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Ghost1671

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Does a resign count as a win/loss
« on: December 07, 2017, 02:13:49 pm »
+2

I am frustrated that players (especially higher ranked) resign when I am winning. Does this count as a loss for them, or a win for me? Does it negate the game? I think it is rude, as it doesn't let me increase my ranking by winning with a higher ranked player.
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Watno

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #1 on: December 07, 2017, 02:53:09 pm »
+7

There is no difference between resigning and losing in other ways.
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Kirian

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #2 on: December 07, 2017, 03:04:20 pm »
+4

When they resign, the screen even says "You Win."  Why would it count otherwise?
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GendoIkari

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #3 on: December 07, 2017, 03:12:41 pm »
+7

Worth noting that in some games like Go and Chess, resigning is considered a quite normal part of the game, and is even considered rude to refuse to resign after you know you won't win.

With board games in general, resigning is not common; because it's generally a social activity. I don't expect people to resign when playing something at my game nights. But online Dominion is more of a competitive scene than a social one, and as such, resigning when you're going to lose anyway is perfectly normal.

As others have said, resigning counts fully as a loss (and a win for the other player).
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Chris is me

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #4 on: December 07, 2017, 03:23:51 pm »
+1

I am frustrated that players (especially higher ranked) resign when I am winning. Does this count as a loss for them, or a win for me? Does it negate the game? I think it is rude, as it doesn't let me increase my ranking by winning with a higher ranked player.

What gives you the idea that your opponent resigning doesn’t give you the ranking equivalent of a win? It even says “YOU WIN” in giant letters at the top, and the scoreboard shows you in first place regardless of the store. It even plays the winning music to make this extra clear.

Resigning is the same as waiting to lose, without the waiting. People resign when they know they have lost and don’t want to play the rest of the game out just to prove it.
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Cave-o-sapien

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #5 on: December 07, 2017, 03:46:30 pm »
0

I am frustrated that players (especially higher ranked) resign when I am winning. Does this count as a loss for them, or a win for me? Does it negate the game? I think it is rude, as it doesn't let me increase my ranking by winning with a higher ranked player.

Your observation that this happens especially against higher ranked players could be more than anecdotal. I think higher ranked players have a more accurate estimate of their win probability in any given match, and it's likely that some use that information to abandon games with low win probabilities so they can start a new game.

As for it being rude, I very much prefer someone to say something before resigning, but if they don't I'm not terribly upset by it. Losing a competitive match isn't fun, almost by definition, so I try to be understanding.
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Awaclus

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #6 on: December 07, 2017, 04:12:08 pm »
+2

Losing a competitive match isn't fun, almost by definition, so I try to be understanding.

I don't mind losing. I just think it's super unexciting to keep pointlessly clicking on things after the winner is clear, so I want to minimize the time spent doing that and maximize the time spent actually competing.
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JW

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #7 on: December 07, 2017, 05:55:32 pm »
+1

There is no difference between resigning and losing in other ways.

There's one difference: if you resign a rated game with multiple human opponents, your rating goes down more (and your opponents' ranking goes up more) than if you had played out the same game but come in last.
« Last Edit: December 07, 2017, 09:02:05 pm by JW »
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crj

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #8 on: December 07, 2017, 08:21:58 pm »
0

Maybe it's obvious what you mean to someone who's actually played the current incarnation of online Dominion, but to me it's quite unclear.

Are you saying that resigning a game with multiple human opponents is equivalent to coming last, or are you saying it's somehow even worse than that?
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Deadlock39

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #9 on: December 08, 2017, 08:57:37 am »
+2

With three or more players, you get a win against the players you beat and a loss against the players that beat you in the rating system.

If someone resigns, it changes the landscape of that game, and may alter the outcome between the two other players. For this reason, the system awards both (all? Not sure about 4-6p) remaining players 1.5 wins against the resigning player, which results in them getting the equivalent of 3 loses (as opposed to 2 if they played out and got last). The player who would have gotten first gets 0.5 less wins, and comes out a bit behind (especially if the other non resigning player is ranked higher). The player who would have come in second ends up a good bit better than they would have at 1.5-0 instead of 1-1.

crj

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #10 on: December 08, 2017, 10:24:38 am »
0

Thanks for the explanation - all is clear.

That behaviour does surprise me, though. If one player in a multi-player game resigned, I think what I'd have expected would be for the game to continue with them replaced by a bot, then for them to be treated as having come last in the final scoring whatever happened subsequently.

Then again, I'm also a bit surprised by the ranking model. By my understanding of your explanation, you break even if you come second in a three-player game, and coming last is significantly worse than coming second? In RL games, we find it much more interesting to seek the death-or-glory lines of play if we're lagging, which that scoring system would seem to discourage.

(I may be unusual in having 3 rather than 2 as my preferred player count for Dominion.)
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Deadlock39

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #11 on: December 08, 2017, 01:57:51 pm »
0

It might be reasonable someday if the AI is deemed good enough. As things stand now, the bot cannot be trusted not to throw the game to one player, which it could do in a multitude of ways.

Keep in mind, you only break even coming in second if all three players have the exact same rating.
« Last Edit: December 08, 2017, 05:23:21 pm by Deadlock39 »
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markus

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #12 on: December 09, 2017, 01:25:34 pm »
0

The description for multiplayer is not entirely correct. In a 3 player game, the 2 remaining players are approximately treated as if they had both won.

What matters for your rating is the difference between wins and expected wins. Let's assume that all players are equal, such that expected win is 50% for each comparisons between 2 players. Then, each player has 2*0.5=1 expected wins in the 2 comparisons with the other players. The outcome for the rating system is:
1st player: 2-1=1
2nd player 1-1=0
3rd player: 0-1=-1
So the difference between all places is equally large.

When a player resigns, there is no comparison between the remaining players, so the expected win is 1*0.5:
non-resigning players: 1.5-0.5=1 (same as winning above)
The resigining player has 2 comparisons, i.e. expected wins is 1:
resigning player: -1-1=-2 (same as losing 2 three-player games)
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Dingan

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #13 on: December 09, 2017, 03:42:53 pm »
+1

As things stand now, the bot cannot be trusted not to throw the game to one player, which it could do in a multitude of ways.

A person could do this, without resigning, either intentionally or unintentionally. Which to my understanding is one more reason ShiT chose to separate the 2-player ranking from the 3-to-4-player ranking (at least I think they're separate .. they're separate, right? I honestly don't even know.)

EDIT: And I guess even a good bot could still do this .. unless such a thing could be programmed into the bot which I have no idea how that would even work.
« Last Edit: December 09, 2017, 03:45:02 pm by Dingan »
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jonaskoelker

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #14 on: December 11, 2017, 07:13:08 pm »
0

And I guess even a good bot could still do this .. unless such a thing could be programmed into the bot which I have no idea how that would even work.
The simple AI that plays perfectly in all games is this:
  • Consider all the moves you could make
  • Consider all your opponent's responses to each of your moves
  • Consider all your responses to each of your opponent's responses to each of your moves
... and so on, until you've explored the entire space of game states. At each game-ending move, take note of who wins. Assume every player tries to make moves that make themselves win and not lose, given optimal future play from the opponent(s), and treat the first move of a mate-in-n as winning move, for increasing values of n. Make a (treated-as-a-)winning move from the starting position if there is one.

This is great for tic-tac-toe which has a small state space (less than 100000 game states, if you merge the symmetric ones), and horribly unrealistically slow for chess which has a large state space—the sun would definitely explode before anything happens, and probably also the heat death of the universe.

One approach which works in practice is to search part of the state space and use some kind of proxy for the win condition. In chess, count pieces (with weights), have heuristics for positional factors; in Dominion, count points. It's a bit of an art to pick a useful subset of the search space. But if you can do that, then it should be fairly easy to create a bot that optimizes for player X winning rather than itself winning: just use "player X wins" instead of "I win" as the thing you're optimizing for.

If both player X and player Y are trying to make player Y win (where none of those are the bot), then it might not succeed; but you can't really blame it for losing to a bigger crowd of dirty kingmakers :)
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jonaskoelker

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #15 on: December 11, 2017, 07:21:50 pm »
0

unless such a thing could be programmed into the bot which I have no idea how that would even work.
I have ideas.

If one player is playing big money and another is playing an engine—use some heuristic that counts treasures and villages to tell them apart—and you want to punish the big money player, buy lots of discard attacks, or other cards hand-picked by experts (e.g. Stef) as asymmetrically hurtful. Or Messenger/Embassy lots of Silver if you want to help the money player.

If the engine player is to your left and you want to help them, play lots of Council Rooms and Governors to improve their reliability, counting on them to play their own Militia.

Near the end of the game, make some reasonably simple estimate of likely gains in each other player's next turn; then lower piles in ways that force the non-kings to break PPR. Or calculate it, which is easier when there are fewer future game states to consider.

Man, these sound kind of sketchy. Take that as a measure of the degree to which DXV succeeded in creating a non-political game.
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crj

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #16 on: December 11, 2017, 10:32:31 pm »
0

The simple AI that plays perfectly in all games is this:
  • Consider all the moves you could make
  • Consider all your opponent's responses to each of your moves
  • Consider all your responses to each of your opponent's responses to each of your moves
... and so on, until you've explored the entire space of game states.
Minimax doesn't play Dominion perfectly; it only plays Dominion perfectly against another similarly "perfect" player.

To play a genuinely perfect game, you must also completely comprehend the state of mind of the other player(s). To pick a random example, suppose you know they have a fetish for Pirate Ships, the correct line of play may be to assume your Copper is going to magically vanish without your having to lift a finger, even though one couldn't "perfectly" determine that a "perfect" adversary was going to play Pirate Ship early and often.
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GendoIkari

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #17 on: December 11, 2017, 11:25:30 pm »
+3

Thanks for the explanation - all is clear.

That behaviour does surprise me, though. If one player in a multi-player game resigned, I think what I'd have expected would be for the game to continue with them replaced by a bot, then for them to be treated as having come last in the final scoring whatever happened subsequently.

Then again, I'm also a bit surprised by the ranking model. By my understanding of your explanation, you break even if you come second in a three-player game, and coming last is significantly worse than coming second? In RL games, we find it much more interesting to seek the death-or-glory lines of play if we're lagging, which that scoring system would seem to discourage.

(I may be unusual in having 3 rather than 2 as my preferred player count for Dominion.)

Yeah, I highly disagree with the notion of ranking any position beyond "winner" vs "not winner". The rules of Dominion don't provide anything about "the player who has the most points other than the winner at the time the game ends comes in second place".

If player A wins, I don't think whether B or C had more points is very relevant in deciding which of them deserves second place. Maybe if A hadn't won when he did, B was going to megaturn and buy all the Provinces right then. Or, maybe C played poorly and never trashed his starting Estates, while B actually did. And A managed to end the game extra quickly right before B or C started to green. It just doesn't make sense to me to reward C in either of those cases.

As the old saying goes, the object isn't to have the most points when the game ends, it's to end the game while you're ahead. Rewarding second place better rankings based on point total at the game end makes it seems as though the object in Dominion is to get as many points as possible.
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enfynet

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #18 on: December 11, 2017, 11:40:15 pm »
0

[...] get as many points as possible.
The great John Madden once said, "you want to score points because the team that scores the most points usually wins."
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popsofctown

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #19 on: December 11, 2017, 11:45:29 pm »
+1

Designating the players with the most Estates as the winner of an unfinished Goons game is a little heinous.
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trivialknot

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #20 on: December 12, 2017, 12:23:34 am »
+1

As the old saying goes, the object isn't to have the most points when the game ends, it's to end the game while you're ahead. Rewarding second place better rankings based on point total at the game end makes it seems as though the object in Dominion is to get as many points as possible.
I don't play online so I don't care how the rankings work.  But to be fair, Dominion is designed to be played IRL, without a VP counter.  And it's pretty hard to track VP with 3+ players.  So while the goal isn't exactly "get as many points as possible", its intention is closer to that then it would seem based on online play.

When I believe I'm behind in a game, I either try to go for the "high variance" strategy, or else I just try to get ahead of the person I think is my closest competitor, whichever seems more fun.  There's no official reward for getting 2nd place, but there's the psychological reward.  And really, when you get down to it, the value of getting 1st is psychological too--at least, IRL.
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popsofctown

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #21 on: December 12, 2017, 01:29:33 am »
0

As the old saying goes, the object isn't to have the most points when the game ends, it's to end the game while you're ahead. Rewarding second place better rankings based on point total at the game end makes it seems as though the object in Dominion is to get as many points as possible.
I don't play online so I don't care how the rankings work.  But to be fair, Dominion is designed to be played IRL, without a VP counter.  And it's pretty hard to track VP with 3+ players.  So while the goal isn't exactly "get as many points as possible", its intention is closer to that then it would seem based on online play.

When I believe I'm behind in a game, I either try to go for the "high variance" strategy, or else I just try to get ahead of the person I think is my closest competitor, whichever seems more fun.  There's no official reward for getting 2nd place, but there's the psychological reward.  And really, when you get down to it, the value of getting 1st is psychological too--at least, IRL.
You also usually don't keep track of how many times each person has won IRL.

Like, all that is true and I agree with all of that, but it doesn't indicate that online play should try to emulate any of that.  (I'm not sure if you're trying to imply that it should, but I don't think you are.)
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jonaskoelker

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #22 on: December 12, 2017, 05:04:11 am »
0

Minimax doesn't play Dominion perfectly; it only plays Dominion perfectly against another similarly "perfect" player.

[...] fetish for Pirate Ships [...]
Right (and this doesn't only hold for Dominion): it will only exploit bad moves on the opponent's part after the bad move has been made; it won't exploit the bad moves that will be (or are likely to be) made in the future.

My game theory is a bit rusty—is there some widely-used definition of 'optimal play' which gets at least the minimax utility (in expectation) against a perfect opponent and also wins more against sub-perfect opponents?

Aside: I'm never quite sure how much I should use math jargon vs. explain concepts when I'm writing on here. I have this vague suspicion that 'programmer by trade' is a group more represented among Dominion players than in the general population; likewise for 'person educated in the (natural) sciences'. But for for the 5% who aren't... :)
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crj

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Re: Does a resign count as a win/loss
« Reply #23 on: December 13, 2017, 09:42:31 pm »
0

My game theory is a bit rusty—is there some widely-used definition of 'optimal play' which gets at least the minimax utility (in expectation) against a perfect opponent and also wins more against sub-perfect opponents?
I'm not aware of one.

Then again, I wouldn't expect there to be such a term; it would have very narrow applicability. Normally, to take advantage of anticipated poor play by an opponent you have to do something that isn't optimal against a perfect opponent. It's quite rare to be in a position where several lines of play are exactly tied for optimal.
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