First of all, I perfectly understand if you guys want to entirely ignore all my opinions here, given that I have resigned the league and thus don’t really have any kind of vested interest as whatever comes out of this won’t directly affect me. Nevertheless, I have some thoughts on this. So read if you want, ignore if you’d prefer to do that.
1. The most important thing by far is the mutual agreement of the players. If the players both think a game was too far gone, go with that. If they both think they should replay, go with that. Overriding a mutual decision of the players involved is not something that should be done.
2. I strongly feel like which player disconnects shouldn’t matter. Adam basically already covered this, but I will add that, yes, this is potentially abusable, theoretically, yet I don’t feel that anyone would really do so. And further, it’s not like there are any prizes or anything – if there were, maybe more would need to be done. But if there were, it would really be necessary to have a more stable system which would allow reconnects.
3. I believe that the default position should be to replay the game. Adam has made some points here, but the biggest thing to me is that with replays, the result is actually decided by a game of Dominion between the players, which is not something you can say for the other options. Now, I do think that there is a point at which you just award the game to the leading player, but it’s very difficult to say exactly where that should be (one of many reasons I want to underline point number 1).
4. Having the players assign percentages is reasonable, but I am against it for a number of practical reasons. The biggest thing is that this is very difficult to do with any kind of accuracy. The Mic Q – SCSN situation has already been referenced, and if you were watching that, you know that Mic Q didn’t really want to assign a percentage. While you can stress here that it’s not that he had a problem so much with the concept of assigning percentages as it was that he had no idea how to come up with a percentage, I think this is an endemic problem with the whole method. And even when people can come up with numbers some times, they’re very often going to be wildly inaccurate. I’ve seen tons of times where people think they are just winning or just losing when the game is completely unclear. Moreover, this leads to the nasty situation where you’re actually encouraged to disagree and haggle for extra percentage points. If a placement ends up getting decided by someone being able to haggle better, or being more persistent than the other player, this is going to be a really feel-bad moment. Yet having ‘assign percentages’ be the way things are done really does encourage this, to the point where you would almost have to push for this, and anyone who doesn’t overpress (which is I think a better way to act, in general) is going to be actively punished for this.
5. Having third parties decide or adjudicate really seems the worst option of all. You can try to not take into account who the players are, but this is really inaccurate to how the game would play out. Do you assume perfect play? That seems very strange to me, since all players are really fairly significantly far off of that ideal. I’ve won LOTS of games I should be less than 5% to win if my opponent played perfectly. On the other hand, you can try to take that into account, but this leads into even more problems: suddenly the opinion of how strong the player is in the mind of the adjudicator is an enormous factor in determining how a ruling would go. Not only is a good evaluation thereof incredibly difficult to achieve, it’s also basically inviting the feeling that the decision is a personal one, even if the person arbitrating is trying to act as fairly as possible. Of course, the biggest elephant in the room is that the judgment of whoever is making the adjudication is very liable to be flatly wrong, on top of which all the time and effort those people would put in, as well as this leading to potential scheduling issues.
6. How far into the game it is should be a real factor. While a player could easily be pretty far behind on turn 4 or even turn 2, I think that in these situations, you should be even more apt than usual to re-play such a game. The more of a game that’s been played, the more you want to just count that as ‘the official game’, the less that’s been played, the more of a preference there should be for playing a new one. You can’t really use turn numbers here, because some games will be over a lot more quickly than others.
7. As a corollary to the last couple of points, there are going to be lots of situations where one player is, in actuality, way way ahead of the other player, because they’ve gone in for a much better plan, but the fruits of that aren’t necessarily borne out yet. I think these games are really poster-children for not adjudicating and indeed for going for a replay. Essentially, by awarding the game to one player or the other, it is just a nod of agreement with one plan or the other. And I feel very strongly that games should not be thusly decided, even if one plan really is much better. Of course, after game-state has played out enough to make it very clear whether the one side is going to ‘get there’ or not, it might be a different story. But it is still quite a tricky thing.
8. Clear leads don’t necessarily mean the game is over by any stretch. There are loads of situations where deck A is clearly just better than deck B, say in a mirror, but shuffles can do a lot. Very simple example is having a 5/2 and getting just ambassador against a 4/3 player’s amb/amb. Amb/Amb is clearly ahead, but that game can really go either way. Obviously that’s a really simple example, but there are loads of things which are similar.
In general, I don’t believe that any solution whatsoever is actually fair. But (and tl;dr) the number one principle is that mutual agreement of the players involved trumps all else, and I strongly prefer deciding things with actual games of Dominion than by adjudication as a default
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Topic: Handling disconnects (Read 10326 times)