This is pretty cool so I'm breaking radio silence to post it. Anonymous delivers again with a userscript to display a mahjong tile font using UTF-8 on /jp/ (or your site of choice, should you choose to enable it elsewhere). This should herald a golden age of in-depth mahjong discussion where one guy posts a hand and nothing else, and no one else cares. Or maybe not.
I'm making an interest check for a Friday night mahjong league, using osamuko.com as the main portal for communicating results and ponpalace.com for discussion. We've had various experiences at tournaments before, and I wanted to see if we can take it one step further. I'm willing to take care of the logistics and organization as long as there's enough people taking part.
To do this, I will need a few things from our faithful readers:
1- Your interest. Please send your intention of participating to ex@white-fang.info and I will compile the list of interested players. I'm looking for at least 12, preferably 16 or 20 to start up. Registered accounts are mandatory, and cannot be switched mid-season.
2- Your dedication. I'm looking for stable three-month commitments for Friday nights (every 2 Friday nights to be precise). I also want to avoid signing up ragequitters or people that are not likely to hang around. People in #mahjong have priority, or most likely will probably be the only people considered for now. If you think this restriction is unfair, let me know by e-mail.
3- Your time zone, and the range of time you can realistically play on a Friday night. My intention is to set up two parallel sessions on the same night split by a few hours. The soonest I can start something up would be 1700 Eastern (2100GMT, 2200 in Britain, 2300 in Europe), and my goal would be to have the other session about 2-3 hours later. You only have to take part in one.
The general information concerning the league is as follows:
- Every league night, you and three opponents play 4 games together. These games will all be played on Tenhou, with the standard mode we play with: East-South match, ari, red, fast.
- Scores will be taken as-is from Tenhou. The ante and spread are as follows: 20 oka, 10-20 uma.
- For the first season, the league will not be stratified, but may become as such afterward at our discretion (or more importantly, with your interest).
- Penalties: Late players have less than 5 minutes free. For every full 5 minutes beyond, the penalty applied is -9, distributed to your opponents equally. After 30 minutes, you will be considered as having forfeited. Forfeiture and no-shows will be penalized -90, half of that redistributed
to the waiting players, the other half to be held. This goes without mentioning, but anyone who has a forfeit match may receive some kind of sanction, and anyone who has forfeit more than once will not be re-invited to future matches.
I'm willing to do all the back-end work, so all we're missing is you.
TENTATIVE START DATE: July 2, 2010. Please contact me before June 15. Thanks!
This will be a short rant because I am drunk and incoherent. Osamu edit this in the morning.
It's extremely often I read about discussions of various mahjong clients/software, and someone will come out of nowhere and say "but it doesn't have ________!"
As a normal player who has never even considered programming a mahjong client or software in my life, I am as harsh a critic as any, perhaps even more so than the various people still playing single hand rounds for money on mahjongtime. But people whining because the client of your choice does not allow you to open riichi/ron on concealed kan for kokushi/insert annoying variant here never fails to annoy me.
Congratulations to Lorizean and our own ron^5 who recently made the cut to represent Germany in the upcoming European Mahjong Championships! We were unable to find any reports of this tournament anywhere online, even though it's been quite a few days since I was highlighted on IRC while asleep. I wonder if I will be hunted down by the European mahjong mafia for posting this.
Jokes aside, I don't think either of them really expected to make it through. We knew that two national tournaments would determine their eligibility to attend the Euros. It was only after most of them decided to skip the first one due to various obligations, that they found out actually they would need to play in both to get a realistic shot.
All of us have been playing quite a lot of Starcraft:Brood War recently for no reason. None of us actually played the game competitively (in any sense of the word) before - I recall reaching level 5-ish in the Terran campaign before giving up, back when I was twelve, and TRA is probably halfway through it now. Needless to say we are awfully awful.
Funny thing is, only because of the internet can we couple expert-level analysis and theorycraft from progamers and various internet pundits with our own abysmal mechanical control and execution. The result is a horrific comedy of errors that frequently makes me want to tear my hair out. And eat it.
Tsuno has implemented several new features to the Windows Tenhou Client.
Show wall
Various tile colours (In wall view mode. blue = dora indicator, green = tiles you will draw and orange = dangerous tiles)
You can view only view the walls from games that were played after 8am on 03/02
I've played on a lot of mahjong clients and the only other client I've seen with the ability to look at the wall in replays was Marujan but that client just isn't worth the enormous price it costs to actually play there.
I just noticed Tsuno has added some shuugi test play games but they seem to be windows client only at the moment.
While taking a break from feverishly constructing pon palaces and kan keeps, most of us play various strategy games. Osamu found a wordpress plugin that kind of does that blog-in-a-blog thing, so you can read while you read. To keep these posts from getting in the way of the normal content, you can only see them through this link.
Just dropping by for a second to tell everyone who doesn't know it already that the first official Mudazumo DVD got released recently. Hopefully, we'll see (non-gg) subs for this soon.
Trailer for the DVD
Minor update: Thanks to some recent fixing by Osamu you can now add comments on the guide pages themselves. Well, if the need to strikes you, of course, it-it's not like we did it so we can read your feedback!
Hello there! We have created a beginners guide to online mahjong, so please check it out! The links to it are in the sidebar. One thing we noticed a lot was beginners wanting information on how to start playing, and we had nowhere to point them. You could either give them huge collections of links like some kind of internet riddle game, or just tell them to play online until they figured it out for themselves. Fortunately now we have a simpler option, and you can start your journey right here.
In completely different news, a list of Yakuza 3 trophies has appeared on the internet. This list is lacking the mahjong trophy and some others (shogi, cabaret trophies etc). Hopefully this means they haven't cut out mahjong completely for whatever reason.
Also, in the Japanese blogosphere (笑) there has been talk about whether or not Tsunoda should allow people to watch dan games in real time, but I could reading this wrong.
Finally NISEMARU2009 has posted a trailer for mudazumo. You may watch it here
1. Always attack, unless you should be defending.
2. Always defend, unless you should be attacking.
3. If you are an expert like me, you can even try attacking and defending at the same time.
4. Only deal tiles that other players cannot use, or you will be helping them form their hands.
5. When other players are in tenpai, it is important that you do not deal into their hands.
6. Make other players deal into your hand by waiting on unexpected tiles.
7. Always score as many points as possible.
8. Win as many hands as you can.
9. It is silly to call tiles when you can always draw it yourself anyway.
10. Do not discard tiles nobody has discarded, or that anybody has discarded early, mid, or late game. If possible you can consider not discarding at all. But it's a double-edged sword. I can't recommend this to amateurs.
11. Always remember what your tiles look like, in case of sudden blindness.
If you are an expert player you are welcome to leave any of your own tips.
