Messages

To some extent it's personal taste how weak / strong you like your potential opponents to be.
The rating update did not affect the meaning of a difference in mu. So if your opponent is 1 point lower in mu and has the same phi as you, they'll be 7.5 levels below as before the update and your chance of winning is 73%.

The update affected the difference in phi between players and the initial phi of players. This increases the level of new players, as the level is based on some lower bound of the skill (mu-2*phi). I think that this is a good thing of the update (apart from being more accurate in terms of player skills), because I want to be matched with people of similar skill (mu) even if they don't play much (high phi).

So, I guess if you primarily care about the waiting time, you can slightly reduce the range now and have the same waiting time. In general, I would recommend using only +/- 7 levels at most as it gives you more equal matches. But as I said that's a question of taste.

As far as I know, it only occurs when switching to the end-of-game screen. (A separate issue that has been discussed is that spending coin tokens can be missed as it doesn't show up on the log but you have to notice the reduction of your opponent's available coin tokens.)

Actual cheaters would probably have to hack the game server, as your client only displays the game's state and sends commands to the server.

I loaded your first game as your opponent on the last turn and he did have 2 golds in hand to afford the province. Sometimes the log is cut off at the end of the game.

don't understand, why it shows you that the province got bought. Maybe the reason is that showing the animations for all the treasures being played on your side took longer than your opponent buying the province.

I also don't understand, why you don't see the cards that your opponent drew at the end of turn 17 for example. Usually, after the game this information is revealed and you could have seen that the opponent had enough money. Maybe that's a related bug.

[I have found that there are 10 cards in the base set which can not be deselected, at all.]

I have found that there are 10 cards in the base set which can not be deselected, at all.

As far as I know, that is not a bug but intended. As a result, there will also be a valid kingdom when two players want to respect familiar cards. The bug that Stef commented was about Tournament, which is not included in those 10 base cards.

Seems plausible.

I would encourage to resign and blacklist. You're not going to get matched with that account again and it's easy to identify the abusive accounts based on the number of blacklists. The slow-roller doesn't get anywhere with their rating because they're removed on day 1 or 2. And your own rating is not affected too much and recovers quickly from undeserved losses.

If your rating is not too bad, you can also use it to avoid newly created accounts: they start with level 20 and you can set the lower bound of advanced match making to exclude that.

So phi is increased depending on your current level?

Sorry, I was not clear: with "level" I meant the level of phi not the "level" that is calculated from (mu,phi) for the leaderboard. And it increases by more if it's currently low (not playing is more unusual when previously playing 10 games/day than when playing 1 game before.)

For example not playing increases phi from
0.2 --> 0.2088
0.5 --> 0.5036

And phi is decreased depending on current phi value? Or did you mean something else?

Exactly. If if's high, one game will decrease it more than when it's low. You can also see that from above numbers: going from 1 to 3 games/day does more than going from 3 to 10 games/day.

Interesting. You would then think that with an unequal opponent (poor match), if the result is the opposite of the expected, phi would fall more, because that is even more informative...?

The result doesn't directly matter for the updating of phi. This is a second order effect that would be captured by sigma (i.e. an usual result will increase sigma and that will actually increase phi over time. The intuition is the following: daily increase of phi captures that we're more uncertain about somebody's current skill if there's no recent evidence of their playing. If, however, unlikely results come in, we should become more uncertain about the current skill. But for practical purposes the algorithm can't capture that well and sigma is almost the same for everyone.)

I once calculated roughly
games/day   phi
1           0.39
3           0.30
6           0.25
10          0.22
So playing 1 game instead of 10 per day will cost you 2.5 levels but not more.

So these values are what phi will converge to eventually?

Yes, with the caution that it depends on your match quality. I think I calculated those numbers assuming that the win probability is 80%-20% back when that was more common. I'm setting narrower bounds for my opponents now.
Therefore, with on average 7.4 games/day over the last month (:o), my phi is only 0.20. So treat the numbers as rather upper bounds.

Phi goes up every day, but the increase depends on your current level. Similarly, the reduction of phi, when you play depends on its current level as well. In other words, depending on how many games you play per day, it will converge to a different value, and not go to infinity.

What that level is, depends also on the quality of your opponent (the better the match is, the more phi falls because a result against an equal opponent is more informative than an expected win/loss.)

I once calculated roughly
games/day   phi
1           0.39
3           0.30
6           0.25
10          0.22
So playing 1 game instead of 10 per day will cost you 2.5 levels but not more.

Having said that, my hunch is that sigma is a bit too large, i.e. the resulting phi (increase) is too large. I'd prefer to reduce that but add some slight mean reversion on mu (currently that remains constant if you don't play).

Thank you for clarifying. I actually checked the Wiki and couldn't find a reference. But then it's only some edge cases in which you might actually want to use that option.

So the same would apply to Artisan - but it wouldn't work with Trader, because "would gain" is before I actually have Trader in hand?

When I use Transmogrify to gain a Watchtower to my hand, I get the option to reveal this newly gained WT to trash/topdeck itself. In game 4836503 I could actually trash it.

There seems to be a bug with the latest release that removed all ratings. Hopefully, they'll be reinstatated soon.

They were not coin tokens but "virtual money" from Goons.

In game 4546559, decision index 115 (markus), I'm in my buy phase having 2 coins, 2 debt and 1 Fool's Gold in hand. I'd like to repay the debt without playing FG in order to buy Alms afterwards. But clicking either "2 Debt" or "1 Debt" or "Alms" or "Copper" always plays the FG, making it impossible to get the Alms effect.

I noticed this bug in game 4419139 (or rather the continuation of it with a bot). Gaining an (inherited) Estate when trashing Catacombs reduced my VP count instead of increasing it by 1.

According to Dominion rules, when having the same number of points, the tie-breaker is the number of turns. In your example, you were the first player and ended the game on your turn with 42 points each. Therefore, you lose. If your opponent had ended the game with 42 points each, it would have been a tie game (same number of turns).