Boudica

I wouldn't like to come off as a naysayer, but I wanted to remind you how this specific type of tournament went the last time it was tried. First, ValihrAnt teamed up with Feldfeld, so it was an instant turnoff for anyone who likes to have a higher than zero chance of winning. Second, it turned out to be hard to find a good time when the scheduled games should take place. So when chrstgtr and me played our series of imbalanced games as scheduled and turned in our replays, we were just told that the tournament had gotten cancelled. It was neither fun, nor worth the effort. I'm now here to ask: What has changed since the last time to make the experience better? I'm afraid that the problem still stems from the small size of the community, where it's hard to form many teams as a similar level. The idea HMS-Surprise and Unknown_Player came up with, when the teams were formed just before the start of the event, might not be a typical way to do things, but we must leave it at that it was possibly the single team event that didn't disintegrate before it finished. Anyway, enjoy the tournament... I guess.

Hi @Joep1802, thanks for reporting the problem. I confirm that the behavior you've been observing is known. Arrows or other projectiles are not currently blocked by obstructions, that means that walls help prevent the enemy from walking farther, but your units behind the walls aren't shielded from the arrows in any way. There is only this small armor bonus that units get when you put them on the wall (using Ctrl + right click). More has been written about this by @fatherbushido there: We could talk about if this behavior is wanted or correct. It sure is easier to compute the trajectory while neglecting any obstructions. So it's less CPU intensive and easier to implement by the programmers. Is it historically accurate though? Well, that depends. You can still at least do what ancient soldiers would do to prevent getting hit by arrows, that is keep alternating between the opposite directions of movement at a fast pace, which will fool even the most experienced ranged units into missing every shot.

I think that the question of whether to go on with the league is already pointless because today the last officially scheduled games should have taken place. I suggest we just evaluate the results and perhaps a new league can start soon? According to the schedule, our team, Centurions, should have played two games on Sunday 28 July. One against Los Gringos and the other against eae em. I hereby present a lobby screenshot showing that neither Los Gringos or eae em were present on time with at least two members as required. Our team was present with at least Wendy and me. For this reason, I'd like to claim the victory of both of the remaining games for our team.

I understand that you see the victory in the attached replay as a matter of luck, @JC (naval supremacist), and I see that as a sign of your weak understanding of what happened in the game. An experienced player can guess the probable outcome based on the initial state of that game. Don't worry, the problem isn't with me not understanding what you mean by "luck can happen". I actually made my conclusion based on that statement. Perhaps it was you who didn't understand that we aren't using just the binary end result of the team game to compare 1-vs.-1 skills, but rather how the players did within that game. Funny enough, your other post is even more off-topic and also full of contradictions. You keep talking about some supposed hate, but explain to me how some games I played weeks ago with a player not present in this conversation is any relevant to this particular topic? You devote several paragraphs to first tell us how it's below your standards to comment or make conclusions from those games, yet you still do both in the same post. There is another paradox with the example you gave, namely that I didn't chicken out of those games. I even reinstalled the game after a few weeks of not playing it, got the right mod and took part in the games I promised to play. I accepted the results without excuses, which makes it a completely different story from yours, which was full of lame excuses and later shouting "only 1v1 matters" as if repeating it more and in different threads had any chance of making that true. So in conclusion, you aren't defending anyone, because you don't bring anything relevant to this discussion. You are only constantly steering the discussion off topic, which makes me decide to stop responding further to your irrelevant comments instead of just reporting them. Regarding your attempt to be funny with meme pictures, that image could work well if used in the right context. I often add reactions to post to avoid spamming the thread with extra comments. I give different kind of reactions, not based on who wrote them, but purely on the content. If you feel like receiving mostly the confused reaction, it can be a sign that your posts are confusing. I devoted most of this post to explaining why I thought so in this case. Needless to say that it wasn't just me who had the same reaction to your post. Maybe just stop taking this personally and accept that your post sucks.

To be fair, you effectively got roughly three times as much thanks to the Iberian bonus (my fast approximation), and PhyZik only received the resources late, when it barely made a difference. The civs were clearly imbalanced and you seem to also have gotten extra berries. I mean, Persia can be a good civ in team games when you have or are able to buy extra the time to develop. No one considers it to be any match in a situation like this. Not sure if it's worth reacting to @JC (naval supremacist)'s comment, but I feel I should. It's funny how he misses the point entirely, and only uses your thread to repeat what he'd like to be true. No no, all your defeats in team games count too. Bad luck can happen, but it's not really bad luck if you chicken out of the scheduled team game just to avoid one more humiliating annihilation. That's just a different kind of defeat.

I initially also only gave the basic information, but then when I log in, I'm presented with this unskippable screen asking to tell them more about myself. Well, and I don't want the information to be used for credits, so this doesn't make me want to fill it in either. Perhaps @GunChleoc knows a secret way to get around that screen. I understand that it's at least possible to clear the information later as @Nescio did. Thanks for the info.

I once wanted to fix a few translations, but I didn't like how much personal info Transifex asks, to the point it discouraged me from creating an account. Why can't you just pick a username to suggest translation changes?

One problem with waterfalls is this gaming industry obligation that there needs to be a secret area behind every waterfall.

That was a nice show, I really enjoyed replaying. I liked @PhyZik's confusion maneuver when he picked Spartans instead of a cavalry civ, because he's mostly been playing those recently. The team also did a good cooperation at getting water control and later while attacking. On the eastern front, nani really showed what it means to be a troll master. You had the patience and no fear of waiting for the right moment. On the other front, JC probably tried to replicate my Kush strategy from today, but he failed hard. Marc knew how to best defend a raid, that is by counter attacking.

I'm afraid that you can't officially demand the points if the match settings weren't set right. You could probably ask the opponent to admit the defeat and give you the points by instantly resigning a new game. Anyway, I'd instead recommend moving on because, knowing how the rating works, it's not bad as it sounds. The thing to keep in mind is that If you improve at the game, it won't be difficult for you to get to a higher rating fast in the future. Higher rated player don't deny you the points as often as noobs. And by beating a higher rated player you can even get significantly more points. Take it like this: this one victory you didn't get points for will make you receive a little more points for several future games that you win (because the rating difference between the players will be higher). That being said, it still isn't allowed to quit a properly set-up rated game, so feel free to report any future incidents. If you go to the replay dialog from the main game menu, you should be able to see the available game replays. If you select one, it shows you where the file is located on the disk. On my computer, it's under Documents/My Games/0ad/replays/0.0.23, where there are sub-directories with individual replay files (commands.txt, metadata.json). It's best to post both of these files of a given replay, or you can just zip the directory containing them.

Hi Poppapoptart, my guess regarding the missing victory notification is incorrect match settings. It could be the victory condition set to None, which makes the game go on forever without a winner. Or maybe if you selected a special map or maybe a map with multiple player slots. I'd have to see the replay to tell more.

You know what, @eae? If you don't have anything reasonable to bring to the discussion, you better just stop contributing. You are quoting what I said in response to you but not include the original point I was responding to. So am I supposed to go find it myself in order to understand your short answers? I'm not going to do the extra work for you when you don't even feel like going through what had been said by others. The key point remains that you are talking about some assumptions people supposedly made. I asked you who made those assumptions according to your observations. What is the reason why you didn't quote this specifically important question of mine and provide the required information? When I proceeded to explain why it wasn't wrong to make some of those assumptions anyway, you come back re-framing specifically those as your observations. Well, great job taking the credit for my work. You aren't being smart by responding to my assumptions with "this is an assumption" either. I supply a reason why I state something (even if you decide to leave it out of the quotation), which is the opposite of what you've been doing. Like it or not, the reasons I provide are not always exact data. I sure could provide the data in some cases, but it's enough for the purpose of this discussion if I can prove my credibility regarding a topic and state my opinion, or just roughly state what I base my opinion on. By quoting a price, I'm demonstrating how strong I believe my statement. When another credible person has a completely different option, which is unlikely to happen, we'll have to work with the real data we have. I'm not going to do this for you here now because your contribution has been of little value and it would be a waste of my time.

If the rams were much easier to destroy, as they used to be, the game would reward an expansive and defensive strategy too much. Consider that rams are one of the pricier unit types. Still, just like 10 swordsmen destroy a ram in seconds. How does that seem too much? That's quite a lot of unit types that you call OP. Have you realized that if everything is OP, nothing is? Your list still is far from complete though. What if I told you that your "invincible" 200 slinger army could be wiped out by a significantly smaller balanced Spartan army? Or let's take half the amount of roman champion cavalry. I tested this and I could decimate your "invincible army" while only losing five units, no micro involved. Actually, I even made the slingers start at an advanced rank. There are currently only a few unit types that needed balancing, and they have been already fixed for the next alpha. No need to be a Hitler about it.

You've just made an explicit assumption. I think it's been already mentioned that the purpose of the rating is to put players in a relative order by their averaged performance over many games and different conditions. These assumptions are correct if you use this definition. Who made this assumption? Also, I'll bet you $1000 that the weakest team won't win a single game against the top rated teams. I'm not saying that my prediction was easy to make but still. Thanks, but this has already been addressed too. Have you read the thread, or are you just trying to argue with a straw man here? I mean, it's not bad to list these as a warning, but as @PhyZik said, the 0 A.D. community is a bunch of nerds. We aren't dumb. Yes, good observation, these really are some questions we've been discussing above. Do you have any arguments to add? Because I've played a few games and I quite know this community. No one watches a pro playing a noob. No one likes to play in an inferior team.

Sorry, @Stockfish, I don't understand what you you're saying. Who can't be saying what seriously? What message? In reaction to @borg-, the purpose of this is mostly to ensure that the games are fun. If we "don't take this seriously", I could as well "have fun" winning battles with an inferior army by dodging all the projectiles. I don't really see any good reason in belittling my fight for a fair game. Especially if this only came as a reaction to someone promoting unfair tactics. And @Dakara, your suggestion sure is good. The main problem I see is that it's written in French. Other than that, it's much easier to say why not "just reduce the accuracy" than "just reducing it", especially in a way that works well. Unfortunately, the solution isn't made simple by the fact you see it as such.

I think we could see that people already started to use tactics while forming the teams instead of focusing on helping fine-tune the rules. Maybe that fine-tuning phase should have been explicitly separated.

I don't want to take any credit from @MarcusAureliu#s for his work with organizing the event. There was more to do than make teams. It was a bit unfortunate that I only joined the discussion later. Anyway, I believe that it wasn't already too late. The tier system wasn't yet finalized, so I thought that the suggested teams would have to be subject to further discussion (rather than letting someone grab the best teammates based on one person's opinion about player abilities). I felt that my suggestions were ignored when the first round was announced, but provided it was only intended as a test week, it wouldn't change much. It unfortunately made some so-far suggested teams commit to the suggestion. So in retrospect, starting the test week was probably the only wrong move. The announcement came late and our opponents didn't even show up, but the negative side effects persisted. My opinion is that we could really benefit more from balancing well, even if it required taking away some freedom of choice. I saw several people compare our situation with professional sport leagues, but I think this doesn't fit our situation at all. There are just too few really good players, which is the opposite you see in football leagues. Also, there is no custom of some kind of clans present in the community. Perhaps because the community is rather small. I don't really think that many players would cancel their participation just because they wanted to be with someone else. Meanwhile we already know that we have multiple players that can't play a good game (or any game) unless we change something.

Based on the games I saw yesterday, I'd need to increase my rating of @Issh. I considered that initially and only decided not to because he likes to embrace nubness, but I doubt he will do that in the tournament. Just for the record, yesterday he could get double the pop of a player rated almost two points higher. Now that the point difference among teams is increasing, it might be a good time to ask the lower ranked teams if they are OK to play like that. I think that @go2die has now put quite a lot of time into it. It might have little purpose if we do nothing with the data we got out of it. And since I'm a part of the lower ranked team, I personally vote for a rebalance.

Do you mean you won't engage any further provided you get the last word? Because your "reasonable opinion" might not be recognized as such by others. What exactly is "quality of life" in this context? I guess my life could be of a higher quality if I could just win every game without any skills. Anyway, even this final opinion of yours wasn't what we were starting with. At first it was like "any mod should be allowed because they are available to anyone", etc. I don't want to extend on this particular topic here either. I mostly only gave it as an example of how you take your opinion as the reasonable one and say you'd like to avoid drama. What if I told you that the rules were made to avoid any drama? Aren't you causing the drama now? I think that by suggesting to remove a rule that is accepted by most of the hosts and adding that "people cry too much", you are actually causing the drama.

Thanks for pointing that out. I realized I was doing that, but I was a bit tired from the lengthy discussion of yesterday, where even solid arguments didn't seem to help. That's why I decided not go my usual way anymore. Another reason is that there isn't really too much space for objective arguments in this case. The game will be a competition of skills in either way, we just have the right to decide what kind of skills it should test. I think that most people consider it to be unwanted when a key skill of the whole set is dancing, rather than team cooperation, picking good battles etc. You see I wasn't wrong with the "other people do it" quote. You are using this argument again here. So I understand that you wish to see a competition of automation mods and spam clicking. I just have different expectations and that's all. On the other hand, I feel very confident about my dancing skills, so I am not strictly against. I could probably be instantly rated higher too.

Wait, did that guy just dance off a melee attack? What a hacker!

Not a surprise that this is coming from someone who tried to advocate the use of cheating mods because "everyone can do it". Allowing dancing is such a bad idea that I'd almost agree to make it happen just to show how bad of an idea it is. There is a clear distinction between retreat dancing and spam clicking a unit in front of your army. Also I don't think it's fair to say that ValihrAnt might have problems with this rule. He knows better than that.

I think that @Dakara did an unexpectedly good rating job. If his rating is not copyrighted, I'd just say copy it and count it as mine. I first considered changing the rating of two or three players, but I realized that it's the stability of their play that matters. Some can grow really fast but won't fight great, some perform worse when rushed or with a less played civilizations, some play great but have little sense of the team, and others the opposite. I think that for example esu might become better pretty soon. He was a good teammate IIRC, only lacking some specific skills.

I really hoped that there would be some more strategy talk before the league starts. There have been a few more players that wanted to join and we could get more fun out of it if we made more and better teams first.

I've just tried playing a game of Civilization VI and I've never been so bored.