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rawsonj / triviabot

A simple IRC trivia bot written in python using twisted.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Always give three clues #81

Closed za3k closed 3 years ago

za3k commented 3 years ago

The current system is to give one clue for short words, and 3 clues for long words. Please give MAX(3, N-1) clues for all words, and just make it easier. One common problem is years: "1---" is a very bad clue for "birth of albert einstein".

rawsonj commented 3 years ago

Well, that's not really the algorithm.

From trivia.py:

22 def give_clue(self): 23 ''' 24 Returns the masked string after revealing a letter and saving the mask. 25 26 If an answer has only 1-2 characters in it, no clues are given. 27 28 If an answer has 3-4, 1 clue is given. 29 30 If an answer has 5-6, 2 clues are given. 31 '''

I should have also stated "6 or more, 3 clues are given." This was decided upon basically from user feedback and testing. It's not perfect, but it works. My personal view is when you get a bad clue, such as in your example, you just got unlucky since the masking algorithm randomly chooses a position to unmask. Luck-of-the-draw is part of the game, so I'm not really inclined to change that part of the game.

It's also modelled after a BBS trivia program from the late 90's that had a very similar algorithm.

za3k commented 3 years ago

Sure. I've played this game for about 50-100 hours, and I'm telling you it's not really fun this way. If a bunch of other people have told you otherwise, ignore me.

rawsonj commented 3 years ago

Well, I've been running this game for the last 8 years and this was explicitly requested by the users of the server I run it on.

Feel free to fork it and do whatever you want to do, but this isn't a bug.