So I’m imagining a script that would be something like the self-study script, where you’re just reviewing stuff that is unlocked to you, not stuff in the actual SRS scheme.
You would open it, and be matched with another user (or users?) who is within a specified level range (like, people within 5 levels of you).
To reduce the complexity, I’m thinking it would be asynchronous. In other words, both people don’t necessarily need to play at exactly the same time.
Then you are both presented with some number of reviews (limited to ones that are available to both of you), say 10 or 25 or something, and then you are scored. I think some combination of accuracy and time would be best.
We could do anonymous ones, where you don’t know who you’re facing, just if you won or lost. Or just with your name out there, and rankings or leaderboards, etc.
Is this crazy and impossible?
EDIT: I just realized that synonyms would be a big wrench in the works, so I think for this alone people would have to accept not using user synonyms.
Another idea would be to have like… “the hourly/daily Pleasant/Painful/Death/whatever” challenge and each time period a random selection of items would be selected, then you could enter into it and your score would be recorded for that competition, rather than head to head.
I saw the latest post was from Leebo and expected him to be trashing on the proposal. Turns out it was his proposal.
To answer your question, for a script like this to work there’d need to be a centralized server to coordinate the players. Other than that requirement, there’s no reason something like this wouldn’t be possible.
It’s already been said, but to implement this a centralized server would be required to take care of the matchmaking, picking the items for the reviews, probably storing data for the leader-boards and so on. Technically this doesn’t seem particularly difficult.
What I see as the biggest obstacle is that anything that involves competition usually attracts cheaters. In my (admittedly very limited) experience, making sure no cheating happens in a purely web based game is extremely difficult.
Well, I mean, I think that’s a given, but I think there’s really nothing you could do. If some random shows up with a perfect score in 5 seconds, you know it was a cheater and just have to move on.
Well yes. I guess part of the charm of the game would be that you would also practice your kanji / vocab, and the WK community seems nice enough, so I think that at least there would be a small number of cheaters.
I mean, as long as the leader boards are not just dominated by random users with impossible scores and normal players don’t get frustrated by getting matched with bots every other game, it would be fun.
Answer is, yes, it would be pretty straightforward to make such a thing. The biggest part of the process would be building a service for matchmaking and score tracking, but I think you could get away with something pretty lightweight. I’d love to imagine that you could get away with just some PHP endpoints on top of a database, but I might be proven wrong on that.
Cheating is going to be an issue, sure, but cheating is an issue even for AAA games with millions of dollars to spend on anti-cheat research. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
I think I’d even prefer a coop mode where you’d collaborate with others to progress and complete quests as a group (“do a total of 500 reviews in one day”, “reach an average accuracy of 90%”, etc). You could make clans, fight bosses, do clan wars… Ok I’m taking it too far now lol
I… I kind of want this… (If I have excess time, I might start looking at something like this until someone else likely does it first since I would be insanely slow unless I were to really get into it lol)
