Attacking The Leader

Back before WBC this year I spent a week in Pounder's basement and we played quite a few games with Robb who was also living there at the time. One of the games we played was Chicago Express, which is a relatively short economic train game. You start the game off by buying shares in different train companies and then you take actions to sell off more shares or to make the train companies improve themselves. The companies spend the money invested in the shares to get better and as they get better the shares become worth more. After a set number of actions all the companies pay out dividends which provide the players with more money to use buying new shares in the companies. Player money is only ever spent buying shares, is only ever earned through the dividends (there is one way to get a bonus dividend payout for a company when it gets to Chicago), and is the only thing that matters when it comes to winning the game.

In our game through a combination of not knowing the game so well and/or misplaying we let Pounder get into a very good position. He was the sole owner of two different train companies while Robb and I were stuck sharing a company. I think Robb and Pounder were sharing a 4th company and the 5th company had yet to appear on the board. Because the only thing that actually matters in the game is personal money and Pounder was set up to make the most money thanks to owning so many shares he was on the fast track to victory. His only downside was going to be that he had a limited number of actions to spend making companies better so he was going to be stuck earning base value for some of his shares while Robb and I could use our actions making a single company really good. We'd have to split the benefit but if we're able to use twice as many actions on making it better that's reasonable. We'd also be sure to get the 'connect to Chicago' bonus. Pounder was set up to win for sure, but if Robb and I worked together one of us might be able to take him down. Probably me since Robb had that extra share in the 4th company that surely wasn't going to get any better since Pounder had two other solo owned companies to work on, but maybe later turns would see shares sold of other companies that would change that fact.

Instead Robb decided that since I had nothing else to do with my actions I was going to be forced to make our company better and he'd stick the work on making it better solely on my shoulders and went off to make his company with Pounder better. This meant Pounder got the benefit from 1.5 improvement actions to Robb's 1 and my .5. Pounder ultimately won. We got into an argument over if Robb should have been working with me or not. My stance was Pounder was in a good way and would win if he got extra help from either of us in the early game. Economic games are often snowbally so you need to reign in the leader. Maybe not beat him up the whole game, but reign him in a little after he had such a good initial share phase and then reevaluate the board on the next turn and adjust. Both Robb and Pounder disagreed because they hate playing games where frontrunning is punished because it encourages smarmy actions to disguise if you're actually winning or not in order to trick the other players into reigning in someone else.

I can't say I disagree with that stance, because I hate when a game encourages you to sandbag. But I didn't think that argument actually countered my argument either. I think Chicago Express, as an economic game, is designed such that the individual players have to be constantly evaluating who will win if 'standard' actions are taken and then shifting off the standard actions to stop that from happening. You either do that or the first auction phase determines victory! Really I think it means Chicago Express is a game that we shouldn't be playing because we don't like to work in game states that it creates.

A similar situation came up in our one Civ V game which is nearing completion. It was a four player game where I was stuck on my own land mass, Matt was stuck on his own land mass, while Dave and Robb shared a third bigger land mass. Dave was a strong early game civ and was certainly the player between the four of us with the most knowledge of game mechanics at the start of the game. He very quickly eliminated Robb and started snowballing his strong early game position into a really dominating position. He became allies with most of the city states and then declared war on Matt and I which meant Dave had a stranglehold on votes at the council. He made way more science per turn than either of us. He even went so far as to switch which tech he was researching so that he didn't enter the renaissance era (which would give us spies) until he was able to get almost all of those techs one after the other. It was inconceivable that either Matt or I could win a diplomatic victory before him, or a science victory either. A culture victory was theoretically possibly but his large culture gain from getting so many wonders coupled with his declaring war on us (and therefore removing a lot of tourism multipliers) made that practically impossible.

This meant Matt and I were backed into a corner. There was no way either of us could hope to win without Dave losing his capital. Taking Dave out would open up a chance for one of us to win in any of the ways (including militarily) but if Dave didn't die neither of us could win. Even taking his capital alone probably wasn't going to be good enough since he still has a vote lead over Matt, his culture still exists to block my tourism, and his replacement capital could just start working on spaceship parts long before we'd be able to do so ourselves. Taking Dave's capital slows down his path to victory but our own paths probably require him to die completely unless we're going for a military victory. (Once either of us take his capital then anyone losing their capital would have the other one win.)

We both acknowledged this was the case and then set off to work together against Dave. Talking about how to vote at the council, trade routes, trading luxuries, research agreements... We didn't work together optimally (Matt built a constabulatory to slow down my spying on him and I researched the same techs as he did instead of diversifying for optimal spying for example) but we put in a pretty good showing of it. I don't know about Matt but I also made a lot of sacrifices as time was winding down to try to hurt Dave at the expense of my own board position going forward. (I sold all my research labs and public schools so I could afford to rush buy more units and pay upkeep on those I'd built. I also sold all of my subs once Dave was no longer in a position to build boats even though doing so means I've lost control of the sea against Matt in the short term.)

We ended up capturing Dave's capital the exact turn he was about to win the game by building the last space ship part. We knew we had this many turns and saved a bunch of suicidal bombing runs for the end just in case, but we did it. Dave was understandably annoyed at this, since he was the heavy favourite to win the game almost the whole way through but he was barely denied at the end. He asserts that I am going to win the game now (an assertion I agree with, for what it's worth) and that because of that fact Matt shouldn't have worked with me. Matt should have spent the final few turns before Dave was eliminating setting up a sneak attack on my capital so that if I pulled off the miracle on my own to stop Dave then Matt could have taken me out right away and won instead.

It goes back to the age old question of what should 3rd place do? Let 1st place win by standing aside? Work with 2nd place to make sure 1st doesn't win even if it means 2nd wins instead? For me I continue to assert that ganging up on 1st is often the right thing to do, especially early in a game or if the game has variable length. We're going to get at least an extra 6-10 turns out of this Civ game and it could go much longer than that. Matt has the fast track to a diplomatic victory once Dave is eliminated since he was getting 2 extra votes each failed UN meeting. My tourism win is going to come home before that can happen, I think. But it was obvious that neither Matt or I could win until Dave lost his capital and it was really tight on making that happen as it was. I don't think either of us could have afforded to divert much off of what we did or Dave would have won.

My big problem with the argument that Matt shouldn't help me because I'm a 'clear 2nd' is that it encourages me to sandbag my second place position in order to get Matt to help me. If 2nd and 3rd only work together when they each think they're the one in 2nd then you need to hurt yourself (and therefore help 1st) in order to keep up appearances. But I acknowledge that it's the same argument against ganging up on 1st. If Dave had sandbagged his own position then maybe he isn't such a clear 1st place and we don't work to stop him?

It's hard to say what should be done. Maybe we have the same problem with Civ V that we have with Chicago Express. Maybe it's a game that just fundamentally has a kingmaker problem. I strongly feel that if someone has a big lead they need to be held in check by the other people working against them in this sort of game. Otherwise a small early game edge is a guaranteed victory. I don't want to play a game where we concede to the person who builds the great library. On the other hand I also don't want to play a game where building the great library is a bad idea because it just gets you killed.

I do think Civ V has enough catch up mechanics going on that someone can get ahead without it being a guaranteed victory. But really all Matt and I did was making use of those mechanics to keep pace as much as we could with Dave and we're still ending up facing accusations of kingmaking. The winning odds in this game were probably something like 90%-9%-1%, but Matt and I only get our 1% and 9% chances to win if we go all in on working together. I guess the problem is if the winning odds in this game were actually 90%-10%-0% what is Matt supposed to do? If you're certain you can't win then you basically have to choose who does. Some people advocate for standing aside but I will always assert that not taking an action is an action itself. Games can have kingmaking positions in them and you can't just ignore them. Often I'll see people advocating for improving your position, which generally means 3rd beats up on 2nd and you kingmake for 1st instead. Oddly enough in this specific game Matt both improved his position and kingmade for 2nd since I'm pretty sure most people will look at the end state of this game and say Matt came 2nd if I end up winning. Sometimes people want you to improve your own score, which works way better in a Euro board game with victory points to earn than it does in a game like Civ V, but I guess there's a score number in that one and you can certainly work to make it bigger. Like by taking Dave's cities! (Though taking my cities might have been more score efficient since I sure haven't been defending myself at all!)

I donno. I think if you're against kingmaking game states you can work to avoid games that have them, especially games that have them as a core element like Chicago Express. I think Civ V is probably more on the side of having kingmaking game states than it is the side of avoiding them... So maybe it's not actually a game we want to play? I guess we probably need to have a few more games get closer to the end of the game to find out? I do think Civ V can get into game states where ganging up on the leader isn't good enough. I think Dave had guaranteed wins earlier in this game if he plays differently, for example if he built a lot of mid game boats he could have crushed me when I was way behind on tech. But with more experience we probably just become better at recognizing those game states and have to start collaborating earlier and earlier? Time will tell!

Whoaah! Frakkin' Zeno's Paradox!

Zeno was a Greek philosopher who lived around 2500 years ago who came up with a bunch of paradoxes that seemed to show that movement was actually an illusion and nothing could ever move. One of the paradoxes essentially took the stance that if you tried to move from point A to point B you'd never actually reach point B. The reason is that halfway between A and B will always be a point C that takes some finite amount of time to reach. But once you reach C there's going to be a new halfway point between C and B that will take some finite amount of time to reach. Because you can keep dividing this path in half you're going to have an infinite number of points to cross before you reach C, and they all take some finite amount of time.

Now, I've taken a walk before, and I tend to actually reach my destination. I don't know the actual refutation but it probably has something to do with the fact that in one step I actually reach a pretty large number of points all at the same time so once the halfway point gets close enough to the end point I'll hit them both at the same time.

This works great for walking, but it turns out it doesn't work so well for getting promoted out of the Silver I division in League of Legends. I complained earlier about how games used to be worth 20+ points with more points for a win than a loss. The swing near the top of Silver I is more like 3-5 points either way. This meant that without going on a pretty big winning or losing streak I wouldn't be able to see a real change in my   position. People kept saying that doesn't matter and I just need to keep playing and winning, either to improve my hidden matchmaker rating or just to grind out small numbers of points over a long enough period of time to get up to the 100 I need for a promotion series. Ok, fine, whatever. Play some games, go on a streak, sure.

Earlier this week I went on such a streak and, winning 4 points at a time, got my way all the way up to 96 points from the 76ish I had. Got into my next game and won it too. Yes! Promotion series, here I come. Nope. Turns out a win at 96 points was actually only worth 2, not 4, so I only went up to 98. Ok, fine, whatever. One more game, which I lost. I lost 3 in a row, in fact, and tumbled back down to 87 points.

Play some more the next day, win more than I lose, get back up to 96. Win again. A gain of 2 points, to 98. Ok, fine, whatever. I was sorta expecting that. One more win and I should be good, right? Wrong. I won my next game, for +1 point. Whooah, I'm halfway there. 99 points. There's no more spots between me and 100 so the next win is golden, right? Wrong. I won my next game too, for +0 points. Movement, it would seem, actually is an illusion. I will never get to the end point because I can't get from 99 to 100 without passing through a middle point which doesn't exist and can't be reached.

Maybe one more win would be enough? I don't know because my next game was a disaster and I lost 3 points back down to 96. One loss undid three wins worth of points. (Though one of those wins was worth nothing so can you really say it got undone?)

I no longer feel like just play a bunch of games and win more than I lose is good enough. I've won significantly more than I've lost in recent days but will need to maintain a 75% win rate just to tread water. Not even the pros win that much against equal competition. So the idea that I need to win that much to stay still in Silver I is ludicrous. Either I'm significantly better than my competition and deserve to be promoted or I'm in the right spot and my point gains should maintain parity at a 50% win rate. The way things are now is illogical to me, which makes it very frustrating, and makes me want to stop playing.

I understand how rating systems work in general. The old system made sense. If I went on a winning streak I could expect to see my number go up. If I lost a bunch it would go down. I played a bunch near the end of season 2, went on a winning streak, and grinded my number up to the point where I was gold status. The similar winning streak now has me making no progress at all and wanting to break something.

Even worse, there's a website that shows you where the players in your games sit divisionwise. I've been checking out all of my games and pretty consistently now I'll be on a team with people in the gold divisions. You can also tell who has the higher hidden matchmaker rating because you pick champions in rating order. I know my rating is higher than some of these gold people as a result. Probably not by much, but it does show that it isn't unreasonable for me to get promoted. The arbitrary barrier where I simply can't get more than 99 points doesn't make sense to me when other people, with worse ratings, are gold themselves.

And really, even if I didn't deserve to be gold, what does it hurt to make it possible to get promoted anyway? Will the world collapse if I'm Gold V instead of Silver I? It really feels like giving me something to play for has to be worth the risk that an unworthy person gets into Gold V. Especially since some people are already there! If I'm not worthy why are the people with worse ratings than me worthy? The answer is Riot changed the rules after some people got promoted and I'm caught in the backlash because I played Blood Bowl when season 3 started instead of League of Legends. If I can't see that number go up maybe I should just go play more Blood Bowl now...

Trying Too Hard

I am confused. Not as badly as last night, where I was confused, overwhelmed, and stressed out, but still confused. It's the sort of feeling that has lead to my current lack of employment. At least here I was able to walk around at 2 in the morning and then take a hot bath to try to unwind instead of having to pretend everything was fine while trying to work for another 5 hours or whatever.

It all boils down to one statement. "I don't get why you're trying so hard." It confuses me. To me if something is worth doing at all, it's worth doing at full speed. I don't understand how trying hard at something became an insultable state. I don't understand berating someone who is trying. I don't understand letting up, or giving up.

Maybe it just boils down to a lack of empathy? Or of understanding empathy? I just don't understand why I should feel bad about getting ahead, or of winning, or of leveling my guys. It reminds me of the loot drama Sky went through in World of Warcraft. Lots of stuff dropped that only he could use, and it was bad that he asked for it all. In my case it was a Blood Bowl game where pretty much everything was going my way. I was up 3-0 on the scoreboard and 11-5 in players with 5 turns still to go. As far as experience earned went it was something like 17-0. I wanted more. My opponent didn't like that I wanted more. With 5 turns and 6 more guys I should likely be able to score again, or get a couple more casualties. Or get a pass. There's a good chance of hurting some more of his guys. I had 2 crucial guys 1 experience from leveling, a fresh guy who was 3 experience from leveling, and a rough match coming up in the finals with Robb's human team.

To me it made a lot of sense to pin in my opponent's 5 guys, punch them, and try to score with my fresh guy. To my opponent this decision was trying too hard, was unsporting, and was worth badgering me about. I guess he would have been happy if I stood back and let him get 5 passing experience. That would be fairer for sure. He'd suffer no more injuries, and he'd get some experience, and I'd still win the game. Does that make sense? If everyone always played that way I guess it might? But the game is called Blood Bowl. And in my experience most people don't pull up and let their opponent farm experience uncontested. I consider that to be pretty unsporting in a league sense, actually. I'd hate it if I was about to play against a team that got a bunch of unearned experience. So if my opponent had run away from the ball I don't know that I necessarily chase after him to kill his guys (and from past experience with my Dwarf team when someone had obviously given up and run away, I wouldn't have). Instead I just try to score twice to level up. But to stand back and let the opposition farm experience themselves? That just feels wrong.

In the moment I didn't really have a chance to think these things through. Getting yelled at for doing the only thing that makes sense to me shuts my brain down. I just wanted to get out of there. Part of me was strongly considering conceding myself and quitting the game entirely. Even now I'm still confused and debating if I want to join future leagues. Two of my last three games haven't been fun, and it feels like my opponents in those games didn't like playing against me the way I play. So maybe it would be for the best to just fade away and find something else to do? Something I can try hard at without feeling bad, since I don't have the ability to do something without trying.

Scarlet Blade

Yesterday I'd started thinking again about gender mixes in the Final Fantasy series. I'm playing Final Fantasy VIII which has an even split, and I was wondering about how male oriented it was going to seem on this play through. I don't actually remember all that much in terms of details in the game, but I was making a mental note to try to pay attention while playing. Then last night while browsing for something or other (I think I was looking for Blood Bowl patch notes) I saw an odd advertisement. It was advertising the open beta for what it termed an 'adult MMORPG'. The picture featured a scantily clad armoured woman with a big sword, so pretty much par for the course in terms of a gaming ad. Even browser games with no graphics to speak of will stick a girl in a revealing outfit in the ad to draw attention, right Evony?

What, I wondered, is an adult MMO? Are we talking some sort of Sims style game with the sex uncensored? Does it feature a lot of colourful language and an epic amount of blood and guts? Cigarettes? I did some poking around and it sounds like, for the most part, a pretty standard MMO with a sci-fi setting. You have quests to go kill 10 monsters. You level up. You can group for dungeons. There are two factions with massively scaled PvP battles. (80v80, apparently? 40 per side in Alterac Valley was bad enough, though I guess computers have gotten a lot better since then!) There's a tank class, a healer class, and 4 DPS classes. It's also running under a 'free to play' model, with an item shop. The item shop seems to have gone in a good direction in that it doesn't seem to be 'pay to win' at all. There are things to increase your backpack size temporarily, or to give an experience buff, or non-combat pets, or new outfits for your character to wear. A lot like the League of Legends item shop, actually. Or the World of Warcraft one. Nothing at all like the one in Ultima Online where you had to pay real money to prevent people from stealing your stuff.

There is one item I've never, ever seen before, and which is the reason they're advertising it as being adult. It's the 'lingerie unsealer'. Which apparently does what it creepily sounds like. All MMOs pretty much have a base level of clothing your character has to wear. Take off all your armour in World of Warcraft and you've still got your underwear on. Pay $20 in Scarlet Blade and your character doesn't have to wear underwear anymore...

I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about this. On the one hand I was brought up to be quite prudish and the idea of nipples everywhere just seems wrong. But on the other hand there's actually nothing wrong with nipples. The game is going to get an appropriate rating to keep little kids from playing it if you think they need to be kept away. And really, you're on the internet. If you just want to see nipples, you can find them. Or you could just watch the Super Bowl or the Oscars...

Oh, and one other twist to the game... You cannot play a male character. Everyone has to play a girl. I'd say woman, but apparently one of the classes looks 12. Apparently there's quite the controversy since the publisher is changing the way that class looks, especially when naked, for the US version. Some people think it's sick that she exists in any version. Some people think it's appalling that it's getting censored. People on the internet... Angry about anything!

I read one blog that made the claim that this game is actually less sexist than other MMOs. The idea was that while sure, it's full of naked women, they're actually all awesomely powerful naked women. It's a game celebrating women, unlike most games which seek to set women up as worse than men. Pretty much every other game has sexist design choices. FFXI wouldn't let you play a sexy cat man. Mithran were exclusively female. FFXI wouldn't let you play an optimal female tank. Galkans were exclusively male, and they were the toughest by far. In WoW there were pieces of armour that looked to offer real protection on men, but had bare midriffs and exposed cleavage on women. Having it seem like plate armour is fully covering some of the time implies armour does something and makes it ludicrous when the female characters are all exposed. In Scarlet Blade everyone is exposed, so clearly something else is coming into play to protect people from grievous injury. League of Legends keeps coming out with cool skins for their male characters and revealing skins for their female characters. Doing some of both for each gender would seem to be more fair, but male gaze pretty much keeps that from happening. Did random blog have a point? I certainly think things would be a lot worse if Scarlet Blade just had the mage and healer classes be naked women while the tanks and melee attackers were clothed men, so maybe they were right and this, somehow, is a step in the right direction? I don't know, and I don't know how to find out. Anyone have any opinions one way or the other?


Apparently there's a real sci-fi plot going on that explains why all the player characters are female. I read a fair number of comments from people saying things along the lines of 'I only logged on to check out the boobs, but it was actually a pretty good MMO'. Part of me really wants to check it out. It's in beta which is normally a deal breaker for me, but I think there's an exception to my buying new games rant from last week. No, not the boobs. It's localization. This game has apparently been out in Korea for more than a year. I'm sure there will be bugs and translation issues with a localization, but the game shouldn't be an unpolished mess. It's not like the game isn't tested, or doesn't have all the features coded, or they haven't bought enough servers. All of these things presumably were solved in the Korean release. I recall that FFXI's US launch was a lot smoother than the WoW launch that happened later that year for these reasons. The FFXIV launch that was global? Complete disaster. Just like pretty much every other launch I've seen. Except Blizzard expansions.

Also it would seem that you can get an ultimate ability which transforms you into a mech... But for some reason instead of having your character inside a cockpit or something you're actually attached to the outside of the mech, exposed skin and all. This just seems really, really weird...

Playing For Second

I was playing a game of Through The Ages in the 3 player league this week (against the Mons of Mons' Goblin Raiders fame) that had an interesting conclusion. I'd played an early Genghis Khan to build up a bit of  a point lead but he'd since died. The score was something like 70-20-16 but I no longer had a material advantage in any real sense. I felt like I was in a good position to win but it wasn't guaranteed. The player with 20 points had in his hand the International Tourism card. This is a pact you can propose to another player as your political action for the turn. If they accept then both players score points each turn equal to the number of wonders the other one owns. The guy with 16 points had 2 wonders and the other two of us had 3 each. There were probably going to be around 3 more turns in the game to score points off of it. Who should he propose the pact to?

If he proposes to me then I rate to score 9 points and he rates to score 9 or 12 points (depending on age IV timing). If he proposes to the other guy then other guy will score 9 points and the proposer expects to get 6 or 8 points. Which should he do?

If he's looking at purely maximizing his own score then he should propose the pact to me. If he's trying to win the game he has to propose it to the other guy. Realistically the only way I'm going to lose is if the other two guys focus on taking me down together with big military plays or by throwing points to each other. If instead they throw points to me it's going to be all over. If he's playing for second place then he should absolutely propose it to me. He can give up on passing me and just work on powering beyond the other guy.

So really it comes down to what should you do in a game when you probably can't win. Do you maximize your individual score, do you maximize your individual placement in the game, or do you go for broke and take the slim lines to try to win anyway? Ultimately he proposed the pact to me, I accepted, and both other players stopped even trying to hit me with anything. They went after each other instead and I coasted to a very easy victory.

Along a similar vein, I played some (for fun) games of Hold'Em at Andrew's birthday party last night. We ended up playing 4 times and I finished with a record of 1st, 1st, 3rd, last. Sky had 1st, 2nd, 2nd, 3rd. Sky mused about which of those records was actually better? Clearly both are very good and would be +EV if we'd been playing for money no matter what the payout scheme was. If it was winner-takes-all then I'd be better off. If it was a 'double up' format where half the people get the same prize then Sky's would be better. So really which is better depends on what sort of weighting function we assign to the different places.

I watch poker coverage on tv when I notice it's on and often they talk about playing for a specific position. Someone with a smaller stack will try to avoid confrontation in the hopes of surviving while a couple other people lose out. Especially when they're 'on the bubble' where all but one of the remaining players is going to win money. A lot of people tighten up and do whatever they can to survive while someone else loses out. Playing passively in this way has to give an advantage to the bigger stacks at the table who can now have an easier time bulling people around and stealing pots.

If it's acceptable in poker shouldn't it be acceptable in board games? There are board games where you're often making plays to give other players points or to hurt other people's positions. (Think El Grande, Diplomacy, or Advanced Civilization.) A game of El Grande with all people playing solely for first is a very different affair than one where people are happy with second place. In the first game getting an early lead is very dangerous since everyone else is going to gang up on you. In the second game an early lead is game winning. People who are playing for second will just keep feeding you points because you simply don't matter anymore in their utility function. They have to give points to someone, and they're allowed to lose to someone, and they're probably going to lose to you anyway. So they might as well give any points to you instead of to one of their competitors.

I donno. I hate the idea of playing for second place. But if what I'm content to come 6th in an event and someone gets out to an early lead in the semis shouldn't I switch focus and start playing for second? Even if it's not a sand plaque on the line... In 2010 when I came 2nd in Tigris and Euphrates you could say my line of play was for second. There was an obvious leader and it would have taken a coordinated effort from the rest of us to take him down. We really could have done it if we'd been willing to spend a blight each. But none of us were willing to be the first one to use our blights and kept fighting amongst ourselves instead.

Improperly Tuned Content

I've been thinking a lot the last few days about content which isn't properly tuned. By this I mean content that the developer thinks should be a particular difficulty but ends up being far easier or far harder than intended. In those situations what should be done?

When content is too hard I think the solutions are fairly straightforward. Adjust the numbers/fix the bugs such that it falls in line with what you intended. Not everyone will be happy with this solution, of course, but even the unhappy people don't have all that much to complain about. Some people would have been able to beat the harder version and will be annoyed that now other people get to trivialize their accomplishments. However, the hardcore people in this case did get the rewards earlier. They got to use the power thus gained in other areas, getting a head start on the competition. And they get to brag about being able to beat the pre-nerf content. Maybe some people were very close to beating the harder version and will be annoyed that they don't get to finish it up but if my experiences with people are any indication they'll ultimately be happy to have the fight beaten, to finally have the loot, and to be able to move on to other things. People who weren't even at the content yet should be thrilled. Clearly they aren't intense enough to have gotten to the fight at its hardest and can actually fight it as intended when they get there. In general, a good thing.

Now, that isn't to say starting content out too hard is wise. The straw that finally broke my WoW camel's back was the tuning on heroic Atramedes. The fight had some bugs, and it had some really stupid numbers, but some people were still beating it so in general people didn't see it as a problem. We bashed ourselves into it for a while and I simply couldn't see a way where I could get better to avoid the instant kills I was eating (flying chasing lazer beams that started on top of me when I was already running and killed me before anything could be done) and really couldn't see a way for some of the other people in the raid to get good enough to avoid the instant kills they were eating. I got fed up and quit. Maybe if that fight was tuned a little saner I wouldn't have gotten fed up and would still be playing WoW to this day.

What about when content is too easy? Here you have a very sticky situation for the developer. If they keep it too easy then their grand vision gets ruined. If they make it harder then the people who got there first will have earned illegitimate rewards that other people simply can't get with the same amount of time/effort/skill. Depending on the rewards this could be a small problem or a game changing catastrophe. One infamous example of this is Kerafyrm the Sleeper from Everquest. This guy was supposed to be an event which rampaged through multiple zones killing everyone in sight, and could only happen once per server. A couple years later a server which still had him sleeping decided to try to kill him. He could only be damaged by a couple of spells in the game (probably someone forgot to toggle him as immune to mana burn) and had multiple instant death attacks. Unfortunately for him he had no AE death spells so it turned out that if you simply had enough people present when he spawned you could resurrect people faster than he could kill them. Three guilds on one server worked together to do this. After fighting him for over 3 hours Sony despawned him! (And this is a game where death caused permanent loss so graveyard zerging something for 3 hours had a very real cost.) Eventually they decided to reset the event and let the guilds kill him off but not after a lot of sketchy explanations. Fortunately for Sony nothing really broke by letting them kill this guy but the fact they despawned him rather than let him die shows just how far developers will go to prevent people from doing things they "shouldn't" be able to do.

This has come up a few times so far in Diablo III. There was a resplendent chest that could spawn in Act 2 that wasn't guarded by anything tough at all. People would start a game near the chest, run to it, open it, and repeat. It was a way to introduce a lot of potentially powerful loot to the game at a rate that was unmatched by actually killing things. In addition a couple of class abilities (in particular force armor) allowed people to survive in inferno more easily than anticipated. In all cases Blizzard let people 'exploit' the issues for a few days and then patched them out of the game. (I use exploit in quotes because I don't know that there's anything exploitative at all about using a survival class ability to survive.)

Here's the problem... You can't really play in Act 1 inferno with loot you found in hell. You need a high damage weapon and good defensive gear that realistically comes from Act 2 inferno. You certainly can't really play in Act 2 inferno with loot from hell or Act 1. The jump in difficulty and in loot is really extreme. (Possibly this content is tuned too hard.) There were ways around the difficulty (like force armor) and there were ways around the loot rarity (like the easy to reach chest) but those ways were only available to the early few who got to the front and thought of them in time. Someone who didn't read about easy ways to get loot or who leveled slowly has no chance of survival.

Except, that is, by buying loot from the people who did. It's entirely plausible to farm the end of hell for cash. Spend that cash on the auction house for inferno quality loot. Use that loot to survive the early part of Act 1 inferno and farm that for cash. Maybe even find an item or two to sell to the people stuck in hell. Use the new cash for Act 2 loot. Use that loot to progress further in Act 1. Repeat. It's certainly a way to play the game, though it isn't the same game you were playing up to 60. My wizard is wearing one item I found myself (a set ring) and everything else I had to buy. Even then, as Sky points out in yesterday's comments, my gear is trash. Despite buying almost exclusively items with int and defensive stats I don't have enough defensive stats to survive and I don't really have enough int to do damage. If I want to keep playing I need to farm more and more money and buy better and better items. Items that I can't feasibly generate for myself. I may hit the jackpot again and get another set item to drop but realistically I'm going to be geared out in rare items and those items are going to be from Act 3 or Act 4 and not from anything I can actually kill. My place on the pyramid scheme is to find items to sell to people barely able to play in Act 1.

I want to play a game where I kill things with my laser beams, look at the loot that drops, and think about putting it on. I don't want to play a game where I need to look at the loot that drops and think about how much I could sell it for. I don't want to play an economic game. (Especially not one with such pathetic data and communication tools as D3. I should play EVE if that's the sort of game I want.)

Perhaps the biggest problem is I can't see a way to possibly catch up to the people ahead of me. Because I can't improve my character's gear on my own I'm stuck relying on those ahead of me to generate loot I can use and price it at something I can afford. But this drains my money and adds to theirs. So when the really awesome stuff from Act 4 drops who gets to buy it? It's certainly not me. I don't have my money anymore, people in Act 3 do. And people in Act 3 don't even have my money anymore, because people in Act 4 do. Indeed, the only ways to catch up that I can see are to find my own undertuned content and 'exploit' it while I can or to spend cash when the real money auction house opens up. In that way I can bypass the in game gold limit where I'll never have more than the people I buy from and jump ahead.

Which makes the cynical part of me wonder if the content was really undertuned at all in the first place... In order for people to play in Act 1 now we need people in Act 2. But how does anyone ever get to Act 2 in the first place if no one can play in Act 1? Well, we let them sneak through some holes we built in to the game! Insert some loot at the start of the system to prime the whole thing!

Blizzard was pretty clear from the get-go that inferno difficulty was going to be really hard. The monsters were going to hit like trucks. How did a wizard spell that reduced all incoming damage to 35% on their max health ever get into the game? As soon as I saw that ability while playing in inferno I could tell it was broken. (As for why I didn't do this right at the start and become one of the lucky people ahead of the curve? I didn't have advanced tooltips turned on so I didn't know what it did.) Either a lot of people at Blizzard are really bad at knowing how things work, or they didn't actually test anything in inferno at all, or they left this rune in on purpose to allow loot to start getting generated. I don't even know which of those options I want to be true. No matter which it is my desire to play the game isn't very high. The issues with chat, the AH, server stability, and account hacking are all contributing to this feeling.

Getting back to the topic... How should Blizzard have handled undertuned content? I honestly think they needed to catch the 'easy' ways to play/get loot in inferno mode before launch or they needed to leave them in for everyone to use. Especially in a game where loot isn't soulbound in any way! World of Warcraft wouldn't have had such an issue. Some people would have more stuff and be further ahead but that wouldn't actually impact the way other people play the game. In Diablo III it does drastically change the way I'm able to play the game. Now, without the early priming of gear they'd probably need to tune down the difficulty curve in inferno or ramp up the gear at the end of hell. I think those would have been better options. But the fact that status quo makes buying gear on the real money AH almost a necessity for anyone who wants to catch up makes me really suspicious...


At any rate, I can see wanting to start a hardcore party up. I can see trying to grind out some more achievements (2590 points and counting!). But I just can't see actually playing the game at level 60. It's just more frustrating than it is fun.

What Is Gambling?

Something I've been mulling over for a while is "what counts as 'gambling'?". Does the level of skill matter? The level of randomness? The stakes? The expected return?

When I think of things that are certainly in the gambling category I think about the lottery. There's no skill in playing the lottery. There's an entry fee and the house takes a guaranteed cut. Buying a lottery ticket is a terrible idea from an expected value standpoint but every now and then someone does get very lucky and hit big. I buy a ticket every few months because I like to daydream about being rich enough to quit my job and having a ticket helps bring power to those daydreams. But every time I do I know I'm just pissing money away.

Roulette is the exact same thing. No matter what anyone with a 'system' may tell you there's no way to beat roulette. If you sit and play roulette long enough there will be only one winner: the casino. Some people will get lucky and swing into the positive realm but it isn't sustainable.

Bingo scratch cards are the same as well. What about actual bingo? It's impossible to be a great bingo player but you can be bad. If you're too distracted to stamp some of the numbers your odds of winning will plummet. Find a room with enough suitably distracted people and I suppose it's possible for the normal dude to realistically make money... Is he still gambling? Does it matter that the circumstances are hard to set up?

Along that vein, what about playing Barbu for money? I played a fair amount of money Bu in University (the stakes were practically peanuts but when you're a starving student peanuts can taste pretty good) and I won way more than I lost. It may be illusory superiority speaking again but I'd like to think I was really good at the game and certainly in terms of all the people who played in the Lounge if we'd been playing for real stakes I'm sure I could have made a living at it. Barbu has a lot of randomness (it is a card game, after all) but it also has a lot of skill. If you can be good enough to win most of the time does it stop being gambling? Is it possible for a game to be gambling for most of the players and not gambling for one of them?

On another line entirely, what about McDonald's Monopoly? You're getting tokens for buying food you'd be buying anyway. There's no cost at all to play and you might win a lot of cash. (Realistically although they don't charge extra for the tokens they expect more people will go to the restaurant and buy the specific things with tokens on them, like large pops. So while there isn't really an entry fee... They're not being charitable!) But it's all luck. Is this gambling?

How about playing Diablo III? After you buy the game there's no cost to keep playing. You can sell items to other players for real cash so it's possible that you'll kill some boss and get a rare and valuable item. Is getting the item gambling? Is killing the boss? Is playing at all? It feels a lot like McDonald's Monopoly in that you can just be doing what you'd normally be doing (eating a Big Mac, playing a game) and suddenly you win some money.

Does it matter that playing and gearing optimally will increase your odds of getting fat loots? One could argue that investing more time into eating Big Macs is comparable to playing more Diablo 3. I'd certainly like to think video game skill is more meaningful than Big Mac eating skill but is there actually a difference between the two? Even if there isn't, is either one gambling?

Dead Rising 2: Morality

I've made it to the final fight in Dead Rising 2 and the plot was interesting though short. It's obviously just there to force you to kill a lot of zombies all over the place which is fine. There was a twist near the end that I saw coming a mile away. At any rate, there's an interesting morality play going on in the story along the lines of 'the good of the many vs the good of the few'.

The basic idea is there's a disease that turns people into zombies. Get bit by a zombie and you'll turn into one yourself in a short period of time. There is a drug you can take which keeps you from turning into a zombie, for one day. So if you get bit you need a shot every day for the rest of your life. That's fine. The tricky part is in order to make the drug you need to gather materials from zombies. But if everyone who gets bit uses the drug then there are no more zombies. So there's no more drug. So everyone who is infected turns into a zombie, biting lots of people. Now we have new infected people and new zombies for drugs.

This seems to be a bad cycle. If you don't have a source of the drug then everyone who gets bit will turn into a zombie. What else can be done? You could kill everyone who gets bit before they turn into a zombie, and if you manage to get them all then you might be able to wipe out the disease. Lots of people are infected though, so this would essentially amount to killing an awful lot of people, many of them supposedly important to society. What happened in the game is they intentionally infected a city and then farmed the new zombies for drugs to use on previously infected people.

Would you kill off a city filled with people you don't know in order to keep yourself (or someone you loved) alive? How about to make a lot of money selling the drug? The main character's daughter is infected and needs the drug and he gets outraged when he finds out the current outbreak was intentional to generate the drug to keep people, including his daughter, alive. But what can he do? Let her turn into a zombie? Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one?

It sounds terrible, but I think I might be one the side of the bad guys here. Forcing a contained outbreak to generate the drug keeps a lot of people alive. We're trading some lives for others and it's terrible to need to make that choice, but some set of people is going to die no matter what we do...

Cylon Leaders

The second Battlestar Galactica board game expansion came out last week and it just happened to be New Year's Eve so of course it got picked up and played at Andrew's place. There are a lot of new mechanics so we wanted to minimize the impact of the first expansion but we ended up with 7 players and hence had to use a cylon leader. I rolled relatively high and got to pick second and decided if one of us had to be a cylon leader it might as well be me.

For those who may not know the game it's a team game where you don't know who's on your team at the start of the game. You get dealt secret cards indicating which team you're on both at the start of the game and halfway through the game. Everyone starts out as a human but some people are actually cylons in disguise. The humans are just trying to survive to game end; the cylons are trying to commit genocide in any of a variety of ways. You take a lot of hidden actions so people try to use logic to deduce who is actually evil based on imperfect information. It's pretty interesting but hard to balance with 7 people. 4 humans against 3 cylons is pretty much a slaughter for the cylons. 5 humans against 2 cylons is pretty much a guaranteed win for the humans. So what they did was they made the "cylon leader" who doesn't take part in the hidden team part of the game the way the other players do. They act as a cylon most of the time but can also turn into a human and help them if they want. Their motivation is derived from a secret agenda card which tells them what their win conditions are. They either need the humans to win while having done things to hurt them or they need the cylons to win with a lot of complications tacked on. In theory it makes the balance more like 4.5 vs 2.5 but in practice it doesn't always work out that way. I think it warps games but it's a reasonable solution to the problem of the game only being balanced with 5 players by default.

At any rate, an interesting situation arose in the game we played. It became pretty clear that I was a cylon-wins cylon leader since every overt action I took for the first 2 hours of the game was attacking the humans. It also became pretty clear that the humans were dead. They were in danger of losing on 5 of the 6 losing conditions and were a long way from the end. But I hadn't completed my special objectives yet, so we were basically just playing it out to see if I could win or not. Assuming I actually am a cylon-wins character there are 4 possible options for what I could need to accomplish. The question then is, how should the other players act?

The 4 humans should hope for a miracle and keep trying to survive as long as possible. I'd actually started helping them near the end and a couple lucky draws and maybe they could have pulled it off. Alternatively, if they've really given up they could try to work out my win condition and fight to keep me from getting it. The cylons win, no need to have the cylon leader win.

What should the 2 cylons do? If they get me working with them again they definitely win. Ignore me and they almost certainly win. If they work at it they might be able to screw me out of my goal, but should they even worry about it? There is certainly some risk involved, since the further they take me from my goal the more I need to prolong the game in order to win.

For me the answer is clear. I need to achieve my goal and then blow the humans up. If I'm not going to win I have to keep them alive, if I am I want them dead. I'm not spite playing here, if that matters, but maximizing my own winningness. This sort of thing came up in Republic of Rome too. Is it 'better' for the humans to have me lose too? Is it 'worse' if I win? Or once they've lost should it be irrelevant to them?

As it turned out I had to help the humans survive one card that was guaranteed to kill them if I hadn't helped. My criteria was met shortly thereafter and then we blew them up. No one even put any thought into what I could be trying to accomplish or tried to help/hinder me in any way. The game was a little long and I think most people just wanted it over, but I'm not sure they could have colluded to keep me from winning even if they knew my goal. (Not without just throwing in the towel long before they were practically guaranteed death.) I'm pretty sure I had the hardest secret objective (cylons win, 3 or less morale, 4 or more Galactica locations damaged) and it was pretty tricky trying to pull both of the requirements off. But I was essentially a better cylon from the start of the game to the end and only helped the humans once, so they didn't have a lot of hope of winning, sadly. Which is the problem with the cylon leaders in general. I had a great game but the humans (Andrew, Byung, Dee, and Heather) had a lot of trouble and the two cylons (Adam and Duncan) had an easier time than they should have. This isn't to say they didn't play well (Adam managed to take some bad actions as a hidden cylon without being ousted and I didn't think Duncan was a cylon either until he revealed) but the game balance was skewed in their favour because of the cylon leader. It's always great to be the cylon leader, so if I played a lot of games and everyone rotated being the cylon leader I think it would be a reasonable mechanic. But I don't play enough and some people refuse to be a cylon leader so I'm not much of a fan. Even if you can call me Al.

Yahtzee Jr.

I played a kid's game this weekend and thought I was quite clever in figuring out a way to get a slight edge. I ended up beating Andrew and his two children twice (probably mostly through luck) but I wanted to see how slight that edge was.

The game is a very simplified version of Yahtzee in that you have 5 dice and 3 rolls to make your best 'hand' which you put on the scoring chart. All you're collecting is sets. There are no straights or full houses or anything like that. (In fact the dice all had pictures on them so the concept of a straight is right out.) There are two twists compared to normal Yahtzee. First, the dice each have the 5 main characters on them that you're collecting and 1 wild value. Second, one of the wilds is actually an anti-wild. It counts as nothing and can't be rerolled at all.

My 'trick' was to find the die with the anti-wild on it and keep it if I had a choice. To make things clearer, assume I'm using standard D6s and the 1s are wild. One of the dice has the 1 scratched off and replaced by something else to represent the anti-wild. I make my first roll and it comes out 1-2-2-3-3. Should I collect 2s or 3s? Normally in Yahtzee the answer to that question depends on what you've filled in on your scorecard but it often doesn't really matter. You have the same odds of getting 5-of-a-kind with either 2s or 3s. In this variant, however, I should find the die with the anti-wild on it. If it's on one of the dice current showing a 2 I should keep the 2s. If it's on a die currently showing a 3 I should keep it. I'm always keeping the wild as well. What sort of edge am I getting by choosing this way as opposed to always rerolling the anti-wild?

Well, I get to reroll each of the dice twice. The first die is 1/3 to give me what I want on the first roll and 2/3*1/3=2/9 to give me what I want on the second roll for a total of 5/9 to turn out good. The odds are the same for the second die. So, my overall odds are 16/81 - 3-of-a-kind. 40/81 - 4-of-a-kind. 25/81 - 5-of-a-kind.

What if I keep the anti-wild in play? The first die has the same odds as above but the second one is 1/6 to give me what I want on the first roll and 4/6*1/6=1/9 to give me what I want on the second roll. Overall that's 5/18 to give me what I want as opposed to 5/9 with the normal die. My overall odds here are 52/162 - 3-of-a-kind. 85/162 - 4-of-a-kind. 25/162 - 5-of-a-kind.

My expected value score in the first case is 4.1111. My expected value in the second case is 3.8333.

How about if my first roll is worse? (Simplify things a little and assume you can't switch horses in mid stream, so even if you roll 3-3-3-3 on your second roll it doesn't help if you kept a 2 to start.) 2-3-4-5-6, say? Pick out the bad die and keep it and you end up with 256/6561 - 1-of-a-kind. 1280/6561 - 2-of-a-kind. 2400/6561 - 3-of-a-kind. 2000/6561 - 4-of-a-kind. 625/6561 - 5-of-a-kind. Run with something else and you end up with 832/13122 - 1-of-a-kind. 3440/13122 - 2-of-a-kind. 5100/13122 - 3-of-a-kind. 3125/13122 - 4-of-a-kind. 625/13122 - 5-of-a-kind.

My expected value in the first case is 3.2222. My expected value in the second case is 2.9444. I am happy but not too surprised to see the difference is the same. A gain a little more than a quarter of a point by making this choice over making the wrong choice. Someone who isn't aware of this is going to pick right half the time, so my edge is .1389 points. This is, of course, assuming that I didn't roll the anti-wild in my first roll and that the die it's on is one of my potential best picks.

Or does it? What if I roll 2-2-3-4-5? Should I keep the 3 if it's the anti-wild? I already know my expected value in that case, so I need to work out the results when I keep the 2-2. Well, my odds are 208/1458 - 2-of-a-kind. 600/1458 - 3-of-a-kind. 525/1458 - 4-of-a-kind. 125/1458 - 5-of-a-kind. Or an expected value of 3.3889. This is bigger than the 3.2222 where I keep just the anti-wild die, so no unexpected diversions in strategy here. Keep the bigger raw number, only use the location of the anti-wild to break ties. This was my gut feeling at the time, so I'm glad it pans out in reality.

Now the real question is should I really be looking for edges in order to beat 6 and 7 year old kids at board games? Now that I have the edge, should I use it? Should I try to explain it to them? Should I only use it if Andrew is also playing?

Roster Management 2

Wizardry V was a game I had on the Super Nintendo when I was a kid. It was a 1st person view dungeon crawl style game where you built a party of 6 adventurers and then explored a dungeon. Every so many steps you'd encounter monsters, kill them, and level up. Pretty standard RPG fare, right?

Well, one of the things with the game was your party wasn't fixed. You rolled up a bunch of characters in the tavern and made a party from 6 of them, but you could always go back and roll a new character and mix/match. Decide you really do need a thief? No need to restart the whole game, just make a level 1 thief and have him tag along for a while. Eventually he'll level up enough to be useful!

One of the quirks of the game is there wasn't really an easy way to resurrect dead characters. One of your 6 guys dies early on? Lug his corpse back to town, visit the tavern, and reroll a new dude to replace him. Alternatively you could pay a bunch of money to the temple and they'd rez him for you. Or at least, they'd cast the rez spell. It had a decent chance of failing. A failed rez didn't just mean your character remained dead. No, it meant he got reduced to ashes. You couldn't cast rez on a pile of ashes, sadly. Clerics (either high level in your own party or in the temple in town) could cast a super rez spell for a ludicrous amount of money to bring someone back from ashes. Hopefully. Sometimes that would fail too, in which case your character was lost forever. Oops.

The 'best' part is what happened when your whole team died in the dungeon. Their corpses and all their stuff just stayed where they died. Want to rez them? Better bring a new team into the dungeon to drag their corpses back to town. Oh, but it's not quite that simple, since corpses occupy party slots still. So you'd need to take five new characters down and drag back the corpse of one of your old party members. Rez him (hopefully!) and sub back down to 5 people to go back for the next guy.

Just to be clear, in order to get your 6 high level characters back you need to roll 5 new characters and level them to the point where they can succeed where your initial 6 failed. Not just to the point where they might succeed but where they will succeed 6 times. Yeah. Oh, and unless you remembered where you died you were screwed. You had to go back to the exact right square and search for their corpses. Rage quit for a week or two and coming back wasn't really feasible. Generally when this happened I just stopped playing.

But eventually I sat down and beat it. I lost my whole party several times on that play through but it turned out after you build a second team to save the first team once it's not so daunting to do it again. I didn't have 6 characters so much as I had 12 and I made sure to be really really careful when doing a corpse run. (Maybe I had more, I don't really remember the specifics. There was a weird aging mechanic too so sometimes you had to cycle out a guy anyway.)

Imagine if the tavern in that setup didn't just have level 1 characters. Imagine if when my team of level 10 guys died I could go pick up 6 new level 8 dudes from town. Spend a little time leveling them up and I can go rescue my level 10 corpses. My adventure gets set back for sure, but the scale isn't nearly as bad. I don't need to invest a full amount of time getting back on top, just 10-20% depending on where my team died. A penalty, but not a crippling one.


Relating to yesterday's topic, my single player World of Warcraft game hates permanently losing a guy because I have to reinvest from scratch to replace him. My multiplayer game hates it, but not as much. The 'tavern' here is full to the brim with vaguely comparable replacements. Personality clashes, strategy training, and the risk they have strafing as a major part of their rotation certainly still exist so there's still a pretty substantial penalty for losing a raider but it's not as crippling as having to start straight from scratch. If you have a good reputation as a guild and have made decent progression then your odds of getting decently skilled and geared recruits goes way up. (Back in TBC we were able to recruit a lot of decent people cross-server because we were fairly decently progressed. Wrath it was a lot harder since most people thought 25 mans were more important than 10 mans. We'll see in Cata if the stigma goes away from that direction or not.)

As such, I think the risk of random deaths is less of a factor than worried about yesterday. Random absences definitely still are and you want to avoid having to cancel raids due to insufficient people but proactive recruiting should mitigate a lot of the risks from having people quit.

Roster Management

I used to play a lot of tactical RPGs back in the day. (Vandal Hearts, Final Fantasy Tactics, Suikoden Tactics, Disgaea, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, etc...) Typically in a game like this you get to choose how your experience is distributed amongst your characters because whoever you take actions with gets the xp and the people you leave on the bench get nothing. Frequently you'll have a 'main character', often the one only plot relevant character you get to name. I develop an attachment to these characters which means I tend to use them more than the average character. This means they get more xp, which means they get more powerful than my average character. Which means when I get to harder fights I have to keep using them. The rest of my team is massively underleveled relative to the current content so if I want to win I have to bring in the big gun.

In Disgaea in particular I've tried to play the game with a balanced team. I've tried to level people equally but it never works out. I always end up with my favourite character taking more of the actions which means they're the only one who levels up with means they're the only one who can take the actions. I took to taking time out after every story act to level the rest of my team on the leveling map but the end result was still that when it came down to crunch time I still only used my favourite character.

In a single player tactical RPG that can even make sense. In Disgaea in particular for equal time spent leveling I can have a bunch of equal dudes or I can have one dude who blows them all out of the water. Even in a game with a more sensible leveling system the optimal play is still to power level one dude. With one caveat, which is that you can always bring that dude along on every fight...

In Romance of the Three Kingdoms (I only played part 3 but I assume the rest were similar) you were trying to conquer ancient China. You could take over one of the premade factions or could start your own in a neutral city. You could even play with other players as I remember my brother and I starting on opposite sides of the map and playing for days and never really interacting. At any rate, it took a turn to walk between two cities on the map, so once you owned a reasonable chunk of the map one army was no longer good enough. Stack your best dudes in one spot and you could beat anyone in your path but your opponents would take two cities from your backdoor for every one you took from their front. In order to actually win you needed to develop a few good armies rather than one awesome army. (Here you didn't really get xp so much as you provided them with more and better troops, but the theory still holds.)

So all your eggs in one basket is the 'best' way to play in Disgaea but an even distribution is the 'best' way to play in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Something I've been trying to quantify recently is what's the 'best' way to go about playing in World of Warcraft?


What do I mean? World of Warcraft is a multiplayer game and barring multi-boxing you can only level one guy at a time anyway. Obviously you should put your effort into that character. But I'm not talking on the micro level of an individual character. I'm talking on a macro level of a raiding guild. Ignore that there are actual people behind these characters for now. Abstract that all away. You have a finite number of pieces just like in Disgaea or Romance of the Three Kingdoms. You have a finite amount of xp entering the system, though in this case it's purple loot and familiarity with encounter mechanics to be gained instead of a flat xp number or a number of archers. How should you set up your team to tackle 10 man raids? (My guild was a 10 man guild in Wrath and will be one again in Cata, so this is what I think about.)

Assuming no other constraints and that this is just a tactical RPG then clearly you just want to level up 10 dudes. Some fights want 3 healers and some only want 1 tank but mostly you want 2 tanks, 2 healers, and 6 DPSers. So I'd set my team up to have 2 tanks and split the tanking gear evenly between them. I'd have 2 healers of different gear types and split trinkets/weapons evenly between them. I'd have 6 DPSers of a variety of gear types and make one of them have a healer offspec. I'd want their mainspec to be a caster so they could reuse gear easily but give them a high priority on offspec stuff before any other DPSer. (Shadow priest would work, ret paladin would not.) I'd pick one of the two tanks to be the DPS guy and give him DPS gear over the other tank and both healers. I'd never change roles, so one tank is always the guy who is in the Abom and the other always tanks Putricide, for example.

This way I'd maximize encounter mechanic familiarity by reducing change. I'd maximize gear by reducing overlap and by splitting it as few ways as possible. (Likely I'd want one of my two tanks to be a feral druid to split tanking gear along type lines as well. And likely wouldn't want a rogue at all as a result.) In this way my little team would be ready for the hardest fights with as few trips through the power leveling map as possible. Just like in Disgaea, I don't want to spend more time on Cave of Trials, Stage 3 than I have to.


Clearly this wouldn't work in World of Warcraft without an insanely dedicated group. In a single player game your main tank doesn't go to Vegas for a week leaving the other 9 people picking their noses. Either you go to Vegas yourself and don't play the game at all or you stay home and have access to all 10 of your characters. There's no risk of a DPSer deciding he wants to play with other people and silently transfering to another server like a dork. Can we enhance our model here in some way to deal with these constraints?

Well, having to essentially start a new character from scratch to join with our powerful team is bad. If I can't reliably beat the hardest fights with my 10 pimped out dudes how can I possibly win with 9 pimps and a chump? If this is likely to happen then I want to have a contingency plan in place from the start. Grab an extra character of each type and rotate them all in equally. This certainly slows down my optimal path to killing the hardest stuff but makes so I don't just have to scoop when one of my characters permanently leaves.

Though honestly I'd have to ask if I'm playing the Manders RPG here. Why do my characters randomly leave in the middle of the game? I'd actually just level 10 guys and then stop playing for good when one left if I couldn't make progress with 9. Maybe I'd add an 11th guy and rotate around my DPSers (biggest pool of people so less watering down of the gear amongst them and increased chance the character death would hit this pool). But if I was playing Disgaea and was using Laharl exclusively and he up and left I'd turn the game off.


But wait, permanent death isn't the only option. In actual World of Warcraft people show up late. Or they miss an individual night with short notice. Maybe their internet went out. Maybe their computer gets so hot even frozen peas won't save it. Maybe they come down with the flu.

Which reminds me of the Bloodbowl league we ran at Chateau Monterrey back in University. I played the halfling race which only had two possible characters: halflings and treants. Halflings were arguably the worst units in the game. They had the least strength of any character. They had the least armor of any character. They had close to the lowest speed in the game and merely average agility. They had a couple special abilities that were quite useful and were incredibly cheap (good since they died so very easily) but they were not good. Treants were amazing. Second strongest unit in the game, the highest armor, and the worst movement and agility. Also useful special stats. But you could only have 2 of them on your team and they had a crippling drawback: a sixth of the time they just wouldn't show up. I had a bench to draw from, but the bench was more halflings. Frankly, any game where a tree sat out I couldn't win. It was a terrible feeling, and if I was taking it seriously I probably would have quit playing it as a result. (Well, and I could spent an awesome level up roll to remove the drawback. I got lucky (1 in 6 chance) and removed it from both trees pretty early on. It helped that trees earned a lot of xp for clubbing things.)


At any rate, back to World of Warcraft. I can't roll doubles and remove the chance of getting sick from any of my characters and I don't want to quit, so I need to come up with some other solution to the problem. The only solution seems to be to have a sufficiently large bench which have sufficient gear, skill, and experience levels to fill in when needed. Swapping in a halfling for a tree doesn't help but if I was allowed to have 5 trees on the roster but only 2 of the field at once that would be ok. Each tree would be worse so my odds of winning a specific championship game goes down (assume I need 2 high level trees to win) but my odds of winning any individual game - and of having fun - go up. The people earning world firsts in World of Warcraft have the commitment to go gung-ho with a super small dedicated roster but if I just want to have fun with my friends and kill everything a little slower then adding bench spots and splitting the gear and playtime around works ok.


One final problem though, which is that we have actual people behind these characters. They aren't just extensions of me with a random number generator deciding if they show up or not. In a single player game I'm happy as long as I get 10 dudes and a chance to win. In a multiplayer game I don't need to keep myself happy, I need to keep everyone happy. Everyone has their own motivations and their own restrictions on what will keep them happy.

Personally, I want to play the whole night when I start playing. Swapping in and out doesn't interest me (if I'm not in then I want to go do something else not hang around on the chance I might get in later). I want to play as many nights as possible, but committing to 100% attendance ends up making me unhappy. I'll get tickets to a hockey game, or get sick, or have a friend in town and just want to play Le Havre instead. I want to have the flexibility to be able to blow raiding off when convenient but also want it to always be there when I want to play. For the most part I always want to play so going with a 100% plan tends to be a good way to maximal happiness but when something else strikes and I can't take the time off the happiness plummets. (It's like I'm Adam's avatar from The Sims when he vistited Tom P's heart shaped house and watched Tom's avatar make out with Adam's virtual wife... I just want to sit at the bar and drink my low happiness bar away. If I drank, anyway.)

At any rate, if it came right down to it I'd almost be fine if raids didn't happen when I didn't show up and always had exactly 9 other people when I did show up. I would be if I was completely antisocial (I'm more avoidant than antisocial really) anyway. But I'm not and they wouldn't stick around if I was. So while I'm fine taking all the loot and practice and just screwing everyone else if I take off, well, it just can't happen that way. But what's the solution? If I was playing a single player game I might just accept that the guild shuts down if a tank quits but that's neither fair nor acceptable to the other people.

But what's the other option? I can see the argument for having 3 tanks and evenly rotate them in. A nice, even split of gear and practice. But that means only playing two of three nights. I didn't keep any stats from this last expansion but I've got a feeling I played a lot more than two of every three nights. I know back in TBC that Amaranthea and myself were in the 98% attendance range... Imagine 13 people with that attendance. Assuming their absences are independent (not true since days like Thanksgiving or Lounge Day will have linked absences). You'd always have 10 people for every raid which would be great, but you'd average sitting 2.74 attendees every raid. That's a little less than 80% actually getting to play when people show up. Is that good enough?

What about if people only show up 90% of the time? Well, then you need to cancel 3% of raids and you're down to sitting 1.74 attendees per non-cancelled raid. Better, but still not really good enough. And we're losing raids.

80%? Now we're losing a full quarter of the raids. We're only sitting .79 attendees per non-cancelled raid and everyone gets to play more than 90% of the time they show up.


What's the upshot here? Well, I think it's that you can't build a 10-man raid from 13 identical people. People either won't get to raid enough of the time that they show up or too many raids will get cancelled to not enough people showing up. You need some people with different expectations. People who don't mind showing up and not getting to play a good chunk of the time. You need diversity. Not just among classes, specs, and buffs, but amongst personalities.

Rules Lawyering

I'm the sort of person who believes there's a right way and a wrong way to do things. I order piles of cards in Dominion so every card in the pile faces the same direction. I tap my cards to a full 90 degrees. In Le Havre I make sure every token in the supply has the right side face up and are stacked up in neat piles. In short, I'm anal retentive. But I tend to feel bad about forcing other people to also follow along. I don't yell at people who return their Le Havre tiles upside-down, for example, but I do flip them over myself. Eventually people tend to follow along but if they never did I wouldn't complain. The game functions fine with the tiles in the supply in any orientation, I just have the need to have them the 'right' way. It extends to non-games, too. On the way home from work today I had to cross the street to get to the bus stop. There was a "Don't Walk" hand up with no cars coming and the light about to change. I could have started across during the yellow the other way, but I had to stand there and wait for the "Walk" guy to come up. Because it's the right thing to do.

But sometimes I'm playing a game with something more than fun and the desire to succeed on the line. I sometimes play in tournaments with reasonable prizes and sometimes the difference between 'right' and 'wrong' isn't just superficial but actually comes down to how the rules of the game work. Here my choices are basically between letting someone cheat for their own profit or being a rules lawyer and enforcing game state. I feel just as bad doing such things and in the past I often wavered and backed down. It takes more of a backbone than I want to have, generally, but I'm becoming more willing to do it. A couple examples from the weekend:


I was playing Thunderstone with Aidan and Pounder last night. (Thunderstone is a game very similar to Dominion in terms of building a deck of cards which you use to earn victory points which clog up your deck but it has a real theme instead of just being cards.) At one point Aidan played an effect which let him sacrifice one of his hero cards to get a higher level hero card. I was in charge of the destroyed pile so I took his old card and threw it away, assuming he would take the level 2 one. He thought I was going to give him the level 2 one and put it in his discard pile and it got overlooked that neither of us did it. A few turns later he noticed that he'd gone through his whole deck without drawing it and had made a plan based on eventually drawing it. (There was only 1 level 3 card left and he wanted to get it. I was also trying to get it, and in fact had bought an extra level 1 card to try to get the remaining level 2 one as well. You know, the one that should have been in his deck already.) How do you resolve this? If this was a tournament game with a big prize, how would you resolve it? Does a prize existing actually matter?

What we did was gave him the level 2 card he should have had but had him shuffle it into his deck instead of guaranteeing it in his next hand. This put which of us got the level 3 card up in the air but I didn't undo my level 1 purchase. It seemed like an ok compromise at the time but it isn't 'right' for either of us and if it was a tournament I don't think either of us would be happy. I don't know that the other players would be happy either.

Later in the game Pounder forgot to take a negative card and shuffled his deck without it and draw his new hand. Then he remembered the disease right afterwards and shuffled it into his existing deck. This meant he didn't have it in the current hand and in and of itself isn't that big a deal. However, he noticed this after I'd played a card that forced him to discard a hero card and give it to me; I was going to destroy it. His hand had his remaining level 0 hero in it. The odds of having his level 0 hero to protect his good ones goes down if he had a disease in his deck... More to the point, if he hadn't had the level 0 one and had had a level 3 one, would he have then wanted to reshuffle with the disease protecting his level 3 hero? Should a reshuffle happen immediately? Would it matter if it was a tournament game? How did Aidan feel knowing that I was going to get to destroy his best card while Pounder was 'cheating' to put forward a level 0 hero?  (I got to force both opponents to discard but only got to permanently kill 1 hero. Clearly I kill the level 3 over the level 0 but what if they both discarded a level 3? Aidan went from a potential 50% loss of his best card to a guaranteed 100%.)

What ended up happening was I got Pounder to confirm that he likely wouldn't ask to reshuffle if he'd be looking at losing his best card and then let him keep his current hand. In a tournament game I would have demanded he reshuffle immediately. In this case no actions had actually been taken based on his failure to take the disease (I was the next player) so other than taking a little time it was trivial to fix.


In another situation I actually played in a Magic tournament on Saturday. Going into the last round I was sitting at 3-2 as was my opponent. Lose and we get nothing. Win and we probably get nothing but might make the top 8 based on tie breakers. We have some good natured banter before the game (mostly about my moustache) and then get started. I have a ritual before every single Magic tournament game where I always pile shuffle my opponent to count and reorder their deck. (Not really randomize since it is deterministic, though I throw in a couple shuffles at the end to do a little randomizing too.)

At any rate, my opponent presented his deck, I pile shuffled and discovered he only had 35 cards. Turns out he left 5 of them in his pocket when he sat down and didn't bother to count his own deck. He found them and slyly suggested he just add them in to his deck and reshuffle. In actuality for presenting an illegal deck (too small) he's supposed to get a game loss. Should I let him shuffle the cards in or should I call the judge?

In the past I've let similar things slip without calling a judge because I'm a "nice guy", only to realize in retrospect that it wasn't an accident at all and they were actively trying to cheat. After all, what if this guy had left his 5 worst cards in his pocket on purpose? If he often gets to just shuffle them in when he gets caught and often gets to play with a smaller deck then why wouldn't he? In this case I called the judge. (They've changed the penalties since I last played; for all I knew he wasn't even going to get a game loss.)

The judge (Duncan) came over, and gave him a game loss. My opponent was livid. While the pre-game had been pretty cordial the games were full of tension. I wished him good luck at the start of game 2 as I always do and he responded that he hoped I lost. He was clearly pissed off that I had the gall to call a judge on his 'honest mistake', and I'm pretty sure it affected his play as well. The part that really saddens me though is he was asking earlier in the day about becoming a judge but didn't seem capable of handling having a judge actually get involved in a match. (I ended up winning the match and came 9th in the tournament on tiebreakers.)


On the one hand, it feels cheap to be trying to do anything I can 'outside' the game to win. On the other you'd have to be naive to believe everyone else operates under the same set of moral rules. If I always play the nice guy then I'm putting myself at a disadvantage compared to other competitors. (And I actually think part of why I never really made it on the PT when I played a lot of Magic is I wasn't cutthroat enough.) Not that I'm saying I should have cheated as I definitely wouldn't have done that, but that I should have been as anal as I could be in order to win. There's a Grand Prix coming up in a couple weeks, maybe I'll be able to be less nice there too.

How Do You Play? How Do You Win?

I find myself teaching board games to my friends quite often. This happens partly because I’m an anal retentive perfectionist and therefore want to read the rules and partly because once I find a game I like I want to show it to everyone I know. For most of the people I play with there’s really only two things you need to worry about, as told so eloquently by James Coburn in his tv ad about slot machines. How do you play? How do you win? I’ll show you how!

For the most part how you win is pretty straightforward. Most if not all of the games we play lately are “euro” style games where you accumulate points over the course of the game. Eventually the game ends and whoever has the most points is the winner. Games like this tend to have scoring summaries to hand out which tell you exactly what actions can earn you points and how many. You probably need to iterate over the summary and explain what each item means, but it’s pretty straightforward. You win by doing the stuff listed here!

How do you play flows nicely from there. There’s normally a turn order summary (often on the same card!) and then you just need to link the potential actions you can take to the scoring items. Easy peasy! First time players who learn the rules this way aren’t terribly likely to win but they should have a reasonable shot at playing the game properly, of having fun, and of learning how to win for future games. The alternative where a lot of strategy is spelled out in the rules explanation makes set-up take a ton of extra time and most people would rather just get to playing. (Try to teach Agricola to someone who wants to win on their first game and needs to learn everything before the first turn!)

Scoring by victory points in this way also lends itself nicely to figuring out how you ‘could’ play when you can’t win. You have a number you can make bigger! It’s ok if you’re not going to win, you still have a relevant in-game goal. Score more points! (How to deal with player ‘elimination’ in general is a topic of lively debate and not really the topic at hand. Suffice it say when you’re learning a game just scoring points will be hard to argue against.)

This works great for euros, but how do you deal with games with odd winning conditions. The game that brought this to light for me is Republic of Rome, a game from 1990 that simulates the Roman senate. The game has many different end conditions and different winners depending on game state when the game ends. In particular there are 3 potential outcomes:

- Rome falls to some catastrophe and everyone is loyal to Rome. Everyone loses.
- Rome falls to certain catastrophes and someone is a rebel. The rebel wins.
- Someone loyal to Rome accumulates enough influence to win.

Consider a specific player’s point of view. How do they win? Take it one step further… Once they know they can’t win (as new players rarely can in any game) how can they play without screwing the game? Taking actions to score victory points in a euro is unlikely to be massively disruptive, what about here?

In a euro you’ve got a grading system that’s easy to understand. More points is better! But in Republic of Rome the potential outcomes from a single person’s point of view are:

- Be loyal to Rome and get enough influence to win. You win!
- Be a rebel and have Rome fall in some way. You win!
- Everyone loses.
- Have Rome fail when someone else is a rebel. They win, you lose!
- Have someone else be loyal to Rome and get enough influence to win. They win, you lose!

The question then is how do you order those 5 things to determine what our player’s goals are. How do you win? Once you can’t win, what do you do? Is it better to have someone who isn’t you win or to have everyone lose? Does the answer to that question change after the ‘learning’ games are done and you’re playing ‘for reals’?

I’ve only played the game twice (and we got the rules muddled all over the place due to the reprinted version having terribly printed rules) but I still don’t know what the right thing to do is. I asked Andrew about this and his response was rather predictable. “If I can’t win, no one should win!” Which, I must admit, is the stance I took. Unsurprisingly this resulted in Rome collapsing and everyone losing in both games. I know for sure I could have stopped the second one from happening (I could have donated enough money to Rome to field a big enough army to survive for game end, but I was guaranteed to not win if I did) and I’m pretty sure the first game was lost because Matt came to the same conclusion. (In his case he blackmailed the leader, which had two possible outcomes. One - he became the leader. Two - we lose…)

My gut feeling is that I’m always going to take the 1% chance to win in a game like this and if I can’t win, well, no one should. Does that mean I can’t play games like this? Do we need to come to some sort of agreement that having everyone lose is somehow worse than having someone win? I could be convinced that having Rome survive with a winner is better than having Rome burn with a rebel who wins. Is it really that much more of a stretch to believe that it’s also better than everyone loses? Alternatively, maybe the game is better if it’s harder for Rome to burn. (We didn’t play with any optional rules, maybe those would help too.)

Maybe it all comes down to how you feel about kingmaking. If you hate the idea of kingmaking then you’d need to get into a position to brute force a victory which seems hard to do (especially in a 6 player game). On the other hand, if I have no problem picking a winner it would be fairly easy to team up with someone else to make them win.