Please use this thread to give feedback on HexRoller!
To react to the first things I was able to read about the game, we have to agree that some challenges require not only the correct strategy but also a bit (or sometimes a lot) of luck. That is the nature of the game. Some rolls are better than others and you will be more or less lucky each time. We have played all challenges ourselves, recorded all scores and seeded them accordingly. We can assure you that most of them can be done in a couple of tries. Getting 3 stars is of course significantly trickier, but even then, we believe that it is quite feasible to get them in most challenges without the need to try 100 times.
The challenges are designed so as to force you to look at the game differently each time. You should be learning new skills in each of them. If you still struggle with a challenge, I suggest trying the training or online mode and play a good number of games. You'll get experience and probably learn important skills for the challenges.
The question has been raised as to why the game is not 2-player rather than solo. It was a tough choice and personally, I was more rooting for the 2-player variant until I was convinced otherwise. It was a tough call. Given the randomness of the game, being able to compare scores with another player who got the same rolls makes perfect sense. But if you play the online version (for rating), the randomness will even out over a good number of games. So it is not so much of a problem. Your task remains to score as much as you can with what rolls you are given each time.
I want finally to tell you about the rating system. It works here exactly as for Raging Bulls. After each online game (and training too actually, but these games don't count), a performance is computed, translating your score into a rating-comparable number (=performance). If your performance on an individual game is higher than your current rating, your rating increases. You should have no problem increasing your rating in the first 20-30 games as the start rating (1400) is quite low.
Because there are 2 sheets, the performance is computed differently for each of them. Here are the formulas:
Grid 8: Perf=Score*40-500
Grid 7: Perf=Score*40-800
I write this from memory so this may be inaccurate, but in any case, for the same score, you will get 300 more for grid 7 as it is much easier to score with this one. The publisher told us 10 more points were scores on average on grid 7. Our own records showed 7. So we settled for a 7.5 advantage. Before leaving for the holiday, I looked at actual stats and the gap was only 2.5 points. It is still early to say though as the number of games was still quite low (about 65). In any case, we will adjust the gap according to the actual stats as soon as we get the change to access our machines again (unfortunately our remote access is now failing which means we can't update anything now).
Finally the figure that is displayed in the ranking page next to the rating of each player is the equivalent score computed from your rating, meaning the score you need to get to keep your rating stable. Another good way to look at it is to consider that this is your average score (which is basically correct if you have played a lot of games). I have just corrected it so that it takes into account the 2 sheets. The formula for computing is is now correctly this one:
Rating = equivalent score*40-650 (650 is the average of 500 and 800 as you many notice)
I hope this answers some of your questions. Please let us know how you are doing with the game!
