BidBot

[Logitude]

Hey, MaBi,

I've seen people trying to bid for nations in the chat at the beginning of a Nations match. A big problem is the amount of time it takes to go around the table. I wondered if there were some way to have a blind auction.

I couldn't think of any way to keep one player from seeing another player's bid before submitting their own, at least just using chat. The only option I saw was to have a third party collect the bids and then reveal them simultaneously.

So I decided to write a web app to do this. I call it, BidBot. I had never written a web app before, so this was a great learning experience. You can read more about it on the site as well as on BGG.

Questions:

Do you have any problem with this?

I realize this is tacking on functionality to MaBiWeb without being part of MaBiWeb. It also requires linking BidBot accounts to MaBiWeb accounts. I accomplish this by having people put a verification code on their forum profile page. Otherwise, this doesn't affect MaBiWeb.

Would you be interested in doing something like this within MaBiWeb itself?

As it is, I think the system is a bit cumbersome and honestly won't get much use. It requires players who want to use it to not select their nations until everyone has bid and then select them according to the auction results. And it requires people to remember that they need to subtract points from their score at the end of the match.

If this were part of MaBiWeb, it could be an option that would require players to bid before they are able to select their nations, and the bids could be included in the running score calculation.

Of course, it might turn out that this bidding system is flawed. Maybe players will settle on fixed values for each nation and bidding won't really add much to the gameplay. So I would hesitate to add a bidding system to MaBiWeb until it has been proven to be sufficiently interesting. It's just something to consider.

In case you're interested, here is the BidBot source code.

[MaBi]

Hi,
first of all, I have absolutely no problem with this. If it works I'm glad you have found a way to work around a missing functionality of this site.
And I know it would be better if this was a mabiweb option, there are many others too that have been requested (choice or exclusion of nations before the game, uniform card distribution). But as I have already said in some previous post, I am no longer working on mabiweb, just maintenance and bug-fixing.

[Logitude]

and I thank you for that. You're very responsive. I can only imagine the effort it took to create a web version of Nations among other games.

[Logitude]

Oh, hey, MaBi, is there any way to get to another user's profile without knowing their UID? As far as I know, this is the only way to access the forum profile of a user without being logged in as that user:

http://www.mabiweb.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=profile&mode=viewprofile&u=UID

Is there any way I can add different GET parameters to access a profile by username instead of UID?

[MaBi]

No, I don't think so.