Write Code, Crush Foes, Get Hired – Multiplayer Programming Tournament

Yeah, I don't like the trend of eye-catching false advertisements either. In a way, this resembles those infomercials that give you a bunch of random stuff along with the core product and then claim that it's a $500 value that you're getting for free!

I would think that they'd want to attract those coders who are not directly interested in cash prizes because anyone with half a brain could tell that the prizes do not match the original $40k advertisement. If you're advertising to a bunch of smart developers, don't treat them like idiots who buy into infomercial style advertising scams. These guys should reconsider spinning the contest as a fun & challenging way to top the leaderboard, and the prizes are just a small token of appreciation for attending the contest.

Haha, agreed!

We'll keep working on the RAM needs, but yeah, that is just about the lower limit that I would expect to be able to play the game at all currently. We have a lot of work to do, but don't worry, we'll get it running on older and older hardware as we optimize. Thanks for your patience (and your students').

I've started a GitHub issue to track that coordinate selector bug: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/issues/1038 – appreciate the bug report!

Interestingly, we have a 10-year-old who hangs out in our dev chat and helps us playtest and simulate. He actually came up with a strategy that did pretty well on the ladders for this latest one, and we'd challenge our other (existing developer) playtesters to c'mon, surely you can beat the 10-year-old!

Looking to the future, we have some ideas to push that younger and younger, too.

No. You may be borrowing this stance from graphic design, which has a (mistakenly) rigid position on "spec work", complete with a "no-spec!" movement that generates complaints in any forum where the notion of a design contest is introduced. Graphic designers feel victimized by "contests" that were actual thinly-veiled attempts to solicit actual uncompensated work. When thinking about no-spec, you should remember that other professions --- particularly law --- routinely do speculative work in the hopes of inking long-term deals with lucrative customers.

There are exploitative contests for software developers. For instance, when a platform vendor hosts a "come up with the best new application for our platform!" contest; whether the contest is rigged or not, all those developers are doing gratis work for the platform, sinking costs that the vendor hopes will result in salable IP bound to their platform.

This, on the other hand, is a video game. The game happens to be controlled in terms of software. The best strategies and solutions for the video game have no value to anyone. Nobody's platform is being built up by gratis work generated by unsuspecting developers. Instead, time that might have been spent playing Netrek or OpenTTD is being spent on a more interesting game.

One way to tell the difference between an exploitative game and "just a game" is whether the organizer of the game gets something more than "publicity" and "stats on the people who played" (both of which are natural outcomes of running any online game). For example, in the exploitative platform game I alluded to above, the organizers got a raft of new applications for their platform that they didn't have to pay for.

I haven't looked carefully at this game, but I sure have run other games --- https://microcorruption.com is one of them --- and I'm happy to discuss them with you as long as you want until you understand that nobody is being exploited by them.

I don't know why you're so down on this. It's a competitive game that looks fun, no one is forcing you to take part. The code created here isn't even useful for any other purpose! It's not some 99 designs contest for code, it's like the Stripe CTF challenges if anything.

Hey pj, sorry you feel that way. I can assure that our intent here is not to get cheap labor, the code that people write won't be usable to use in any way by us or third parties, so as pdenya mentioned you should only enter the contest if you think it's fun!

Sometimes contests are just harmless fun. This contest is about finding suitable people jobs, not harvesting work for free, as you imply.

We pay a lot of attention to the way we position our site content, and thought this was in line with the copy for other competitive games. I don't think that competitive games are inherently masculine or feminine, but the critique is valid: competitive games I'm familiar with do tend to rely on marketing language that's more targeted at men.

This comment does not deserve to be downvoted. It's thoughtful and asks a legit question.

All: when you see substantive, civil comments in faded-out territory, please give them a corrective upvote.

Though 'crush foes' is just rpg/fantasy-speak for 'beat your opponents'. So they would have to take the competition-part out of it if they wanted to change it.

Thanks iMuzz, that was an intense day for everyone, and it's always surprising to see how much of a splash that made!

Which levels didn't load for you? I'll check it out. Sorry about that!

The campaign is certainly short a few thousand levels. It will take time for us to get there, since making good programming levels is a challenge even when you aren't trying to fit them into a cohesive campaign. We'll get there, though. Lots to do!

Hey Maikklein, did you start playing? We built a mini-tutorial into the level itself, along with documentation and API details. We also have a rules tab on the ladder page that describes how the tournament works in broad strokes. If you still have questions, drop us a line at team@codecombat.com

Yeah, artwork is surprisingly expensive if it's customized. Obviously it's possible to get really cheap artwork, but we've found that quality and reliability are worth paying for. We also allow every winner to iterate the design a few times to get what they want.

That's a great idea! I'll add it to my todo list.

Right now, there isn't a nice and well documented way to do this as we haven't ever had demand for an API like that. You can reverse engineer the POST for the code ranking to submit your code and the GET for the leaderboard information.

Also, could you email me at michael@codecombat.com with details on what stats you'd like to have access to?

Hi michaelmior,

Those simulations are used to calculate the public leaderboards during the competition. They aren't used for final rankings as the simulation results need to be validated. However, they provide a nice way for people to gauge their standing.

To perform the final ranking/validation, we'll play n of the top games on each team against each other and then sort by wins and losses. We're not quite sure of how large n will be, but I think it will be 150-250. It would be nice to calculate the public leaderboards this way, but as a O(n*m) calculation, it really doesn't scale in practice (we have to strike a balance between accuracy and responsiveness of the ranking system). The public leaderboards are calculated with a Bayesian algorithm.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask! :)

Hi malloreon,

You can find the link to the main site in the middle of the top bar of the blog where it says "Click Here for the Main CodeCombat Site".

Really well actually. The TLDR summary is "we got swamped and made 4 placements."

We had ~50 good candidates that got in touch, but we took PG's advice to do things that don't scale, which meant I was doing high touch recruiting. About 2 weeks in, we decided to refocus on 12 of the candidates and we placed 4 of those. In the interim we've built out an automated profile system, employer portal, and a bunch of internal tools to scale up so that this time we can handle increased demand.

The overall feedback from employers was very favorable. One startup told us that our candidates were 5x more likely to pass technical screens that their other recruiting channels.