It is a bit weird to me that you want starfighters to be a recruitment platform but think it's 'Fun' when somebody releases recording of the solution.
> "I recorded a speedrun of level 5, clearly labeled as a speedrun of level 5, which spoils the twist midway through level 5." -- Fun
> We're OK with you publishing facts about Starfighter games/levels but don't want people to be exposed to intentionally hidden facts (discovery of which is, in many cases, the point of the level) unless they go looking for them.
I am asking because I sometimes record or stream myself playing CTFs and I first thought I couldn't do that with starfighter... But I can do it as long as I label it properly and this would not be frowned upon?
I understand that you cannot stop people from leaking and spoiling challenges. But I definitely want to be obedient with your vision.
Really looking forward to this! Thank you for your work
We want people to be able to experience Stockfighter like a fun game. Part of the expected, baseline of experience for games in 2015 is that you can play them socially, either a) with your friends or b) with your cast-of-thousands watching you play them.
We're thus OK with folks streaming our games. (And, ooh, thanks for reminding me to put up that policy note for the platform IP reviewers.)
We'd appreciate folks trying to not spoil folks who aren't looking for spoilers. I'm not too worried about folks being able to find solutions if they turn over the Internet for them; I'd just prefer that they not be pervasively available.
As to whether this causes us issues as a recruitment platform: don't worry about our business model. That's my job. You can search HN for "patio11 stockfighter cheating" if you want to hear a little elaboration on why I am not too worried about this.
Given the whole point of streaming, as a watcher, is to share the streamers experience, I can't see this being a problem based on my interpretation of the docs, especially if you stream in good faith rather than just showing a slideshow of spoilers!
This of course comes with the caveat that I'm not part of Starfighter, it's simply my interpretation of what they've said.
I signed up for MicroCorruption a while ago, but never even did the first level until reading the posts about Starfighter here reminded me of it. And I'm hooked - I've done some reverse engineering and exploit work before for fun, and I'd forgotten how much fun it is doing crackme type challenges.
I'm really looking forward to the Jailbreak arc of Starfighter, and also trying my hand at the stockmarket one (despite my knowledge of markets coming exclusively from the summary in your team's blog posts...). Best of luck with your launch!
We have no problems with OSS API clients. (I've mentioned previously, but given that it is 2015, I'd expect most developers given the task "Do something with a novel API" to immediately start looking for the OSS client rather than sending in raw HTTP requests.) Our community has several of them ready to go: https://discuss.starfighters.io/t/helpful-external-tools/136
The more the merrier!
We'd prefer if folks exercised discretion with regards to posting solutions; many of our players find the existence of them anywhere demotivating.
All the Really Good Hackers are now heads-down writing ridiculously fast, OSS-but-completely-incomprehensible clients in Erlaskelleron that will be unbeatable for performance, ease of use, and phoning home trading strategies.
Please send me an email. I will give you a invite code to the beta, which will let you create an account to put your client up on the forum thread. (HNers who did not already spend a metric truckload of time writing clients: give us until tomorrow afternoon, please.)
"We have per-level leaderboards which give people a meaningful number to golf on, and additionally, we have discretion to (automatically or after human review) award additional badges for going above-and-beyond on a level. We’ll also do that outside of levels, too — I can imagine issuing badges for people who, e.g., write OSS clients for our API, submit documentation patches, responsibly report security issues, etc." - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/08/20/designing-and-building-s...
Been waiting all week for this to come out. I love doing wargames, and have been looking forward to trying out stockfighter for a long time now after reading through all your posts.
Hey Guys - I'm a big fan of your work, both with, and before Starfighter. Just a few initial comments:
>> If your use of the system decreases Fun for other players, it is a violation of the Zeroth Rule. If it doesn't, we have no strong objection to it.
>> Illegal market manipulation wait, we're not the SEC -- that's very clearly Fun.
>> [Fun] means what we say it means, and our decisions on it are final.
What constitutes 'fun' seems arbitrary. It might frustrating and very un-Fun to be told "Patrick, Thomas, and Erin say no" because the rules aren't well-defined. For example, I don't think that illegal market manipulation is fun - it's just deleterious - and part of the reason it's illegal in the first place. To what extent are you planning on taking user feedback on what 'fun' is? It's not clear to me whether or not it's 'fun' to craftily infer your internal network topology, for instance. Your game has a global audience, so you have to assume that linguistic/cultural/whatever norms aren't shared by all your players.
Also, the contrast on the code samples is way too low. Please make the text stand out more? I can barely read it.
It might frustrating and very un-Fun to be told "Patrick, Thomas, and Erin say no" because the rules aren't well-defined.
With respect, the rule is well-defined: it's a walled garden, we're the gardeners, and we will prune ruthlessly. You may not like that rule, but that's our price of admission.
Our rationale for it is simple: we don't want to spend our time being disciplinarians arguing with rules lawyers. I've spent most of my life on Internet message boards. I know how that conversation goes: "You didn't explicitly say that `festering pustule of a fascist` was an insult, so I am innocent of `harassing behavior.` Also, for behavior to rise to the level of harassment..." "I consider running a dictionary attack against someone else's password and then resetting it to something random to be valuable security research! How was I supposed to know that was out of bounds!?" etc, etc
It's not clear to me whether or not it's 'fun' to craftily infer your internal network topology, for instance.
You're always clear to ask. That one's Fun. Probing AWS' infrastructure to attempt to reconfigure that network topology, on the other hand, un-Fun -- it will get the game shut down for everyone.
Your game has a global audience, so you have to assume that linguistic/cultural/whatever norms aren't shared by all your players.
I am aware that we have norms which are not shared by all our players. We're going to enforce them regardless.
