Yahtzee diceFreethedice.com

New Features & Developments

YAHTZEE DEVELOPMENTS

As everybody should know by now, we are currently under-going a rebuild of FreeTheDice.com. I would like to talk to you a bit about why we are doing this and what changes have taken place. Some of these changes will be obvious, some not so obvious. I will also discuss with you the future of FreeTheDice.com and try to answer some commonly-asked questions. Finally, I will address many of the comments and issues that were raised during our testing period months ago.

WHY WE ARE UPGRADING

There are a few reasons. Firstly, many new players don't find the site very user-friendly. Also, there are many developments that people have requested. The current system has not been built in such a way that is easily adapted and so we have had to start again. Think about trying to build a skyscraper on foundations made for a house. It's not really possible. So in order to be able to introduce any of these new features, we have had to entirely rebuild the foundations and we have done this in such a way that we will also be in a good position for any future developments too!

Additionally, the rebuilt site will be much more efficient than the current one, meaning that the server should run a bit more quickly mostly of the time and be able to handle more simultaneous players.

Finally, we want to do even more to ensure that FreeTheDice.com remains a fun and welcoming place for ALL players. We hope that some of our developments will achieve that aim.

PROCESS

We did allow a period of testing whereby we invited players to test the new site completely uninhibited. Some people did this very productively and contacted me about everything that they saw as potentially problematic, and thus we managed to resolve many bugs and also to introduce a few new features that we had not previously thought about. I would to extend a warm thank you to all of those who contributed in this way, or via one of our questionnaires. Later in this document, I have addressed some of the points raised.

DIFFERENCES THAT YOU WILL SEE IN THE REBUILD

- Announcements and Log-in Screen

The log-in screen will start to grow a bit more in the coming months and I hope that this will become more of a HUB for you to return to and use regularly. It should contain links to all of the important parts of the site and one or two key reminders about the community, as well as displaying the most recent announcements so that you never miss out on an important website upgrade or tournament announcement.

- Menu

There is a new drop-down menu system. This should make it much easier and less time-consuming to navigate the site.

- Styles and Colours

We now have new colours. The W3C recommend that all websites should have black text on a white background as this is easier on the eyes, so we have gone for that approach but have tried to stick with the support colours of orange and green. Some people wanted bigger fonts and other people wanted to be able to use more of their display. Some people didn't like the change in colour schemes. We have therefore created a system that allows you to change the colour schemes and layout of the site according to your needs. You can find this within the profile->settings section.

- View/Edit Profile

This screen has a much better layout. You are now also required to enter your date of birth. This is a legal requirement as explained in our policies and guidelines. Nobody else will be able to see this information and it is entirely confidential. We have changed the 'occupation' slot into 'about me', to give you an opportunity to tell a sentence or two about yourself. We have also added a Name field which is not in any way compulsory. it is optional!

- Photo Upload

For those of you that have access to the photo uploader, you are now able to keep more than one photo attached to your account and then pick one to be displayed on your profile. This will save you from having to re-upload photos whenever you want switch your profile picture around, saving time for you and saving us an abundance of server resources.

- Select/Change Dice

This has now been completely rewritten but is only available to people who buy credits. These players will be able to sort their dice into three categories: Archived, New, Favourites. This will enable you to better manage your dice sets and remove those from view that you really don't use.

- Friends/Foes

The foes section is the new name for the "ignore list" and we now have a friends list option, although it doesn't actually give any advantages as yet. If anybody has any ideas what we can do with the friends list then please contact us as we are still planning possible developments for that.

- Creating A Game

Wow. This part of the site has been totally reformed. We will no longer use the term "host". A player who initiates a game is the Game Creator. This is because the Game Creator should not and does not have any special powers or privileges over anybody else; he was simply the one who decided to initiate the game. Everybody should have equal respect during a game.

The game creator now has many options to choose from:

We have decided to limit the number of simultaneous games that anybody can make at one time, to one. This is to prevent players from flooding the games hall with several games at the same time which confuses people and also reduces the chances of getting a game going quickly. However, players who have previously bought credits may be allowed to create more that one game at one time.

- Games Hall

The Games Hall is now vastly improved. The layout is much better, shows more information about each game, AND the page does not constantly reload every time you do something. The chat and games section is handled in real-time, which massively cuts down on server load and should really speed up the site, as well as making your games hall chat experience much more enjoyable.

Games that are starting now also show if any alternative rules are being used. This is shown on the Games Hall and the Join Game screens. Where players have submitted their rule-sets to us, we have included them in the rules-list.

- Joining A Game

When joining a game, there is now an entirely new process. When a player attempts to join a game, the game creator can accept that player as per normal. Once accepted, a player will have to confirm that he is ready otherwise he will not be included in the game when it starts. This will prevent games from starting with players active at the table that aren't aware that they are involved in the game. It is almost impossible to "accidentally" join a game. It also gives players a chance to see who else is at the table before joining. The join game screen also shows all details relating to the game so that players can easily see the game options. Once a player has been removed/declined from a game, he cannot keep coming back and trying to rejoin, although he can stay in the foyer for that game to chat. If anybody abuses this, then please report the incident to admin.

This page also runs in real-time so will also never need to be refreshed, again saving on server load and convenience.

Players are now limited to playing in two games at any one time. Anybody who has ever bought credits may have this increased to five at one time, as in the current system, and subscribers may be allowed to play in up to ten games at any one time. The reason for these restrictions is based on resources. If people are willing to contribute financially, then we are willing to allow them to use a bit more of the processing power that is available.

- The Game Itself

- Resign and Kick

Kicking has been discussed in more detail below. The point I want to make here is that it is now possible to resign at any time during a game, even in a solo-player game. The game also now detects when there are no more players involved and will not "get stuck" if the last player is kicked or resigns.

- Ending A Game

A game will now end even if the last player has either been kicked or resigned. The game will not now calculate the ratings immediately, but will be placed in a queue. This is to ensure that the system can do each game one-at-a-time and thus not be clogged-up and slow down the server. This method also resolves a bug that we had previously with the adding-up of game scores. It could take up to fifteen minutes to see your game finalised and the final ratings points come through.

- Tournament

The tournaments will now have their own section under our new menu. We are also considering allowing only those players who have ever bought credits to enter the monthly tournament. This is by no means a certainty, just a consideration at this point. Keeping the numbers down will enable us to run more tournaments, more frequently, and we would like to introduce different types of tournament such as painted, team, leader, triple, masters, etc etc.

- Inbound Messages

Your inbox will be checked once every minute and if you have received a message, then an extra row will appear beneath the drop-down menu. You should no longer miss or forget to check your messages during games, and also won't have to tolerate a flashing yellow link, which was highly unpopular.

- Community and Forums

Some of the forums have been removed because they simply weren't being used or were detrimental to the community. Our Games Hall Chat will no longer be archived at all, and so players will not be able to scroll back through the previous day's chat. We have other forums for any team game scores announcements that need to be made, and those are archivable and should be used for such matters.

- High Scores

The high scores charts now have a feature of "find my position" that finds you in the rankings. It is also still searchable by various headings and now has a much cleaner layout. The value for win ratio will be calculated slightly differently from before. This will be an average of your final position, where coming 3rd in 5 player game would score you 50%. This months top scorers will extend now to the top 20 instead of 10, and the all-time list will be extended to the top 100.

- Dice Shop

This now has a menu making it much, much easier to navigate to the special features.

GLOBAL DIFFERENCES

- Advertising

On the most part, advertising has now been moved away from the central areas of the site, to improve your gaming experience. In fact, on low resolutions, some won't even be visible and therefore will not take up any of your valuable playing space. We really need the support of our sponsors as it provides us with very important revenue to be able to fund developments as large as this one.

- Chat

There will now be a few seconds delay between posting messages. This is to cut down the possibility of flooding and also helps to keep the chat-flow consistent.

- Display of Player Names

Every time that a player name is displayed anywhere on the site, you will now have a little floating box that appears whenever your mouse cursor floats over a player name. This box contains some details and some options such as "send message" and "view profile". If you have any suggestions for more details/functions to include in this box please let us know. This is a works-in-progress.

NEW DICE-SHOP ADDITIONS

As everybody knows, the server doesn't pay for itself and nor do the developments. Therefore, we really want to reward people who contribute financially to FreeTheDice.com. We therefore have introduced a few new benefits to those who buy dice and we have introduced a subscription scheme.

1. Credits

Anybody can buy credits at any time. Credits can be used to bid on auction dice, to buy animated dice, to buy special limited edition dice, to buy normal dice from our dice shop, to send gifts of dice or credits to other players or to create your own custom dice. Anybody who buys or has previously bought credits will have unlimited access to the following features:

2. Subscriptions

You may subscribe for a nominal fee each month to have access to a few extra features:

POTENTIAL DEVELOPMENTS FOR THE FUTURE

- Styles and Colours

We will periodically be introducing new style schemes and colours, if they are requested. We may decide to offer these as part of the dice shop.

- More Game Types

We will now be able to develop more game types and offer more support for new rule sets

- Tournaments

We hope to introduce different forms of tournament and there is the possibility to eventually allow players to set up their own miniature tournaments

- Multi-Language Support

We will now very easily be able to introduce new languages and really have a multicultural community, where each user can select which countries/languages he wishes to play with. We may decide to utilise this and open our doors to more of our non-English-speaking friends

DISCUSSION ON SOME CONTROVERSAL ISSUES

- Game Limits

- Kicking

This is a very sore topic. I don't understand why. It's quite simple. If for whatever reason, you are unable to play your turn within a satisfactory amount of time, it is only fair to be happy for the other players to continue without you. The only exception to this, is if for some reason the players agree to wait for a given period of time. NOBODY should EVER be pressurised into waiting for ANYBODY. This is a game and it is about having fun, so our policy is to support kicking and to strongly oppose bullying.

So, have fun together…..or else!!!! :)

However, we have agreed to be a little flexible on this. You asked for:

We have listened and we have now given you those options, but we strongly suggest that you set all of your games to have a kick limiter of 3-5 minutes and that everybody kick anybody who takes too long, unless agreed previously. If you have been bullied or harassed because of a 'kicking' issue then please inform admin immediately.

- Ratings

There has been a bug in the system that sometimes caused the odd game to have the ratings multiplied and added to the scores. This may have made a big difference to your TRUE rating and many people have raised this as an issue. We are going to address this by recalculating every rating point since the beginning of time on the site. This may shake up the leader-board a little bit and whilst we understand this may affect some people unfavourably, we would like to point out that the real problem was that we were reporting the wrong ratings for some time so please be understanding and thankful that we have now resolved this issue for the future.

- New Ratings

The first free-online-yahtzee-game ratings system was devised during a dream whilst sleeping on a train. It tended to bias towards players who had played the most games, but that was not really ever seen as being a problem.

This scoring system had never been published, until now. Here it is:

my_rating = (total_num_players - 1) * 20 - (my_position - 1) * 30

(eg: where I finished third in a five-player game :
my_rating = (5-1) * 20 - (3-1) * 30
my_rating = 4 * 20 - 2 * 30
my_rating = 80 - 60
my_rating = 20

However, we now feel it is time for a change to get towards something that better represents a player's real ability. This formula will also not be published. BUT! we can tell you that the new ratings system takes into consideration the following factors:

One final note: there is only ONE way to score negative points, and that is to resign or be kicked from a game that you are not doing well in.

We really hope that this system will give more meaning to the ratings system.

HERE IS A RESPONSE TO SOME OF YOUR COMMENTS AND CRITICISMS

Firstly, I would like to say that we really appreciate ALL of the comments that we received. Without your feedback, we would not have been able to progress the community. I wanted to respond to as many of your comments as possible so that you can see how we also view these issues.

Please keep the comments and suggestions coming!

We received many comments about small bugs that were found. Thank you very much for finding these, we have now fixed everything that was reported.

- "Game Type/Name Should Appear Above Players List"

Many of the players asked for game name to be put back into the game system. We really wanted to get more towards using Game IDs instead of game names, but we have decided to go with your feedback and so game names are now used again. The game name appears on the title bar and the game listing and game play screens.

- "Games Hall Chat No Longer Has White Space"

A small amount of white space has been added for easier reading.

- "Triple Yahtzee Scoring Not Correct"

Well, some of you seem to agree on this. I have changed this.

- "Where Is Painted/Rainbow Yahtzee?"

It has now been implemented, not fully tested but seems ok

- "Dice Flash Before Each Roll"

Yes, they do. There are a few reasons for this. One of the major upgrades of the new system is to reduce the amount of information that is sent backwards and forwards through the internet. This actually massively speeds-up the loading times of just about everything across the whole site for everybody. Before, when you rolled your dice, a whole section of the page was refreshed, and every time a turn was finished, the entire page was refreshed. Now, what happens, is only the numbers on the dice are refreshed. However, that means that on the first turn or two of each game, the system needs some time to load-in the dice images. Also, because everything is now so fast, it is possible that your dice actually change before the images update. That is why the dice now flash between rolls, it is to let you know that the dice roll has completed.

- "End Of Game Can Sometimes Be Slow"

Yes, it can be sometimes. Also, the game ratings are now calculated at some time after the final turn. This was the solution to the bug that used to cause some games to be calculated several times over.

- "Time Factor In New Ratings - It's Not Fair For Those With A Slow Connection"

Yes, the time taken is a factor. However, there is a limit to how much your score can be affected by fast or slow playing time, so if you take several hours to finish a game, then you will simply receive the maximum penalty on your rating, which is unfortunate but is unavoidable.

- "Styles and Colours"

Not everybody liked the new colours. Some people even said that the new colours were too bright and hurt their eyes. Actually, the new colour system had actually been chosen to be more in line with many commonly-used theories about social and community websites, such as always having black text on a white background, rather than the other way around. However, we have listened to your views and there are now several styles and colours that you can choose from within the Profile->Settings section, so if you don't like a particular setting then you can easily change it. We even copied the current green/black colour scheme and added a setting for that!

- "Scorecards Not Visible"

The lines on the scorecards were not dark enough for some of you. We have made them darker.

- "No 'Contact Admin' Button"

This is now embedded within the Help dropdown menu. It is still there.

- "Change The Create Dice Module"

There have been many comments about how to change the customised dice maker. This is something that we may look at in the future. For now, we have added a button that lets you remove your submission of a dice set and resubmit it, if you notice an error before an admin approves it.

- "Why Dont You Upgrade The Current Site Rather Than Building A New One"

There are simply too many changes that need to be made to the data structures and to just about every other part of the site. Well, it's not really possible. No, triple and painted could not have been added to the existing site just like that. To give you a metaphor…it would be like trying to build a swimming pool in a tenth-floor apartment that is only four feet cubed in capacity.

- "Last Player Kicked Kills Games"

This is now automatically resolved within the game system itself.

- "No Incoming Message Notifications"

Inbound messages are now checked once per minute on every screen of the website, and a notification appears on-screen when there are messages in the inbox, directly beneath the top menu.

- "Dice Rolling A Bit Slow"

Some people have the feeling that it's a bit slow, but I can assure you that it is much faster than the old system as much less data is being sent. It's impossible that this function is slower. If the whole system ends up being slower then that is something that we will move very quickly to address.

- "Mouse Over Causing Player PopUp"

It 'should be' that when the player profile pop-up comes up, all you have to do is to slowly move the mouse cursor out of that pop-up box and it should go away. If that does not happen, please let us know and we can find another way of preventing this from happening

- "Only Start One Game At A Time"

One of the main aims of the new design was to make it easier to get into games and to prevent games from being abandoned and left unattended. One way to do that is to only allow one game creation at a time, especially to new players. I believe that the advantages will outweigh the disadvantages.

- "Tabs Don't Say When It Is My Turn"

Actually, you know what? My own personal feeling is that if you can't know when it is your turn by yourself, then you are playing too many games. However, since so many of you want this feature, I will add it back in at some point.

- "Would Prefer Selected Dice To Not Disappear"

They do disappear yes, but then they return - the reason for this is to illustrate that the turn has finished loading, so that a player doesn't accidentally click 'roll dice' too soon and miss a turn.

- "Alternative Games Rules Not Enforced"

For now, the alternative rule sets are not enforced by the system. We have an issue with this. So many players claim to have invented a new set of rules and we are actually not interested in who designs the games, only that the players can play them. Some players actually campaigned to prevent us from receiving the various rule-sets for their own personal reasons, so that's really up to you. If you don't want them implemented, that's fine. We have published the game rules that were sent to us and we think that's enough considering the circumstances. We don't really want to fight with you about it :) Update: a lot of players have now submitted their rules to us so we have displayed these in the games.

- "Game Chat Is A Long Way Down"

That is true, but unfortunately we are working with a default window size of 800 pixels wide; some people want large text; some people want larger dice; some people want a bit of everything, so yes, it is a long way away from the dice and the scorecard, but there's not really much that can be done about it. Split-screen 'could' work if the text was tiny. If enough people ask for this, then I could design a new styles setting that enables these things to be moved around a bit, but it would mean tiny tiny text. So, if you want tiny text, then tell me. If enough call for it, I'll do it.

- "Triple Game Creation Doesn't Allow 6 Rounds"

It only allows for a game with 3 rounds - in fact, the number of rounds changes to 3 when you select 'triple'

- "Disapproval of Scorecard Displays"

Some people didn't like that the other players scorecards appear where yours is….some people wanted to see more than one scorecard at one time…. So, we decided to make it so that when you click on the link for the other players scorecards, they will turn on/off and load beneath your own scorecard, allowing you the option to view what you like, when you like. Your own scorecard has a pale background, the others are 'greyed'.

- "Lag When Chatting"

Yes. This is done on purpose to prevent spamming the board. However, I am going to reduce the amount of time this takes.

- "Game No Longer Available - should reflect this on games hall chat"

Ok, when a game was created, we inserted a link into games hall chat to announce the game and to enable people to easily join it. Unfortunately, when the game started, people would try to click that link and become frustrated that the game had started. We decided the best solution was to remove that feature altogether.

- "What is the Server Time?"

The time that is displayed is the time ON the server itself. I understand that this is not going to be a different timezone to almost every player, because there are people registered on this site from more than 150 countries around the world, so there simply has to be one universal time, which is what we call 'server time'. Sometimes this can be knocked-off by a few minutes from what you might expect, but it's not something we can really fix other than to reset it once per month. This IS now displayed on the site and updates itself once every minute, whereas before it did not automatically update at all.

- "Sounds"

People have asked for all kinds of different sounds. This is not planned as yet, but I have taken note of what you have asked for and we might introduce it in the future.

- "Drop Down Box For Place Score Does Not Have 'Ones' At Top"

Again, this is to prevent you guys from making mistakes - as it is, you HAVE to select something and cannot blindly click "place score" without choosing a place.

- "Too Much White Space on InGame Screen"

Good design principles are actually to leave the screen less-cluttered. However, a single-round game does appear to have lots of space because we no longer display the columns for rounds that won't be played, but that white space is reserved for when there are 6 rounds, so whilst it appears that there is a lot of white space, this area has actually already been utilised.

- "I Cannot Cancel Solo Games During Creation"

A cancel button has now been added

AND SOME POSITIVE COMMENTS FROM YOU

NEW GUIDELINES AND POLICIES

We have introduced a new set of guidelines and policies which have been published separately here.

Google cookies are used for ads personalisation and also to analyse traffic to this site. Information about your use of our site is shared with Google for that purpose. FreeTheDice uses cookies to manage your login to our website.  [ Details ]  [ OK ]