Crowd voting

[notexactlyawe]

One of the extensions we discussed was implementing crowd voting so that multiple people could play together on the same side in a game. This is quite a large issue and could be implemented in a number of ways. There are also a number of design questions to answer.

• How are moves selected? Is it the modal value of player moves? Is it voting on a set of top N moves we get from a chess engine?
• How many people should this work for?
• Should everyone have to vote before the move is made, or should there be a cut-off?
• Assuming a cut-off time for making a move, what happens if no move is selected?

Most likely we will need a new set of endpoints as it might lead to spaghetti code to try and fit this way of playing into our current endpoints. Those will need to be defined.

[notexactlyawe]

Assigning people to teams

This will require some changes.

• The players field in the game object will need to be able to store a list of IDs
• If we leave free_slots as it is then we can't enforce player numbers for each side, which may be fine
• We need to mark a game as crowd voting somehow (just a boolean in the game object would be fine)
• The frontend will need to let people join either side if it is crowd voting
• Maybe there should be a "random side" button to avoid people clogging up one side or the other

Mechanics of voting

Twitch Plays Pokemon did voting by having users input within a 30 second time window and at the end of that time period the modal action was taken. I think it's sensible to roughly follow this model, but there are choices to be made.

Generate N moves from a chess engine and users vote on these

This has the advantage of always having a default move if there is no mode for whatever reason. The disadvantages are that it robs user choice and potentially makes the game easier because the chess engine will probably generate good moves.

Let users have free choice over moves

This has the advantages of being as free as possible and not making the game easier by giving hints. The main disadvantage is that I'd imagine it would be quite likely that no modal value for a move would be chosen (especially early game) due to the number of possible moves. In that case, what is the default? Picking a random user move could open the game up to trolls, whereas generating an AI move may be an unfair advantage and may not even feature in the list of user moves.