Messages

Out of the top 50, the only account I'm actually skeptical about besides the known smurf is aaaasn, who only has 4 games, but maybe he's just luser's good friend.

I think I've seen that name in some old leaderboard, and have probably played with them before. He may currently be overrated - which would explain why I recognize the name and you don't - but I think the account is legit.
A trip to the WayBackMachine confirms that he ranked 101st on December 21st 2016, with 836 games played.

/stalkingmode

This is my proposal:


We all get to make a list of disliked cards in the client. You can make it as long as you want.

Tables get a new setting. Respected number of disliked cards. By default it's 3.

Players also get a new setting: preferred number of respected disliked cards.
If one player has >3 and the other <3, it will stay at 3.
If both have it set to some number >3, the lowest one becomes the table setting.
If both have it set to some number <3, the highest one becomes the table setting.

I see what you're getting at, but it seems very complex - the sort of thing that you need a faq about somewhere.
I think the main concern that needs to be addressed is that you want to be able to turn it off for some tournament matchups. But that can be as simple as a checkbox in the table setup page.

And maybe also as a player preference: "I'm fine playing with my disliked cards". If both players have checked that, dislikes are ignored.

I just want to point out that I recognize many of the names at the top of the leaderboard from the leaderboard in the old implementation, so I don't think they are twinks as I would define the term in this context - experienced players making multiple accounts to shoot up the leaderboard, then abandoning them to stay on top.

The old leaderboard used to hide players that hadn't played in more than one month. A similar system might be helpful to clear the leaderboard if the natural decay isn't enough.

Another solution could be to hide every player with a phi (Rating Deviation) above a certain cutoff, such as 1, for example. This means that new players would need to play a bit (5-20 games, I believe) before appearing in the leaderboard, and that players not playing for a long time would eventually disappear from it.

Incidentally, it appears that beating luser 3 times brought one player to 26. While it may be a decent estimate (aaaasan is a good player), it detracts from the credibility of the leaderboard. My proposed solution would also prevent this.

Just a thought. The leaderboard definitely needs to settle a bit before people start messing with it.

markus, your third bullet is probably way too harsh. :) Maybe make that if you get 3 resignations in a 48-hour period, you may not play 3p in the rest of those 48 hours? It may still be a bad idea altogether. Incidentally, how often are people forced to resign right now? I have all sorts of connection issues but I always manage to reconnect without problems.

Adam, we don't include bots in the leaderboard because there is a big slice of the population playing only bots, and that might skew the ratings. But in principle I wouldn't be against that, but there is the problem of the bot being really bad as it is now.

Then I don't understand what determinism has to do with the issue at hand. Is the problem that the bot becomes predictable? A lot of players are quite predictable as well, at least for better players that know them well. And anyway, a bot need not be necessarily predictable. Most good chess bots are non-deterministic, for example.

Regarding the relative placement of the players and bot, I don't really know how the algorithm works.
But maybe you could secretly rank the bot, and if and only if the bot beats you, count that as a loss relative to the bot. Anyway, when was the last time somebody in contention resigned on you? It won't be very common.

But let me change my stance and argumentate a bit more aggressively instead of defensively. Your proposal of discarding the result of the two players who did not resign will discard a lot of valid results, if resigning stays as common as it is now - and we are not sure we'll be able to do much to reduce it. In a lot of games with two similarily-skilled players and one weaker player, most games won't be able to help ranking the two good players relative to each other.
And for the player in second place the games might even evolve in a game of "stay in contention, screw the third", hoping for him to resign. The player in the losing position always has an amount of kingmaking (or kingvoiding?) power that is bigger than what can normally happen in any game of 3p Dominion.

In my view this leads to problematic situations being more common than if we allow bot replacement, given that players tend to resign when they are hopelessly losing.

Bot is problematic when it has a good shot at first or second place.
Voiding the result is problematic when the resigning player is hopelessly losing, and has the possibility of voiding half the win for the player who is hopelessly winning.
Since resigning mostly happens when a player is hopelessly losing, bot is less commonly problematic than the alternative.

The voiding system is quick and more fair than what is in place now, so I'm fine with that in the meantime. But I believe it's inferior to having the possibility of playing it out with a bot.

I think the ideal solution would be:
Player A resigns. B and C get a window with three choices:
Resign as second place
Void the remaining game
Play it out with a bot.

If either one resigns, we have a clean result that everybody agrees upon. If both void, we have a clean result that everybody agrees upon. If either player wants to play it out, then they should do so, and that game should be ranked, in the interest of the leading player.
If both resign, uh, they all unlock Saboteur as an easter egg, and you count that as a void.

This way everybody is happy: the leading player is never forced to forfeit by an stubborn opponent, the second place guy can get it over with quickly if they want to, an early resign can safely end in a void if everybody is fine with that, and the bot gets to play a few games and is happy.

Hey! Pm those usernames to any of the mods/admins.

Sure thing, I'll shoot you a PM. :)
Thanks!

"Is built fairly" is easy to define, and means: doesn't collude with other players. I mean, that it must not say: "if the higher-ranked player (or the most handsome, or the most Dutch, whatever) is in the lead, buy Province". It's obvious but worth mentioning.
As long as it's as likely to screw you as it is to screw me, then I'm fine with it.
If I'm playing three player, I must be ready to get screwed - by bot or by human.

Of course you'll want a better bot than our Rattington in that position. But you'll want a better bot than Rattington in any position.  ::) :P

I feel like assigning leaderboard results to this kind of thing requires that you have a bot that isn't going to do stuff like this, ever.

But humans do stuff like this all the time. I play a good deal of 3-4p IRL, and I will take the last Province to ensure a second position, or push the piles to dangerous levels to get something I really need to make an unlikely comeback. In short, I will interfere even if I'm not in close contention.
So why set an extra-high bar for bots?

I mean, I can see your argument working against 3p dominion in general, but I don't see how it works against bots in particular.

As a rescue mechanism, I believe that replacement by bot wouldn't be problematic in the vast majority of games - even using Rattington would maybe be ok in the meantime, but I'm less sure - I haven't played Big R in a long time.

It's just a different thing in my mind to have a human player do this and to have a bot do this -- you can blacklist that human, or you can expect to climb high enough above them on the leaderboard to not have to play them anymore, but the bot will always be there.

Well, the bot can always get better. We can surely agree that your example is very extreme. An OK bot wouldn't do that, and an OK human wouldn't do much better than the OK bot in terms of non-interference.
It may be a slippery slope, but then you're already sliding when you start a 3p game.  :)

What about just skipping the first X turns? If you really want curses involved you can say that you must buy a Curse on the first or second turn, or something of the like. :)
Another thing that we sometimes do is: before the game the handicapped player choses a protected pile. Then, their opponents agree on a pile (other than the protected one) that the handicapped player may not gain during the game.
It works very well for casual games, even though the degree of handicap is very kingdom-dependent.

I don't know. I mean, by entering a 3p game you accept that there may be some "kingmaking/helping" interference in your game due to the inherent three-playerness. This even considering that Dominion has rather little "politics".
The fact that this interference is controlled by a bot rather than by some other player would not be relevant to me.


I would not complain about kingmaking, as long as the bot is written fairly. What the bot does to hinder me could as easily be done by a player, and at least the bot is more transparent.

And again, I'm not the target audience, so maybe I should just shut up.  ;D

Adam's solution has merit because it's simple, but I personally wouldn't enjoy it much. I play to win, but I mostly play to play, and being forced to end an open game with no clear winner would annoy me almost as much as ending it with a arbitrary one (as it is now).

So, I think the best choice would be replacement by bot with the choice of jointly forfeiting the game.
In the meantime auto forfeit sounds ok.

Regarding the "dont resign plz" message, I think it's a good idea.
If the rating system rewards second place over third you might also want to add that to the message: hey, the game might be lost, but what about fighting for second?

And then the mandatory caveat: I never play 3p online, so I'm currently not the target demographic.

I think it would be amusing/interesting to see some system-wide stats published periodically (monthly?). Things like:

# of games played (broken down by 2p, rated, 3p etc.)
# of unique Kingdoms played
Breakdown of win conditions (province/colony/3-pile/resignation/starvation)
Most commonly bought action cards (by cost)
etc.

I think this is most likely to be implemented by some dedicated fans in a fashion similar to the old CouncilRoom. AFAIK the logs are publicly available, so it's just a matter of waiting for some hero to write the code.

What is the policy for dealing with players with offensive usernames? I just got matched with somebody with a rude username and I think that if not banned these players should be forced to have their names changed.

Not naming anybody, but I'll just say that there are 4 instances of Fuck, 3 of Dick, and 1 each of Bitch and Cunt in the leaderboard.
Don't want to whine or anything, but the world would be slightly better without these usernames.

I've just come back to Dominion after a few month, and until now I've had this happen in 4 games out of 4.

At least in Firefox, you can make the Ctrl-F tool case sensitive. Not sure if Chrome does that, though.