

Thousands Play a Single-player Game Simultaneously - toksaitov
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26240191

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danielweber
There are ideas that I see and say to myself "why didn't I think of doing
that?" This is one of them. Any of us could have made this in the past several
years but no one did so.

It's fascinating how the community must have to work to protect themselves
from griefers. It only takes a few commands to release a pokemon (which
happened a few days ago).

What's the threshold on parsing commands? Does it send a new command every
frame, or is the emulator smart enough to let the old command "finish" before
issuing a new one?

~~~
Heliosmaster
"anarchy" mode is, if i understand correctly, in such a way that all commands
are passed to the emulator. Then, simulating a real game boy, most of them are
discarded (think about pressing left-up-right-down in a gameboy, with a delay
of a few milliseconds.. only left would be registered and the other ignored).

democracy seems to be a system in which everyone votes and the command which
is more popular is executed (i don't know the timeframe).

to switch from one mode to the other 75% of votes are required in some
timespan

~~~
jader201
Yeah, for anarchy mode to truly work, it would be better to give 1 second or
so delays between each queued command. It seems pointless to have it send them
all at once, or only a few ms apart.

As for democracy mode, it seems to be sending a command once the top command
receives 100+ votes.

~~~
dmm
There is a huge lag on the stream, around 20-30 seconds meaning if you send a
command you are controlling the game 30 seconds later.

When democracy is in effect it takes votes for a time period(5-10 seconds?)
and then chooses an action.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon/comments/1y8o60/a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon/comments/1y8o60/anarchydemocracy_explained/)

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Osmose
There's a subreddit for discussing the stream:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon](http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon)

Of particular note is the live updates and google doc for current party
status. Make it way easier to check in on progress than watching the stream
itself.

(Praise Helix)

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KVFinn
People are really upset about the switch to a vote based input system.

I can sort of understand why. Progress now feels inevitable rather than
miraculous. There was places and menus where it is quite possible to dismiss
all your pokemon permanently, or use up all the currency in the game and not
be able to earn more. So the tension was quite high! Can we really risk going
into a building that would let us get rid of all the pokemon?

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bitwize
The main character of Pokemon, the game, is named "Red".

"Ash" is the name of the main character from the anime. I know they're
supposed to be the same guy, but serious hardcore players distinguish the two.

~~~
livingparadox
Actually, its not "hardcore players" who distinguish them. they are actually
are separate characters. Red is the protagonist in the game/manga. Ash only
exists in the anime, which is not always parallel to the game/manga.

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toksaitov
There is an interesting development. A five-second rule caused a riot (in the
Twitch chat and in the game). So the developer decided to add a system that
people can vote whether they want to pass commands directly to the emulator
(anarchy) or allow the system to select the next most popular command. Now
they can select an appropriate strategy based on a situation at hand.

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donquichotte
When I read the title, I thought they were writing about Flapmmo [1]!

[1][http://flapmmo.com/](http://flapmmo.com/)

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JonnieCache
Apparently they discarded their charizard (their starting monster, which is
generally the most powerful one throughout the game) pretty early on, and it
went downhill from there.

Most amusing. Reddit in general seems to be extracting an enormous amount of
fun from this. Makes me wish I was 12 again. Sort of.

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trendnet
All this can turn into a completely new genre of games: turn-based single-
player MMOs. The potential is rather interesting.

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heartbreak
It's a crowd-sourced fuzzer for Pokemon Red!

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nfoz
.... I was hoping this would be about the olympics ;)

