Rated games with specified kingdom

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AdamH

It's possible to play a rated game where I specify the entire kingdom. It's also possible to play a rated game against a specific opponent. I ended up doing this on accident last night, and had an opponent resign a few games against me (my opponent was rank 3 on the leaderboard) because we were looking to playtest a specific kingdom with a specific opening. We both just assumed it would not be possible to play a rated game with a completely specified kingdom so we didn't even bother to look to see that it was rated.

I've seen people get their accounts removed for doing this. It was an accident this time but that doesn't change the fact that I basically took my opponent's rating -- people have been banned for less. I want it known that this was an accident and if possible, I'd like for these games to not count towards ratings -- it's not fair to my opponent.

Why is it possible to play a rated game against a specific opponent? Why is it possible to play a rated game where you specify kingdom cards? I thought the whole reason the liked/disliked/banned cards lists were implemented was to make it so rated games could have this little bit of control. This has to be a bug, right?

Ingix

#1
Why should those things not be possible, provided that both players are aware of the fact that this is a rated game? Making players aware of the fact that a given game is rated is apparently not working well enough.

People were banned because they "played" dozens of games against sockpuppet accounts that lastet 1 turn, if even that.

While I can at least in some part understand that completely or almost completely pre-formed kingdoms are considered fishy, I cannot understand why the non-random opponent is considered a problem as well.

I played a league match a few days ago, my opponent was indifferent to rated/non-rated, and since I just started to play rated games again I asked if rated was OK, and so the 6 games were rated. Why would you consider that a problem?

As for "unrating" those games, I assume its the 3 games against WanderingWinder?

AdamH

I guess the difference here is, well, umm, I'm not sure. If you're willing to ban people for abusing the ability to do something (select kingdoms or opponents in rated games) then I just don't understand why it's allowed to happen. It's very clear that the tools are there to make it impossible to do these things; I don't want to feel like I'm walking on eggshells, making sure everything I do is very visibly not something I could get banned for. I just re-upped my subscription and I don't want to lose that money, and I don't want to have to make an alt to continue to play because I like my username. Wait, why is it so easy to make new accounts again?

I digress.

It seems pretty clear to me that the leaderboard is made less legitimate by the fact that people can choose their opponents or choose the kingdoms they play. The only thing that rated games matter for is the leaderboard (and apparently banning some people). So why not make the leaderboard as legitimate as possible? I can kinda sorta see an argument for letting you choose your opponents, but allowing kingdom cards to be required seems way over the line -- especially considering that there was a new feature released (liked/disliked/banned card lists) that appeared to be the result of a discussion where what was OK to do in a rated game was talked about. Why go to all the trouble of making that feature if you can just specify a kingdom yourself?


Quote from: Ingix on 13 January 2020, 12:51:29 AM
As for "unrating" those games, I assume its the 3 games against WanderingWinder?

Yes, these are the ones. At least those are the ones that were resigned? Really those and the other three games I played last night with that same kingdom should all not be counted -- one of them was with a different opponent who had never seen the kingdom before and I have played many practice games against a bot beforehand. My win there was definitely not fair to him and it looks like that game was rated as well.


Quote from: Ingix on 13 January 2020, 12:51:29 AM
Making players aware of the fact that a given game is rated is apparently not working well enough.

Well, I suppose? maybe? Maybe the "are you sure you want to resign?" box could say something extra if it's a rated game? I dunno, I don't really care what's done on this front.

Ingix

Quote from: AdamH on 13 January 2020, 04:29:48 AM

It seems pretty clear to me that the leaderboard is made less legitimate by the fact that people can choose their opponents or choose the kingdoms they play.

I still don't understand that argument for chosing opponents. Of course people deliberately playing against sockpuppets is a problem, but that is obviously cheating. When I'm automatched against someone and play 2 or 3 more games with them on the table, is this also a problem?

If this was happening 200 years ago with the physical cards then of course players would play only in their phyiscal neighborhood, and then level 50 in New York would mean something else than level 50 in Tokyo, but that is not what's happening, IMO.

So to me it is not at all clear that choosing an opponent will have an effect on ladder rankings.

For the kingdom, I can of course see that players that favour certain strategies could preselect the kingdom that favours that strategy. Again, this has AFAIK happened in the past and I think those games were made unrated.

But by the same argument, base-only games between players with no current subscription are also heavily different from games where cards are selected only from the expansions in the Silver or Gold expansions. Should rated games from the beginning of the service (so pre Nocturne and Renaissance) be made unrated because they don't represent the current "full game"?

Quote from: AdamH on 13 January 2020, 04:29:48 AM
I can kinda sorta see an argument for letting you choose your opponents, but allowing kingdom cards to be required seems way over the line -- especially considering that there was a new feature released (liked/disliked/banned card lists) that appeared to be the result of a discussion where what was OK to do in a rated game was talked about. Why go to all the trouble of making that feature if you can just specify a kingdom yourself?

The main difference is what you see when you click "Ready" and what you don't see. If you click "Ready" when the table rules are 'empty', but then the table host adds required cards to the Kingdom, you get unreadied, and can see the changes and decline to play or discuss with the host.

So the general idea behind this seems to me to give players maximum freedom to customize their tables, where all players can see those customizations and must agree to them.

OTOH, features with 'hidden' effects, like the banned and disliked cards, are restricted to not allow too much influence, so they can only contain 'a few' cards. This is unlike familiar cards, which can be heavily restricted to (in the extreme case) just 10 cards.