I know Warfish had plugins, which let the community write and share little scripts for calculating things like luck, the board state, and similar things.  Is there a plan to add hooks for something like this at some point (or do the hooks already exist?)?  It seems like that could potentially offload some of the work that Tom has on his plate to other members of the community.

Hopefully they will just be integrated into the site. I think 11s was able to do it on WF more easily because nothing ever changed there, with this site updating so frequently I assume it may be more difficult to keep up to date if written (at least that's the way I understand partly why the Turn Poller was waited on for a bit before released).

To be honest I'm not really sure how to approach this so happy to take ideas on this one - perhaps a Plugins tab on the settings page with a list of available plugins? I'd rather have the plugins hosted here on a major provider's site though as it was annoying on WF having plugins unavailable because someone decided to pull the plug on hosting.

What other plugins are people interested in?

Luck.

Mmm plugins.

Well you got your browser extension plugins that handle info that you need when you are not on the site. I haven't been able to think of anything other than 'is it your turn' that would fit in this category. (BTW, Google Chrome now has extension support in the latest release (non-beta) version, so I've been poking around with 'porting' the turn-poller to Chrome, which is basically the next Firefox, and yes I used nested parens sorry).

Then you have what I did with scripting on WF, which was only really an option because the site was static. I can't think of any compelling reason to use this sort of scripting to modify the site's output when Tom is making a billion changes a day.

Then you have the WF plugin style hosted plugins. I would actually argue against setting up the same sort of system. Basically you had 5 different luck analyzers, a high contrast one, a last-turn diagrammer, and a bunch of other random crap. All hosted in various places introducing additional points of failure. An 'API' that was clunky and had out of date information (like not showing cards for teammates in some instances when the cards were visible on the Details page).

If anything, Tom could make some json or XML board/status info available and let anyone who wanted to make a 'plugin' do so, but don't waste the effort designing a plugin hosting environment.

Instead, if someone writes something cool using the API spend the time to incorporate it into a logical place within the site with a credit line given to the author.

I personally would like to do a luck analyzer, although I just haven't had enough time to devote to WG lately. I'm already behind on the one super secret project I've been asked to do... =] (P.S. tom sending you a msg about that now)

I think IRoll11s is right, a simple way to access board state and possibly history data could be sufficient. One thing I've been thinking about for a little while is a little plugin that calculates the expected number of units required to eliminate each player. During most games, especially on the standard Risk boards, I will start with the number of territories a player controls, and add to that 0.5 for each single unit territory and 1 for each unit defending a non-single unit territory. That gives me a pretty reasonable idea of whether or not I'd succeed in eliminating a player, but a plugin could probably go even further and calculate the number of units you'd need to have to have a 50% chance of eliminating the player, a 75% chance, a 90% chance, and so on.

Aside from that (and perhaps as a starting point), it could be helpful to know the chances of capturing a territory given the unit counts in the attacking and defending territories. It's pretty easy to know with standard d6 vs d6 (I think the ratio is about 6 attackers lost for every 7 defenders), but it's a little murkier when you have border modifiers and such.

(Of course, maybe all of this is too much information for the player to have without any effort on their part.)

Norseman wrote: all of this is too much information for the player to have without any effort on their part

I tend to side with that sentiment. However, it would be nice to have a roll-simulator available on the site, which would simulate individual or chains of attacks. User would specify number of territories and number of units on each territory in the chain (could just be a comma-separated list of numbers representing the units on each territory), and the sides of the attacking and defending dice. That way if people wanted, they could enter in the specifics of the scenario they're faced with, but the player would have to come up with his own plans of attack to test.

Norseman wrote:

I think IRoll11s is right, a simple way to access board state and possibly history data could be sufficient. One thing I've been thinking about for a little while is a little plugin that calculates the expected number of units required to eliminate each player. During most games, especially on the standard Risk boards, I will start with the number of territories a player controls, and add to that 0.5 for each single unit territory and 1 for each unit defending a non-single unit territory. That gives me a pretty reasonable idea of whether or not I'd succeed in eliminating a player, but a plugin could probably go even further and calculate the number of units you'd need to have to have a 50% chance of eliminating the player, a 75% chance, a 90% chance, and so on.

Aside from that (and perhaps as a starting point), it could be helpful to know the chances of capturing a territory given the unit counts in the attacking and defending territories. It's pretty easy to know with standard d6 vs d6 (I think the ratio is about 6 attackers lost for every 7 defenders), but it's a little murkier when you have border modifiers and such.

(Of course, maybe all of this is too much information for the player to have without any effort on their part.)

I always considered being able to do this and combine it with gut feeling is what makes people good or not. Why even play if the machine does most of the work for you. It's like going to Vegas to play Blackjack with a little cheater card next to you. Might as well have a robot play your hands according to the odds.