Fall Over

Scott Hardie | November 26, 2014
The end of the goo game's fall season is almost here. The scores are so close: Eight players are within 1000 points of the lead as of this writing, with several more players close behind them. Victory really could go to anybody this Saturday. This is going to be a wild finish! Good luck. :-)

Just a reminder: The game will end on Friday night at midnight. When the server clock reaches 2014-11-29 00:00:00 (one second after 2014-11-28 23:59:59), the nightly process that would normally publish Saturday's new goo will instead compare the scores at that moment in time and declare the winner based on whose score is highest. We'll take Saturday to congratulate the winner and then begin the winter season on Sunday.

Some of you may be planning to save your guesses until late on Friday night, but this is a risky strategy, so employ it at your own peril. Firstly, the server clock may be a few minutes off from the clock on your wall, and you don't want to be seconds too late. Also, if your guess doesn't match the right answer on record or any known alternate spelling, then it will become pending until I can get online on Saturday morning to mark it correct, and by then it will be too late: The highest score on Friday night is the winner no matter the later outcome of pending guesses. (Plus, there are other reasons why waiting until late Friday night is risky, from underestimating how much research is needed, to becoming too busy with something else at that moment in time, to plain forgetting to play.)

The lucky cats are only valid through Friday. After the winner is declared, they can no longer be used. After the winner is declared, you can keep guessing goos from this week, in order to boost your lifetime score or just for sake of pride, but they're no longer worth points.

This has been a busy fall for me, and I regret not making time for creating lots of goos, which has often rendered Beju useless because there are too few goos in the queue for her power to work. To any players who got stuck with Beju along the way when her power could not be activated, I'm sorry. :-( I'm also working this coming weekend, so I don't know if I'll have time to implement some of the changes that we considered in the Variable Values discussion. I'll make those changes now if I have time; otherwise I'll save them for another three months.

Thanks for your dedication and enthusiasm going into this final week. Have a happy Thanksgiving and a safe Black Friday, and good luck solving every last goo by Friday. :-)

Samir Mehta | November 28, 2014
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | November 28, 2014
There is no point in holding onto a cat. They will reset at midnight tonight when the season ends, so that the winter season can begin with a clean slate. I have altered the expiration dates on the Lucky Cats page to reflect this.

I think everybody reading this is well aware of it, but a reminder just in case: Midnight tonight means Eastern time, so plan accordingly if you're going for the last-minute guess strategy. Someday I'd love to program a timezone-per-member filter into this site so that you see all times in your local time zone instead of seeing them in mine and having to adjust them in your head, but the "someday I'd love to" list for this site could fill volumes.