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Topic: 2007 Computer Championship and Challenge (Read 2274 times) |
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omar
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Arimaa player #2
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Re: 2007 Computer Championship and Challenge
« Reply #15 on: Oct 20th, 2006, 8:48am » |
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on Oct 14th, 2006, 9:57am, unic wrote:
In my opinion, the spectators shouldn't be catered to. The competition to find out who is best should be in center; not the spectators. If they want to watch, then that's good... if they don't want to watch, well, I don't see it as a problem if there are no spectators.
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Ideally I agree with you 100% on this. But practically, not catering to the spectators gives you a 100% chance of killing any game, good or bad. Any game that involves skill depends on the spectators for it's long term survival. No spectators leads to no sponsors or ticket income which means less prize money which results in fewer talented players wanting to devote their time to the game. Of course without players a game is basically dead.
Also the other thing to realize is that at every speed there is some player or players that excell at that speed. Yes, the quality of the moves decreases with faster speed along with the chance of the same player winning the tournament again, but that's something we have to accept to a certain degree if we want to make the game interesting for spectators.
The other thing is that as the difference between two players gets smaller it will take longer and longer to distinguish which player is truely better. At some point the amount of effort needed to make that distinction out weighs the reward. Even with computers, the amount spend on dedicating the hardware has a cost.
My general approach is try to be as ideal as possible while catering to the conflicting requirements of different groups, because in the end they all matter.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 21st, 2006, 11:37am by omar » |
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omar
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Re: 2007 Computer Championship and Challenge
« Reply #16 on: Oct 20th, 2006, 8:57am » |
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on Oct 16th, 2006, 11:36am, Fritzlein wrote:
If you focus 100% on entertainment, then I agree with you, the game will lose its focus on skill. It might be entertaining to have secret landmines planted it the board, or to roll dice to determine how many steps you get to take, or other such silliness. But things that take skill out of the game ultimately take the fun out of the game too, and we would be left more bored and less entertained than before.
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As I had mentioned in an earlier discussion I actually think rolling a dice for the number of steps would be in interesting variation to Arimaa. In fact some of the early version did use a dice.
Adding a little luck to the game does not completely kill skill, but does give more players a higher chance of winning and thus allows a game to prosper on just players alone without the need for spectators. Poker for example; and the lottery is an extream example.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 20th, 2006, 8:57am by omar » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2007 Computer Championship and Challenge
« Reply #17 on: Oct 20th, 2006, 9:41am » |
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on Oct 20th, 2006, 8:57am, omar wrote:| Adding a little luck to the game does not completely kill skill, but does give more players a higher chance of winning and thus allows a game to prosper on just players alone without the need for spectators. Poker for example; and the lottery is an extream example. |
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Luck games usually thrive because people like to gamble with money. The lottery thrives with no element of skill whatsoever because people like to dream of winning millions. If there were no money involved, nobody would play the lottery just for fun.
Poker is a different story. There are many levels of skill in Texas Hold'em. However, it is just as difficult to create strategic depth in a luck game as it is in a game with no luck. Over the years there have been hundreds and hundreds of poker variations that have died off because there was no depth. Everyone could master all the skill of a certain variation in a short time, and then it became totally luck, i.e. you might as well flip a coin as play that variation of poker.
Five-card stud is one of the good variants of poker, and it used to be very common way to play for high stakes. But eventually the depth of five-card stud was exhausted, everybody learned how to play it well, and that universal knowledge of strategy killed it off. Hardly anyone plays five-card stud any more.
Texas Hold'em, in contrast, is not well understood even at the highest level of play. Not long ago I saw Phil Hellmuth ranting at two guys who beat him in the finals of a tournament because (in Phil's opinion) they played poorly and got lucky. In other words, the world's best players of Texas Hold'em disagree about proper strategy just as much as top Arimaa players disagree about proper strategy.
While it would be theoretically possible to introduce luck into Arimaa in a way that preserves the depth and skill, I highly doubt it could be done in practice. Most likely you will kill off many layers of depth and replace them with a single, simpler idea. Adding dice to Arimaa would (in my estimation) be 99% likely to create a game that has superficial interest but little depth, just like 99% of variations of poker. In other words, you would probably make a lottery out of the game. As soon as everyone masters the skill of dice-Arimaa, you are left with essentially a complicated way of flipping a coin.
The present rules to Arimaa are something very rare, indeed almost miraculous. I don't think I could design a game as good as Arimaa if I spent my lifetime trying. Please, don't mess with it unless you absolutely have to (i.e. unless some flaw is killing the game anyway). I must believe that changing something this good is more likely to make it worse than better.
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