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I though Stockfighter was a cool idea, and was incredibly excited to try it when it launched. Unfortunately the site was unreliable, winning felt random, and in

I though Stockfighter was a cool idea, and was incredibly excited to try it when it launched. Unfortunately the site was unreliable, winning felt random, and in the end I'm not sure that I would have had faith that it was a good litmus test for developer skill. It was a great effort, but I feel like it never really caught on and that a community never really developed around it. As a comparison, I found Elevator Saga [1] to be much more approachable and fun. [1]: http://play.elevatorsaga.com http://play.elevatorsaga.com

nsxwolf 10y ago
I had fun with the first few levels, but like you I noticed little difference with better or worse strategies - it all felt pretty random. As I got into the harder stuff, I quit because it just felt like work for me and the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is more coding.
elptacek 10y ago
Did you attempt the second set?
- nmalaguti 10y ago
  The embedded device levels? Or were there levels after 6 for stockfighter? I played around with stockfighter in December/January and in July-ish. While the service was more stable in July, the lack of documented endpoints for level selection or the back office was still a bit of a turn off. There were a few things I found most frustrating: - the trading bots concentrated most of their activity in a 5-10 second chunk every 60 seconds. This made it hard to "react" to trading behavior in a meaningful way throughout the "day" when my latency was in the 150ms+ range. I think this was supposed to be part of the challenge, but instead I found it to be an odd approach to getting people engaged. - I spent a lot of time on level 2 trying to code a bot that could win every time. Maybe I just don't understand HFT (very likely) but I often felt powerless to impact the result and instead was a victim of the whims of the bots. I could beat the level, often handily if the bots traded my way, but I never reached a point where I felt my actions were meaningful. It felt less like an exercise in good engineering and more like a game of chance. And maybe that was meant to reflect the real world, but it certainly didn't feel like a game where I was actually increasing in skill as I progressed. In reality, I don't think CTF style games are really for me. But I do love a good engineering challenge, and really loved the blog posts about how everything was put together. I wish I could have been doing that work instead of trying to outwit the system. Building a system that fulfilled an API might have made me feel more satisfied than the other way around.

nsxwolf 10y ago

I had fun with the first few levels, but like you I noticed little difference with better or worse strategies - it all felt pretty random. As I got into the harder stuff, I quit because it just felt like work for me and the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is more coding.

elptacek 10y ago

Did you attempt the second set?

nmalaguti 10y ago
The embedded device levels? Or were there levels after 6 for stockfighter? I played around with stockfighter in December/January and in July-ish. While the service was more stable in July, the lack of documented endpoints for level selection or the back office was still a bit of a turn off. There were a few things I found most frustrating: - the trading bots concentrated most of their activity in a 5-10 second chunk every 60 seconds. This made it hard to "react" to trading behavior in a meaningful way throughout the "day" when my latency was in the 150ms+ range. I think this was supposed to be part of the challenge, but instead I found it to be an odd approach to getting people engaged. - I spent a lot of time on level 2 trying to code a bot that could win every time. Maybe I just don't understand HFT (very likely) but I often felt powerless to impact the result and instead was a victim of the whims of the bots. I could beat the level, often handily if the bots traded my way, but I never reached a point where I felt my actions were meaningful. It felt less like an exercise in good engineering and more like a game of chance. And maybe that was meant to reflect the real world, but it certainly didn't feel like a game where I was actually increasing in skill as I progressed. In reality, I don't think CTF style games are really for me. But I do love a good engineering challenge, and really loved the blog posts about how everything was put together. I wish I could have been doing that work instead of trying to outwit the system. Building a system that fulfilled an API might have made me feel more satisfied than the other way around.