An extraordinary year has passed. A year that showed humanity that many services that had been taken for granted since the beginning of time may no longer be available at some point.
When activities in the physical world are limited, a replacement will be found in the virtual world. Just as last year was very successful for many large cloud service providers (e.g. Zoom, Amazon), 2020 was also very successful for the Estonian Mõttespordi portal Vint.ee.
Year 2020 on the portal Vint.ee
As soon as recreational activities were restricted in March and schools switched to distance learning, it became clear that many would like to conduct chess and checkers training on the vint.ee portal. We reacted quickly and brought the functionality of Vint trainers . To date, 46 users from 11 countries have already acquired trainer rights!
We were soon contacted by the Estonian Checkers Association, who also wanted to have a separate online training environment . The training environment was already ready in April, and several training sessions have already taken place. In addition, 366 checkers tasks have already been entered into our system.
At the beginning of the summer, it became clear that many major international tournaments would also move online, and there was a high probability that some of them could take place on the vint.ee portal. However, this required introducing many different innovations:
- To support tournaments with long time controls, we added multi-day tournament functionality to the game.
- It also became clear that our opening rules for gomoku and renjū do not quite meet international standards and need to be improved in order to hold large tournaments. We introduced the swap2 opening in gomoku and eliminated the swap1 opening in renjū .
- Our tournament odds system needed an upgrade and we introduced a full truncated Buhholz odds system.
- International tournaments cannot be held in an Estonian-language environment, and in addition - our design was outdated. We started a seemingly impossible project: to redesign vint.ee and also introduce multilingual support .
Today, vint.ee has a 100% new design and is available in three different languages. Several international tournaments took place at the end of the year - we have proven to ourselves and others that vint.ee is ready to take a big step into the wider world.
In November, we started a new Mental Sports Olympiad season, and in connection with this, we also reached one milestone:
When we started bringing crossword puzzles to Vinti in 2016, we received a lot of criticism: people said that automatically generated crosswords were not comparable to hand-crafted crosswords and that the quality of our crosswords was, to put it mildly, poor.
We didn't give up: we let users enter more questions and adjusted their difficulty levels.
This year we introduced crosswords to the Mind Sports Olympiad and the result exceeded expectations : We received positive feedback from schools and the number of users who solve our crosswords on a daily basis increased by 50%!
Vint.ee year in numbers
- We were visited by 92,000 unique users
- 6324 new users registered
- 9844 tournaments took place
- A total of 221,000 man-hours were played
- Sasku - 53836 (46080)
- Chess - 27238 (20788)
- Sudoku - 24586 (18662)
- Checkers - 23406 (12210)
- Thousand - 22053 (20868)
- Family of 4 - 14812 (12056)
- Bismarck - 14241 (10866)
- Double - 9105 (5412)
- Gomoku and Renju - 8178 (2290)
- Podkidnoy - 5980 (5712)
Plans for 2021
Training environments
Last year we created a training environment platform for kapele, this year we will also add training environments for chess and gomoku/renju. In addition, we want to introduce a simple call creation option (so that students participating in training can easily communicate with the coach). We can also extend this call option to regular tournaments or game tables.
Playroom design
While the entire portal section got a new design last year, the game room remained on the old platform, so to speak. And there are several problems with that: Navigating the game room is not convenient on mobile, and the game board cannot be enlarged normally (the game room is not responsive).
We are trying to improve the situation this year and quietly start rebuilding the play area!
New games
We can't make any promises at the moment, but in terms of new games , Blackjack and Video Poker , Bridge and Scrabble are on the "top of the list".
There are dozens of ideas for other improvements. You can read all of them on the Make vint.ee better forum. Here, each user's feedback is also important - go read and like the different ideas - that way we know which innovations would be most useful to our users!
In conclusion - last year was a year of big changes for the vint.ee portal. And since there is good momentum, we will continue with big projects this year as well.
We wish everyone an exciting and thought-provoking year!
Marten Meikop
Founder of Vint.ee
