Happy Anniversary!

Jon Berry | October 27, 2010
I know I'm new here, but I just wanted to say congrats. Awesome site and from what I've seen an awesome community.

Ryan Dunn | October 27, 2010
Ditto.

I heart Funeratic.

Chris Lemler | October 27, 2010
I Have to agree with Ryan and Jon Berry

Ryan Dunn | October 27, 2010
I even heart Chris Lemler and his ridiculously difficult goos!

Chris Lemler | October 27, 2010
LOL

Steve West | October 27, 2010
Oh, you will be (snicker).

Scott Hardie | October 28, 2010
Thanks, Jon! We're glad to have you. I heart happy members of the community, all around.

Normally this is the day when I add ten more icons to the site history, but Kelly and I are going through a sudden move and it's going to have to wait.

Chris's goo wasn't the only ridiculously difficult one this round. I've regretted a number of goos that have turned out too hard because I didn't have enough mental focus while creating them. Some players like the game hard, I know, but I don't. I plan to make some changes to the game next round, but creating easier goos is something I'm already trying to change now.

Jon Berry | October 28, 2010
I don't know, I agree, to a degree with both sides. Difficulty in the game can be rewarding when you solve it, but sometimes they are really tough. I guess as long as the clue is strong enough or the distorted image is somewhat clear where you could make a correlation, it would still be fun to me.

The only time I would consider it too hard would be if the image was distorted to the point of being useless.

Kelly Lee | October 28, 2010
To be honest I was really psyched from GooCon, and wanted to get back into playing Goo Game. I tried. It's insanely hard. Not fun anymore, suck the fun out of new people wanting to play type hard.

Ryan Dunn | November 1, 2010
If you make it too easy everybody will lose interest. Just needs a mix.

The only time I get bent out of shape is when the clue is shifty, AND the picture is so distorted it serves no purpose. But so long as those are few and far between...I like them as part of the game(what's goo without Golden Imeldas?!?!?)

As far as attracting new people...if i were new and saw the current scoring system I'd be like,"Uh...what?"

Scott Hardie | November 1, 2010
Yeah, the betting system has some advantages, but one of its chief problems is high barrier of entry for new players. It's on the way out.

After the RB tournament controversy last summer, when rules were sprung on players without notice, here's sharing my plans for the future of the game in advance so that you can be prepared and offer feedback. Next month, I intend to change Celebrity Goo Game into a model closer to the live game from GooCon. Instead of 50 goos for 50 days with an occasional themed week in the mix, there will instead be a goo each weekday for ten weeks, with each weekly set of five goos representing a theme. This theme might be five celebrities from the same place, or with the same first name, or who became famous in the same year, or something else in common that unites them. The claim-to-fame categories (Movies, Music, Sports, etc) will disappear in favor of these themes; you should be able to infer from the image and clue most of the time what claim to fame the celebrity has. Some weeks will just be a "Grab Bag" featuring five celebrities that I want to put in the game but can't fit into a proper theme, but I intend not to do this often. I will gladly take requests for an entire week of five celebrities; more on that later. A calendar will show the progress through the ten weeks, to put the themes into perspective and visualize the schedule.

The goo appearing on Monday will be easy. Each day, the next goo will increase in difficulty until a hard goo on Friday. Over the weekend, no new goos will appear, but you'll have a chance to guess all goos from the previous week. On Sunday night at midnight EST, all seven goos will expire and a new week will begin with a new easy goo. For players and for me, this system will be easier in some ways and harder in other ways, but having done it three years now at GooCon, I'm pretty confident that this will be a fun way to play, and that I can keep it going for a long time.

What I haven't decided on yet is a scoring system. I have several models in mind, but the one that I'm currently leaning towards is a bracketed tournament. All players who solved a goo in the round will be eligible. The more goos of higher difficulty that you solved over the ten weeks, the better seeding you will have against less accomplished players. Each goo will be timed, with the faster time in each bracket advancing to the next day. The eleventh week of the round will be the tournament, starting with an easy goo on Monday and advancing to harder goos at the end of the week for the win. With a one-week hiatus between rounds, this gives us four rounds per year. I intend to name rounds after the season and year (Winter 2011 etc) instead of Roman numerals.

If GooCon players are curious why I don't plan to keep the live game's scoring system after taking so much else from it, the reasons are 1) copyright and 2) high probability of a tied score with this many players and without random opportunities to bet along the way.

Radical changes to the game haven't always been met well, but I believe these changes will make the game more fun to play and easier to get into. If there is any aspect of the changes that I expect to be controversial, besides the timed goos which we've already debated plenty (thanks for helping me decide), it's that there will not be new goos on weekends. I get it; I'm frustrated when some of my favorite web sites take weekends off. But I've learned the hard way the value in pacing myself when creating goos. Also, the live game has taught me that themes of five are much easier to create than themes of seven; for example, look at how much I had to scrape the bottom of the fame barrel to find seven "celebrities" for Peanuts Week.

Scott Hardie | November 1, 2010
Also: Longtime players know the trouble that I have predicting goo difficulty. There were so many complaints for so long ("how could you call that easy?") that I changed the "difficulty" label to "intended difficulty" and eventually just got rid of it altogether, which was controversial in and of itself. I'm not thrilled with the return of that controversy, since I will inevitably publish a hard goo earlier in the week here or an easy goo late in the week there, but I'm prepared to deal with that quirk of the game again.

Ryan Dunn | November 1, 2010
Thanks Scott!

Looking forward to trying the new system. I like the idea of increasing difficulty(or trying to) as the week goes by...just like the NYT crossword!

Steve West | November 6, 2010
Bring it on! Sounds great. I can tell you that the five goo theme play was a lot of fun, especially when the theme was not announced but had to be discovered.

Scott Hardie | November 21, 2010
Another long-overdue bit of post-GooCon work is finally complete: Adding ten new icons to The History of Funeratic. The new items are highlighted in red. I'm grateful to have such enthusiastic users who observed the site's anniversary anyway. :-)