This is great! I was recently thinking of creating something like this for my own personal use to follow a bunch of YouTube channels.
Would you consider making visited links a different color? That would vastly improve the experience for me, since I could see at a glance which content I have not viewed yet, if any.
You might be interested in a site I created, Day Old Hacker News (http://dayoldhackernews.com). This shows Hacker News as it was exactly one day ago, so the comments are always full.
I wrote an online multiplayer game called Aberoth: http://aberoth.com. I released the first version to the world in January 2010, but the game did not have many features initially, and there was no way to buy anything. Toward the end of 2012 I felt good enough about the product to start selling memberships.
One way to intuitively believe the answer is to imagine there were 100 doors, you picked one, then the host opened up 98 of the other doors, revealing goats. Switching would be the obvious answer in that case.
The problem with emergence in MMOs is that once an emergent trick is found, it becomes an exploit, and then the emergent behavior has to be eliminated somehow, for the good of the game.
For example, in the MMO I am creating, you can catch bats, hold them for a while, and then they become your pets (if you don't hold them long enough, they remain wild). Some people gathered up hundreds of bats, then released them in a small room. When other players came into that room, they were swarmed and die. After letting the trap sit for a while, they would return, cast a fear spell to disperse the bats, and then collect the loot.
It was a cool trick, and probably super fun for the players involved. But, if I left the exploit in, it would be happening all the time, and would wreck the game for everyone else. In single player games, the worst a player can do is beat the game using an exploit, which is not necessarily bad.
OVH prices are so amazing, I wonder if they must be running at a loss. I use them to run Aberoth (http://www.aberoth.com), and I always keep my eye out for a better deal, but nothing comes close for high RAM servers. They also seem to be continuously sold out: http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers.xml, so there is clearly a huge market for these cheap servers. I wonder why no one else seems to be able to compete close to their price point.
Having all players move on when there is a tie has always baffled me. If any three contestants ever agreed to always lose down to the lowest score in final Jeopardy, they could all win forever until the rules changed.
Thanks for pointing this out! I went ahead and registered and disputed the 'threat', so hopefully this warning will go away once they have manually reviewed the site.
Basically, the only thing sent to the server are mouse clicks and keystrokes, which should make cheating difficult. In the past, people have used macros or programming to flood the server with mouse / key input, which caused performance issues. I now rate limit input, so if too much is sent too quickly it is just thrown away.
I'm not sure what the causes this. I always get this error when trying to run Aberoth from Apple stores (and I have tried 3 different stores). I can't debug or fix the problem because I have not seen it anywhere else. The Java version might work.
Wow, thanks for the encouragement! I am indeed making a business out of this, and so far I sell memberships, character customizations, vault upgrades, and name changes. The income has not reached "quit my day job" yet, but I am still actively developing and marketing the game, and I'm hopeful for the future! Any ideas on how I could "spread this far and wide"?
I've considered a Kickstarter, but I'm not sure exactly what I would use the money for. Perhaps some professional artwork or music. I am trying to get Aberoth Greenlit on Steam, however. You can see it at: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=930412...
I first released the game in 2010. There was originally only one small area to run around in, and it was running off my DSL line, so it could only support 5-10 players. Also, the client was only available as a Java applet. Websockets made it possible to create a Javascript client. There is also a mobile version available which includes controls for touch.
Would you consider making visited links a different color? That would vastly improve the experience for me, since I could see at a glance which content I have not viewed yet, if any.