Optional player's rating

Brainstorm ideas of possible additions to the game. Read this before posting!

Moderator: Forum Moderators

Forum rules
Before posting a new idea, you must read the following:
bproberts
Posts: 24
Joined: July 9th, 2014, 10:49 pm

Re: Optional player's rating

Post by bproberts »

I feel like this is beating a dead horse at this point, so let me be completely clear: This has previously been a problem for Wesnoth. If there are things we can take and use from how other communities have done this, then great. But ultimately, I don't care about the sheer number of other games and communities that this has ended up working out for. I care about making sure Wesnoth doesn't run into the same problems with MP it did before.
When? When was this supposed massive MP trolling, BM, flaming dark age? How long did it go on for? How many people did it involve? I've been playing/following Wesnoth for years, and I've never seen any evidence of it it. I've seen a lot of people "worried" that it would happen, but I've never seen any evidence of it actually occurring. How can ranking have caused a problem when the game has never even had a ranking system?
Currently? Not much. And less than 1.12. But I expect it would increase dramatically if competitive play became popular.
This is completely meaningless. What's "not much"? One report a day? A week? A month? What was 1.12? Ten percent worse? Double? Triple? If we went from one report a month to five that's a dramatic (500%!) increase, but it's still not a major problem. The MP toxicity issue feels like paranoia at best, if not an outright red herring.
I can speak only for myself, but if someone were to propose for what those rules would be, what changes to Wesnoth itself would be needed, and how disputes would be handled, I would keep an open mind about it.


And that is 1000% more support than has been publicly given to any kind of ladder/ranking system in the entire history of Wesnoth combined.
Or even simpler, one person can save the current turn of the match, then open the save file locally and view all information about the opposing side.
There's a variety of options here:

1. How hard would it be to simply disable saving in any ranked game? If this type of cheating is that big of a concern, the tradeoff against being unable to load a game would be acceptable. This would be a useful option in Single Player as well, people love "Iron Man" modes in X-Com, Fire Emblem, etc.

2. Is fog of war necessary for ranked? I prefer it, but I know just as many players who do not. This might be a non-issue depending on how the rules were set up.

3. At a high level, map/vision cheats are identifiable in most games. A player can only get "lucky" so many times without scouting before attracting suspicion.

4. Again, we don't need to be 100% accurate. We have to be better than the current system/good enough to be playable. Even if something absurd like 10% of games were cheated, it's still better than a ladder that most players don't know exists/can't understand.
Last edited by Pentarctagon on July 28th, 2019, 7:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Removed specific example of how to cheat.
bproberts
Posts: 24
Joined: July 9th, 2014, 10:49 pm

Re: Optional player's rating

Post by bproberts »

Yomar wrote: July 27th, 2019, 8:02 pm It's also not always fault of who looses connection, maybe he simply can't fix it, or he has an power outage cause bad weather or other reasons, his computer or the game crashes, or he faints lol.
For this I'm usually very flexible with my opponents in case of problems.
Your internet, your problem. If your opponent chooses to be lenient with you, that's their prerogative. It's extremely self centered to expect someone to sit around twiddling their thumbs because you might come back. Again, this is for ranked, competitive, matches. If your opponent randomly disappears for 5 minutes it can throw you off your game, and makes cheating easier.
Beside this, regarding to players ranking, I think that this goes against the spirit of BFW,
How? What is "the spirit of BFW?"
If you really like ranked games, just join Wesnoth ladder.
The Wesnoth ladder effectively does not exist. It is dead, and has been for years. You might as well tell people to hop in a time machine.
(As me personally, I'm not strictly against it, but I also don't feel the necessity of this feature, maybee some would like it but then others probably would not.)
There is no reason to believe that adding a ladder will significantly effect players who do not choose to use it. It's no different than adding another campaign, if people don't want to use it, they barely have to look at it.
User avatar
Pentarctagon
Project Manager
Posts: 5526
Joined: March 22nd, 2009, 10:50 pm
Location: Earth (occasionally)

Re: Optional player's rating

Post by Pentarctagon »

bproberts wrote: July 27th, 2019, 8:25 pm
I feel like this is beating a dead horse at this point, so let me be completely clear: This has previously been a problem for Wesnoth. If there are things we can take and use from how other communities have done this, then great. But ultimately, I don't care about the sheer number of other games and communities that this has ended up working out for. I care about making sure Wesnoth doesn't run into the same problems with MP it did before.
When? When was this supposed massive MP trolling, BM, flaming dark age? How long did it go on for? How many people did it involve? I've been playing/following Wesnoth for years, and I've never seen any evidence of it it. I've seen a lot of people "worried" that it would happen, but I've never seen any evidence of it actually occurring. How can ranking have caused a problem when the game has never even had a ranking system?
Currently? Not much. And less than 1.12. But I expect it would increase dramatically if competitive play became popular.
This is completely meaningless. What's "not much"? One report a day? A week? A month? What was 1.12? Ten percent worse? Double? Triple? If we went from one report a month to five that's a dramatic (500%!) increase, but it's still not a major problem. The MP toxicity issue feels like paranoia at best, if not an outright red herring.
You can either believe me when I say it was a problem, or not. Ultimately it makes little difference to me either way.
bproberts wrote: July 27th, 2019, 8:25 pm
Or even simpler, one person can save the current turn of the match, then open the save file locally and view all information about the opposing side.
There's a variety of options here:

1. How hard would it be to simply disable saving in any ranked game? If this type of cheating is that big of a concern, the tradeoff against being unable to load a game would be acceptable. This would be a useful option in Single Player as well, people love "Iron Man" modes in X-Com, Fire Emblem, etc.

2. Is fog of war necessary for ranked? I prefer it, but I know just as many players who do not. This might be a non-issue depending on how the rules were set up.

3. At a high level, map/vision cheats are identifiable in most games. A player can only get "lucky" so many times without scouting before attracting suspicion.

4. Again, we don't need to be 100% accurate. We have to be better than the current system/good enough to be playable. Even if something absurd like 10% of games were cheated, it's still better than a ladder that most players don't know exists/can't understand.
For #1, it would likely be trivial. But seeing as Wesnoth is open source, it would be equally trivial for a user to undo that restriction.

For #2, I don't know. I assume it would affect the usefulness of the Wose's ambush ability, for example.

For #3 and #4, I still have a hard time believing that an officially supported ladder system where there are known, simple ways to cheat would be well received, especially when fixing those issues would be an absolutely enormous task that is unlikely to ever be done (unless the Wesnoth 2.0 attempt pans out).
Last edited by Pentarctagon on July 28th, 2019, 7:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Removed specific example of how to cheat
99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs
take one down, patch it around
-2,147,483,648 little bugs in the code
User avatar
lhybrideur
Posts: 357
Joined: July 9th, 2019, 1:46 pm

Re: Optional player's rating

Post by lhybrideur »

bproberts wrote: July 27th, 2019, 6:16 pm
Historically, there has been a feeling that MP in general, and the ladder in particular, were unwanted sources of conflict and drama.
Again, thousands of other games manage to have multiplayer and ranked, without devolving into toxic cesspools. Either the weight of evidence proves that this is a non-issue, or Wesnoth's player base is somehow so vile that they can't handle something that Starcraft, Chess, Mortal Kombat, Football, Pool, Bowling, Scrabble, Quake, Foosball. etc. can. If the Wesnoth community is that bad, that's on the devs, since the community is basically dead except for them at this point.
There is also a whole list of games with toxic MP.
Soliton
Site Administrator
Posts: 1680
Joined: April 5th, 2005, 3:25 pm
Location: #wesnoth-mp

Re: Optional player's rating

Post by Soliton »

I don't think wesnoth's multiplayer community is that much different from others. The tendency for toxicity is surely there like anywhere else and there's also going to be lots of well behaved players.

Automatically assuming that introducing player ratings is going to bring out the best of everyone seems naive. Nevertheless instead of arguing how good or bad it's going to get someone needs to put in the work to implement it first. Then it can be tried out and issues identified and hopefully fixed, etc.

Regarding cheating I'd like to say that besides being able to see through fog of war one way or another I don't think there are any ways to cheat that aren't trivially detectable. Of course there can always be bugs we're not aware of that can be abused to cheat. I'm sure those will be fixed once they're discovered as per usual.

I just want to make it clear that design wise I don't think wesnoth multiplayer has issues. As mentioned apart from the fog of war thing that would be quite hard to fix and exists similarly in other games with wallhacks or whatever. That will likely never be fixed since it would come with annoying restrictions like not being able to save a game since you don't have all the data etc. As was already mentioned people can also just play without fog if they want to. I think barely anybody does though since it's just less fun.
"If gameplay requires it, they can be made to live on Venus." -- scott
User avatar
sergey
Posts: 475
Joined: January 9th, 2015, 9:25 pm

Re: Optional player's rating

Post by sergey »

Soliton wrote: July 30th, 2019, 7:42 pm As was already mentioned people can also just play without fog if they want to. I think barely anybody does though since it's just less fun.
It also impacts the balance. Fog of war and random factions are very important in competitive play. Knowing enemy faction from the beginning is an advantage, exposing yours is a disadvantage. Impact of that knowledge depends on player's skills, to the point where some match-ups may be considered severely imbalanced if the factions are known from the beginning and players are very skilled.
Author of SP scenario Dragon Fight and SP campaign Captured by a Nightmare.
Created The Rise of Wesnoth (alternative mechanics) version of the mainline campaign.
Soliton
Site Administrator
Posts: 1680
Joined: April 5th, 2005, 3:25 pm
Location: #wesnoth-mp

Re: Optional player's rating

Post by Soliton »

sergey wrote: July 31st, 2019, 5:16 am
Soliton wrote: July 30th, 2019, 7:42 pm As was already mentioned people can also just play without fog if they want to. I think barely anybody does though since it's just less fun.
It also impacts the balance. Fog of war and random factions are very important in competitive play. Knowing enemy faction from the beginning is an advantage, exposing yours is a disadvantage. Impact of that knowledge depends on player's skills, to the point where some match-ups may be considered severely imbalanced if the factions are known from the beginning and players are very skilled.
Why would the advantage and disadvantage not cancel each other out?

At one point both players will know each others faction and if that severly unbalances the game there is a balancing issue either way.
"If gameplay requires it, they can be made to live on Venus." -- scott
User avatar
sergey
Posts: 475
Joined: January 9th, 2015, 9:25 pm

Re: Optional player's rating

Post by sergey »

Soliton wrote: July 31st, 2019, 7:35 pm Why would the advantage and disadvantage not cancel each other out?
Because they are not equal, it depends on factions. For example, Northerners vs Undead. For Northerners vs random faction it is optimal to have many grunts. For Northerners vs Undead it is optimal to have many trolls and archers. For Undead vs random faction it is optimal to have a diverse mixture of units, vs Northerners it would be still a diverse mix. Northerners have greater advantage of knowing their enemy in this example.
Soliton wrote: July 31st, 2019, 7:35 pm At one point both players will know each others faction and if that severly unbalances the game there is a balancing issue either way.
In competitive play there is a big difference between knowing the enemy faction from the beginning or later at some point. At the beginning players have relatively big amount of money (it is unlikely they will have such amount during the rest of the game). Under specific circumstances (factions, map, who is the initiator p1/p2) it opens a door to a devastating rush attack.
Author of SP scenario Dragon Fight and SP campaign Captured by a Nightmare.
Created The Rise of Wesnoth (alternative mechanics) version of the mainline campaign.
Soliton
Site Administrator
Posts: 1680
Joined: April 5th, 2005, 3:25 pm
Location: #wesnoth-mp

Re: Optional player's rating

Post by Soliton »

Sure there are faction combinations that require more unusual units than others and it can be asymmetric in what side needs more unusual units but this should not be so "severly unbalancing" that you just have to hope for the best.

If on some map there is a rush possible that cannot be countered that is an issue of the map that should be fixed. Not something that hopefully doesn't happen often because the needed initial recruit is less likely when fog is on.
"If gameplay requires it, they can be made to live on Venus." -- scott
User avatar
Yomar
Posts: 394
Joined: October 27th, 2011, 5:14 am
Contact:

Re: Optional player's rating

Post by Yomar »

To bproberts, spirit of Wesnoth is having fun not be competitive, and the Wesnoth ladder is not dead at all, just visit it, the last game was just today, and if you give a look to the dates, you will see that there are games almost every day.
Beholded Wesnoth's Origins.
Max G on WIF
Rank 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Post Reply