Ratings Disputes and Offence Reporting (Discussion)

[aeonios]

22 minutes ago, Boudica said:

-The opponent collected seven valuable treasures before you scouted the map. A single one of them was worth 600 food, which allowed for a faster start, and then a metal treasure allowed phasing up to the City Phase earlier.

I didn't even notice that, but obviously he took that into account when setting resources to very low and was counting on his opponents not knowing about that, which I didn't and didn't even notice on the replay.

23 minutes ago, Boudica said:

Even though you had more units when you were first attacked, you took a fight with a smaller group of soldiers. While it's true that the opponent also had more techs researched, this wasn't the main reason of him winning the battle. His other advantages were better army composition (using the hero as a tank, while your tank units were chasing rams), having captured a temple that kept healing his units while fighting and, last but not least, making use of the hero bonus for skirmishers.

No, when I was first attacked it was a cav rush, and I was way behind on units then. He used that to slow me down to ensure that I couldn't recover, while he still had enough units gathering resources that the lost time with the cav didn't matter. By the time he attacked with rams I had just barely passed him with pop, but I was still severely behind in resources which meant that if I had used every unit at my disposal to fight him off I would have gone broke and died anyway.

27 minutes ago, Boudica said:

You had no ram counter prepared, so that your main base got destroyed and most of the economy stopped.

No really? When I spent most of the game 20-30 units behind and panicking you think I could stop to think about countering rams? The only thing I was thinking about was scrambling trying to play catch up in pop count, and even then I just barely managed to succeed at it. Given the huge disadvantage I started out with I think it says a lot that I even managed that much.

I've seen this guy do the exact same thing to other people over and over. It's basically all he does. If you'd seen any of the other games I've played you wouldn't be insinuating that skill had anything to do with it. I've beaten stronger people in a fair fight, more so now that I've gotten used to multiplayer.

For example:

Sophie_Hatter, new but surprisingly strong with ptol: commands.txt

CAGD_Lulofun, kush vs kush: commands.txt

Wycombe, kush vs brit: commands.txt

So yeah, sure I was angry that I lost, but losing is fine as long as you can learn something useful from it. The only thing I learned from that is that this guy has figured out a scheme where he can score free wins by using the map and map settings to gain an unfair advantage. He gets free resources by going straight to the treasures while his opponent gets crippled by the very low resource setting. I mean he wasn't a bad player overall, but can you honestly say that what he did was fair in any meaningful sense? It's basically like having a one-sided resource cheat.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I see your point about the treasures and low resources. I think the treasure info from @Boudica was the key information here. I wish there was a way to randomize some things in Skirmish maps (like treasures, metal mine placement, animal placement, berry placement, etc.). Either that, or treasures are disabled by default on rated games.

[Stan`]

Being able to edit resources objects count depending on maps would be cool too. It could also be used for scripts. and ambient sounds

[Boudica]

Yes, you are right. Switching an unusual mode on silently is quite a common way get an advantage. I don't agree with that, I'd just perhaps accept the consequences once I click the Ready button without checking properly. Setting victory conditions to an instant win after capturing a relic, or things like a long ceasefire, which allows you to boom without worrying about rushes, might be even easier ways to an possibly undeserved victory.

I agree that you managed to do very well considering the disadvantage. However, it happens often that managing a big battle well does more than anything else. I think that you could have won the decisive battle (it wasn't really the first one, but the first and only important one) if you managed your army better, but you would also need a counter for rams, which is where Macedonians really are disadvantaged. You didn't yet have a fortress, so your options were using rams or women against rams. I think you could rightfully suggest that Macedonians should have a decent Town Phase counter to rams. Let's conclude that I might agree with your general point but not completely with the argumentation.

[elexis]

It's not rigged at all but all players have the same chances. If you had searched for treasures you could have had the same economic advantage. Becoming familiar with the game and the maps is something that distinguishes the good fromt he better.

[aeonios]

34 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I see your point about the treasures and low resources. I think the treasure info from @Boudica was the key information here. I wish there was a way to randomize some things in Skirmish maps (like treasures, metal mine placement, animal placement, berry placement, etc.). Either that, or treasures are disabled by default on rated games.

I don't think that's necessarily optimal. Some maps, notably Bactria, are really not playable without the treasures. Bactria is pretty wood deficient even with them. The treasures probably wouldn't have been that much of an advantage had it not been for the very low resource setting. For a very strong player perhaps, but very strong players don't need that sort of buff to win anyway.

35 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

Being able to edit resources objects count depending on maps would be cool too. It could also be used for scripts. and ambient sounds

What? You can pretty much tailor everything exactly as you like it when it comes to random map scripts. Maybe not ambient sounds, but resources and treasures can be set based on whatever criteria you want. There are issues with random maps that are related to the use of crappy deprecated resource spawning functions, but I'm already working on fixing that for a24 as well as greatly improving a lot of the random maps both in terms of appearance and balance.

36 minutes ago, Boudica said:

Yes, you are right. Switching an unusual mode on silently is quite a common way get an advantage. I don't agree with that, I'd just perhaps accept the consequences once I click the Ready button without checking properly. Setting victory conditions to an instant win after capturing a relic, or things like a long ceasefire, which allows you to boom without worrying about rushes, might be even easier ways to an possibly undeserved victory.

I agree that you managed to do very well considering the disadvantage. However, it happens often that managing a big battle well does more than anything else. I think that you could have won the decisive battle (it wasn't really the first one, but the first and only important one) if you managed your army better, but you would also need a counter for rams, which is where Macedonians really are disadvantaged. You didn't yet have a fortress, so your options were using rams or women against rams. I think you could rightfully suggest that Macedonians should have a decent Town Phase counter to rams. Let's conclude that I might agree with your general point but not completely with the argumentation.

I dunno about that. It's possible but there are other contributing factors that I didn't check, like upgrades. For experienced players I kind of doubt that they'd put up with this kind of nonsense, and might be more careful about checking game settings. There are two main issues that bother me though.

The first is that this guy prefers to pick on newbies, especially people who are unrated or are 1200-1300 elo since those people are more likely to fall for the trap and less likely to voluntarily exit as soon as they realize that something crooked is going on. That sort of predatory behavior is bad for new player retention.

The second is that this guy has gotten like 1400+ elo by gaming the system this way. Elo should be a reasonable measure of skill, and cheating that system undermines its value. It makes the game and its devs look bad if one or more people in the top 100 ranking have basically cheated to get there. I don't think it's actually that common at this point, but it could easily become so, and for the sake of our community I'd rather that it didn't.

23 minutes ago, elexis said:

It's not rigged at all but all players have the same chances. If you had searched for treasures you could have had the same economic advantage. Becoming familiar with the game and the maps is something that distinguishes the good fromt he better.

I don't think so. I doubt he "searched" for them, but rather memorized exactly where they were to ensure that he could get to them first. I mean sure if I'd been more familiar with the map or been thinking about treasures at all I could have had the same chances, but under normal circumstances treasures are either an optional bonus or something that's placed right next to your CC so that you can grab them easily, not something that entirely determines the outcome of the game. Obviously with random maps an exploit like that isn't really practical one way or the other.

[Stan`]

5 hours ago, aeonios said:

What?

I mean for instance setting the stone slab to give 6000 instead of whatever the default is.

5 hours ago, aeonios said:

There are issues with random maps that are related to the use of crappy deprecated resource spawning functions, but I'm already working on fixing that for a24 as well as greatly improving a lot of the random maps both in terms of appearance and balance.

Glad to hear that. If you haven't already look at @Pyrophorus's work

[coworotel]

10 hours ago, Boudica said:

setting an official standard for rated duels (and highlighting the differences in the match setup screen)

That is a good solution, I think.

[Sundiata]

Just my two cents: you're all kind of right i.m.o.

Technically there was nothing wrong here. Technically you both had the same chances. Technically you could/should have checked the match setup beforehand, and scouted better (there are often clues in the map description). Technically, no rules were broken.

That having said, I totally understand your frustration and would be equally annoyed if I even noticed what was going on... I've seen these types of "predatory" behavior myself, when "experienced" players pick on the weaker ones, winning matches solely by virtue of knowing things which aren't obvious or sometimes not even possible to know without scouring the forums. I've even seen people sneakily change the game-setting a second before beginning the game, after everybody else had clicked the stay ready button... There are some really weird types out there. My own rating is artificially low because most of the time I play a one on one rated match, my (higher rated) opponents deliberately brake the connection when they realize they're going to loose. Almost systematically... So no points for me and the vicious cycle continues. I never report them on the forum because I ain't no snitch, but its still annoying... I don't know how alpha 23 is in this regard. 

There are just too many little details about the game that are impossible to know or easily found out by new players, putting them at a great disadvantage. I don't think anything needs to be removed, because I love the details, but there should be an option to toggle on/off in-game pop-up messages, providing specific and clear tips on economy management and unit micro stuff. Especially in terms of dealing with siege, attacking structures, defending against a superior force, fortifying, army set up and build and attack orders. In case of a map with a lot of treasure, a message saying that there may be some treasure worth looking out for might be usefull.

[aeonios]

9 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

I mean for instance setting the stone slab to give 6000 instead of whatever the default is.

If we did that we'd end up with "money maps" like in starcraft, which isn't really good because then we'd need to disable such maps for rated games, creating yet another problem. I've been thinking of changing the way resources (esp stone and metal) work a bit, but I'm honestly not sure if the effect on gameplay would be beneficial or not. That's kind of off topic though.

@Sundiata Nothing has changed for a23 regarding droppers :[. I'm hoping to fix that for a24, by making the networking p2p and making a drop = loss condition if a dropper doesn't rejoin after a certain amount of time (like 3-5 mins maybe) and converting "exit" into "vote-exit" so that you can't exit the game without resigning unless the other player(s) also agree(s) to. Zero-K does that and 'dropping' isn't a thing in that game so it definitely works.

16 hours ago, elexis said:

It's not rigged at all but all players have the same chances. If you had searched for treasures you could have had the same economic advantage. Becoming familiar with the game and the maps is something that distinguishes the good fromt he better.

I actually rewatched that replay, and aside from picking up the treasures that guy played horribly. It's kind of embarrassing that I even lost to him. If I'd had full unit upgrades I probably could have won, although after checking I couldn't find a single mace unit with hack damage (ie mace doesn't have one, which I guess is the trade off for having every type of siege weapon), which wasn't really in my favor. I probably even could have recovered from losing my CC, but I wasn't really calm enough to manage that at the time.

[Stan`]

5 minutes ago, aeonios said:

Nothing has changed for a23 regarding droppers :[. I'm hoping to fix that for a24, by making the networking p2p and making a drop = loss condition if a dropper doesn't rejoin after a certain amount of time (like 3-5 mins maybe) and converting "exit" into "vote-exit" so that you can't exit the game without resigning unless the other player(s) also agree(s) to. Zero-K does that and 'dropping' isn't a thing in that game so it definitely works.

How many things have you planned to do exactly ? :P This is an awesome list you have so far !
On that topic there will probably be a  timeout needed, cause you might just have crashed, or lost your connection because you idiot brother disconnected the cable :)

7 minutes ago, aeonios said:

f we did that we'd end up with "money maps" like in starcraft, which isn't really good because then we'd need to disable such maps for rated games, creating yet another problem.

Well it would be easier than to create custom templates for it ^^


 

[aeonios]

21 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

How many things have you planned to do exactly ? This is an awesome list you have so far !
On that topic there will probably be a  timeout needed, cause you might just have crashed, or lost your connection because you idiot brother disconnected the cable

A lot.  Since it's on average about a year between releases that's a lot of time to get stuff done though. I plan on starting with graphics and random maps and then moving into multiplayer performance and fixing/improving other multiplayer issues, and then maybe improving gameplay in a few important ways. I'm intending to make a24 a really big improvement over pretty much all previous versions, as far as I possibly can.

 

29 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

Well it would be easier than to create custom templates for it ^^

I'm still not really sure what you mean by that. o.O

[Nescio]

16 minutes ago, aeonios said:

A lot.  Since it's on average about a year between releases that's a lot of time to get stuff done though. I plan on starting with graphics and random maps and then moving into multiplayer performance and fixing/improving other multiplayer issues, and then maybe improving gameplay in a few important ways. I'm intending to make a24 a really big improvement over pretty much all previous versions, as far as I possibly can.

 

I'm still not really sure what you mean by that. o.O

Not on average; 23 releases in eight years works out at a mean of about four months each. Other than that, great, I'm looking forward to your contributions

[Stan`]

1 hour ago, aeonios said:

I'm still not really sure what you mean by that. o.O 

Let's assume I want to make a campaign for 0 A.D. I have several missions, with different objectives, and I might want to have the same mine model with different values of resources, to simulate for example a mine being nearly empty, or one being extra full. Currently there is only one way to go about that. Make XML templates. If I could affect the templates resource amount by script, I would only need on template for a normal, a depleted, and an extra full mine.

[coworotel]

On 5/28/2018 at 4:33 PM, Boudica said:

I don't think that the match setting screen is to blame. The recent alpha made it rather easy to check the few important options, and I wouldn't consider it useful to restrict players from playing a rated match with the settings they want. While setting an official standard for rated duels (and highlighting the differences in the match setup screen) might be a good suggestion, I wouldn't hurry calling the current system stupid. 

Building on this, maybe showing the match info in the loading screen would be useful.

 

 

These quitters are more and more frequent, and it's annoying as hell. A complete loss of time. I think the situation is getting out of hand with only manual reporting via forum.

 

 

 

 

Some possible solutions that come to my mind:

• If a player disconnect from a rated game, game is paused and cannot be resumed while he is absent.
• If a player is disconnected from a rated game for more than a certain time limit (say 1 minute) he loses and points go to the other player.
• Maybe have an indicator for each player of number/ratio of unfinished rated games that he's hosted, so we can avoid playing with quitters.

[Jeee]

kiudwildff lost, cancelled the game; no rate change.

[Guest]

And the lack of moderators doesnt help. Currently there are just 3(?) moderators who logs in and moderate the lobby on a daily basis.

[elexis]

One of them is currently in holidays for some months, the other two ones moderate the lobby chat. We cannot afford to moderate rating fakery if we want to do it properly, because we first have to hear the other side of the story (otherwise someone could make up rating fakery and get innocent people banned).

It's a problem which must be solved on the program level. It should be technically impossible to leave a rated game without influencing the rating.

But for that we will have to implement Wildfire Games hosting rated games, for that we will need the dedicated server and for that we will need players to be able to setup the game and for that we need to rewrite the way gamesettings are handled in multiplayer gamesetup. I'm tired of both the rating fakery and the repetition of the story and we have planned the implementation for the most part, so unless fate stops me, I'll write it down. (But then again I don't know if I should do it for this lobby or one that I host under my terms.)

[HMS-Surprise]

I think this is not a bad idea. If there is a checkbox that asks permission for an anyhow rated game it could work. If players want they chose that option and it doesn't matter it's a connection problem or not the last man standing gains the points.

[Guest]

How would that handle host side drops and player kicks?

[coworotel]

4 hours ago, HMS-Surprise said:

If players want they chose that option and it doesn't matter it's a connection problem or not the last man standing gains the points

 

3 hours ago, (-_-) said:

How would that handle host side drops and player kicks? 

I would say kicking a player should not be allowed in these "anyhow rated games" and if the host disconnects he loses automatically.

[Guest]

Rated games shouldn’t be hosted by players. Especially when the system in 0AD is very central. There is also a trust issue to be considered of whether the information transmitted to wfg servers is legit or not. For example, who dropped, or was that person really disconnected or was he kicked out (not only by the /kick command).

While the perfect or atleast near perfect solution is hosting via official WFG servers, it may still be worth to patch up the obvious flaws and exploits. It would atleast reduce then. I doubt most people would go to such lengths to protect a number.

[Hannibal_Barca]

23 hours ago, (-_-) said:

And the lack of moderators doesnt help. Currently there are just 3(?) moderators who logs in and moderate the lobby on a daily basis.

You or any other potential candidate may apply to the proper authorities who might - after rigourous questioning - accept your application and appoint you for a designated test period after which you could be elevated to the permanent*  status of Lobby Moderator.

We are indeed short-staffed at the moment and could use a helping hand.

 

* Privileges may be revoked if deemed necessary.

Edited July 1, 2018 by Hannibal_Barca

[coworotel]

1 hour ago, (-_-) said:

Rated games shouldn’t be hosted by players. Especially when the system in 0AD is very central. There is also a trust issue to be considered of whether the information transmitted to wfg servers is legit or not. For example, who dropped, or was that person really disconnected or was he kicked out (not only by the /kick command).

While the perfect or atleast near perfect solution is hosting via official WFG servers, it may still be worth to patch up the obvious flaws and exploits. It would atleast reduce then. I doubt most people would go to such lengths to protect a number.

While I agree that the ideal would be a central server hosting the games I don't know if it's economically feasible since the game is open source and all... But maybe some solution where the game is mutually hosted or something like that could work, I think.

Yeah I think so far few people would go through the trouble of faking the information sent to the servers just to improve ratings. In this regard displaying information about how often the players had problems hosting rated games could be a good way to warn others.

45 minutes ago, Hannibal_Barca said:

We are indeed short-staffed at the moment and could use a helping hand.

@Hannibal_Barca how much time does it consume? Does it require a fixed schedule or is this flexible?

[Hannibal_Barca]

2 hours ago, coworotel said:

@Hannibal_Barca how much time does it consume? Does it require a fixed schedule or is this flexible?

It (assuming you mean moderatorship) requires you being active almost every day for a few hours - this means being available and not afking