Cards I like:I prefer Cellar.
1. Fishing Village
2. Warehouse
3. Oasis
I don't even understand what Ben Warden is doing 'wrong.' He proposes games directly. And doesn't use the point counter. Is that it? The point counter is a variant. It almost by definition can't be 'gaming' the system to not use it.Anymore gems?
-Use classic proposal instead of auto-match with point counter turned off. (Ben Warden)
-Propose these games against players that are higher level than they should be. (Ben Warden against me haha)
I was just about to put up a separate post on that. It's annoying but ultimately fine when that happens. Yesterday, though, I had an auto-match game proposed, declined, proposed again, declined, then a direct invite from the auto-match player with point counter turned off. Again, the burden was probably still on me to notice that and not just click "yes" to every proposed match. What got my goat is that the guy denied doing it when I asked him about it. I assumed the best, then returned to the lobby and noticed that I indeed had point counter enabled so I have no better explanation.
I assume Ben Warden is above board with it. He probably just likes to pick his opponent, rather than waiting for auto-match. There's at least one other player, though, who uses it to gain a cheap advantage. Annoying.
Anyhow, didn't mean to derail. I'm still fuming just a little.
How to get on top of leaderboard on iso:Get good at the game?
Make sure not to tell your opponents when they are clearly doing something suboptimal (playing banks first for $1).
Make sure you leave after every win (but never after a loss), so that you can maximize chance of being first player.
Bias towards prosperity.
Anymore gems?
I don't understand why you all have alternate accounts on Isotropic. It doesn't bother me, I'm just curious as to their purpose. Clean CouncilRoom profile? Experimenting with crazy strategies and/or 3p-4p?I created an alternate account right about when I discovered dominionstrategy.com and realized just how little I knew about the game. So in order to protect my level (which, hilariously, was probably about 27 at the time) I created another account to mess around with. I really hated the Prosperity cards and was convinced I didn't know how to play them, so I used Prosperity bias. In fact, after a couple hundred games I realized that I was perfectly fine with all the cards, but it was really helpful to have a 'low-pressure' way of realizing this. After that, I just play around with the other account 5-10 games at a time, mostly because I think it's fun to watch where the real account and the fake one rank against each other. My normal one is usually higher, but due almost entirely to the very high variance for the alternate. The skill of the other account has been equivalent or higher pretty much since that one had 100 games or so.
Yup, that's 9 straight losses in the span of an hour or so. Fun fun.On that note, thanks to Fabian for helping me to spot a way to victory in the game I played against him (the 8th of his consecutive losses, I believe).
Thanks for being a good sport!
Doctor Who references are comedy gold.Really olneyce, you need two accounts here, too?No, they are both future incarnations of The Doctor, also starting with D.[shifty eyes]
man, i like that you are friendly and civil but i disagree with a lot of what you have to say.Yeah, I don't really agree with this, but I totally get where you're coming from.
a few things:
- you are right, we don't know exactly how much influence biasing and veto will have on levels. but i'm not sure we can dismiss it as being negligible either. by my math, OWB wins 6% more colony games than he does province only games and he makes it so that about 60% of his games have been colony games. we can argue on whether a 6% change is a "small amount of noise" or a large amount, but it is something. and i'm also not sure i would call TrueSkill a "very noisy metric".
- i still don't think the fun aspect should matter as much for competitive play. but if you want to bring it up, just remember that it can cut both ways. i prefer playing with a fully random set. no automatic vetoing of attack cards. no bias towards sets. i prefer the random mix of games, and i think that the current IsoDom challenge helps demonstrate this. how many match reports in the first round were basically hey there's witch/BM again. ditto masquerade for intrigue. should some people enjoying a bias give them preference over my preference for a fully random set? and that is before we even consider if that bias gives them any advantage at all. winning games is going to be more fun than losing most of the time, so any change which cuts into that is not something i will be eager to embrace.
- it is a game and it is supposed to be fun. but that doesn't mean that we can just cast aside the competitive aspect of it. chess and baseball are just games too. fun should always be a factor, but you can't enter in to a competitive environment and expect that people aren't going to care about advantages. if you play in a softball beer league yeah everyone there is trying to have a good time but they are still gonna get mad if they catch you trying to sneak a lead from first base.
Rankings have enough inherent flaws that other means (for example, tournaments) are a far better way to determine skill at top levels.Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
What a helpful contribution to this thread!man, it is a huge stretch to call anything on isotropic a horrible interface design.false.the whole thing is very well written, especially for something that is basically one guy's hobby.true.and as gendoikari said, its free so we can't complain anyway.false.you can't fault the software just because you are in autoplay mode.false.
