The Official Unofficial Multiwinia Ladder

Working on new maps for Multiwinia? Discuss!

Moderators: jelco, bert_the_turtle

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Imeanunoharm
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Postby Imeanunoharm » Thu Dec 11, 2008 4:01 am

When I say time, I mean time as in "over time the statistics start averaging (for want of a better word) and making much more sense".
Mas Tnega
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Postby Mas Tnega » Thu Dec 11, 2008 4:24 am

Kaizer wrote:i miss the days when games were about fun and not about a number on a website. still apart from a small percentage of players i think the ladder has cultivated a healthy competative nature in the game.
I want my days of fun back. When a first minute meteor showers was lulzy and not gamebreaking bullshit. When taking over the other guy in under 2 minutes meant you killed the game for them and we could all appreciate it. When Assault sucked because Assault is balanced like a one armed tightrope walker carrying a 100lb weight. When Ants were a pain in the ass just because shitty frame rates are shitty. (Noticing the gripes lie mostly with machine performance? Screw you!) When I didn't have to see "Mas is ranked 5th" when I'm using any number of alternative pseudonyms!

*tear rolls down face*
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Postby Kaizer » Thu Dec 11, 2008 4:38 am

there there i hate ants too. want a hug?
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Postby Mas Tnega » Sat Dec 13, 2008 5:26 pm

Please to be with the considering Weight Crate locations. There is no fairness whatsoever in Random. The so-called positional fight for them is a lie, because where they land requires an all-or-nothing from one party, and "Ooh" *pick up* from another 90% of the time. More to the point, 90% of them go to the same player.
If this is based on xander's notion of whoever's winning should be the winner, reject it. The whole point of the game is that it isn't decided by the first 10 seconds of the game, but EVERY SINGLE 2P MAP is *exactly* like this without the catch up mechanisms. A single crate may tip the balance in the case of something close to a tie, but it'll take half a dozen to come back from having half as many spawns when handicap's off, unless one happens to be armour, and another reinforcements.
Random doesn't make the game more like Chess, it makes it Chess if you flipped a coin to see who goes next; statistically you each get as many turns, but in reality whoever got to 20 turns first has already won.
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Postby Mas Tnega » Sat Dec 13, 2008 6:20 pm

Consider it, is all. Discuss, yell, tell me why I'm wrong. Because I really don't think Basic-Random is even conducive to a game of Multiwinia.
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Postby xander » Sat Dec 13, 2008 8:14 pm

Mas raises a good argument with regards to weighted crate drops, and I think I have to reconsider my previous statements on that issue. On the other hand, I am still not convinced with regards to basic crates only. In a tournament game, the person who is winning should be the winner. Mas has pointed out that a less skilled player can win by starting just a hair faster than their opponent, and that the more skilled player should be given a chance to fight back with crates. However, I still feel that a lucky meteor shower, infection, or nuke barrage can tip the balance too far, and that basic crate only are a better test of player skill in a tournament setting.

xander
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Postby Mas Tnega » Sat Dec 13, 2008 10:39 pm

I think Basic Crates is fair. Putting the crates in order of how scary they are to pick up, we have:

Practically a godsend:
Armour - Kept alive and filled, this ruins opposition. You don't know where it's going until it's halfway there and by then you might not have much to defend against it. The only flaw is that you can only be so far behind in terms of position before it becomes more useful as something to attract grenades. This of course only really applies to CTS, KOTH, and DOM where they aren't nearly so easy to acquire, or limited.

Initiates comebacks:
Reinforcements - Almost never useless, truly brilliant if you need something to load into the armour.
Squad - You may need a start point to put it down, but it happily travels from spawn A to target B in a timely manner and under competent control almost certainly deals serious damage to target B. If you want to stop someone lifting off in RR and don't want to use your man-power, get a turret on their base and put down a squad.

Secures leads:
Gun Turret - It can help you wrest control of an area, wiping out any number of enemies, and then it'll get captured and it all happens to you. That or they just bomb it. Takes more thought to place well than it does to overcome it.
Airstrike - It kills turrets (usually), shuts off spawns (briefly), wipes out formations (maybe), flushes the enemy out into gunfire (in the right circumstances), and ...spreads MWs out to save the enemy the effort of micromanaging them to be harder to surround.

Not immediately useful:
Engineer - Recovery tool. You've broken the enemy's grip on the spawn point and you're almost out of MWs. Enter the Engineer. Then he'll be needed where there are souls but no enemies. This place will be the arse-end of nowhere and the Engineer will still die somehow. Pray for a Magical Forest not too far away, pray it doesn't burn. While you're doing that, I'll pray for a million pounds.
Magical Forest - Burn me! Burn me now! Burn me and purge from the world all those foolhardy enough to walk beneath my canopies! Seriously though, throwing yourself at a forest where the enemy is hopelessly entrenched and waiting for an unlucky grenade is the most spectacular loss of life you'll see in basic crates. This one is generally so bad that you think "Oh sh-" when you get it. It's a waste of a crate, and it's a major liability if it's anywhere near you.

Go on, fault that line up, I dare you.
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An idea for visualising the ladder

Postby moth » Thu Dec 18, 2008 8:44 pm

I'd like to see a diagram of how everyone's rank has changed over time. Something like a grid of dots, one row per player, one column for each rating period, with lines connecting the dot for each player's rank in each column to the dot for their rank in the next column, and the lines labled at both ends with the player's name.

Possible refinements:
Add lines representing matches: for each match, draw a really faint line from the looser's dot in the previous column to the winner's dot in the column for that rating period. Players who loose see their score spreading out and dissipating, those who win see score flowing to them from the loosers. I'd really like to see this.

Make the size or colour of player lines and dots a function of their rating deviation and/or score.

Make the thickness of match lines a function of how much they effect the score of each player.

Thanks for putting so much work into making the ladder.

moth
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Postby Mas Tnega » Fri Dec 19, 2008 3:35 am

In the interest of raising discussion about 4P (and dick waving, but that's a given):

This match result. Huge exaggeration of player dynamics, or valid case study? Gigantic skill gap, or an long and interesting series of plain bad moves?
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Re: An idea for visualising the ladder

Postby moth » Fri Dec 19, 2008 2:48 pm

jelco wrote:These are very ambitious ideas, but I'm afraid they're both not going to work. There are so many players and matches respectively, both graphs are going to be one giant mess of lines and dots which can in no way be read by anyone. However, I can see where you're going so I might be able to come up with a compromise. This will probably be something along the lines of a list with people a particular player has played against during the most recent rating period. I will see what I can do. ;)

Jelco


A huge mass of lines - yes. Intimidating - yes. Totally unreadable - not necessarily. Straight lines work well on complex diagrams because you only need to see part of them clearly to see where they are going. With enough pixels and (especially for the match lines) a non-linear blending algorithm that doesn't saturate too easily, i still think it could work.

I think a lot of the unintuitiveness of the ladder comes from the way everyone's score depends on (approximately) everyone, so i was trying to think up a way of getting a sense of what is going on with the whole ladder. I wouldn't hope to be able to pick out every individual match, but i think you could get a good sense of who is shooting up, diving down, drifting one way or the other or just fluctuating, and think the way the match lines fan in and out of each dot would make it clear who is climbing by defeating a few higher-ranked players, or a lot of lower players, or just because the players above them are loosing to others, etc.

That said, it is ambitious, and maybe diagrams visualising the update formulae separately for each player would be a better way of showing what is happening.

moth
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Postby MadMorgan » Sun Dec 28, 2008 11:33 pm

Hey Jelco - thanks for all the work on the ladder!

I have a feature suggestion. I'd be interested to see my match history against individual opponents.

I imagine an additional filter on the "view played matches" page for entering an opponents name. The url would be something like: matches.php?user=MadMorgan&enemy=Jelco

When logged into the ladder a "view played matches against me" link could be included on opponent profiles, too.

I'll have to chat you up about VJing some time in another channel...

Thanks again!

~ Mad Morgan
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Postby NeoThermic » Mon Dec 29, 2008 12:07 am

MadMorgan wrote:~ Mad Morgan


Thought I recognised you! "Mine!" had me in stitches for the proceeding 5 mins. :)

NeoThermic
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Postby MadMorgan » Mon Dec 29, 2008 2:05 am

Enjoy!

Jelco


Thanks Jelco! I'm already enjoying it :D

MadMorgan wrote:
~ Mad Morgan


Thought I recognised you! "Mine!" had me in stitches for the proceeding 5 mins. Smile

NeoThermic


I worked really hard for that statue! :wink:

Thanks for ded-hosting, NeoThermic.

~ Mad Morgan
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Postby Phelanpt » Fri Jan 09, 2009 6:22 pm

Thanks Jelco!
Very interesting data. :)
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Postby cheesemoo0 » Fri Jan 09, 2009 11:44 pm

Nice, I love the new feature!

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