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Announcing Starfighter

kalzumeus.com

61–70 of 418 posts

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#61
You should explain what the hell is a CTF the first time you use the acronym, not later.

Anyway I don't expect much from a known surveillance and Google shill (tptacek) and a Bitcoin irrational hater (patio11). These guys are insane in a bad way.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#62
post #34

Sounds very competitive, achiever-focused. Do all organizations want programmers who are viciously determined to win? Does that lead to society-efficient solutions? (To elaborate a little, Richard Bartle noticed four types of players of MUD. Achievers are just one.)

IIRC, The three other types are Explorers, Socialites, and Griefers

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#63
post #34

Sounds very competitive, achiever-focused. Do all organizations want programmers who are viciously determined to win? Does that lead to society-efficient solutions? (To elaborate a little, Richard Bartle noticed four types of players of MUD. Achievers are just one.)

We want the Explorers more than the Achievers, but we want to exploit Achiever impulses where they exist to keep the game interesting.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#64

Very cool! Signed up for an invite. Couple questions: 1) Is this a Stripe-like CTF that happens over some caffeine-fueled weekend? Or is it more of an ongoing Project Euler-style drop-in-and-solve type process? I don't think I could handle the former, but the latter sounds quite enjoyable and something I might do in my free time just to learn. I did that with PE for a while since it was fun to earn completion points.…

It is long-running and not timeboxed.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#67

Very cool! Signed up for an invite. Couple questions: 1) Is this a Stripe-like CTF that happens over some caffeine-fueled weekend? Or is it more of an ongoing Project Euler-style drop-in-and-solve type process? I don't think I could handle the former, but the latter sounds quite enjoyable and something I might do in my free time just to learn. I did that with PE for a while since it was fun to earn completion points.…

I loved the Stripe CTF. We're not going to adopt the time-boxed model from them. Starfighter : our CTFs :: Blizzard :: Blizzard games. There's no reason for us to ever turn them off. We'll likely have a particular flagship property but we have the option of dropping a new game on the market any time we want.

You don't have to rush through Starfighter games. Some people will, of course, just like there is a metagame to be the first guild on the server to complete a new raid. Players are gonna play. But if you want to pick up our CTF a year after release and just casually spend a few hours learning a new skill, you'll be able to do that, and we'll fully support you in it.

How do you make it so that the solutions aren't given away?

The same way you do it with math problems. Mastery of the subject material is the easiest cheat code.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#68
This looks fantastic. One possible wrinkle: I predict that, although top-performing Starfighters will be a diverse lot, they will lack "diversity". I hope the Starfighter founders have a plan to push back against the carping complainers a venture such as this is likely to attract. (My suggestion is to point out that CTFs are the ultimate expression of "Shut up and show us the code." [1])

[1]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6642

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#69
post #2

I'm all, involved? and stuff? You can, like, ask us stuff, I guess. Let me answer the most frequent questions we're getting right here: "CTF" stands for "Capture The Flag". Conventionally, it's a contest with a collection of "flags" each of which is guarded by a programming puzzle; teams of people compete to collect flags. What we're doing is not a conventional CTF, but if you want to get the flavor of what we're doi…

Congrats on this new venture, looks fun.

What do you expect will be the effect of this on hiring women? Do you have any relevant data from microcorruption (what % players were women)? It'd be great if Erin could also chime in.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#70

I’m curious as to how much this will select for people with free time. Many of the CTFs I’ve played in required a quite non-trivial amount of investment of time (which I didn’t mind, as they’ve been quite enjoyable), but there are certainly people who can’t afford n dozen hours to solve problems due to family/work/other obligations. I do think this is significantly better than the alternative, but I’m also concerned…

If this works the way they're hoping it will, I have to think it will be a huge time saver over:

-Updating a resume

-Contacting a recruiter

-Replying to recruiters

-Searching job descriptions

-Writing cover letters

-Tweaking previously updated resume

-Sending applications

-Maintaining a GitHub profile

-Working on open source projects that may or may not fit a future job description

-Spending 1-5 days interviewing

And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure we could come up with a few dozen more.

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