The Last Timed Tournament

Scott Hardie | November 11, 2013
Well, we're off to a fantastic start. Technical difficulties affected several early-morning players on today's first tournament goo, so I have fixed the problem and removed the goo from the tournament. (It still appears on the page but is treated like a bonus goo, with no affect on scores.) We'll resume the tournament tomorrow.

I have selfish reasons for being even more upset about today's problem: I'm leaving on a trip next week, and I would prefer not to try to run the tournament remotely because it won't be easy to get online on the road. I was hoping that the tournament might conclude before I leave, but that's less likely now that it's starting a day late. Oh well; I'll manage. The tournament can run while I'm gone; it will just take me longer to approve pending guesses.

As the theme description mentions, this will be our last timed tournament. Some changes to the goo game's format are necessary for a bunch of reasons, including legal ones. I'm in the midst of programming the game's new format now, and I intend to make an announcement sharing some details about it before it begins. If you want to be there on day one of the new format, visit Funeratic on Sunday December 1: The new season will debut on a weekend, since the goo game is about to start running seven days a week.

Steve West | November 11, 2013
Sorry for the difficulty and thanks for your perseverance. I'll be there.

Samir Mehta | November 11, 2013
[hidden by request]

Chris Lemler | November 11, 2013
You have done great work on this site and you keep making it better and better. I agree with Samir on looking forward to greater and better changes to the site.

Scott Hardie | November 12, 2013
Thanks everybody. :-) I'm embarrassed by the mistake. I was diligent in testing to avoid it, just not quite diligent enough. (The site now spawns certain images dynamically, and the code is smart enough to know whether the person requesting the image should or shouldn't have access to it. In this case, the code worked, but it lacked the proper data to recognize tournament players.)

More details coming on the new format asap. Good luck in the tournament as always!

Scott Hardie | November 12, 2013
@&%*$#

Due to technical issues beyond my control, Funeratic was offline for 60-90 minutes this evening, and just came online a few minutes ago. This is not something that I ever want to have happen, but especially not during a time-based tournament. (Thank goodness this is the last one!)

From looking at the activation timestamps and the guesses to date, it doesn't look like any player was affected by the outage, so I'm leaving this goo in the tournament instead of striking it. I would hate for any of the fast solve times today to be lost unnecessarily. If my calculations are incorrect and someone was indeed adversely affected (ie. prevented from playing) in today's tournament because of the outage, please let me know asap.

Thanks for your patience. This tournament may be cursed.

Samir Mehta | November 13, 2013
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | November 26, 2013
We have a winner. Congrats on a hard-fought victory, Justin! This tournament was unlucky for the website but lucky for you. This is your seventh victory in the last few years, an incredible accomplishment. I continue to be impressed, as always. :-) This coming weekend, I'll order your prize and update the site to reflect your victory.

Four bonus goos will fill out the rest of the week, and we'll begin a new season next week. As noted elsewhere, the next season will not introduce a new format to the game as previously announced. I do plan to finish that new format asap, but we'll have fun with another traditional season in the meantime.

Scott Hardie | December 1, 2013
Justin, congrats as well on playing another perfect season! You have now done so more often than any other player in the game's history. And your current streak is now much longer than any other player's. I salute your achievements here in writing -- and by sending a belated prize as well; check your inbox. :-)

Scott Hardie | December 9, 2013
I may as well announce this early: Winter 2014 will not be the last timed tournament either. I've just begun a lot more freelance work for the next two months to help pay for the wedding, so there goes most of my free time until February. And even if I were somehow to finish programming the new format to begin on March 1, I would be concerned about all kinds of new code doing unexpected, inappropriate things to the game while I was offline on a two-week honeymoon soon after that. Thus, I'll say now that the Spring 2014 season will play in the same format that we're using now.

And just in case some other thing happens, here's being clear that I'm not promising the new format by summer; it will begin when it's ready. I'm done promising new stuff on this site in advance for a while. And after this batch of freelance ends, I'm done with that for a while too, because I really want my nights and weekends back.