Draft your cube at CubeTutor.com!

[Ben Titmarsh]

I felt this was a big enough feature to announce it on a new thread.  Draft cubes here:

Ben's Cube: http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/1
Simon's Cube: http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/5
Tom's Cube: http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/7
Kieran's Cube: http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/12

You can pick cards and you'll see them on the right as you do so.  You're actually playing againt 7 bot drafters who basically just force two colours each and take the occasional artifact/land.  Each colour will be drafted by at most 3 bot drafters so it kinda mimics what should end up happening in a real draft.  They pick at random a card from their colours.

As usual only minimal testing has been performed, please do report any bugs and let me know what you think!

[Simon O'Keeffe]

This is really cool Ben!

Only thing I've noticed so far is a display issue where previously displayed cards remain on the screen. See image.

Are you planning on recording the human picks to help teach the bots?

[Ben Titmarsh]

I've noticed this display issue too.. it's really annoying me but I will get to the bottom of it. Only thing that I can suggest for the min is to give it a second after the pack has loaded before choosing a card.  I think it's when a pick it made too quickly that we see this problem

EDIT: Just realised this also happens when you make a pick and hover over another card in the fraction of a second before the next pack loads.

Some sort of bot learning could be good!  Would just make it a little slower as we have to go to the database after every pick but I will have a think about how feasible this is.

[Simon O'Keeffe]

I guess a simple approach would be to just assign the pick position to each card when picked by a human, then divide that by the total times picked to get it's average pick position, and then the bots can refer to that when deciding a card in their colours. Obviously this will depend on a large volume of human picks to seed the system to get enough data to be useful to the bots.

Ben Titmarsh said:

I've noticed this display issue too.. it's really annoying me but I will get to the bottom of it. Only thing that I can suggest for the min is to give it a second after the pack has loaded before choosing a card.  I think it's when a pick it made too quickly that we see this problem

EDIT: Just realised this also happens when you make a pick and hover over another card in the fraction of a second before the next pack loads.

Some sort of bot learning could be good!  Would just make it a little slower as we have to go to the database after every pick but I will have a think about how feasible this is.

[Ben Titmarsh]

Yeah that would be the most straightforward way of doing it.  The pick orders would have to be contextual to the cube (obviously Sliver Queen is a bomb in Sliver Cube but not necessarily elsewhere).  Plus it would rely on people actually making "correct picks" rather than messing around with it or going rogue.  It might just not be worth the extra effort and latency given this is more of a test-run type feature, but I'm not sure.

I've put in a workaround for the display issue.  It should be a bit better now.

Simon O'Keeffe said:

I guess a simple approach would be to just assign the pick position to each card when picked by a human, then divide that by the total times picked to get it's average pick position, and then the bots can refer to that when deciding a card in their colours. Obviously this will depend on a large volume of human picks to seed the system to get enough data to be useful to the bots.

Ben Titmarsh said:

I've noticed this display issue too.. it's really annoying me but I will get to the bottom of it. Only thing that I can suggest for the min is to give it a second after the pack has loaded before choosing a card.  I think it's when a pick it made too quickly that we see this problem

EDIT: Just realised this also happens when you make a pick and hover over another card in the fraction of a second before the next pack loads.

Some sort of bot learning could be good!  Would just make it a little slower as we have to go to the database after every pick but I will have a think about how feasible this is.

[Kieran Symington]

This is awesome! Obviously the bots have no idea what they're doing since they just pick randomly, which lets some ridiculous stuff go around super late (nice 13th pick Jace TMS) but it definitely gives a feel for what the draft decks will look like. Good work!

I think you should definitely increase the frequency at which they pick colorless cards since a lot of the really good cards are colorless and the bots very rarely seem to pick them, leaving you with super-late Duals, Swords and Jittes.

[Ben Titmarsh]

Done.  Bots now shuffle the pack and pick either a) the first card in their colours or b) the first artifact/land they come across with 50% chance (increased from 33%).  Given there are 7 bots doing this, significantly more colourless cards will be taken.

Also made the menu a bit more prominent and menu like!

Kieran Symington said:

This is awesome! Obviously the bots have no idea what they're doing since they just pick randomly, which lets some ridiculous stuff go around super late (nice 13th pick Jace TMS) but it definitely gives a feel for what the draft decks will look like. Good work!

I think you should definitely increase the frequency at which they pick colorless cards since a lot of the really good cards are colorless and the bots very rarely seem to pick them, leaving you with super-late Duals, Swords and Jittes.

[Thomas David Baker]

Cool stuff Ben.  I should have been in U but I like my deck anyway ... this is cube after all :)

[Thomas David Baker]

Had a sign in error just now but I just signed in again and it worked.

Now I have a feature request - more than one cube!  I want to put Graveyard Cube up now that you have nifty features but I'd have to sign up again to do that right now.  Might be a niche feature :)

[Ben Titmarsh]

This error you speak of is driving me insane Tom.  It's basically something in my app is keeping a db connection open (I have literally checked them all a thousand times).. when the site is inactive Mysql closes the connection and the next request attempts to reuse the connection and fails.  Subsequent ones work fine.  I will look at multi cube support.. shouldn't be too hard!

[Ben Titmarsh]

I think I've got this fixed now (although there are about 8 commits to the code base saying the same thing already!).  Please let me know if you get the exception where the site blows up and you see the red/blue/yellow text.

[Ben Titmarsh]

As you guys know, a big part of cubing for me is collecting great looking foil/alternate art/signed/generally unique cards.  Therefore, this side of things (for me at least) should be reflected on Cube Tutor.

I've put in a new feature (although it's not quite available for other people's cubes yet) to upload scans of the cards in your cube and these will replace the default Gatherer ones.  In my cube, for example:

Arbor Elf

Bonfire of the Damned

Birds of Paradise

Black Sun's Zenith

Iona, Shield of Emeria

All 5 Swords

etc

I've added about 115 of these custom scans today.  So when you draft my cube, look at the visual spoiler or hover that card name anywhere on the site (for my cube only) the custom image will now come up.

Seeing the odd foil, altered, signed card makes the whole thing feel thoroughly more cubey to me!

Let me know what you think and if you guys would be interested in this at all.

[Nick Lovett]

3rd pick, hmm, foily Jace TMS or altered art Sword of FIre and Ice....