Balanced Drop

Lobby conversation. Suggestion made. [spoiler]07 Feb, 02:12 am KoE_Doja: hey hood normally in 2 vs 2 games if someone flops a bonus area the game is void,,,,,,,,,,is it possible that d12 could take the same solution? 07 Feb, 02:39 am Hoodlum: It's possible if all players playing agree. It's not a rule of any sort in the current tournament. 07 Feb, 02:42 am KoE_Doja: personally i think it should be changed by d12 after the tourney................weautomatically void hame in game ranger when it happens 07 Feb, 03:10 am JeopardyTempest: The thing is the team who goes first normally still has a bonus (though depends on position). Some games are just lost. Certainly would think some additional Balanced options like yours might be nice to some... 07 Feb, 03:10 am JeopardyTempest: but should be a choice, not a requirement 07 Feb, 03:31 am Hoodlum: maybe it can be an option for the host, and something the programmers might be able to implement. Click, fair drop option..and the game auto reloads a new drop till all is fair. 07 Feb, 03:32 am Hoodlum: Or any other idea, the programmers could work with. The programmers will read it in the forums..and likely comment 07 Feb, 03:33 am Hoodlum: if you make a mention, of it, or any solutions[/spoiler] Suggestion, idea.. With a balanced drop option, the code detects fair starting reinforcements. If it drops unbalanced, then the drop reloads till suitable.

I have mentioned this a few times. One question would be what is considered an unbalanced drop? One person has a bonus? Maybe you cannot benefit from the bonus on the first turn? But I guess since you are creating the games for a tourney you could just kill the game if you see a start bonus and make a new one.

I agree with hood to make a button that refreshes the set up until they all agree, but this might cause disagreement and waste so much time until the game begins.

Hmm, there appear to be two ideas here competing. [list type=decimal] [li]Automatically reroll if the drop is "unfair"[/li] [li]Have a way for players to decide to reroll[/li] [/list] Each of them has their own set of challenges, so which one is it? Then I can explain a bit more about what the challenges are, and how we could solve them.

I think having a balanced drop option that just rerolls for even reinforcement drop is the way to go. It's simple. Simplicity works for d12. It would work with long term games effectively this way, rather than having to wait for players to decide to reroll. I see this option just used for small player settings, 2p, 3p or 2v2 games and nothing much more. But of course, there are A LOT of these games, and a fair game is a good thing for the site. Especially for tournaments and such. As for 2p games, I just think they should be [b]pointless[/b] anyway, or have a separate ranking.:) Down the track, I imagine the programming team, might work on a territory grab option, and that's where it's going to get complicated to implement.

[quote]I think having a balanced drop [color=red][i][b][u]option[/u][/b][/i][/color] (...)[/quote] I think my opinion on adding additional *gulp* options is pretty well known around here, so I think we need to think really careful about how to do this. My suggestion would be to throw balanced dice and balanced drop under the same banner, and have players choose between "standard rules" and "derandomized rules". The latter could probably use a better name, but I think "balanced" is bad terminology, since the rules don't make the game more balanced, just more boring by reducing statistical outliers. By combining balanced dice and drop under one banner, we also don't have to explain as much on the create game page, and generally creates a smoother experience I think. Now I hear you ask: "but what if you want one and not the other?". Tough luck, if you ask me. I think the balanced options are used by people who like to blame their losses on random chance, so they would always go for both options. I myself think these outliers are part of the game, and good strategy can still deal with them (and if not, well... it happens), so I would choose neither. If there are a lot of people who want an either/or here (and have good reasons for doing so), then it's something worth considering, but I think we should work from the assumption it's either both or neither. Now for the technical challenge. There are a few things to solve: [list] [li]What counts as unfair? This sounds like something people may have different opinions on. An algorithm doesn't have an opinion, so we need to define clear rules that determine when we will reroll a drop.[/li] [li]To explain how complicated this actually is: World Expanded with few players will have a large chance on giving somebody a small region. Again: how do we define what is fair? A rule "nobody can ever start with a full region" clearly doesn't really work for this map. And I can imagine some people will already start complaining about an unbalanced start if somebody starts with almost an entire region. How do you translate that into something the computer can understand while also dealing with cases where this is bound to happen?[/li] [li]What do we do if we cannot create a fair drop? There are maps that happen to have the wrong number of territories.[/li] [li]I am not sure how easy it is to reset a game and start over with the generation. The initial setup is technically not the most trivial, especially if you consider different types of generation such as the special rules for capitals and assassination. I don't think we can just hit a rewind button and start over, so this would probably require a rework of the code dealing with this. Not something to worry about for most of us here, I suppose, but I think this might be a more costly feature in terms of implementation time than what it looks like on first sight.[/li] [/list] Personally, I like the level of randomness introduced in the game, so I don't think these problems are worth the time solving, but if it's something people want, then make sure to direct them to this thread to help figure out these problems ;)

"Standard settings" and "Uniformed settings"? I too personally like the randomness of the drops and dice, and it has never bugged me that much in the many games I have played, but I can see the annoyance it generates relating to competitive tournaments with single elimination formats. Turn order for the best outta formats is the main unfairness I have seen. Players often getting 3 starts outta 3 quite often, it makes me crinnnge when hosting.

Would be cool if for tournament games we could specify some extra parameters. For example, if you had a 1v1 tournament with two games being played per round (with a third decider round), it would be cool if we could specify that player 1 goes first in game 1, and player 2 goes first in game 2. Or if you're doing a group phase, making sure that that is properly distributed. So yes, I can see this in the context of tournaments. Going to see what @@Matty (and others) have to say, but to me it sounds like it would be worth putting some effort into the game generation code to allow us to do more things with it. I don't want to complicate it from the user's experience, but there's probably a lot of under-the-hood things we can do to make it more flexible.

I agree with Cireon that we shouldn't add options just because some players think they like to have it. However, for this particular one I think we could have either such an option (and make it the default!), or just only use the fair one. However, we do need to find a way to decide what is fair and what is not, and that's not as trivial as some here think. The only* way I currently know is this: 1. Create a 'drop; 2. Check if someone starts with a region 3. If so, go back to step 1. 4. Done Now imagine you are playing on Texas or World expanded with 2 players - you'll go back to step 1 almost forever - clogging up server resources and slowing down the whole site... So yeah, how to find a good way to decide what is fair and what isn't. Note: you could replace step 2 with a players vote, but we don't have voting as of yet, so for now this is something I deem 'impossible'. If this is the only way, then sure, but it'll take a long time before we get it. * To be fair, I can think of some other solutions, even better ones, but none are satisfying.

I like the suggestion. Maybe it is only in cases of 4 or more players automatically? I think for 2 (and likely 3) players it is just a given it will happen, unless you assign territory by territory within region. Maybe this feature is ONLY for tournaments?

What about generating lots of drops and having players say whether it's fair or not. Then use that as signal for a machine learning algorithm to automatically detect unfair drops. #notentirelyserious. I don't agree with Matty that it should be always on or even the default, but yeah basically what he says otherwise ;)

An uneven drop is a major problem in 1vs1 and 2vs2 games. Something needs to be done about it. If a player / team starts with a bonus, the game could very well be over, before it even begins. Not much fun in that. Assuming that fixing the algorithm is difficult, a temporary fix could be to report the drop to an admin, who then makes a decision whether or not to suspend or replay the game from scratch – with a new and more balanced drop.

It happened to my partner and I in a team game. He started the game with 6 (normally 5), and I started with 9 (normally 5). The other two players started with 5 each. It was over before it began.

I dont mind anything, its quite good, fighters, deal with it, random is the essence of being a good strategist and creating a comfortable position from the worst position, every game can be won with good tactics and a little luck, there are many factors, the most important is a dice, you can have a starting bonus and a drop that you can only wish for, but in the end you lose.People give up too easily, play 1000 games the same setings the same map, you will see that everything will come within the optimal limits of reality and equality... It is natural that in a 1 vs 1 game on a map as big as Texas, there will never be equality, firstly because the map has many bonuses, and secondly and importantly it is important that if you want to play 1 vs 1 choose smaller maps with fewer regions and therefore reduces the possibility of discomfort. If you want to always be the one to play first then play the sametime option. If you are dissatisfied with the dice, simply play ballanced... I think the solution to any discomfort is right there, you just have to find yourself in settings.

Since organizing tournaments...it is quite frustrating having players ask me to do a restart because a player got a bonus on the drop....especially when I didn't have the superpowers to do so, so I couldn't. Now I have some superpowers (the ability to change end games thus creating another) I can ensure no bonuses on a drop...however, this is still frustrating....for example, for this tournament, I had to end and re-create these games to get a fair drop. This is time-consuming for me....but if I don't do this...then we have frustrated players. Game 1360565 Game 1360564 Game 1360545 Game 1360542 Game 1360540 At a minimum tournaments should have fair drops (everyone starting with the same number of reinforcements). Overall, I think all drops should be fair or balanced. Coming from another site that ensures this...this is one of my pet peeves here and it IS a turn-off for those who are checking out our site. You have many players that just play 1v1 games. Coding for a balanced drop will bring less frustration. I realize that there are a few that think it is part of the game...however...as a consequence you have more frustrated players if we don't address this. Balanced drops would reduce the frustration (especially for those new players playing 1v1). Less frustration means more addiction and love for the game...which means more players stay on this site. I think it is in your best interest to code for balanced drops. my understanding now is that it grabs the order of players, grabs the territories, sorts them, then applies down. After asking for some expert advice....we could instead of sorting by territory, it would randomize the commands, then the territories within it. Then go down the list of players. So if 4 players and the first command is 4, you would be guaranteed everyone one spot, so never a command on the drop. This should take a maximum of 10 lines of code? We can try this only for tournaments for now so you aren't fully committed? This is not hard to implement and I think it is worth it to keep player frustration down and player retention up. my 2 cents