Hello! I bring some suggestions for the "Duck Race" game. With the introduction of new challenges, it has become a bit complicated to set up a match. As far as I counted, there are 27, which makes the configuration time-consuming, especially when doing it through a smartphone.
With that in mind, I have a few suggestions:
1.
Divide the challenges into 3 modules:
• Basic: where only a few pre-selected challenges are included.
• Custom: where the user can choose which challenges to include in the match.
• Advanced: with all challenges pre-selected, without allowing any changes.
2.
As a last resort, it could also be considered merging some similar challenges, such as "Pese a Pena" and "Peso Pesado."
3.
I also suggest that, if possible, when pressing the R shortcut during an ongoing match, information about the selected challenges is displayed.

Hello,
I agree that preset modes for challenge selection would be good. The question is, what should these two modes include to make them useful?
The obvious choice would be mode 1 - no speed based challenges, mode 2 - with speed based challenges, but I think that's a too big separation and to be honest, at least with the games in English, I've never seen anybody play the game without the speed challenges anymore, so probably not so much useful. Then again, you did propose the mode for phone users, and for a phone it's actually perfect…

However, I don't think we need the third mode you propose where all challenges are pre-selected.
If you choose custom, all challenges are already pre-selected by default, so you just have to change nothing.

PS: Google Translate did not pick up "Pese a Pena" and "Peso Pesado".
For anybody interested, it refers to merging the light weight/heavy weight challenges. I have no opinion on this one, I don't find these challenges interesting at all, because unless I am missing a super secret strategy, with two good players, the light weight challenge will always end in a draw.

Also an undocumented, but very helpful tip, there is a very useful shortcut when selecting challenges, although available only on a PC. Pressing shift+I will invert your selection. This means that any challenges which were checked now become unchecked, and any unchecked challenges now become checked.
You can use this to quickly enable just a few challenges you want to use, or, at the beginning of the challenge selection, just press it to disable everything if you want to enable only a few yourself.

Finally, of course I agree that pressing R should indicate the available duels. A while back I also suggested it here. Hopefully it's eventually implemented...

hello,
a small suggestion from me, first letter navigation should work in the list of available chalanges. this can be usefule to reach quickly a specific chalange and then disable it befor pressing validate.
thanks.

Personally I don’t think its a good idea and will complicate things and in my view it don’t take that long. You are only loosing say 1 or 2 minutes as you checking items. Again this is just me. Then again I’m a player who just unticks 3 challenges but the letter navigation could be a good thing to quickly untick items.

I think these are good suggestions; in particular, the shift+i command will be helpful for me because when I want a quicker game, I sometimes disable some of the more complicated challenges like heavyweight. However, I have played with some people who leave my tables while I am setting up the options or if certain challenges come up; this will allow me to minimize this problem by being able to quickly select the challenges I want.

Hello,

No, I won't merge heavy weight and light weight challenges. They aren't similar at all.

Concerning letter navigation, in fact, because of a bug, I can't currently provide both letter navigation and selection shortcuts like Shift+I and Shift+R. That's one or the other.
I haven't thought a lot about it, but for the moment, I think that Shift+I is more useful, because usually, you are going to activate all challenges except a few ones that you don't like.
A windows client update is needed to fix the bug, and as many things are ongoing, it won't be very soon. Remind me about this bug when the client will be in beta.

I'm quite against having the R key to tell all activated challenges, as it's going to be quite long. Maybe a less obvious key, or maybe open the list in a menu.

I'm not either very fan of providing presets, lists of preselected challenges, split challenges into categories, or whatever you name it.
Speed / non speed is quite unbalanced, as many challenges are based on speed, and beyond that, each player has his own preferences. It's difficult to come up with a meaningful sorting everybody will agree on. That's the same difficult question as splitting the create/join table menus into game categories.

Hello,

Concerning letter navigation, in fact, because of a bug, I can't currently provide both letter navigation and selection shortcuts like Shift+I and Shift+R. That's one or the other.

Doesn't that happen only with quick letter selection, not first letter navigation?
For instance, in the client forum interface, shift+Y/X/Z work just fine, even if you are unlucky that there is a post from a user starting with Y, that post will just gain the focus but the correct previous post will still get the vote.
In this case I think shift+I would just focus any challenge starting with the letter I, but the shortcut would still be performed. In the Exam we had this problem because that menu activated a choice as soon as the letter was pressed. I don't think we should do that for the challenge selection, it's anyway impossible, R is both rock paper scissors as well as Roulette, M is both mental math and musical duel, etc... We're also lucky enough that in English no challenge starts with I at the moment.

I'm quite against having the R key to tell all activated challenges, as it's going to be quite long. Maybe a less obvious key, or maybe open the list in a menu.

Yeah, shift+R could open a menu indicating all the available challenges. The main reason I stuck with the R key is because, again, this is a feature particularly useful for phones, and we already have a button to perform the R key action. Maybe just announce it when the game starts instead?
You could also make the logic a bit more advanced and always announce the shorter information. I.e., 3 challenges are enabled but 24 are disabled, announce the enabled ones prepended by a message like the following challenges are enabled:. 24 challenges are enabled but 3 are disabled, announce the disabled ones prepended by a message like the following challenges are disabled:.

Yes, it's a bit inconsistent, but I think the reasoning wouldn't be so bad in this case.

hello,
in my opinion, enabled chalange should just open in a list, this is in my opinion the simplest way to do this and the simplest for all users.
thanks for your interest on this topic.

I agree we should also remove longest word and anagrams chalange as many people don't know good English or its their second language. Most of them have problems with it I guess.

@aayushi I don't think those challenges should be removed, even though some might not enjoy them, there is always an option to disable them before the game starts.

As a scrabble player, I really enjoy those word challenges. I always leave that option open if I’m table master. Just thought you should know there are people like me who do play those so they’re not just sitting there decorating.
Hope this helps.

I agree with you now.

@emerald If you like word challenges, then maybe you should play a game with me because I also like those challenges. However, people who aren't good at them often claim that I am cheating when I win because I end up stealing their feathers. I am not cheating though; I just have a good vocabulary.

And what about being able to save your prefered challenges and it could ask if you wanna start the game with your prefered challenges or select them manually? same could apply for settings in different games, actually, since the alt o is no longer supported in all games.

HEllo,

You can now have a list of challenges with Shift+R.