More Helpful Forms

We love numbers and statistics here at Jawaker, and we love solutions that are derived from studying the numbers. Based on some statistics that we gathered, and based on some research we performed on forms, we decided to revamp our two most important forms: the "Sign-up" and "Log-in" forms. We introduced the concept of guiding textual instructions that come up as the user fills up these forms in order to increase our sign up and confirmed user ratio.

Advertise on Jawaker!

After weeks of hard work, Jawaker is proud to announce the launch of the almost-ready-for-market campaigner. We have integrated the Jawaker campaigner into the website to allow companies to create an advertiser account on their own, buy credit online (via Amazon FPS) and create their very own targeted campaign.
The process has been simplified and automated. The client company only needs to upload one image and Jawaker will resize and crop the images on the back-end to fit on the back of cards and on the game table. Each company will also have statistics on their campaigns and will be able to set an expiry date for each campaign. Open an account and advertise with Jawaker now!

Experimental Features on Jawaker

We are very proud to announce one of our most "structured" deploys. Today we launched two feature sets in an experimental fashion. First, let us tell you about the feature sets.

Profile View
Our new design for Jawaker was based on building for the future. Part of that forward thinking was to make way for versatile and flexible functionality on the game table. We did this through the introduction of "layers" or "views". We initially had only one view, the "Game View", which allowed players to see information related to the game itself. The "Profile View" now allows players to see information about other players, including details about their rank, membership date, tokens and country. It is important to note that the game is fully playable in each and every view by design.

Admin View
This view allows every player to see who the game administrator is and also allows players to change their seat during the game in order to play with a preferred partner. Game administrators can also change the game parameters, such as time to play and game name, during the game. In addition, Game admins are able to kick any player out of the game (and thus banning them from that particular game) at any time.

The great thing about this new feature launch is that it will be opened up on a feature-by-feature basis to a select set of players. We will ask these players to provide us with their feedback and improve each feature set based on player feedback. We are particularly proud of this approach to adding new features, as it marks an important milestone in our goal to host a top-tier professional website.

Updating Ranking System

We have made yet another update to our ranking system. We didn't change anything fundamental, we just added more clarity that is aimed at giving our players more insight into the ranking system and engaging them more.
We added the segmentation of our ranked players into 13 subsets, from 2 to Ace (following the standard rank of cards in a deck). We also split the ranks into 3 levels: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. We hope that you like the new changes!

Jawaker 2.0

We made some pretty significant changes on Jawaker last week. It took us a while to write this post because we wanted to be sure that our major revamp was well received. We couldn't be happier with the outcome and the reception that we got from our users, so without any further ado, here are the major changes that constitute "Jawaker 2.0".

A new look and feel for the site
We changed the entire layout and markup of the site, including the home page. The changes are intended to simplify the DOM tree and to a more intuitive feel to the site as a whole.

Improved game table (with new descriptive icons)
The major page on the site, the game table, went through yet another makeover. We simplified and standardized the layout, including the addition of user-friendly and descriptive icons to represent certain important game events relating to each player.

Ability to turn off chat
Sounds simple enough :) Our players can now turn the game chat on and off as they please.

Play a card with one click
Players no longer need to double click on cards to play them. They can now hover over their cards and see the card of interest pop-out, in which case they click only once to play it.

Estimation is added
Seems like this news should be in a blog post of its own! However, the addition of Estimation as our latest game is long over due and we decided to add it to this round of updates.

Ability to search game by game name
It's a good sign that the number of games on the site is increasing, but we felt we had to do something to help users find the game they wanted to play in. So now from the game index players can type in the game name and the games are filtered automatically based on any subsequent letters in the game name that match the typed search.

Improved AI
We are always looking to improve the skill of the automatic Jawaker players that sit in for players. We have been statistically tracking the skill of our AI over time and we have made significant changes that have vastly improved how Jawaker plays during a hand.

Ability to play with one player only
Since we have become more confident in our AI, we felt that the time was right to allow games to continue with only one player on the table. This also has the added benefit of improving the percentage of games that are completed and avoids any backlash from players leaving a winning player and adversely affecting his rank.

Sound is played whenever a card is played
A small change that we feel adds more character to the game. You can now hear a sound of a card being played whenever a card is played on the table :)

We Improved Our Ranking System

After long and hard research, trial and error and a lot of creativity, we are finally ready to launch our updated ranking system. The system will retain the same "mark" concept as before (giving marks from 0% to 100% on a per game basis), but will calculate marks in a smarter way.
First of all, marks will be calculated on a per hand basis and will take the actual rank of the people you play against in that hand into consideration. The sophisticated algorithm also makes adjustments for mark inflation and rewards players for playing parts of a game rather than only rewarding players for playing in full games. We plan to continuously tweak our ranking algorithm based on the data that we gather and on user feedback.

Jawaker Launches New Ranking System

Jawaker has launched its new ranking system! Now players will be ranked on a game-by-game basis.

How does ranking work?

- You are only ranked based on games that you finish from start to end
- The better you play the more marks you will earn
- We also take into consideration the rank of other players in the game
- You must keep playing in order to retain and improve your rank. If you don't play in full games for a long time your rank will go down

Tokens will now only be given after the end of each round. They will not be given out at the end of the game and they will not influence your rank anymore. In the future, you will be able to exchange them for different things on Jawaker.

Winners of the Ramadan Trix Competition

The winners of the Ramadan Trix Competition have been announced. The top 4 players of the 64 players that qualified for the final round each won an Acer 15.4" laptop. The winner of the final table was sattam_77 and he also won the 42" Sanyo flat screen LCD television. The winners are shown above, from left to right: sattam_77, OmarTM, fadi_ru and Muaidbcn. Congratulation to all!

New Chat System

Most of the complaints that we have been getting lately were related to chat, and people misusing the chat box. We care about keeping Jawaker a friendly environment, and that's why we decided to revamp the whole chat system.

The chat is now a totally separate subsystem that can be managed independently of everything else; this gives us a lot of dynamicity, something we really care about in Jawaker. The chat now is filtered against a smart list of bad words that not only catches the words in their original format, but also catches variations of the word. The word is then replaced with stars. This list is constantly being enhanced and extended.

To protect our players from people who repeatedly misuse the chatbox, we implemented a policy by which a player who is reported for language misuse too often is banned from chatting for two weeks. So make sure you flag players who annoy you with their language by clicking the next to their name on the game table!

Another small adjustment, now you can see the chat as a viewer of the game, but you still can't participate :)

The Ramadan Trix Competition

We launched our second competition today. Our Ramadan Trix Competition will be bigger and a little different from our last competition. Players will compete to be one of the top 64 players, after which they will play AGAINST each other in an online elimination tournament. The last 4 players will each win a laptop and the winner of the final table will win a 42" flat screen LCD television. Good luck to all!

Winners Of The iPod Touch Competition

We are proud to announce the winners of the first iPod Touch Competition. Jawaker player "jumjum" won the first prize by achieving the highest score, and Jawaker player "kirk" won the draw for the second iPod Touch. The players were awarded the prizes by members of the Jawaker team in a ceremony marking the occasion. Congratulations to both players!

Jawaker Launches Facebook Connect Application

Ever since we launched our initial Facebook Application, we thought we needed to create something more viral for Jawaker. When we learnt of Facebook Connect, we thought that it would be the perfect fit for Jawaker and would give our users more functionality and benefit. Quite simply, a registered user would "connect" his Facebook and Jawaker accounts and give us permission to publish information on their news feed. The user is then asked to invite his Facebook friends that are not currently on Jawaker to join and play cards with him. The user will earn 10 tokens for every friend that signs up, and the friend will get 10 bonus tokens for signing up this way.

The nice thing about connecting your Facebook and Jawaker accounts will be that you will be able to publish your Jawaker achievements directly on Facebook, you will be able to see a more relevant Jawaker rank between your Facebook friends and you will eventually be able to locate your Facebook friends on Jawaker when they are online!

Three New Games: Tarneeb Syrian 41, Sbeetiya And Leekha

We launched three new games on Jawaker today, furthering our commitement to provide the widest range of multiplayer card games in the region. Tarneeb Syrian 41 is a variation of the popular Tarneeb. Sbeetiya is a regional variant of the game Hearts, and Leekha is a popular Lebanese card game that is similar to Sbeetiya. Enjoy!

Tarneeb Egyptian Is Launched

We are proud to announce the launch of yet another game. Tarneeb Egyptian, a variation on the popular game Tarneeb, was launched today. Tarneeb Egyptian differs from regular Tarneeb in that it requires players to choose the Tarneeb suit during bidding rather than after, and each suit has a different "power". Enjoy!

Trix And Trix Complex Partner Are Launched

Based on popular demand, we have launched the partnership versions of Trix and Trix Complex. These games are almost exactly the same as the non-partnership versions, except that the two players sitting opposite each other play as a team and their scores are added to each other.

Jawaker Launches First Competition

Today we launched our first online competition that will run until August 9 2009. Quite simply, any player on Jawaker can join the competition and play his entire Kingdom of Trix against the computer. The player with the highest score by August 9 2009 will win an iPod Touch. To enter the competition, the player must pay competition fees of 0.4JD, payable in stages of 0.2JD each and payable by sending an SMS to a predetermined short code. The SMS will automatically unlock the game and open up the competition for the player. This competition is only available in Jordan and as a Trix competition, however we plan to extend this platform to all Arab countries and to all games on our site.

One additional "twist" is that players are allowed to re-deal their cards up to a maximum of 3 times during the course of one entry. However, they must pay tokens (which are earned for free while playing on Jawaker) to re-deal the cards. This is synergistic with our core revenue model of selling ads on the back of cards, because it drives players to play more and earn more tokens and thus giving Jawaker an opportunity to sell more ads.

Jawaker is a special application that demands a special ad server. We had decided long ago that we would not serve our ads in the traditional online fashion, but would serve them using what we call "Cost per Hand", or CPH for short. The idea is that every CPH credit displays an ad (which consists of branding the back of all the cards on the table, branding the table cloth and a small text ad on the right on the page with a target link) to the player for an entire round (or "hand") of play.

We have been working long and hard to customize our our ad server so that potential advertisers can log into their designated accounts and create their own targeted campaigns on Jawaker. The Jawaker Campaigner does just that. Advertisers create a campaign and choose to target their ads based on: Country, Gender, Age and Time of Day.

Advertisers state the maximum number of hands to serve per day, write their ad text and target URL (in both Arabic and English) and upload their ad images. Jawaker will then approve the campaign and start serving the ads. The advertiser can freeze or delete the campaign whenever they want and can add as many campaigns as they like. Jawaker automatically deducts credits from the advertiser's total CPH credits as soon as an ad is served on a hand to the target audience. The advertiser will also be able to see statistics on their campaign such as how many impressions were served, how many clicks their ad got and their average implied click-through rate.

We plan to keep improving the Jawaker Campaigner based on client feedback. Currently, advertisers need to contact Jawaker in order to get an account and purchase credits, but we plan to role out an automatic sign-up system and online purchasing of credits in the near future.

Baloot Is Launched!

We are (very!) proud to announce the launch of Baloot as the newest game on Jawaker! Baloot is a popular Saudi Arabian card game and is the first of many games that the Jawaker team did not know how to play beforehand. The challenge in building Baloot started from gathering and understanding the rules all the way to implementing one of the most complex card games on the site.

Launching Baloot is a proud moment for us because it is an important step in realizing our vision of becoming a truly international website with card games that fit all local flavors. Enjoy the game!

Jawaker Trix And Trix Complex Advertising Campaign

Jawaker Italian Mafia - Play Trix, Trix Complex, Tarneeb, Baloot With Friends For Free Online by jawaker

Jawaker launches the first of many smart commercials to promote the site with relevant story lines about the game of Trix and Trix Complex. Enjoy.

Jawaker Community

Since our launch, we have noticed that we have created a thriving community of card game lovers. Our users have started making friends with people on the site and have requested the ability to see the games that their "favorite" users are playing in so that they can join them. We have launched a feature that does just that!

Users can now click on the star next to each player during a game to mark them as a favorite. They will be able to see a yellow star next to that user in the future and they will also be able to see (and filter) games with their favorite players from the main games page.

Unfortunately, some people also abuse the site and we have been receiving some complaints about certain players. Therefore, we also introduced the concept of "flagging" whereby a user can mark the 'X' next to each player and submit a complaint about that player to Jawaker for review. Users will also be able to see a red 'X' next to that user in the future as well as be able to see (and filter out) games with these "bad apples" from the main games page.

Faster Jawaker

In our efforts to ensure that you have a great time playing your favorite card game on Jawaker, we have been tinkering with how Jawaker works and we ended up with a major system redesign.

During peak hours some of our users complained about slow game play. Since we believe that performance problems should be solved with smart system architecture rather than by throwing more hardware at the problem, we undertook the big job of redesigning our system.

Jawaker now runs as a collection of cooperating services, each with a specific task. This has given us great flexibility in addressing particular problems on their own without affecting the system in general. Furthermore, this loose coupling of systems allowed us to write different components in different programming languages - using the right tool for the right job. So, for example, our web tier is still running on Ruby using the awesome Merb web framework, whereas the new in-game client/server communication bridge is written in Python.

The changes we made seem to have solved all the issues we were having. The new system has been in production for almost two weeks and we haven't received any slowness complaints since.

In the end we ended up with a system that can handle more players, while at the same time providing a smooth and seamless game play. We hope you like the new and improved Jawaker and continue to enjoy playing on Jawaker!

Jawaker Launches Radio Advertising Campaign

Jawaker Advertisement - Play Trix, Trix Complex, Tarneeb, Baloot With Friends For Free Online by jawaker

Jawaker launched a small radio campaign in Jordan to promote the site with this advertisement telling potential players that they can now play Trix, Trix Complex and Tarneeb online and for FREE with friends. Enjoy.

Jawaker And Gravatar

As part of our effort to stay focused on our core competency of providing the best gaming experience, we have decided to move our avatar management system to a third party provider, gravatar. Gravatar is a great web application that removes a lot of non-core clutter from the Jawaker application and we are glad to integrate them into our service.

Re-organizing Games

Jawaker has been growing, and we couldn't be more excited about that. But with growth comes responsibility on our part, responsibility to build a site that can scale well and can display information that maximizes user experience. We made a small change on the main games page that we think will go a long way in organizing the site and game play. Instead of categorizing our games by their state (i.e. new games, games in progress, etc.) we are now organizing them by game type. This way, players can click on the type of game that they want to play and then join any of the new games or games in progress of that game type. Enjoy :)

Game Table Upgrade

We have upgraded our game table to make it more user friendly for our users and to adapt to the needs of our advertising clients. We are focused on providing a free site for our users to enjoy, but we are also focused on providing an effective advertising platform for our clients. The major changes on the game table are:

- The bottom information bar was moved to the side at the expense of a shorter chat box. This means that users can now see more information in a more convenient way.

- In addition to our original ad serving model of branding the back of cards, we introduced a watermarked logo of the brand on the game table itself as well as a text ad on the right side of the table that pushes the message that the advertiser wants to relay to their audience. This text ad has a link to the advertisers target URL.

We feel that the new game table is an improvement on game play as well as a better non-obtrusive branding tool for advertisers.

Tarneeb (and more on the way!)

We have recently launched Tarneeb, another popular card game in the region.

Since day one, we knew that we didn't want to be a Trix-only website; that's not the idea behind Jawaker. The idea is to have a card game website for the Middle East that would include many of the most popular games.

This had a big effect on how we designed the core of Jawaker. The core is designed to allow us to add more games easily. We also found out that some parts of games are common among many games, such as partnering, bidding and doubling. These parts are made to be re-usable.

So in short, our system will allow us to add more games for you to enjoy! And the more games we add, the easier it is to add new games, since they will probably have common parts with previous games.

Server Upgrade

As it turns out Jawaker is getting more popular by the day; as a result our server is working hard to keep up against the onslaught of user requests. We always strive to provide seamless smooth game play, even at peek times, so we decided to upgrade our server to a faster one capable of serving more users more quickly. Furthermore, big servers are cool :)

Enjoy!

Jawaker Has Improved, So "Watch" Out

We had heard a lot of feedback from our users requesting to be able to watch games in progress. This feature made a lot of sense to us, so we decided to add it to all games in progress. Now our users, whether logged in or not, can click the "eye" next to each game in progress and immediately start watching the game. Logged in users can also join the game directly if there is an empty seat.

On another note, we also implemented a new tool tip. We are strong believers in improving usability, so we applied a tool tip that is intelligently placed according to your screen, comes up upon hover and "sticks" upon clicking :)

Something For Everyone

Variety is the spice of life. After deploying our recent changes to the game play that we thought were amazing eureka moments, we started receiving complaints from players who wanted to go back to the old style of play (i.e. without a timer and without people leaving and joining during the game). We were taken aback, because we thought that we had hit the nail on the head with our new changes. So the Jawaker team went back to the drawing board and decided to introduce choice to players when creating a new game. Players can now choose to play a game based on five parameters:

- With or without a timer, and how long the timer should be.

- With or without kicking out players when they fail to play a card for a specific number of turns.

- With or without the ability for players to manually leave during the course of the game.

- With or without the option for other players to join mid-game and continue games in progress.

- With or without the option for the computer to continue the game by playing in place of a player that has either left the game or has been kicked out.

To simplify things, we introduced two default styles of play, WITH all the options (which we call "non-stop") and WITHOUT all the options (which we call "humans only"). Our players also have the ability to customize their game and all this information is shown on the main games page for other players to decide whether they want to join or continue a specific game.

MySQL to PostgreSQL

Last week, we started noticing Jawaker becoming a bit slow. To investigate the problem, we built some custom tools and analyzed the logs. It turned out the game index is taking way too long to render! Digging a bit deeper, it turned out to be a particular SQL query.

We had earlier optimized most of our SQL queries, but we nevertheless tried our best to optimize this one even more. It wasn't clear why this query would take so much time; a very unreasonable amount of time actually. Fouad, being bitten by MySQL many times before, figured out that we might be better off if we try another system, in particular, PostgreSQL.

It took us one restless day to acquaint ourselves with Postgres, adjust the old queries for compatibility, create new schema, and move all the data. But it was worth it

At the end of the day, the problematic page was loading about 80 times faster! The server load dropped by a factor of more than 10.

Tick Tock And Joining Games In Progress

Here at Jawaker, we work to solve the issues of our players. Game play is of paramount importance to us. The number of games that are filling up with players and starting in on the increase, but our users have told us that there are players that cannot commit to complete a full game and are therefore leaving before the end of the game. This is frustrating for many players. We have also had feedback from people who admittedly state that they cannot commit to a full game, and would like to play for a little while only. Some of these users would not mind continuing a game in progress. So we decided to deploy a solution that would cater to all players.

First of all, we introduced a timer during which a player must act. If players don't act within the specified time, a card is played automatically on their behalf. This has the effect of speeding up the game play. If a user decides to leave the game, or if a card is played automatically on their behalf too many times, then that user is kicked out of the game and a computer takes over. The player's seat becomes empty so that he (or any other player) can continue the game and take over from the computer.

Play While You Wait

Today we deployed Solitaire on Jawaker as our first single player game. We are still focused on providing users with the more entertaining and engaging multiplayer card games, but we don't like to leave them waiting until the games start. We therefore added Solitaire as a game for users to play on the side.

You will notice that while playing Solitaire, the box on the right (where you would normally chat) will now get updated with information about the current games and allow you to directly join the game from within the Solitaire game. Your Solitaire game will, of course, be saved for you to go back to and complete at a later time if you wish.

Unmuffling Jawaker

Jawaker now has sounds! We hope this will make the games more entertaining :D.

We have, for the time being, attached sounds to the following events:

- A player joining a game
- Cards are shuffled and dealt
- The current hand is ready to start
- A new message is received on chat
- Someone has passed his turn (in a Trix hand)
- It is your turn to play
- An important card has been played (such as the King of Hearts in a King or Complex hand, or a Queen in a Queens or Complex hand)

To include the sounds, we have chosen to use Adobe Flash. A small hidden 1-pixel Flash movie is included in the page, and is used to dynamically load and play sounds. The Flash was built to be generic, which allows us to add more sounds without having to edit the movie itself.

One nice thing we did is make sure everything works OK if you don't have the Flash plugin installed. Well, you won't be hearing any sounds, but you will still be able to use all other aspects of the website without any problems. This complies perfectly with our goal of making Jawaker work without the need for any downloads.

A More Usable Jawaker

All the games, one page

User feedback over the past few weeks has helped us in improving the navigation of the website in order to drive players to the most important pages of the website in fewer and easier steps. After creating a new account on Jawaker, you will now only be 2 steps away from entering the game table page where you can enjoy playing any one of our games.

We now only have one page where users can create a game, join an existing one or go back to a saved game that they didn't finish. We categorized the listing of the games rather than having each set of games on a different page. We believe that the people who are visiting Jawaker to play a game are looking to do just that, and they wouldn't enjoy any confusing navigation between pages in order to figure out how to start playing.

An improved game table

We are focused on having a browser-based gaming experience without the need to download anything. You will notice a few subtle changes on the game table page that will go a long way towards improving user experience. Mixing attractive design elements, solid CSS and creative JavaScript were all part of the magic recipe that resulted in a new, improved and cross-browser compatible game table.

Jawaker Tokens

We have revamped our ranking system today to incorporate tokens. Jawaker tokens are different from points in that players will eventually be able to exchange them for different things on Jawaker. They will also be used for ranking purposes across all games on the site.

We have decided to use tokens in order to simplify the incentive to play on the site. Having tokens allows us to reward players for playing longer, rather than just rewarding them for finishing a game. Of course, players will get a bonus for finishing a game and will get even more tokens for winning.

Our plan is to introduce different virtual and real prizes that users can exchange their tokens for. We are excited with this new feature and we plan to work hard on pushing out all the new and exciting things that you can do with Jawaker tokens.