my family' and 'my friends' for Double Deck Pinochle. If they click directly on the Double Deck Pinochle game panel from the home page, they will go directly to the 'my family' table - because this is their "primary" private table name. But if they click on the "list of tables" link in the lower left corner, they will see any private tables with those two names:

extra private tables show in list of tables

Double Deck Pinochle is now available at World of Card Games! It's a 4-player game that combines pattern-matching abilities (think Gin Rummy) with teamwork (think Spades). The rules are described at the Pagat website.

double deck pinochle

As usual, there's a tutorial to get you started (click on the "Tutorial" button to the lower right of the Double Deck Pinochle panel on the main page). You might also want to read my Double Deck Pinochle page for beginners.

If you have not played this game before, you may want to play with robots first, to get comfortable before playing with real live humans.

I've tested the game quite a lot, but there could be bugs. If you try the game and find any problems, please let me know by sending an email to me -  marya@worldofcardgames.com - or leave a comment here.

A number of players have requested that they be given the ability to completely block chats. Maybe they find them distracting, or just don't type fast enough to chat effectively. They just want to play cards, that's all.

That's fine with me, and I hope that they are not being given a hard time if they don't chat... it's everyone's right to remain silent, isn't it, after all?!

Now, these players can easily ignore chats by checking the "Hide All Chats" checkbox in their Settings area. You find your Settings by clicking on your user name in the upper right corner. The new checkbox is encircled in green in the screenshot below:

use "Hide All Chats" to block chats at World of Card Games

Other players tell me that there are one or two players whose chats annoy them. They'd prefer to avoid these players' chats. There's something for these players, too. There's now a little "volume" control beside each player other than yourself. If you want to block a single player's chats, click that volume control. It stops the player's chats from being shown.

If you want to undo this action, use the "Manage Chats" area shown under your Settings in the screenshot above.

use the "Hide Chats" icon to block an individual player's chats

Please keep in mind that just because you cannot see a player's chats does not mean that they are not chatting!

Kick Players

 

Finally, there's also a new feature that has been added specifically for players of the game Twenty-Nine [and other team games]. I've had a number of people tell me that they want to be able to kick players from a table. This is the internet and there are times when someone comes in who is extremely ill-behaved. Everyone at the table agrees that this is the case, and wants them out, but their only recourse is to dislike the player and leave. This is more painful in Twenty-Nine than in other games because Twenty-Nine is a very long-lived game. Imagine playing at a table for 1 hour, when a troll comes in and starts harassing you...

For these people, I've added back the "kick player" feature. If there are four human players at a table and three players have all disliked the same, single player, then that player is ejected.

If you wind up being ejected, you may very well know why. I expect that this may get used to eject slower players in addition to trolls. I'm sorry that this can happen, since I don't think slow players should be penalized. Personally, though, I'd rather not be sitting at a table where 3 other players don't like me. So I think it's fair enough to add this feature now.

The server was down for a short time early this morning to apply a few bug fixes: in particular, the game timer that had been added with the last update was buggy, and is now fixed. Also, in Firefox, some people noticed a player's name hanging around (literally, attached to their cursor) after they clicked into a game from the list of tables. This has been fixed.

Sorry for the disruption in service this morning! The site was down for about 10 minutes to apply some changes.

A bug has been fixed in 29. You may have noticed that sometimes a trick looked like it was going to the wrong player (it wasn't counted that way, it just looked like it). This bug is now fixed. A big thanks to Kaycie, who reported this - that was very helpful!

World of Card Games was down for a brief time this morning, while some updates were applied. My apologies for the interruption in your games.

There are now 7 new avatars! Enjoy!

The server at World of Card Games was down for a short period this morning, to apply some bug fixes and updates - sorry for the interruption in service!

There's a new category in your "stats" area: "absolute" wins and losses.

The rules for a game counting as an "absolute" win or loss are as follows:

1. There is only 1 winner per game.
2. If you leave a game before it ends, you forfeit that game, and it counts as a loss for you.
1. Exception: If you are seated at a table for less than 30 seconds, it will not be counted as a forfeit if you leave. This is done to be fair to someone who takes a losing seat directly at the end of a game.
3. Only human players are counted as winning or losing; if a bot wins or loses, it does not show up in the global statistics for absolute wins and losses.

new "absolute" statistics

This is in contrast to your "Games Played" number. That includes all games that you have been in, even if you left after 1 second! If you stay with the game until the end, that is counted in your "Games Finished" number. If you quit before the end, it is counted in your "Games Abandoned" number. So the absolute stats are  a little more lenient. They forgive you if you take a seat by accident, perhaps with a very poor losing position, and quickly leave.

These new statistics are being recorded for a couple of different reasons.

First - the original way that statistics were recorded at World of Card Games was confusing to many. These statistics are now shown as the "Relative Win Ratio". An example will explain the counting used: If you came in 1st place in Hearts, you were counted as winning against 3 other players. If you came in 2nd place, you were counted as winning against 2 other players and losing against 1 player. This counting method is relatively expressive - a person who comes in 2nd place a lot is probably a better player than someone who comes in 3rd place a lot, but if you count both placings as "losses" then you'll never see this distinction. However, most people expect a single winner for a game! This new statistic provides that clarity.

As an aside, the above counting method would not lead to confusion in team games like Spades, because there are exactly two winners and two losers (the winning and losing teams) in that type of game. It was really only a problem in Hearts, 3-5-8, and Go Fish.

Second - it has been proposed that some players are leaving a losing position  shortly before a game ends so as to avoid having a loss counted against them. With the new forfeit rule, there will be no encouragement to leave a game early. I am a little skeptical that this will help with the "quitting players" problem, but we shall see.

These new statistics are experimental, so don't get too attached to them yet. In the next few weeks or months, I may make modifications based upon feedback; in that case I'll probably wipe the new stats and start fresh. Stay tuned.

This morning, World of Card Games was down for a short time to apply some bug fixes and new features.

Exclude Games in Progress option

Here's a brief summary:

1. There is now an additional option to "Exclude Games in Progress". If you only want to be seated at tables where the game has not yet started, choose this Option (click the Options button to get to your game options). Keep in mind, it may take you a bit longer to get started in this case.
2. The List of Tables now shows how long a game has been in progress. If you really dislike being seated at a long-running table, this is a good feature to use!
3. A few people reported to me that when joining a game in progress, sometimes their cards did not appear in front of them. This bug is now fixed. Please let me know if you see this happen again; it should not! A big thank you goes out especially to "no bots plz" and "davidly" - the two players who gave me enough information to reproduce this bug, so that I could squash it!
4. There is now an audio alert when a game that was paused is restarted.
5. You may use the "replace robots" link after a game has started, now. Previously it could only be used at the start of a game.
6. The "Seventh Card" option has been added to Twenty-Nine. I've written about that in a separate blog post.

A number of players have written asking that some variations of the game "Twenty-Nine" (29) be allowed at World of Card Games. One popular request is the "Seventh Card" option. Today, this option is available, and it is turned on by default. (If you absolutely don't want to play with this option, you will have to edit your Options, and set "Allow Seventh Card" to "No").

Choosing the 7th card to decide the trump suit

The Seventh Card option gives you a new choice for choosing the trump suit. If you choose this option, the trump suit is taken from the 7th card that is dealt to you. The 7th card is placed to one side of your hand. It is not allowed to be used until you cannot follow suit (i.e., you cannot lead with this card). When you do play it, the trump suit is declared.

The 7th card is 8 of Clubs; the trump suit is Clubs

Trump is usually declared when a player cannot follow suit. However, if the high bidder chose the 7th card, then they do not have to declare trump when they are unable to follow suit. They also do not have to play their 7th card. Instead, they can discard an off-suit card, if it appears strategically wise to do so. This keeps the trump suit secret for longer than is usual in 29.

I hope you enjoy this new option! Please let me know if you see any bugs related to it. I'll be adding options for other variations when I have more time.

World of Card Games was down for a few minutes this morning. Sorry for the interruption everyone! It's back up now.

photo credit: "358" by Graham Richardson cc license

World of Card Games has a new game! It's called "Sergeant Major" or "3-5-8". It's a 3-player game. So there are no teams: every man for himself, so to speak. Every player is given a target number of tricks that they have to take. If you fail to hit your target, you will be at a disadvantage, because you'll have to trade away your high cards to other players. So take as many tricks as you can!

The game is fairly straightforward. Any rules that need to be followed are applied by the site, and you get instructions about what to do next. So don't be afraid to try this new game. You can try out the tutorial and then play some games with bots to get the hang of it before challenging people.

In other news, the server had a little bit of indigestion this afternoon, so I restarted it. I took advantage of this little hiccup to deploy the new game. I'm very sorry for the disruption in games! Please let me know if you have any trouble with the site now.

The server was out for about 5 minutes this morning, so that some bug fixes could be applied. Sorry for the disruption in games!

I've attempted a fix for the blank screen bug. I was not able to reproduce it reliably, but I could find one case where it rarely happened, and I've fixed that. Please let me know if you see it again!

I've also received reports that the table listings are sometimes incorrect - empty, when they should not be. This appears to have been caused by the "blank screen bug" as well, so it should be corrected now. (Keep in mind that an empty table listing can sometimes occur - it just indicates that there are no tables with seats open at the moment.)

There are a couple of other bug fixes that you can read about in the changelog at the site (under "about" > "show change history").

I'll take this opportunity to let everyone know that there will be a longer outage on December 13, from about 10 pm - 2 am. The company that hosts my server is moving the server to a new data center. Sorry but there's not much I can do about this! I'll post another blog the day beforehand to remind you.