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Author Topic: First player bias  (Read 62016 times)

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Obi Wan Bonogi

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #75 on: May 02, 2012, 03:56:33 pm »
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Also, you presumably have rules against collusion which, in a real competitive environment, SOMEONE will be able to enforce.

Ok so in a tournament setting: what happens when someone in third place ends the game on their turn ensuring a win for a different player?  Should they be disqualified?  What if they say it was an accident?  What if you know they are friends?  What if someone buys the second to last village instead of VP allowing the next player to 3pile and win an otherwise unwinable game?  Should the first player be DQ'ed?  Should they both be DQ'ed?  What if a player passes a province instead of an estate during a masquerade?  What if a player passes a duchy instead of a gold during a masquerade?  You quckly run into a lot of grey area where you are left trying to enforce "proper play" which would simply not be needed in a two player scenario. 
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WanderingWinder

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #76 on: May 02, 2012, 04:00:13 pm »
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Also, you presumably have rules against collusion which, in a real competitive environment, SOMEONE will be able to enforce.

Ok so in a tournament setting: what happens when someone in third place ends the game on their turn ensuring a win for a different player?  Should they be disqualified?  What if they say it was an accident?  What if you know they are friends?  What if someone buys the second to last village instead of VP allowing the next player to 3pile and win an otherwise unwinable game?  Should the first player be DQ'ed?  Should they both be DQ'ed?  What if a player passes a province instead of an estate during a masquerade?  What if a player passes a duchy instead of a gold during a masquerade?  You quckly run into a lot of grey area where you are left trying to enforce "proper play" which would simply not be needed in a two player scenario. 
Of course that's all needed in two player. Why are people magical darlings in two player? You get the exact same problems in chess, and there's these things going on all the time.
I'm SHOCKED if this doesn't come up in poker.

Obi Wan Bonogi

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #77 on: May 02, 2012, 04:00:31 pm »
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You are talking about proper strategy I am talking about collusion.
You can collude just as much in 2 player.

No.  No you can't.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #78 on: May 02, 2012, 04:01:59 pm »
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You are talking about proper strategy I am talking about collusion.
You can collude just as much in 2 player.

No.  No you can't.
Sure you can. It's just not always the same form of collusion. You throw games, you tip people off, you have pre-arranged results of all kinds... why do you think you can't do that?

Obi Wan Bonogi

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #79 on: May 02, 2012, 04:08:47 pm »
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The only collusion fear involved in two player is someone throwing a game.  There are obviously various tournament scenarios which this becomes a strong incentive(see sumo wrestling collusion for a great study).  But by in large it is generally in the best interest of an individual to win their match instead of lose it.  There are also ways to construct tournaments that you offer very little incentive for such scenarios. 

In poker there are MANY anti-collusion rules that have evolved over time.  They are a huge pain in the ass, troublesome to enforce and ultimately only partially effective.  Three player dominion would be WAY worse.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #80 on: May 02, 2012, 04:10:37 pm »
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The only collusion fear involved in two player is someone throwing a game.  There are obviously various tournament scenarios which this becomes a strong incentive(see sumo wrestling collusion for a great study).  But by in large it is generally in the best interest of an individual to win their match instead of lose it.  There are also ways to construct tournaments that you offer very little incentive for such scenarios. 

In poker there are MANY anti-collusion rules that have evolved over time.  They are a huge pain in the ass, troublesome to enforce and ultimately only partially effective.  Three player dominion would be WAY worse.
This is wrong on so many levels. But, you've got me to a point where I actually have to go back to work.

Obi Wan Bonogi

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #81 on: May 02, 2012, 04:13:55 pm »
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Sure you can. It's just not always the same form of collusion. You throw games, you tip people off, you have pre-arranged results of all kinds... why do you think you can't do that?


How is this "just as much as" three player?
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Eevee

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #82 on: May 02, 2012, 05:04:06 pm »
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2p dominion (i think) would be fun to play for money "just to make it more interesting". 3p wouldnt, because of the collusion problems Obi Wan is trying to explain. I mean, in an isolated single match, it isn't possible to collude on 2p. (I'm sure people understand the problems with gaming the leaderboard/letting a simulator play for you/what have you for 2p real money games, but those are the same in 3p with the added hurdle of two people working together to cheat the 3rd).
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tlloyd

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #83 on: May 02, 2012, 05:42:59 pm »
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Not to break up the discussion here, but it seems like 3P involves, in addition to as much or more potential for collusion as 2P, the possibility of unilateral king-making. It obviously depends on how the games are scored (does second place score higher than third?), and how turn order is determined for the next game (does seating order remain the same so it's best to be to the left of the previous winner? Is it even the same three players?), but it's pretty easy to imagine a scenario where a player would give the win to opponent A in order to take it from opponent B.

I can also think of circumstances in which the winner might be able to influence which of his opponents came in second, rather than just playing the game "straight." Is that legit strategic play? I tend to say no. So that's another potential problem that you face with 2+ players.
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timchen

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #84 on: May 02, 2012, 07:13:05 pm »
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In principle OWB is right. Saying a 3p game is qualitatively the same as a 2p game is plainly wrong.

Whenever there is interaction between players, there exists a situation in a more than 3-player game, where a player's decision just marginally influences his own situation but affects the other players critically. In this respect 2p games are just different.

To what extent it is possible depends really on games. I think dominion is a game where king-making or collusion is not so bad.
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Robz888

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #85 on: May 02, 2012, 08:00:47 pm »
+1

So long as each player wants to do his best, and second place "counts" more than third, I think there is very little room for collusion or kingmaking in 3 player Dominion. Not zero, but very little.
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GigaKnight

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #86 on: May 02, 2012, 08:12:29 pm »
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So.... steering the conversation back towards first player advantage... has anybody experimented with bidding?  In a tournament setting, letting players bid negative points to go first after they've seen the Kingdom seems like a decent way handle the first player issue.

Isotropic / online is a bit more complicated since people generally just want to play and going through a bidding process before each match would be obnoxious.  I can imagine a gentle handicap system working here, though if going second has cost Captain_Frisk .4% of his 5000+ games, maybe it's just not a big enough deal for a casual online format.

EDIT: Typo
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Mic Qsenoch

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #87 on: May 02, 2012, 08:21:48 pm »
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So long as each player wants to do his best, and second place "counts" more than third, I think there is very little room for collusion or kingmaking in 3 player Dominion. Not zero, but very little.

Making second place worth more than third doesn't necessarily reduce kingmaking. As tlloyd mentioned earlier, this could allow a person in first to choose who gets second/third (I guess this is actually princemaking). This could be a strategic decision or a petty one. And it doesn't address situations where a person's actions don't improve his final standing but do decide the positions of the other two.

I can't say how often these situations come up, but I have seen it happen (and done it) in some multiplayer games.
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timchen

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #88 on: May 02, 2012, 09:23:53 pm »
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So long as each player wants to do his best, and second place "counts" more than third, I think there is very little room for collusion or kingmaking in 3 player Dominion. Not zero, but very little.
No. For example: in a pile driving game, suppose I am last place, but can get the last Duchy and end the game. Unfortunately the Duchy is not enough for me to get to the second place. In addition, suppose the first two players are very close, and if I don't end the game the player who ends the game can win. Should I get that Duchy?

Or even in longer terms, suppose one player goes for a rush and the other player builds up. I fell behind both players, but should I get as many cards as possible to help the rush player, or just sit and watch?

Yes, lots of this situations technically comes from playing with the end game. But even discounting that, whether to play a militia, take a curse from the torturer, or get to a pile that is strongly competed can affect the other players differently. As long as their score are closer than yours to theirs, it can cause some form of king-making.

The only way to eliminate that is to require all the interaction from me to be strictly equal to the rest of players. Unfortunately it is usually not possible due to both the fact that players have to play in order, and that different strategies take the same interaction differently.

For the second point, simply put, say there is a paper-scissors-stone occasion. The other two player is playing paper and scissors. Do you play paper, scissors, or stone?
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Fabian

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #89 on: May 02, 2012, 09:32:39 pm »
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3+ player Dominion clearly has lots of potential problems which 2p Dominion doesn't have, both in tournament formats and in "cash game" formats (to continue with the poker analogies). It surprises me (though I guess it shouldn't) that WW denies this so fervently. Collusion issues exist in 2p too, but obviously (or so I thought) to a much smaller extent.

I wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable playing multiplayer Dominion for cash online, though I would be super trilled for a 2p cash game mode :)
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popsofctown

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #90 on: May 02, 2012, 09:48:25 pm »
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Team Gardens versus Team Province seems a totally unsolvable form of collusion.  Of course, if we're talking about online with anonymous players, there's little need to worry about collusion.  Kingmaking just becomes a luck thing. 
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dondon151

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #91 on: May 02, 2012, 11:06:54 pm »
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In a lot of circumstances (but not all) it is possible to defend against unintentional kingmaking by figuring out how the opponents can work against you and adapting to it. In the circumstances in which it's not possible to defend as such, it usually boils down to a first player bias, anyway.

Granted, there's not a whole lot that you can do to defend against active collusion, except just to play better.
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Robz888

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #92 on: May 03, 2012, 12:11:41 am »
+1

So long as each player wants to do his best, and second place "counts" more than third, I think there is very little room for collusion or kingmaking in 3 player Dominion. Not zero, but very little.
No. For example: in a pile driving game, suppose I am last place, but can get the last Duchy and end the game. Unfortunately the Duchy is not enough for me to get to the second place. In addition, suppose the first two players are very close, and if I don't end the game the player who ends the game can win. Should I get that Duchy?

No, you shouldn't. The game would end, and you would not improve your position by buying it. Your correct move is to not buy it. If you do buy it, it's a strategic blunder (possibly from a situation in which your chances of winning were effectively zero), but it's hardly kingmaking, at least in my view.

Quote
Or even in longer terms, suppose one player goes for a rush and the other player builds up. I fell behind both players, but should I get as many cards as possible to help the rush player, or just sit and watch?

Neither. You should try to win, or barring that, get second.

Quote
Yes, lots of this situations technically comes from playing with the end game. But even discounting that, whether to play a militia, take a curse from the torturer, or get to a pile that is strongly competed can affect the other players differently. As long as their score are closer than yours to theirs, it can cause some form of king-making.

The only way to eliminate that is to require all the interaction from me to be strictly equal to the rest of players. Unfortunately it is usually not possible due to both the fact that players have to play in order, and that different strategies take the same interaction differently.

Okay, if kingmaking just means "taking actions that affect other players disproportionately," than there's nothing wrong with kingmaking.

Quote
For the second point, simply put, say there is a paper-scissors-stone occasion. The other two player is playing paper and scissors. Do you play paper, scissors, or stone?

I would play the strategy, then, that I think is most likely to triumph if the other two make mistakes in their own strategies.
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Robz888

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #93 on: May 03, 2012, 12:18:41 am »
+2

Look, part of the fun of 3+ player Dominion is trying to guess what other players are going to do and when the game is going to end. It's time to buy Victory cards much sooner. Do I really need that last Gold, that last Engine part? Remember, too, that not all games are played with a Point Tracker. I may be able to end the game but unsure that I am winning, or even in second. But if I suspect that my finishing place will be worse if the game goes another round, I will end the game. That's not really collusion or kingmaking. Your strategy needs to take into account whether the next person will try to end the game. Is it different from 2 player? Yes. Is it, like, less valid? I really don't think so. Yeah, there's more luck involved--the first player advantaged increases, certain cards scale poorly, etc.
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dondon151

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #94 on: May 03, 2012, 12:22:20 am »
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No, you shouldn't. The game would end, and you would not improve your position by buying it. Your correct move is to not buy it.

If there is weight in the number of total points earned over X rounds (which, though stupid, seems to be a fairly common metric), the correct move would be to end the game on a Duchy buy if you know that it's your final turn.
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Robz888

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #95 on: May 03, 2012, 12:25:13 am »
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No, you shouldn't. The game would end, and you would not improve your position by buying it. Your correct move is to not buy it.

If there is weight in the number of total points earned over X rounds (which, though stupid, seems to be a fairly common metric), the correct move would be to end the game on a Duchy buy if you know that it's your final turn.

True, but I think most people agree--most people in this forum, at least--that final score is a specifically bad way of determining anything. And in fact, if I want the most amount of points, or something, over the course of a certain number of games, I think that will tend to exacerbate what everybody in this thread is worrying about. So I would advise against that, too. 1st should count more than 2nd, and 2nd more than 3rd, etc., etc., and that's all.
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dondon151

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #96 on: May 03, 2012, 12:26:46 am »
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True, but I think most people agree--most people in this forum, at least--that final score is a specifically bad way of determining anything. And in fact, if I want the most amount of points, or something, over the course of a certain number of games, I think that will tend to exacerbate what everybody in this thread is worrying about. So I would advise against that, too. 1st should count more than 2nd, and 2nd more than 3rd, etc., etc., and that's all.

Of course we all agree on it - but that doesn't mean that it's not used as a metric, and that doesn't mean that everyone agrees with us (in particular, it seems that players outside of this community don't disagree with this metric).
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WanderingWinder

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #97 on: May 03, 2012, 12:30:24 am »
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True, but I think most people agree--most people in this forum, at least--that final score is a specifically bad way of determining anything. And in fact, if I want the most amount of points, or something, over the course of a certain number of games, I think that will tend to exacerbate what everybody in this thread is worrying about. So I would advise against that, too. 1st should count more than 2nd, and 2nd more than 3rd, etc., etc., and that's all.

Of course we all agree on it - but that doesn't mean that it's not used as a metric, and that doesn't mean that everyone agrees with us (in particular, it seems that players outside of this community don't disagree with this metric).
Fine, but it's a straw man argument. 'Multiplayer has kingmaking' conditioned on the total point tiebreakers... you're pinning the blame in the wrong place here. It should be on the tiebreakers, rather than on the multiplayer.

dondon151

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #98 on: May 03, 2012, 12:51:58 am »
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Fine, but it's a straw man argument. 'Multiplayer has kingmaking' conditioned on the total point tiebreakers... you're pinning the blame in the wrong place here. It should be on the tiebreakers, rather than on the multiplayer.

It's not a straw man argument. I wasn't saying that multiplayer has kingmaking just because of the existence of poor tiebreaking metrics; I was saying that circumstances exist where a player would play kingmaker as an "irrational" decision, and tiebreak-by-VP is one of those circumstances.

Another circumstance that I encounter fairly often is when one player just wants to get the game over with and move onto the next game, and as such seeks to hasten the end of the game. I could potentially see this as a problem under the standard rules because if you're losing anyway, there's no benefit to yourself if you prolong the game. Meanwhile the megaturn engine guy is probably steaming mad, but you know what, he should have seen it coming.
« Last Edit: May 03, 2012, 12:54:12 am by dondon151 »
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Robz888

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Re: First player bias
« Reply #99 on: May 03, 2012, 01:10:50 am »
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It's not a straw man argument. I wasn't saying that multiplayer has kingmaking just because of the existence of poor tiebreaking metrics; I was saying that circumstances exist where a player would play kingmaker as an "irrational" decision, and tiebreak-by-VP is one of those circumstances.

Another circumstance that I encounter fairly often is when one player just wants to get the game over with and move onto the next game, and as such seeks to hasten the end of the game. I could potentially see this as a problem under the standard rules because if you're losing anyway, there's no benefit to yourself if you prolong the game. Meanwhile the megaturn engine guy is probably steaming mad, but you know what, he should have seen it coming.

Those circumstances do exist, but I am saying that those ways of playing are flawed for other reasons and you shouldn't play them. Or rather, you should play whatever way you want, but if you play in certain ways (using total points over many games, or with people who don't care about winning and just want to get to the next game), you will have disappointing results.
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