Thingol wrote: Poq, the Muster of Rohan map, which you referred to, is basically awaiting the Review Board to pass it:

http://www.wargear.net/games/view/207840

well ain't that something. looking forward to it! who is the review board?

poq wrote:

 who is the review board?

Good question.  I don't know if there's a published list.  There are about 15 or 20 of us.  The process is a bit ad hoc, but I suspect most would say that it works pretty well.   There aren't much in the way of official guidelines for reviewers to follow, and it is my opinion that this area should be shored up a bit.  The site has a lot of live boards at this point, and I think there's the potential for things to get unwieldy.  I know that's more than you asked for, but I figured I'd elaborate.

http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/2438/Development_Testers_and_Review_Team

It's a STICKY at the top of the Board designers chat... 

Up-to-dateness is Yertle's issue I think. 

Thanks for posting that Ratsy...the list does appear to be out-of-date.

Ahh, I see. Is there also some sort of statistical analysis involved in deciding whether a board is balanced? Like analysing the game statistics of a 20 player round-robin tournament on the dev version of the board?

poq wrote:

Ahh, I see. Is there also some sort of statistical analysis involved in deciding whether a board is balanced? Like analysing the game statistics of a 20 player round-robin tournament on the dev version of the board?

Nope; it' s much more informal that that.  With all but the most complex of boards, it's done pretty much by smell.  Many of us on the Review team are designers ourselves.  Making the board balanced is one thing, but we also concern ourselves with game-play (use of modifiers, choke-points, etc.), as well as the clarity of visual elements, etc.

Mind you, "balancing" a board is pretty much an art, and there's a fair amount of subjectivity involved, which can make it tougher for the "team" to agree. 10 or 20 games on a board is not large enough of a sample group to determine if, over time, it will split 60/40 or 55/45 in favor of the first player in a a two-player game. To make it even more nebulous, some could legitimately ask, "What's wrong with a 60/40 balance?", arguing that if you and I play enough of those games, you'll sit in the first seat half the time and the numbers will balance.

Designers can always "update" just about any aspect of the board after it goes live. For instance, on a number of scenarios of the Go-Geared board, White starts with a Stone on C3, which, when you back out the "draws" leaves it at about 44/56 in favor of the second player to move ..after about 250 games played so far. I could move that starting stone around in future versions, and it would start to impact on those numbers.

There is no review process for updates.

I noticed there are a lot of folks on the Review team that don't seem to be very active here anymore. That being said I'm willing to join the team if folks would value my input.

AttilaTheHun wrote: I noticed there are a lot of folks on the Review team that don't seem to be very active here anymore. That being said I'm willing to join the team if folks would value my input.

It's up to tom, but the list needs to be updated and we could probably use more reviewers.

Perhaps every 3 or so months an e-mail or PM could go out to all Reviewers asking them to "re-apply".  Any response leaves on the team. This way, inactive reviewers could be purged from the list and a more accurate assessment of the numbers can be made.

poq wrote:

CK66 wrote: There is a Simulgear map. It is a scenario under the Global Warfare map.

Ahh. I didn't know that. I wonder why everyone keeps playing 2p games on wgwf then.

Would it make sense to disallow 2p tb games on wgwf? Or would that be too harsh? After all, these 2p games somewhat distort the whole ranking system.

 

I debated that before release because I absolutley abhor 2-player games on "standard" boards.

My pure hatred for 2-player turn based games is so great that when I was testing PipeDream, I made sure to play 20+ 2-player games on it and made some tweaks so I could acheive, as best I could, a "fair" 2-player game.  By my estimates, PipeDream - if played by two people who both know what they're doing, will end about 55/45 in favor of P1.  Sure, it's not the perfect, but it's about as good as I could get it.

Also I'd like to chime-in, that although I agree Simulgear is much more fair for 2-player games, I do not believe that all boards can (or should) be played Turn / Simul interchangably.  If you like 2-player games, then play on a specific Duel board.  I've got 3 duel boards in development at the moment; I'm hoping to get things finalized on at least 2 of them before the year is through.

Toaster wrote:

.. I do not believe that all boards can (or should) be played Turn / Simul interchangably.

An interesting comment that calls for another thread, but..

The whole lightning/real-time game system, (which seems to be pretty popular; there always seem to be a few open games, and I don't know how many live), works realistically with 2-3 players with the large majority of them being 2p games. The irony is that most boards don't play well with only 2 players for the very reasons we are discussing.   A simul-order-placement system seems like the obvious solution, but apparently the complexity of placing SimulGear orders combined with whatever Toaster is alluding to makes it a less than stellar option. 

Toaster wrote:

     "My pure hatred for 2-player turn based games is so great..."

I share that hatred Toaster.    I think all 2-player games should be SG with one exception (Kjeld's Lorax map).

Thingol wrote:

Toaster wrote:

     "My pure hatred for 2-player turn based games is so great..."

 

I share that hatred Toaster.    I think all 2-player games should be SG with one exception (Kjeld's Lorax map).

I'm sensing a lot of hate here ;P

I'm currently play-testing a SG scenario of Go-Geared with Andernut.  SG makes it a different game, and it works very well, but it's difficult to understand what's going on unless you are pretty familiar with the standard turn-based game.

The only problem is the way the order of factory implementation can affect certain uncommon positions.  An understanding of this can potentially give a player a tiny advantage when those situations come up, but we're thinking that if it's documented, it's fair game, and only a few players can play at a level where they can take advantage of it.

Toaster wrote:

poq wrote:

Would it make sense to disallow 2p tb games on wgwf? Or would that be too harsh? After all, these 2p games somewhat distort the whole ranking system.

By my estimates, PipeDream - if played by two people who both know what they're doing, will end about 55/45 in favor of P1.  Sure, it's not the perfect, but it's about as good as I could get it.

I guess my question is the following: If you know PipeDream only allows 55/45 odds for 2p games, why offer it as a two player game in the first place? Just make it 3p and up. Same for WGWF and the like.

poq wrote:

I guess my question is the following: If you know PipeDream only allows 55/45 odds for 2p games, why offer it as a two player game in the first place? Just make it 3p and up. Same for WGWF and the like.

If you did that you'd have to do it to most every board.  There are very, very, very few boards that are fair in two player games.   Considering that 2p games are by far the most popular, you'd pretty much kill the site by essentially wiping out the opportunity for people to play them.

Besides, what would constitute fair enough?   ..52/48?  ..or perhaps 51.3/48.7?  And how would you prove it?

The only way to make every board play fair regardless of seat would be for them to be played with some kind of simul-play type of system.

Right now players keep playing 2p WGWF because there is always that chance to be on the good side of luck/seat position/etc.  True, it's not an equal matchup, but since most feel it's a gamble either way it keeps players coming back.

AttilaTheHun wrote:

Right now players keep playing 2p WGWF because there is always that chance to be on the good side of luck/seat position/etc.  True, it's not an equal matchup, but since most feel it's a gamble either way it keeps players coming back.

The draw for me was simply that it was a familiar board that I could play without having to invest a lot of mental energy on and that there'd be more immediate gratification.    

Contrary to the impression I might have originally created when I started this thread, I don't mind a certain amount of randomness in these games.  It can add to the fun and challenge.  I joined those two-player real-time games because I didn't want to think as hard and I was looking for a quick escape.  That's the lure for me, a quick escape.  Even though I was somewhat joking, the addiction metaphor works for me because that lure was strong enough to cause me to disregard the things that I objectively knew to be the case: that luck plays an overly significant role in the outcome and that many of the people who play are socially inept.    Similar to the challenges SquintGnome described in post #8, I found it very difficult to keep to the high road in my reaction to the outcome of these games.    

(Hi, this is Harmless' sub-conscious.  "not keeping to the high road" is, ahem, sugar-coating it... Frankly, his behavior was juvenile and embarrassing, yelling at the computer, pounding his fists on the table, etc.  It took all the will-power I could exert from this level to save the small animals in the vicinity from being punted across the room) 

Thanks to this thread, I've been "clean" now for going on 5 days and I'm much happier. 

p.s. I also discovered an option in the settings which allows you to turn off the pop-up notifications of new real-times games being started.   That's a nice feature.   For those like me who haven't checked the configurable settings in a while, you should check them out, it seems there are a lot of helpful things there that I never noticed before.

Step away from the pop-up.

ratsy wrote:

http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/2438/Development_Testers_and_Review_Team

It's a STICKY at the top of the Board designers chat... 

Up to date now :)