Always give three clues

[za3k]

The current system is to give one clue for short words, and 3 clues for long words. Please give MAX(3, N-1) clues for all words, and just make it easier. One common problem is years: "1---" is a very bad clue for "birth of albert einstein".

[rawsonj]

Well, that's not really the algorithm.

From trivia.py:

22 def give_clue(self):
23 '''
24 Returns the masked string after revealing a letter and saving the mask.
25
26 If an answer has only 1-2 characters in it, no clues are given.
27
28 If an answer has 3-4, 1 clue is given.
29
30 If an answer has 5-6, 2 clues are given.
31 '''

I should have also stated "6 or more, 3 clues are given." This was decided upon basically from user feedback and testing. It's not perfect, but it works. My personal view is when you get a bad clue, such as in your example, you just got unlucky since the masking algorithm randomly chooses a position to unmask. Luck-of-the-draw is part of the game, so I'm not really inclined to change that part of the game.

It's also modelled after a BBS trivia program from the late 90's that had a very similar algorithm.

[za3k]

Sure. I've played this game for about 50-100 hours, and I'm telling you it's not really fun this way. If a bunch of other people have told you otherwise, ignore me.

[rawsonj]

Well, I've been running this game for the last 8 years and this was explicitly requested by the users of the server I run it on.

Feel free to fork it and do whatever you want to do, but this isn't a bug.