There is a fun thing you can do in Roster Relay that also turned out to be a pretty good way to break the scoring system.
Imagine you've successfully worked your way onto the 2007 Phillies.
And for some reason, your brain contains an unreasonable amount of information about the 2007 Phillies.
You remember the stars.
You remember the bench.
You remember the relievers.
You remember the guy who played 27 games and whom nobody outside southeastern Pennsylvania has thought about since the second Bush administration.
Great.
Roster Relay is basically built for this exact sickness.
So you start entering them.
One guy.
Another guy.
Another guy.
Every one of them is legitimately connected because they were all on the same roster.
Their faces keep appearing.
The obscure ones have nice high Rarity scores.
This is fun.
There was just one problem.
The game was also rewarding you for it.
A lot.
The scoring system was doing exactly what I told it to do
The original idea behind Roster Relay scoring was pretty straightforward.
You have two endpoints.
You build a chain between them.
Fewer links is good.
Using obscure players is also good.
So the game tracks both Links and Rarity.
Makes sense.
Then you encounter our hypothetical Phillies expert.
Instead of using one player from that roster to move toward the destination, they can keep adding more players from the exact same team and season.
The visible chain gets longer.
The Rarity total keeps growing.
Depending on how the scoring is calculated, the route can start looking more impressive even though the player hasn't really gone anywhere.
They've just discovered that I accidentally created a rewards program for naming the entire bullpen.
Which, again, is fun.
It just shouldn't make you look like you found a more difficult route.
This is the difference between a valid move and a meaningful move
Every player in that sequence really is connected.
Nothing is factually wrong.
If Player A and Player B were both on the 2007 Phillies, that's a valid teammate link.
Then Player B and Player C were also on the 2007 Phillies.
Also valid.
You can continue like that for quite a while.
But from the perspective of the actual puzzle, you are effectively standing in the same place.
The interesting unit isn't really:
How many player names can I string together?
It's:
How many distinct roster connections did I use to get from one endpoint to the other?
That distinction wasn't obvious enough in the first scoring system.
Once I saw the loophole, though, it was pretty hard to unsee it.
I didn't want to ban the fun part
The easiest fix would have been:
You already used the 2007 Phillies. You may not enter another player from that roster.
I didn't like that.
Because remembering another obscure guy is still fun.
That's a big part of why I made Roster Relay.
If you're sitting there thinking:
*Wait, wasn't this guy on that team too?*
I want you to be able to type the name.
And if you're right, I want the player card to appear.
I want you to see the headshot.
I want you to see the Rarity score.
I want you to get the little satisfaction of proving that yes, apparently that extremely specific piece of sports knowledge really was still hiding somewhere in your brain.
So the behavior itself wasn't the problem.
The incentive was.
That led to the compromise I still like best:
Let people make the move. Just don't let the repeated roster pad the score.
Links now mean something more specific
The scoring logic was changed so a specific team-season only counts the first time it advances your scored route.
If you use the same roster again, the player can remain in the visible chain, but that repeated team-season doesn't add another scored Link.
The Rarity calculation follows the same principle: players reached through a roster connection you've already scored don't keep increasing the scored rarity of the route.
So suppose your route looks something like:
Player A
↓ 2007 Phillies
Obscure Phillie #1
↓ 2007 Phillies again
Obscure Phillie #2
↓ 2007 Phillies again
Obscure Phillie #3
↓ different roster
Player B
You can still see all of those players.
But the scoreboard understands that those three Phillies transitions did not represent three separate leaps through sports history.
You spent some time hanging out in Philadelphia.
Then you moved on.
The full route still matters
This was another part I didn't want to lose.
Roster Relay stores and displays the actual path the player took, not some cleaned-up version that pretends the extra names never happened.
That matters because the route is part of the fun.
Maybe your path was efficient.
Maybe it was bizarre.
Maybe you found a player nobody else used.
Maybe you intentionally took the scenic route because you remembered someone funny.
The current implementation preserves those players in the route while calculating Links and Rarity using the anti-padding rules.
That feels right to me.
The game doesn't need to slap your hand and say:
Stop having fun incorrectly.
It just needs the scoreboard not to be fooled by it.
Scoring systems create behavior
This is one of those things that feels obvious after you've run into it.
If you give players points for something, some of them are going to do more of that thing.
That doesn't require anyone to be malicious.
You don't need a team of professional Roster Relay exploiters coordinating on Discord.
People just notice incentives.
If adding an obscure player increases your score, why wouldn't you keep adding obscure players?
I probably would.
And once a game rewards behavior that isn't really aligned with the challenge, the player has an awkward choice:
Play in the way that feels most fun, or play in the way that produces the best number.
Ideally those are close to the same thing.
The original scoring had allowed them to drift apart.
This comes up in a lot of daily games
One reason I care about this is that I know what happens when I find a repeatable strategy.
I did it to myself with Wordle.
For a while I used basically the same two opening words every day.
That was a strategy.
It may even have been a good one.
But eventually I noticed I wasn't really approaching the puzzle fresh anymore.
I was running the routine.
Roster Relay has similar risks.
Use the same giant connector every day.
Exploit the same roster repeatedly.
Figure out the one behavior that optimizes the score and stop searching your memory in interesting ways.
None of those things are cheating.
They're just signs that the scoring or puzzle design may be pushing too hard toward one style of play.
And I don't really want Roster Relay to have one style of play.
There still isn't one “best” route
This is also why I haven't tried to collapse everything into one giant score.
Fewer Links is good.
Higher Rarity is good.
Those goals can conflict.
A three-link route using famous players might be extremely efficient.
A five-link route through three guys you haven't thought about since 2009 might be more entertaining.
Which is better?
I don't know.
More importantly, I don't think the game needs to know.
You can decide what you're chasing that day.
Maybe you're trying to find the shortest possible connection.
Maybe you're trying to make your friend say:
How the hell did you remember that guy?
Both are valid ways to enjoy the game.
The scoring rules just need to make sure the numbers mean what they claim to mean.
There is something funny about taking this so seriously
I am aware that we are now several hundred words into an explanation of why repeatedly naming members of the same baseball roster should not inflate a score in a free browser game.
Nobody asked the Federal Reserve to review this policy.
But little inconsistencies like this bother me.
Games are more immersive when the rules behave the way you expect them to.
If a player finds something clever, the game should reward it.
If a player remembers someone obscure, the game should acknowledge it.
But if the scoring system says a route became substantially more difficult because you named six people who were all sitting in the same dugout, something feels off.
And once you notice something like that, it's hard to leave it there.
The fix ended up preserving more than it removed
That's probably what I like most about this change.
The goal wasn't to restrict the player.
It was to make the score more honest.
You can still enter the obscure guy.
You can still see his face.
You can still get the satisfaction of remembering him.
You can still build an absurdly long route if that's how you want to play.
The game just knows the difference between:
I remembered another player
and:
I actually moved one step closer to the destination.
It turns out those aren't always the same thing.
And for Roster Relay, both are worth keeping.