I personally was never participating for the money but rather for the fun and the challenges and this is still possible without the bigger official challenges.
So I’m writing this post to figure out if people are still interested in improving algos and having fun in competitions.
I have some ideas of possible competitions that we as a community could do without there being an official competition. Things like going for long streaks on the top of the leader board or having an algo that wins the first 100 or 200 matches. I imagine goals like this having fewer problems with copying algos and the other benefit would be that the competition is spread over a longer time span. (In previous seasons the last week was often the only week with real competition)
If @RegularRyan agreed, we could also give away some special forum badges for the winner of such a community competition.
I’m interested to know who is interested in such competitions and maybe other ideas of competitions.
I plan on working on a new algo still, for now i just uploaded an older algo, but i plan on working on it, I will probably work on it less now than i did in the past season i particitpated in (Season 7, 4,3 and 2) Since there is no deadline to get into the finale this time i think a lot of people will take more time between putting up new algos and updating their algos. I’m hoping it’s active enough to keep things going for at least a year, I think it will be interesting to see what new algos people come up with well now an indefinite amount of time to work on them.
I’m working on a new algo right now for the live competition. I will submit it and tweak it over time for the online competition, but probably not spend too much time on it.
I like this idea of some sort of player-driven competition. But it seems to me that without a way to make two algos play each other that we will not be able to have any real head-to-head tournaments. This seems to me like it should not be that hard of a thing to add to the API (although I know they said there would be no more changes). One other way around this restriction would be to run a tournament using one of the many different simulators that us players have written
I’m also working on a new algo for a live competition. Generally, the hardest thing is finding the time to work on the code when I have so many other priorities. I still want to have a continued presence, whenever I have time to make changes!