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Topic: Will there be a widelands tournament 2016?

king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2015-10-02, 19:08

Venatrix wrote:

king_of_nowhere wrote:

So, you want the players to not know the map, you have to make a brand-new map and not let the players download it, but rather have a third part host the game with that map. Now that I think about it, it makes sense. If we don't want people to prepare, not making the map public and having a referee host with it would be the only way. Still, it would add other difficulties.

But with this approach you don’t have to use 27 maps, as you can
a) set all the games in one round on the same map (as long as the players are fair enough not to talk about the map AND nobody’s allowed to watch the game until the round is over)
b) even let more rounds be played on the same map as the players don’t have a chance to play (or watch) it more than the others.

But I guess the biggest drawback is the already mentioned problem with creating and playtesting the map first.

Seems to me, creating and playtesting the map is a little problem. Depending on the size and artistic level you want to put on it (we're not talking about archipelago sea where I drew several hundred islands one by one), a map can take as little as a few hours, and if it is simmetric you don't need much playtesting (except to make sure it actually IS simmetric, but again, a few hours).

(EDIT: ok, if you want a single map for all the tournament then it's not a big deal. If you want seven different maps for seven different games, then it is a bigger deal)

No, the biggest problem i see would be the complication with the schedule because you have to include one more person.

My experience with the last tournament was that it was bloody difficult to get four people to play together. And I was lucky to be in the group that only had european players, so we could all play in the evening; I can't even imagine the troubles of getting people from europe, america, and maybe china to play together. So, with mmy proposal, you have to add the referee in the mixture, and for every person you add the chances of getting everyone to agree on the same time decrease exponentially.

Plus, if you want to keep the map secret you'd have to forbid spectating (which sucks) and to wait to upload the replays (which sucks less, but still) until everyone played at least one game. And if you want to avoid people getting more experience by watching other people play, you have to forbid spectating and downloading replays until the torunament is over. And you can't be certain some players are sending each other replays by email.

Those are the technnical difficulties I'm alking about, and I frankly believe it's not worth the effort.

Furthermore, we are not such a strictly competitive community, and there are no big prizes (unlike in starcraft, I assume). People learn by watching others. People can improve with the tournament. I've seen a lot of improvement in the various games, even among the same team. I myself have improved a lot, when the tournament started I still didn't knew trees do not grow on mountains. Also people can be involved in playing by watching the tournament. So, losing all that by keeping the tournament secret because you don't want people to see the map doesn't sound a good idea.

Edited: 2015-10-02, 19:12

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einstein13
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Posted at: 2015-10-04, 21:16

@king_of_nowhere:

Here I asuume that we don't want to let the players know the maps.

As I understand you, you want to create 27 equal maps for 27 games. Ok, that is not a problem. But we can signifficantly reduce the number. How? Very basic strategy: Let players have games 1 vs 1 vs 1. Then ALL the games will have different problems (economy + military + some politics). In all tournaments we have 1 vs 1 or 2 vs 2. Of course last games can't be 3 players. Must be 2 players.

Second problem is that you have to host the games for other people and never play on this tournament. That can be problematic for you (if you want to play!).

But last thing can be very interesting: you can provide some maps with lack of resources (like iron, gold, coal, fish, ...). You can add some islands where you can find plentifull of everything. You can imagine ALL the possible issues and even more solutions for that. Players will have different skills and probably they will have different strategies for that. For sure most of them will not be satisfied face-wink.png


einstein13
calculations & maps packages: http://wuatek.no-ip.org/~rak/widelands/
backup website files: http://kartezjusz.ddns.net/upload/widelands/

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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2015-10-06, 04:37

umm, I have a feeling that if we play 1v1v1 I'll always end up with both opponents focusing me and ignoring each other until they have killed me. and the same happening to you and mars and other stronger players. I can see that mechanism leading to the victory by the second-worst player in a final game with the very worst, after they eliminated the third worst in the penultimate game by ganging up on him.

Anyway, we're getting sidetracked here. I was hopeful than in a few months we could play another tournament, and was trying to determine if we had any hopes for it. I was hoping to get an answer (yes, no, or maybe) from the people who normally organize tournaments.


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SirVer

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Posted at: 2015-10-06, 09:05

Couple of comments: I think playing on unknown maps is a bad idea. The last tournament showed that even maps that we had in the core distribution for a long time were not fair - or as fair as we thought. The maps were be improved in response - so the tournament was finding bugs in the data files of Widelands which made Widelands better.

So I think it is a) rather difficult to make blind maps that are fair and b) beneficial to play the maps in the core distribution so that Widelands keeps improving.

So far most tournaments have been run by either myself or my wife, Kristin. That is not a must though, anybody can organize a tournament. Organizing a tournament and keeping it going is hard work though: you need to choose the maps, playtest them, distribute them evenly over the tournament, watch all the replays to make sure everything is alright, upload the replays and keep the wiki page up to date. The hardest though is keeping the tournament going: people are notoriously bad at scheduling games and there are always one or two players in the tournament that require basically daily poking to get their games going. That can be rather exhausting.

Kristin and myself are super busy right now, so we will not host a tournament anytime soon. Maybe in 2016 again, but no promises. If a member of the community wants to do that and is reliable, I will gladly provide posting rights for the website to post updates.


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staustelladam

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Posted at: 2015-10-07, 22:17

I may be missing the obvious here, but if you are going to have someone referee the matches, and the number of players, because of timezones, is unpredictable, why not set times for tournament matches, agree the number of players, agree the parameters for tournament games, and then just have the referee generate a random map for that round using those parameters and for that many people. That way no-one will know what is coming up, the game will be purely skills based, and any people observing can see how certain problems and obstacles were overcome ... or perhaps even not overcome.


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2015-10-07, 22:29

well, thanks sirver for your reply. I'd volunteer to help with organizing, but i don't know much about it. i could help with some work, but not do it alone.

staustelladam wrote:

I may be missing the obvious here, but if you are going to have someone referee the matches, and the number of players, because of timezones, is unpredictable, why not set times for tournament matches, agree the number of players, agree the parameters for tournament games, and then just have the referee generate a random map for that round using those parameters and for that many people. That way no-one will know what is coming up, the game will be purely skills based, and any people observing can see how certain problems and obstacles were overcome ... or perhaps even not overcome.

have you tried the random map generator? there is no way a map coming out of it would be balanced.

Edited: 2015-10-07, 22:31

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staustelladam

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Posted at: 2015-10-08, 09:13

king_of_nowhere wrote:

have you tried the random map generator? there is no way a map coming out of it would be balanced.

That would be the point - it would be purely skills based, as nothing is "balanced" in the real world. If everyone has the same balance of resources, lands, space etc then by definition it wouldn't be balanced anyway, at least insofar as it is unlikely that everyone would play as the same tribe. You could "balance" say, fish, and that means Atlanteans would have an advantage over other tribes ... random would be a better test of a player's ability.


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2015-10-08, 14:51

I think your logic is warped here. Yes, the real world is not balanced, and in fact no one says the real world is fair. That's why we have games. So, to keep the real world analogy, saying that a contest with different land is purely skill based would be like saying that the eskimo people had the same chances as the european to establish a civilization and they remained hunter-gatherers because they were less skilled, not because they had poor land.

No, that's not how it works. If the random map gives me a half screen of flat land to build my economy, while my opponent has a vast plain with all the needed commodities, then he win because he has better land, not skill. if my opponent has chosen atlantean and he has no access to fish, he lose because of land, not because of skill.

In running contests, all participants run on the same track; if there are obstacles, they are the same height for everybody. In fencing contests, all participants have identical swords. In football, the two halves of the playing field are identical. In chess, the two players start in the same position. in school, everyone is given the same test. that's fair. that's a skill-based contest. I don't see how using a random program that may give you a land where you cannot even make a single large building (i tried, it can do that) would make it more fair.

And I am especially baffled by your claim that by balancing fish, i.e. giving everyone the same number of fish, you would give atlanteans an advantage. would you care to explain that?


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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2015-10-08, 20:01

Balanced maps are really needed for a tournament. So random maps do not work.


Fight simulator for Widelands:
https://wide-fighter.netlify.app/

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Vassili
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Posted at: 2015-11-02, 12:03

I do not have much experience in Widelands, so can you make me a list of balanced maps we can use in tournament, in case i will organize one :) Thanks


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