RE: Interactive Battle Tournament - the building of a Steemit game
While I am no expert on web programming and @aussieninja's and @culgin's arguments do have some merit, I do believe that you can keep the PvP game on Steemit and not have to resort to a separate front-end. Combat doesn't need to be always resolved in real-time.
I see this PvP game as being similar in technical complexity to a game called "Pairplay" that ran for several months on Steemit. Pairplay was a fully automated game that posted 3 games a day. Players would "activate" a game by upvoting the appropriate game post, receive 2 cards, and then reply to the post with a command to hold or change their cards. Pairplay would then change cards if necessary, and then confirm players' final results and frequently update the game leaderboard. The delays between a player decision and the processing of that decision in Pairplay were similar to the delay between a player initiating combat and the final resolution of that battle in the PvP game tests done so far.
In the event of multiple players trying to activate a game of Pairplay at nearly the same time, Pairplay would just process them all in a single batch and make one comment for them. If multiple players tried to make decisions at the same time, those decisions would be queued and then processed and replied to first in, first out.
With the PvP game, here you have the advantage of not having to deal with a leaderboard -- so you'll never need to update the status of more than two players at a time. My opinion is that you'll be okay if you have a queuing or batch system in place to deal with multiple players trying to play at the same time (which I don't expect to happen with any regular frequency).
There is one fringe case to think about though: should the PvP game catch on like a wildfire and there's suddenly a huge influx of people who want to play -- in this situation @wizardzap's RCs may not be able to keep up and having an off-site front-end could help. As it currently stands at the time of this post, I think @wizardzap can handle 55 or so battles a day (at 2 comments per battle) -- and in the current environment I don't expect to be seeing anywhere near that amount.
Thanks for the detailed and considered response.
You have mentioned at least once previously that not all games are created equally. The unique thing about IBT is it was created to work within the confides of the Steemit environment itself.
I do think aussie has a point though, there are limitations within the Steemit environment - it is predominantly a blogging platform after all. I think this in itself will always limit the number of players for anyone wanting to create games on it. I must say though games on Steemit run from bots, seems a far better use of bots then paid upvote bots, yet these will always attract the numbers and draw a profit for the owners, benefiting them few and gradually destroying the value for the many - as pay for votes is a pay to win system after all...and anything that you pay to gain, always has a cost.
IF a key objective was to get as many players as possible and/or turn a profit then clearly a game must be 'off platform' to be successful. This was never an objective of IBT. It was always just a fun thing to play on the platform.
Still, if the demand is for more games off platform that run on 'steem' then it makes sence to put more energy this way - I could be convinced :)
Lets see if any other IBT players come forward with views.
Cheers