I didn’t see mention of it yet in this thread, so I wanted to point out that Cliffski’s new anti-stacking code is in the recently released patch 1.47, so this significantly changes what can be accomplished in the in-game deployment editor vs notepad.
So how long do you think until people start complaining about not enough stacking in the game…?
Kdansky, you’re not listening to anything being said at all.
Prior to 1.47, you COULDN’T tell. People could stack WITHOUT notepad as much as they wanted, it would just take a bit more time.
And that is why I said that it’s not cheating, since the game does allow it. I have no clue what you are trying to tell me, except for the hostility.
The game allows it, the rules don’t. There’s a big different in using an intended feature and an unintended one.
Btw, stacking is now officially undesirable.
There are no rules separate from the game here unless agreed upon for a specific challenge. There are individuals who like/dislike certain things such a stacking (before 1.47) or spamming and they are free to rate challenges accordingly. However I haven’t seen any community concensus to outlaw any particular behavior that is allowed by the game. That’s not to say that such a concensus could not develop, but it hasn’t yet.
No, there are rules above and beyond what the game allows. That’s called intended features, and that’s the goal towards which a programmer makes an application. Then there is unintended program behavior, aka bugs. And that’s what a programmer has to remove.
Cliff has been working towards removing stacking, so even though the game used to allow it, it SHOULDNT HAVE. Stacking is against Cliff’s intended features. Actually we could say, forbidden stacking is now part of the rules. You stack, you’re knowingly usign a flaw in the game code, and you deserve to get all kinds of nasty things happen to you.
This is your opinion, not a universal rule.
Unless there is a clear consensus in the user community that a certain behavior is improper then the only rules are what the game allows. In the case of stacking pre-1.47 there clearly was no such consensus. Stacking was in fact explicitly allowed in recent tournament and SAC’s.
You are free to disagree with that but you can’t impose your opinion by shouting it.
I actually largely disagree with the spirit of Playing to Win. The thing is, it says, “unless the rules i agreed to explicitly disallow use of something then im going to use it” no matter how fair or fun it is to use. If this game had a cruiser module that was called the “Omgz lazor” that 1-shotted any ship at any range and spammed shots, then of course you’d load up all of your ships with it because thats how you win. Never mind the fact that you did practically nothing to win, and so don’t really deserve the victory, you won right?
It’s like in Supreme Commander 2, where you can turn off air units, but you can still pop the escape pod on your ACU (which is an air unit). You can then go hide in some obscure corner of the map (maybe over water, or somewhere unreachable by land units), never to be found by anyone, and just go do something else till the other guys get bored, and presto you have a victory! But i ask you, was that a real victory? or did you cheat the enemy out of a victory because you’re a sore loser?
To expand on my point a little, PTW assumes the game you’re playing is perfectly balanced. No game is like that, and if there happens to be a flaw in the game, then the player is allowed to abuse it to his heart’s content just so he can get a few meaningless victory messages. What matters more: winning at any cost, or winning when you have a genuine chance to fail, because you didn’t go for the unbeatable move?
No it’s not my opinion, it’s Cliff’s. The fact that he tries hard to prevent stacking should tell you something about how legit he thinks this ‘tactic’ to be.
What you are saying is that you are allowed to use flaws and bugs becuase the game technically allows it even though the guy making the game and making the rules is against it. This is dubious at best.
Bingo! The thing is, since this game is unbalanced, PTW has little influence (which follick and others seem to rally around), since you can cheat and use cheap tactics which really are unfair.
Rather than getting so riled up by a tactic that was fair, balanced and widely used and is now in any case moot, I would think that you would be more worried about all the ways to outright cheat in this game.
There are a lot of cheats that can be done through creative editing of text files some of which are very difficult to detect. Cliff has said that he’s not going to bother fixing them unless there is an outcry and I feel like I’m the only one who is bothered by this.
For example, if a person gave himself a 50% boost in budget in a posted challenge in, say, a SAC that would give him a big big advantage over his opponents, but the only way to detect this would be to decompile his challenge file and reconstruct his fleet to check the point cost. It would not be obvious just looking at his fleet. I think anyone would consider this cheating.
The point of strategy is to choose the best choice, and choices are inherently imbalanced. nobody use quantum blast for example because it’s a bad choice. Unfortunately Tribe stacking was the optimum strategy pre 1.47. It was seriously hurting the diversity of the game. As such the fix was well received. Personally though, I see Tribe, not stacking, as the greater of the 2 evil. You can’t stack everything into a single pile and survive the shockwave damage with the other races.
With regard to SAC, the fact is, we, the players, had ample opportunity to impose balance due to the community nature of the tournaments. At every corner. We didn’t. And when members of the community complained because of stacking, it was really their own fault for not raising their voices when they had and have had ample opportunity to correct the problem. For example, by proposing modification of the rules or even proposing an entire new tournament.
Regardless of PTW in a more general context, this is a pretty clear cut example of why PTW is an important concept to understand. Because people don’t understand, they feel justified in complaining and insulting other people and resorting to other pettiness like rating a challenge’s difficulty as the lowest possible even when they couldn’t even beat the challenge after a dozen tries.
Actually, if the choices are inherently imbalanced, then what you have is not strategy. In a real strategy game, your choices will be highly situation dependent while still allowing you flexibility to choose between options.The moment there’s a clear “best” option is the moment some strategy just went out of the game.
That’s true, though i still think PTW has an issue here as well. If you come across an exploitative move (one where you’d be a fool not to use it), then you can’t be bothered to take two seconds of thought and think “well the developer probably didn’t want me sailing through on this one move, so i won’t”. This attitude is what largely makes community-imposed bans of tactics or moves necessary; because the players “can’t be bothered to think”.
According to PTW, stacking is perfectly allowed, since the game did let you before, and no one was banning it. Did it ruin the game and vastly reduce it’s strategy? Yes. But according to PTW, that doesn’t matter.
The rules are the game are not as relevant as you might think. Or rather, the rules of a tournament override the rules of the game. The discussion whether stacking is game-legal became irrelevant the moment we made it explicitly clear that stacking was allowed in SAC, in the context of SAC.
It is not that players “can’t be bothered to think” it’s that it is not the moral responsibility of a player to police game balance. It is up to the community as a collective to set the rules.
PTW has a lot to say on tournaments as well.
Technically, you’re both right. These are two distinct schools of philosophy on game strategy that have no clear cut resolution.
One side of the argument says that the “skill of the game” comes down to making intelligent choices. Essentially, strategy becomes determined by analysis and deductive logic. Whoever makes the better choice out of all possibilities, wins. In World War II, for example, we learn that a frontal attack against a machine nest can be a very bad choice. Still, it could be done (and was). Better strategies would have involved finding/making a better choice. Proponents of this argument believe that some choices must be more valid for others to even have a game – if all choices are valid, then there is no strategy… simply pick a choice at random and go with it.
Another argument says that the “skill of the game” comes down to managing the pros and cons of different choices, and that a choice only has strategic merit to the game if there’s a corresponding risk or cost. Strategy and tactics in this philosophy become synonymous with “risk management”. Proponents of this choice believe that the calculation of theoretical probabilities is what’s important to the game, with the opponent essentially being an almost pseudo-random factor since there isn’t a clear path for them to follow. They might argue further that the game is a medium for competition against the opponent - you’re playing to out-think your opponent, not playing to figure out how to play the game properly.
I think both philosophies are valid, and I’m sure the fine line of the proper Truth is somewhere down the middle. Personally, I subscribe to the second philosophy more than the first, but I fully understand and respect the former viewpoint… I just don’t really share it.
Those two types of strategies are not mutually exclusive. Deductive reasoning can be used to narrow down multiple options that perform the same task (ex. CL > Quantum Blast). If more than one option remains, risk manage then follows to analyze resources allocation (ex. ratio between MWM and CL).
So take tic tac toe for example, it only has one optimum strategy for both player, which results in a tie. This is true also for checker (which has been solved), and theoretically should also be true for chess.
In GSB however, it’s structure prohibits one optimum strategy for the host, so risk managements are required in addition to deductive reasoning. So even if Tribe Stacking was the optimum strategy, the ratio between long range and short range, shield vs no shield, cannot be optimized. For the challengers however, all they needed is deductive reasoning to counter.
If that module existed, I would use it. That doesn’t make me a bad person, it demonstrates how horrible the game would be. If we would all go a moral route, then sooner or later someone would say: “Oh look, I am using it, but I only have one, and it’s on my very weak ship! It’s totally fair like this.” and it might even be. And then the second person enters the scene, and puts it on a medium-strength ship. And so on. Until we arrive at a point where we have to decide arbitrarily if the use was fair or not. No rules have been ever broken, but the game degrades into “who can break the social contract the most”. That’s certainly no fun.
The solution? Fix the Omgz Lazor.
That is cheating, by definition. The RULES state: “No air-units”, yet you build air-units. Sure, you could break them because the game allowed you to. But that only shows that SupCom2 is a badly designed game. If you swap out two pieces in a board game while your opponent is on the bathroom, the game didn’t prevent it, and still, that is cheating.
Actually no. PTW assumes not more than “competitive game”. Chess is completely one-sided, with white having a huge lead over black in every game. Still, you can play to win. MTG is never perfectly balanced, there are always decks that are better than others. But as long as the other decks are competitive (sometimes by being able to only win against that one true strategy, and nothing else), there is a (meta-)game left. At the point where only one single strategy will ever win, then PTW does not work anymore. There is no playing to win in drag-racing with identical cars and automatic gearboxes, because the only correct strategy is: “Push down gas pedal”. But drag-racing does not claim to be about strategy anyway.
If I have to try to not win so the game doesn’t degrade, then the game must be changed (because it is not a game anymore, it’s broken), or abandoned.
Yes, but you have to arrive at a solution till it’s fixed, and the solution is to not use it period.
It’s more properly an issue that the mechanism can’t restrict the method used to make the escape pod, because the game wasn’t completely designed for it (via an ability interface). I’m sure they’re working on a solution. It’s actually more in line with stacking pre-1.47, since it’s something the game allows but is certainly not intended.
Bingo.
What i don’t understand is why the first line of thinking isn’t a subset of the second; obviously you need to find the best strategy for the given situation but if you can find an unequivocally best then the game is not interesting (there’s no thought as to which strategy to use, since you’ll have less of a chance of winning if you do). Otherwise, you have many choices to pick from, and then you can really have a battle.