FUMBBL :: Online Blood Bowl League

Joined: Sep 30, 2005

Posted: Jul 13, 2008 - 21:44

I just wonder:
If I am really competitive, then I need to spend time not only to understand the game and it rules and mchanics, but also to first train a set of skills, strategies, reflexes, perception etc.... and then continually spend time to keep my set at the upper edge.
I have to make the game my profession. Only then I am "truely competitive" and not "scrub-competitive". Only then I lay off the self-imposed rule of not dedicating all my time for the game. If I am lucky, my game knows a thing like "professionals" and allows me to be fully competitive while making me a living. If I am unluck, but want to be "truely competitive", tehn I ahve to quit my job and rely on social welfare. Only quitiing my (drone/slave/not-game-related) job will allow me to free more ressources and train my skills to reach maximum expertise. If I do not want to quit my job, then I will not use all I have to win the game. Then I am a scrub: even if I try to use everything "inside" the game, I will still be weaker than a professional.
Of course, by quitting my job I rely on others to pay for my food and lodging - for a debatable return.

---

I tried to write in the what I felt was the spirit of the article, and drive it over the edge. The article knows only "scrubs" and "competitive" and doesn't allow for much in between - apart from the seemingly contradiction of the japanese soft and world-wide hard ban for some characters... especially the soft ban seems very "scrub"-like from the earlier description.

Ergo: I prefer to play with Scrubs.
Plus: I will not engage in a discussion, so if anyone feels like he/she should comment the above, then do not expect that I reply to those comments. I had a game where I spent way too much time into, which did not earn me a living, and tried to be "competitive" close to "truely competitive". It was a serious waste of time that I deeply regret.

pac

Joined: Oct 03, 2005

Posted: Jul 13, 2008 - 22:50

Walks_in_the_Sun wrote:

Are you being hyperbolic for the sake of the internet, or are you serious? You're either the laziest person in the world or I'm an appallingly bad writer, because I can't imagine you're reading the same things I'm writing. What hoops? I'm talking about playing the tutorial, reading the manual, and/or watching a demo!

Those things tell you (the very basics of) how to play, not how you're meant to play. Are you saying that you should never take any action in a computer game that isn't mentioned in the demo/tutorial/manual? That would be pretty dull.

There's nothing obviously wrong (from the background, demo, manual, etc of the game) about a Zerg rush, for instance. There were peasant rushes in Warcraft too. It is clearly something that players are going to try out and, if it works, some of them are going to carry on doing it. A lot! (However, they'll feel pretty silly when it's fixed and they never spent any time learning to play the rest of the game and so are not able to implement any other effective tactics.)

Quote:

See? Were the designers of Street Fighter and Starcraft "appallingly bad?"

Clearly not, since their games continue to be played widely and competitively.

People got far far better at Street Fighter and Starcraft than the designers probably ever imagined and no doubt discovered some possibilities the designers hadn't realised were there. I doubt the designers were upset by this.

(Please note: I said that a designer was 'appallingly bad' if they relied upon players interpreting what they meant ('the spirit of the game') to make their game work. In the Zerg rush case, Blizzard did not do this: they just fixed it. I doubt they threw tantrums along the lines of 'you lot should know better than to do this!' first.)

Quote:

How do you "read the minds" of the gamers who will seek to bend it until it breaks?

You don't have to 'read their minds'. They are exactly the sort of people you need to test your game. You give them the game and ask them to do everything they possibly can with and to it. You find out whether there are depths to be explored and, if it's possible within the time available, whether there's something truly broken down there that you need to sort out.

Quote:

And how do you take all these opportunities away from them, without de-evolving the game all the way down to checkers?

Why would you take their opportunities away from them?

Some people believe that the 'best' tactic always has to be 'nerfed'. This is a fallacy. There will always be a best tactic. By nerfing one, you just make the former second best tactic the best tactic. The problem only comes when there is no reasonable counter to the best tactic, when it is so strong that everyone has to do it, all the time. By all reports, Zerg rushes may have fallen into that category - that was first addressed by the community and then fixed by the developers. By all reports, 'low strong' in Street Fighter did not fall into that category - it was just a tactic that on one day, in a hot arcade somewhere in California, some exhausted guy could not find his way around.

On some days, caging in Blood Bowl is invincible. Sometimes fouling is, or stalling, or AG 5 players. But none of them are broken. On other days, they are beaten - sometimes they're beaten so badly you wonder why anyone ever tries them!

Quote:

Do you think Blood Bowl's designers wanted both sides to do nothing for one half, then play out the second half to reduce casualties? Or put everyone on the LoS and select 'both down' and 'attacker down' all day? How would they prevent someone from doing that, if they felt it important?

On FUMBBL, these things are banned by site rules. If someone sees the match, report or replay, they report it and measures are taken.

In a typical table-top league, there would be similar rules to stop such play (although they might not get round to writing them down till someone actually tried it).

If you're just playing at home with a friend and want to do something so silly, fine, it's nothing to do with me. Very Happy

What no one has to do to resolve these situations is consult or read the mind of the designer. Does anyone still think Jervis Johnson knows more about Blood Bowl than anyone else?

Quote:

If there is a genuine consensus, if something really is broken, then people usually recognise it quickly and act on it.

Like a 'soft ban'? What have you agreed not to use?

Nothing. I don't believe anything in LRB 4 Blood Bowl is so overpowered it should be banned. More importantly, while there are lots of individuals who do think some things are, there is no consensus on what is too strong (some say Orcs, some say elves; some say fouling, some say not fouling).

The biggest issue in LRB 4 BB (in my opinion) is Get the Ref combined with DP - but at least this is a random kick-off result potentially available to either player, or both! (And you know in advance you could be very vulnerable to it if an opponent's FF is significantly higher and he has DPs.) It doesn't break the game (although it does occasionally break teams Wink

).

Quote:

Dauntless+Horns is not. It's really good and, in my opinion, definitely not what the designers intended.

So now you are reading their minds? What context clue had you thinking this isn't what they intended?

It's just my opinion as a designer, based upon my knowledge of the game. As a player I wouldn't need to think about it. In addition, I seem to remember it being confirmed that the intended order was the other way round (add Horns before Dauntless), but no action was taken until LRB 5.

Dauntless+Horns is a great example, by the way. Let's agree (just for a moment for the sake of argument) that it wasn't intended to work that way. So, when they finally noticed it, they decided to fix it in the next version. But look: here in the mean time, we don't need a soft ban on it. It helps Skaven (and more rarely Chaos) out, sure, but do teams with Dauntless+Horns overwhelm every tournament? Not remotely: though it wins some games, it can be countered. It's a tiny little boost in competitiveness within a huge range. A classic example of an exploit (if you accept for a moment my assumption that it was unintended) that might have some coaches disapproving, but doesn't damage the game.

Edit: Let me throw in another BB example here. Chainpushing a player in order to one-turn. Now, this is pretty damn weird, isn't it? These impossibly complex arrangements of players somehow propelling this guy further than he could have run. I don't think the designers ever expected people to do it (although they would certainly have been aware of natural one-turners!). If they had realised the possibility back at the start it's entirely possible they'd have come up with some rule or rules to prevent it. But they didn't.

So here we are now and we've got this weird 'exploit' that the designers (probably) never intended. Do we need to ban chainpushing? Again, no. There are set-ups that make it much more difficult and there are some that make it impossible (though you may need the right skills). And it's never a sure thing. Not to mention that it can only happen once or twice a game - you can't win endless games just by chainpushing, you're going to have to play for the other 15 turns too. Also note that chainpush scoring itself even acts as a counter to another disliked tactic, stalling. The system works!

BB (like most complex games) is full of things like this that the designer did not mean or expect. (Some of them are so much second nature to us now that we've forgotten how counter-intuitive they are.) But they are not always bad things. Very often, in fact, they're good things, adding depth to the game which is there to be mastered for those who want to (as in the case of one-turn chainpushing, just because it's called an 'exploit' doesn't mean it's always easy to exploit).

Quote:

People don't like Duck Hunt?

People don't like reductio ad absurdum either. Razz

That said, there are lots of very simple games that have far more depth and complexity than the surface suggests. Designers did not put this all in. Players found it.

Quote:

Missing one thing on year 2, week 10, day 3, opening up the possibility of one player forcing others to 'adapt or die' to his chosen exploit that wasn't intended to exist?

Every time you talk about these bugs or exploits, you seem to be talking about ones which completely destroy the game. I've already agreed that those should be addressed. But they are very rare.

Normally, on delving deeper into a game, there are counters to this tactic someone thought was invincible, and in the long run it ends up a forgotten dead end.

Quote:

I couldn't be bothered to learn all the moves in SF; so maybe I didn't get the 'full' experience, but I elevated my play a little above "button mashing" and I enjoyed the game without ruining it for anyone else. Maybe it's just because I'm a 'casual' gamer.

Precisely. You didn't care what the top players were doing. In fact, you didn't care if the designers thought people should be playing it ultra-seriously and mastering every last combo either. If the designer had showed up out of nowhere and said, 'Hey, your inferior standard of play is not doing justice to my beautiful game!', you'd have told him where to go.

You just played the game you wanted to and enjoyed it. This is exactly the idea! Very Happy

Quote:

The point here is imposing yourself on others. If you were watching a movie, and kept rewinding and watching the same part over and over again, people would want to kill you.

And when it comes to games - played between people - and you're playing a particular way that forces your opponent to play a certain way as well, or otherwise bend over and take it, you're forcing your will on them.

No one forces you to go to tournaments. No one forces you to play against people like this outside tournaments either. Yes, there are issues with identifying these people and finding a like-minded group, but unless you think this type of player is going to suddenly go away, that's always going to be the case. The solution is to find and build better ways of doing those things (identifying, forming groups).

(We've already discussed, and acknowledged, the problem of Ranked on FUMBBL being an intermixing of casual and competitive play.)

Quote:

Now, generally, this is a simple moral issue, do you want to be that guy? Because usually, if the behavior is legal in the game, the other guy doesn't have a leg to stand on. But when it's unclear if an action is legal, or even more, clearly illegal but unenforceable - just because you can get away with it doesn't mean you should.

No, of course not. If it will destroy the fun of everyone else playing (and maybe yourself too), and fun is why you're playing, then it would be dumb to do it.

But that isn't the situation we're talking about here. This whole thread is about a tournament context where (participants have adopted the attitude that) winning is everything. In that situation, you would be dumb not to do it (if you want to win). And if the other guy is prepared to do it, and you're not, you have no business complaining - on the terms agreed by everyone participating, he won.

Quote:

And of course, here on FUMBBL you can't even agree with your opponent pre-game what kind of match you're going to play, and what sort of behavior you do and don't approve of.

You can put it in your bio, and you can consult the opponent's stats to get a pretty good picture of them. You also know what race and team they'll be using. Alternatively, you can set up an [L] group where you can restrict things (within certain limitations).

Quote:

My main concern is that the tactics used in tournaments - to win at all cost, including at the expense of fun - 'bleed' into the general pool of players, and color the whole community of that game, making the whole thing to homogenous, and well, dirty.

Again, we've already agreed that the casual/competitive mix in Ranked is far from ideal. That's a problem that I hope can be addressed in the future, but the current form of Ranked is so successful and popular that that's not going to be easy.

Last edited by pac on %b %13, %2008 - %23:%Jul; edited 2 times in total

johan

Joined: Aug 02, 2003

Posted: Jul 13, 2008 - 23:05

pac wrote:

You don't have to 'read their minds'. They are exactly the sort of people you need to test your game. You give them the game and ask them to do everything they possibly can with and to it. You find out whether there are depths to be explored and, if it's possible within the time available, whether there's something truly broken down there that you need to sort out.

Speaking as a professional software tester in the gaming industry (this is gaming as in gambling, not as in computer gaming — I prefer to get paid properly and work decent hours rather than work with computer games Wink

), Pac is completely correct here. No-one is going to care about designer intent when there is much at stake (such as money), and the only way to get things right is to test the design aggressively until it breaks, and then get the developers to fix the problem. That's the only way to get good product (unless you have some kind of mythological genius designers who get it right the first time. Wink

)

This goes beyond even just testing the game design - you want to to test to block off avenues for cheating and exploits as well.

_________________
”It's very sad
To see the ancient and distinguished game that used to be
A model of decorum and tranquillity
Become like any other sport, a battleground...”
—Benny Andersson & Björn Ulvaeus, Chess

Emphasy

Joined: Jun 14, 2004

Posted: Jul 28, 2008 - 20:00

If only everyone had the insight like Pac - go tell them girl!!

Purplegoo

Joined: Mar 23, 2006

Posted: Jul 28, 2008 - 20:02

Emphasy!

Come back and lfg... This instant!

harvestmouse

Joined: May 13, 2007

Posted: Jul 29, 2008 - 04:30

Who is Emphasy? Must have been a has been character before my time.

pac

Joined: Oct 03, 2005

Posted: Jul 29, 2008 - 08:55

harvestmouse wrote:

Who is Emphasy?

He is a collective of Danish fishermen who played thousands of fast games here.

Melmoth

Joined: May 05, 2004

Posted: Jul 29, 2008 - 09:11

pac wrote:

Walks_in_the_Sun wrote:

Are you being hyperbolic for the sake of the internet, or are you serious? You're either the laziest person in the world or I'm an appallingly bad writer, because I can't imagine you're reading the same things I'm writing. What hoops? I'm talking about playing the tutorial, reading the manual, and/or watching a demo!

Those things tell you (the very basics of) how to play, not how you're meant to play. Are you saying that you should never take any action in a computer game that isn't mentioned in the demo/tutorial/manual? That would be pretty dull.

There's nothing obviously wrong (from the background, demo, manual, etc of the game) about a Zerg rush, for instance. There were peasant rushes in Warcraft too. It is clearly something that players are going to try out and, if it works, some of them are going to carry on doing it. A lot! (However, they'll feel pretty silly when it's fixed and they never spent any time learning to play the rest of the game and so are not able to implement any other effective tactics.)

Quote:

See? Were the designers of Street Fighter and Starcraft "appallingly bad?"

Clearly not, since their games continue to be played widely and competitively.

People got far far better at Street Fighter and Starcraft than the designers probably ever imagined and no doubt discovered some possibilities the designers hadn't realised were there. I doubt the designers were upset by this.

(Please note: I said that a designer was 'appallingly bad' if they relied upon players interpreting what they meant ('the spirit of the game') to make their game work. In the Zerg rush case, Blizzard did not do this: they just fixed it. I doubt they threw tantrums along the lines of 'you lot should know better than to do this!' first.)

Quote:

How do you "read the minds" of the gamers who will seek to bend it until it breaks?

You don't have to 'read their minds'. They are exactly the sort of people you need to test your game. You give them the game and ask them to do everything they possibly can with and to it. You find out whether there are depths to be explored and, if it's possible within the time available, whether there's something truly broken down there that you need to sort out.

Quote:

And how do you take all these opportunities away from them, without de-evolving the game all the way down to checkers?

Why would you take their opportunities away from them?

Some people believe that the 'best' tactic always has to be 'nerfed'. This is a fallacy. There will always be a best tactic. By nerfing one, you just make the former second best tactic the best tactic. The problem only comes when there is no reasonable counter to the best tactic, when it is so strong that everyone has to do it, all the time. By all reports, Zerg rushes may have fallen into that category - that was first addressed by the community and then fixed by the developers. By all reports, 'low strong' in Street Fighter did not fall into that category - it was just a tactic that on one day, in a hot arcade somewhere in California, some exhausted guy could not find his way around.

On some days, caging in Blood Bowl is invincible. Sometimes fouling is, or stalling, or AG 5 players. But none of them are broken. On other days, they are beaten - sometimes they're beaten so badly you wonder why anyone ever tries them!

Quote:

Do you think Blood Bowl's designers wanted both sides to do nothing for one half, then play out the second half to reduce casualties? Or put everyone on the LoS and select 'both down' and 'attacker down' all day? How would they prevent someone from doing that, if they felt it important?

On FUMBBL, these things are banned by site rules. If someone sees the match, report or replay, they report it and measures are taken.

In a typical table-top league, there would be similar rules to stop such play (although they might not get round to writing them down till someone actually tried it).

If you're just playing at home with a friend and want to do something so silly, fine, it's nothing to do with me. Very Happy

What no one has to do to resolve these situations is consult or read the mind of the designer. Does anyone still think Jervis Johnson knows more about Blood Bowl than anyone else?

Quote:

If there is a genuine consensus, if something really is broken, then people usually recognise it quickly and act on it.

Like a 'soft ban'? What have you agreed not to use?

Nothing. I don't believe anything in LRB 4 Blood Bowl is so overpowered it should be banned. More importantly, while there are lots of individuals who do think some things are, there is no consensus on what is too strong (some say Orcs, some say elves; some say fouling, some say not fouling).

The biggest issue in LRB 4 BB (in my opinion) is Get the Ref combined with DP - but at least this is a random kick-off result potentially available to either player, or both! (And you know in advance you could be very vulnerable to it if an opponent's FF is significantly higher and he has DPs.) It doesn't break the game (although it does occasionally break teams Wink

).

Quote:

Dauntless+Horns is not. It's really good and, in my opinion, definitely not what the designers intended.

So now you are reading their minds? What context clue had you thinking this isn't what they intended?

It's just my opinion as a designer, based upon my knowledge of the game. As a player I wouldn't need to think about it. In addition, I seem to remember it being confirmed that the intended order was the other way round (add Horns before Dauntless), but no action was taken until LRB 5.

Dauntless+Horns is a great example, by the way. Let's agree (just for a moment for the sake of argument) that it wasn't intended to work that way. So, when they finally noticed it, they decided to fix it in the next version. But look: here in the mean time, we don't need a soft ban on it. It helps Skaven (and more rarely Chaos) out, sure, but do teams with Dauntless+Horns overwhelm every tournament? Not remotely: though it wins some games, it can be countered. It's a tiny little boost in competitiveness within a huge range. A classic example of an exploit (if you accept for a moment my assumption that it was unintended) that might have some coaches disapproving, but doesn't damage the game.

Edit: Let me throw in another BB example here. Chainpushing a player in order to one-turn. Now, this is pretty damn weird, isn't it? These impossibly complex arrangements of players somehow propelling this guy further than he could have run. I don't think the designers ever expected people to do it (although they would certainly have been aware of natural one-turners!). If they had realised the possibility back at the start it's entirely possible they'd have come up with some rule or rules to prevent it. But they didn't.

So here we are now and we've got this weird 'exploit' that the designers (probably) never intended. Do we need to ban chainpushing? Again, no. There are set-ups that make it much more difficult and there are some that make it impossible (though you may need the right skills). And it's never a sure thing. Not to mention that it can only happen once or twice a game - you can't win endless games just by chainpushing, you're going to have to play for the other 15 turns too. Also note that chainpush scoring itself even acts as a counter to another disliked tactic, stalling. The system works!

BB (like most complex games) is full of things like this that the designer did not mean or expect. (Some of them are so much second nature to us now that we've forgotten how counter-intuitive they are.) But they are not always bad things. Very often, in fact, they're good things, adding depth to the game which is there to be mastered for those who want to (as in the case of one-turn chainpushing, just because it's called an 'exploit' doesn't mean it's always easy to exploit).

Quote:

People don't like Duck Hunt?

People don't like reductio ad absurdum either. Razz

That said, there are lots of very simple games that have far more depth and complexity than the surface suggests. Designers did not put this all in. Players found it.

Quote:

Missing one thing on year 2, week 10, day 3, opening up the possibility of one player forcing others to 'adapt or die' to his chosen exploit that wasn't intended to exist?

Every time you talk about these bugs or exploits, you seem to be talking about ones which completely destroy the game. I've already agreed that those should be addressed. But they are very rare.

Normally, on delving deeper into a game, there are counters to this tactic someone thought was invincible, and in the long run it ends up a forgotten dead end.

Quote:

I couldn't be bothered to learn all the moves in SF; so maybe I didn't get the 'full' experience, but I elevated my play a little above "button mashing" and I enjoyed the game without ruining it for anyone else. Maybe it's just because I'm a 'casual' gamer.

Precisely. You didn't care what the top players were doing. In fact, you didn't care if the designers thought people should be playing it ultra-seriously and mastering every last combo either. If the designer had showed up out of nowhere and said, 'Hey, your inferior standard of play is not doing justice to my beautiful game!', you'd have told him where to go.

You just played the game you wanted to and enjoyed it. This is exactly the idea! Very Happy

Quote:

The point here is imposing yourself on others. If you were watching a movie, and kept rewinding and watching the same part over and over again, people would want to kill you.

And when it comes to games - played between people - and you're playing a particular way that forces your opponent to play a certain way as well, or otherwise bend over and take it, you're forcing your will on them.

No one forces you to go to tournaments. No one forces you to play against people like this outside tournaments either. Yes, there are issues with identifying these people and finding a like-minded group, but unless you think this type of player is going to suddenly go away, that's always going to be the case. The solution is to find and build better ways of doing those things (identifying, forming groups).

(We've already discussed, and acknowledged, the problem of Ranked on FUMBBL being an intermixing of casual and competitive play.)

Quote:

Now, generally, this is a simple moral issue, do you want to be that guy? Because usually, if the behavior is legal in the game, the other guy doesn't have a leg to stand on. But when it's unclear if an action is legal, or even more, clearly illegal but unenforceable - just because you can get away with it doesn't mean you should.

No, of course not. If it will destroy the fun of everyone else playing (and maybe yourself too), and fun is why you're playing, then it would be dumb to do it.

But that isn't the situation we're talking about here. This whole thread is about a tournament context where (participants have adopted the attitude that) winning is everything. In that situation, you would be dumb not to do it (if you want to win). And if the other guy is prepared to do it, and you're not, you have no business complaining - on the terms agreed by everyone participating, he won.

Quote:

And of course, here on FUMBBL you can't even agree with your opponent pre-game what kind of match you're going to play, and what sort of behavior you do and don't approve of.

You can put it in your bio, and you can consult the opponent's stats to get a pretty good picture of them. You also know what race and team they'll be using. Alternatively, you can set up an [L] group where you can restrict things (within certain limitations).

Quote:

My main concern is that the tactics used in tournaments - to win at all cost, including at the expense of fun - 'bleed' into the general pool of players, and color the whole community of that game, making the whole thing to homogenous, and well, dirty.

Again, we've already agreed that the casual/competitive mix in Ranked is far from ideal. That's a problem that I hope can be addressed in the future, but the current form of Ranked is so successful and popular that that's not going to be easy.

Hm did not even read it...But you guys have too much time?

harvestmouse

Joined: May 13, 2007

Posted: Jul 29, 2008 - 13:52

Melmoth wrote:

Hm did not even read it...But you guys have too much time?

I did read it!!!! But I wasn't part of the argument!

Collective of Danish Fisherman huh?! Well FUMBBL is like all sports, and has moved on. These old timers simply couldn't keep up with the uber hot new coaches like me. I reckon I could them!!! I challenge the collective danish fishermen to a match! If they win, they have to comeback and play here. If I lose, I will leave fumbbl................for a whole 10 minutes (and that's a huge forfeit for me).

Plorg

Joined: May 08, 2005

Posted: Aug 05, 2008 - 11:46

I just found this quote and wanted to remember it later...

George Orwell, writer (1903-1950) wrote:

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

harvestmouse

Joined: May 13, 2007

Posted: Aug 05, 2008 - 15:24

But as far as I can tell, he has a similarly cynical view on just about everything which isn't socialist in nature.

Also, professional sport have evolved greatly since his time. Kudos on the novel bump however.