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Post by Ellestar on Nov 15, 2007 6:49:47 GMT -5
I'm not a programmer at all, so I wasn't refering to how complicated it would be to program, but how complicated it would be for the average player to understand a system that changes the weighting depending on the game type listed. I don't think a single multiplication will make or break it, it will be about as complicated. However, it will make it better.
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Post by Ellestar on Nov 14, 2007 5:07:17 GMT -5
Personally, I've known Ellstar as a player for some time now, and at no time did I become aware that he was a web database programmer, if that is infact his area of expertise. I may know alot about alot of players, but I can't know everything. If there are players on the ladder that have real life skills that can help us and they want to help, I would expect them to come forward and identify themselves and what they can do for this community. CS It's from another thread, but let's keep it in this one. Actually, i said that it is not my speciality (see the link above) but i made some things on PHP/MySQL for other fansites. So maybe i'm not the best candidate to make it from the scratch, but i can help developing the project.
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Post by Ellestar on Nov 14, 2007 5:06:28 GMT -5
That is a possibility, but we don't want to make things more complicated than need be until we are sure that it is the best course of action. There is a lot to be said for keeping things simple too. CS Hmm, i guess you have a wrong judgement call on things which are complicated to code and which aren't. As long as game type is stored in a database (and you already said that it is), writing the code that will apply a different weight coefficient to a different game type will take about the same time as writing this post. And discussion about which exact weight coefficients to choose will certainly take more time than that ;D
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Post by Ellestar on Nov 14, 2007 4:46:31 GMT -5
No one has said that people like Geforced or Ellstar can not be invited, if they so desire. To date I don't beleive that they have indicated that they want to assist us, although it seems that they are working on something with MGT, although I'm not aware of the status of that project other than what Geforced has stated in this thread. But if they want to contribute there expertise it would certainly be welcome. Well, i believe i said that i can try to help with the project. To the best of my ability, i understood that your reply meant that you don't need my help. civ4players.proboards44.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&thread=1189726740&page=6I'm not sure what kind of ladder MGT wants and i never said that i'll help him in that because IMHO it's a waste of time. I said only that i'll help with a game mod. Mod will be obviosly even more imbalanced than BtS (for whatever reason MGT thinks the opposite) but probably it will be fun to play for a while. And probably there will be some good ideas for a balanced mod ;D
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Post by Ellestar on Nov 7, 2007 1:42:02 GMT -5
Yes we looked at the TrueSkill system, but unfortunately MS only gives you have the info for free, the real details are not public intellectual property. But I am sure that we can tweak our ante system to ensure that teamers are as fairly treated as ctons and 1v1's, but we also have to ensure that while we create a system that ensures the league is competitive across the board we also don't want to create a huge rift between new players and the top players. We have enough people screaming "elitism" as it is now. If we do this system right it should create a normal bell curve of player skill values over a few month's of reports. CS Well, actually they explain it in pdf but then you need to know probability math good enough so to understand it. More importantly, they hint on the right way to count teamers using ELO-like ranking - skill gain/loss in a teamers should depend on a total team skill (sum of skills of all members). And skill gain/loss from teamers should be lower because a variance in performance of a team is significantly bigger. They say that FFA is the fastest way to roughly measure skill and teamers are the slowest (as expected, more players - slower measurement research.microsoft.com/mlp/apg/trueskill.aspx). Well, they use their system for match-making while we obviously don't. Also, with matchmaking their FFA will have players of a close skill so that makes a difference too. So IMHO for our ladder we should give a maximum weight (skill gain/loss per game) to duels, somewhat lower weight to ctons and lowest to teamers. And use ELO or some variant of it. It will not be as good as TrueSkill (it's ELO variant with a mathematical apparatus to roughly measure a new player's skill much faster), but still better than what you "invented"
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Post by Ellestar on Nov 6, 2007 9:15:51 GMT -5
umm, yea? that's exactly how it was supposed to work, lower skilled players gain more skill from the same game than higher skilled teammates if they win (and lose less if they lost). Ok, but then it contradicts your statement "and you'll gain more skill if you beat a overall 'good' skilled team with mostly 'bad' skilled teammates on your own team". That is, from my point of view because i think i'll have a higher than average skill. isn't it always this way? it's the same with cases right now and it will be the same with every other skill system too, if you team up with a low skilled player and your team wins, he will have the most gain from it if he didn't contribute to the win. it's always at the higher skilled player's risk to play with lower skilled player in the same team. Of course it isn't. AFAIK in every such skill ranking system you don't lose much score if you're expected to lose anyway. Cases system will work perfectly for 1v1 and maybe for ctons too but it shouldn't be used for teamers the way we use it. Say, that Microsoft TrueSkill system you mentioned works that way. That's why i said that we'll be better using separate ladders for 1v1, ctons and teamers, at least until we'll find a better solution. If we don't, all that "skill" thing doesn't make sense at all because you don't use it properly. In your system it's a very bad idea to play with weak players against a strong players, even if you lose 67% of the usual loss, your chances to win are near zero. Maybe a stacked team's gains will be lower, but they'll mostly be at the expense of a stronger players in a weaker team. And i don't think that denying new players to teamers is a good idea, it happens too much as it is (because it's not fun to play such games). Obviously, your system makes it even worse. At least, in Case's system you don't lose your own place when you're a part of a much weaker team. Also, skills will represent a real player skills only if there will be no weird jumps in a skill if your team is supposed to lose (according to a skill comparision). That's the whole point of the ranking like ELO etc. If a stronger players will lose relatively the same score when playing with weaker players against a much stronger team, you'll never have a fair ranking. what you are right with is that the skill gain should ideally be greater for the high skilled player when winning with a low skilled team than winning with a high skilled team. but with the ante system the total pot is lower with more low skilled players participating. I just pointed at a mistake in your advertisement let's see what nom comes up with, hope his theoretical model will work in practice as expected. i will have both skill systems run on the same random set of pairings after and see how they behave in the long run, working on such a test program right now. i will also change the function for skill calculation and make it interchangeable so whenever someone comes up with a good model it can be put in easily. another look around for other rating systems would not hurt either, but there really isn't a good system incorporating duels, team and ffa games. if anyone knows of a good system please speak up ... something like the MS True Skill System might be a good, if someone could explain it to me ... (not enough math skills for that : It's incomplete, looks like a full description is here ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2006-80.pdf. Good thing is that it already includes the way to calculate skills based on team games. And it was made by a professionals. So if you really want to have a ladder that incorporates team games, we should use this skill rating system. However, i just read their descriptions so far, i didn't check the math. Also, they have an example dataset here research.microsoft.com/mlp/apg/downloads.aspx
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Post by Ellestar on Nov 6, 2007 4:30:30 GMT -5
we had a longer discussion about that too and we also had the idea to spread it like you suggested. but after going through some more examples it showed that redistributing it based upon the given fraction would favor the better players when winning and penalize the worse players when losing just too much in the long run. in your example losing vs 2 players with double your skill the 1000 player would lose 30 skill, that's really a lot for such an unbalanced game. and it's even worse if the difference is larger and that team wins, the highest skilled player in the team would get the most skill because he anted the most. but that would mean that the player will gain too much skill for playing vs players that are each lower skilled than him. ROFLMAO ;D With whom you're discussed a lot? They should go back to school ;D Since in your system ante is proportional and redestribution is equal, lower skill players will gain more skill after a match compared to higher skill players in the same team. I'm not related to any work concerning mathematics (that is, i'm not a specialist and not even an amateur) but even for me it's obvious. Another obvious conclusion from that is that lower skill players will gain skill by just playing teamers with higer-skill players, given about equal win/losses - obviously, at the expense of the higher-skilled players, even if lower-skill players don't contribute to wins. Just a frequent participation is enough. If you ask me, it will be more balanced if skill gains in case of a loss should be proportional. Since ante is proportional, total skill loss because of a match will be proportional too (some % of a total skill at the start of a match). And in case of a win, winning pool should be used to compensate ante first (proportional part) and after that you can distribute extra equally. Then total skill gain will be equal for all players no matter the skill. Of course, it still has the same problems but at least it's not that extreme. so we added a global rule that a losing team NEVER gains skill and a winning team NEVER loses skill for a won match. with extreme values this will still give good results for players not affected by this rule and just cut off negative values but does work better in the long run and works even great if people of equal skill play each other. Team or player? Even if a team doesn't lose skill because of a win, that obviously doesn't mean that all individual players will not lose a skill because of a win. So IMHO that rule doesn't make sense. Well, i guess it's because you don't understand the fact mentioned above. that would be really great, if you can make a model that works for duels, teamers and ctons alike i would give it a shot for sure. although i wasn't really bad at math, probability theory and statistics were not my favorites ;D ... so a small explanation of your model would be nice would be really cool if you can make it within 2 weeks, after then it will be much harder for me to change the skill calculations when finishing the tournament reporting system - i'd really like to implement it if it's suitable before that. I'm suggesting you to keep all match details in the database so skills can be recalculated retroactively if you'll want to change the system (as a bonus, you'll be able to test the settings like ante % on a real data and choose the best ones). I bet that your first version will not work as you expected.
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Post by Ellestar on Nov 6, 2007 3:42:31 GMT -5
[/li][li]Skill gain in team games will be based on your teammates' skills too and not only on your own skill. It's more hard to gain skill with stacked top players on one team and you'll gain more skill if you beat a overall 'good' skilled team with mostly 'bad' skilled teammates on your own team. Of course it also works in the opposite direction, if you lose with your team against a team of all lower skilled players, you (and all your teammates) will lose significantly more skill than you would by losing vs a nearly equal or better skilled team.[/quote] Something tells me it's not exactly so. Let's see... Say, more experienced players have skill H and less experienced ones have skill L. So, for a standart 5v5 teamer with 1 experienced and 4 unexperienced vs 5 experienced it will be: pool: (4 * L + 6 *H) * 10% = 2 / 5 * L + 3 / 5 * H If unexperienced team wins then gain of the only experienced player in a team is (2 / 3) / 5 * ( 2 / 5 * L + 3 / 5 * H) - H / 10 = = 1 / 150 * ( 8 * L + 12 * H - 15 * H) = ( 8 * L - 3 * H ) / 150 With only experienced players in a teamer, the same player gains (2 / 3 ) / 5 * ( H ) - H / 10 = ( 20 * H - 15 * H) / 150 = (5 * H) / 150 So, let's check when skill gain is bigger. 5 * H > 8 * L - 3 * H 8 * H > 8 * L (H, L >0) Since we agreed that H > L, 5 * H is always bigger than 8 * L - 3 * H In other words, experienced player playing with unexperienced players against more experienced team gets less skill from a win compared to a win in a game where all players are experienced. So, your original statement isn't true Well, i sensed that something is fishy with that system. So it was a good idea to check it
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Post by Ellestar on Nov 1, 2007 16:40:57 GMT -5
Anybody from a Free For All match can report it, but they MUST MUST MUST first check to see if it has already been posted. If there is a double post of the same match then either player can delete theirs. A warning message which says "Please check that this match hasn't already been reported before filling out this form" would be a good idea Well, i guess it isn't hard to make an automatic check if a game with exactly the same players was reported recently.
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Post by Ellestar on Nov 7, 2006 3:15:51 GMT -5
Please IP-Ban MMV already. We don't need spam bots here.
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Post by Ellestar on Jul 31, 2007 3:52:59 GMT -5
We missed the Advanced Start bug. I guess no one ever thought of abusing the system in that way. Our bad. Besides, it resembles one of the classical ways to dupe in MMORPGs. It was present in about half of the MMORPGs i played.
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Post by Ellestar on Jul 27, 2007 7:07:58 GMT -5
The "no sound" ping was probably a request by longhorn, lol Nah, longhorn ping should have been invisible as well ;D PRAISE the Civ GODS- JUSTICE has been served! ;D Death to the PING and pingers! Death to beggars who don't have money to buy a decent comp
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Post by Ellestar on Jul 27, 2007 11:42:22 GMT -5
You know that Civ4 has a build in timer and alarm? CS Timer??? I guess you don't understand... www.xfire.com/profile/ellestar/Civilization IV 1257 hours Civilization IV - Warlords 527 hours Counter-Strike: Source 477 hours etc. It counts all popular games that way. well my xFire doesn't tell me anything or list anyone, so I keep it turned off now.....guess I have to add friends like with YIM? Yes, of course. You can also see friends of your friends if that option is on.
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Post by Ellestar on Jul 27, 2007 7:05:44 GMT -5
Comrade is just another useless piece of software like Xfire before it.. CS XFire is not useless. If anything, it counts time played and i like it So i use it all the time when i'm playing.
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Post by Ellestar on Jul 27, 2007 6:38:15 GMT -5
I played SMAC/SMAX a little too. Also, there is a SMAC/SMAX mod for Civ 4 forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=207806 It's not an exact copy of SMAC, but it's close enough. I'm helping to make it, didn't make much so far though.
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Post by Ellestar on May 20, 2007 7:11:46 GMT -5
I was on play.com this morning about to pre-order my copy of BTS, then i went on amazon.com and noticed there is a 20 day difference between the US release date the UK one. Now i dont mind paying for software, but if paying means waiting an extra 20 days... no thanx. However i can get it ASAP, that’s how i will obtain it. Don’t understand such crazy stuff, and then complaining about piracy being a form of theft. Whats the alternative, wait an extra month? pffffft. I don't see what's the problem. If you want to pay for it then you can always do so, irregardless of how you got the game.
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Post by Ellestar on May 6, 2007 15:22:53 GMT -5
· Enhanced AI: The AI has received many enhancements, making it tougher to beat on the higher difficulty levels. The ways in which the AI will attempt to achieve victory have also been expanded. I wonder, they just merged a BetterAI mod in their expansion or what? That's exactly the features of a BetterAI. I bet their new AI sucks anyway, one of the good AIs is the one in Galactic Civilizations (despite that GalCiv budget is 5% of Civ 4 budget at best). It runs in a different thread all the time, during a player's turn too. Well, Civ 4 is like all big brands in that regard, why bother writing a good AI if it sells anyway?
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Post by Ellestar on Aug 2, 2006 1:05:22 GMT -5
Personally both the immortal and the war chariot are a bit overpowered now. They were already really good, now they are nuts, lol. I am also running a few tests on catapults now, to see how they have changed, will let you know when I have something solid. I do know they won't hurt units that are around 50% or so life, but I forget if they did that before or not. For catapults limit was always 50% (40% cannons, 30% artillery).
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Post by Ellestar on Aug 3, 2006 5:54:47 GMT -5
im sick of peeps cryin about banning russia in reni's. stalin is the new napoleon....except he spams COSSACKS!! Woo HOOOOO. lets play some warlords you girls. Correction: we're just banning it. And you're crying because of that banning ;D
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Post by Ellestar on Jul 26, 2006 1:08:51 GMT -5
SDK wasn't updated with Warlords yet? Any plans for it?
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