Forum
Spell out why there is ante to me (please)?
|
JKD wrote
at 11:11 AM, Tuesday September 4, 2007 EDT
"Hey guys, want to play this game called kdice? It's a multiplayer version of Dice Wars with same gameplay except your score is rewarded for quitting early."
With ante I would quit over half my games of Dice Wars instead of winning them all. Another example I saw yesterday was sinth asking someone to flag when there was four players left. Buddy in first separated them all down to four territories and could've milked them for more ante but chose not to for some reason. It seems you have to play with friends to not get screwed by this. I see there is an autoflag if you're at -15, but how do you tell who gets knocked out first by this? In theory, winning a convincing 1st place is *bad* because if you don't trick your opponents into thinking they can do better, they'll flag early. That's not a fun strategy. The main two drawbacks I see of ante (they're small, but I don't know any benefits): 1. Instead of strategy that makes the best of a bad situation in a fun, suspenseful, random game; you quit. (Battles get reduced to boring 1vs1 at a time until everyone has flagged?) 2. It's more complicated than not having ante In poker, it'd be like going all in with pocket Queens, and getting all your money back if you quit when the flop shows Ace or King. Anyone can do that. With ante, anyone can hope for the payoff of a risky attack and minimize their losses if it goes badly. There's no strategy left in thinking about if 4vs5 is good idea, just do it and flag when it fails. There was a couple other minor cons that I'll reply with if I remember them while playing. There's less skill in knowing when to flag than using strategy, you're taking away skill points and rewarding them to people who exploit bad players, just like in poker, that's not fun. Without ante people shall still flag. Player in 3rd can say, "I'll flag if you kill off 4th." Game ends fast, everyone gets the place they deserve. The only reason there's less 8vs8 is everyone's racing to pick off neutral/kamikaze lands. Then they quit immediately when there's a clear winner. I like 8vs8 when there's at least 3 people all going for 1st, and even 2 players is fun because there are so many people who are bad at 8vs8 (because they always flag and never played Dice Wars). ---- This is incoherent and uninformed but would still like to know the improvements ante brings and where I'm wrong. Haven't seen any topics discussing ante except that "you don't get punished as much for getting last" which can easily be accomplished without ante. |
« First
‹ Previous
Replies 11 - 17 of 17
|
DamoVOTF wrote
at 4:51 PM, Tuesday September 4, 2007 EDT Seems to me the game has gone from being fighting the bit out and being aggressive to a lesson in knowing when to flag.
Flagging is not fun. I agree with JKD here. |
|
|
JKD wrote
at 5:15 PM, Tuesday September 4, 2007 EDT All I know is I have to surrender to people who may or may not suck (after failing the obvious hail mary in a game I may have won by being patient, but would lose points in the long run for not folding), and so asked for the reason why to be spelled out. If it takes me longer than overnight to think of something I just get stupider and stupider and it doesn't happen. Sorry!
I guess I'll wait until the 2500 tables are active. |
|
|
rnd_ wrote
at 5:33 PM, Tuesday September 4, 2007 EDT if you are going to win the game by being patient.. be patient and win the game.. you will recoup the ante you put in -- thats the whole point of betting.
|
|
|
JKD wrote
at 5:49 PM, Tuesday September 4, 2007 EDT "but would lose points in the long run for not folding"
|
|
suckmyballs wrote
at 6:53 PM, Tuesday September 4, 2007 EDT thats not true.. if you are the underdog and win -- the way teh system works you won't get as many points as if the clear leader won, but you will get a shitload more than you would if you flagged in round 3.
|
|
|
JKD wrote
at 7:05 PM, Tuesday September 4, 2007 EDT The way the system works is I can lose less points for flagging 7th than for getting 3rd in a long game. Do I deserve to lose more points for getting 3rd in a long game instead of flagging for 7th and screwing up the whole table? And if 90% of the time I end up losing an extra 5 points of ante, I'll need my 1st place to be more than two shitloads higher than it currently is.
|
|
|
JKD wrote
at 10:41 AM, Wednesday September 5, 2007 EDT I'll start again but with my second point: Having ante is more complicated than not having ante.
---- Let's take a look at the benefits. The main benefit of ante has been said to give more points for long games, (and also low players can get more if they make a comeback). Well to help the comeback player, why not make the player in last only pay ante if they die or flag? (This is possible but I'm not going to take the time to accurately explain the details.) But then the player in second last has to flag to someone in worse position or else they lose even more points to the comeback. Other important problems would be also caused, unfortunately I have forgotten them while typing this. And yesterday I saw an idea called: "make the anti rate more dynamic, maybe one point per turn initially, and incrementing by .1 points each turn, with the result either rounded up, or truncated. It would allow for better initial strategy." I'm not even going to think about whether that's a good idea because it's making things even more complicated. The new point I'm briefly starting to make is paying ante each round is so complicated that you can no longer fix any problems in this game unless you make ante more complicated (or remove it). ---- Let's take a look at why there's no ante in chess. There's already time limits and a draw for repeat moves. The top players would certainly deserve to get more points for long games. But then they'd have to mess around to get points out of bottom players. If you add a fold option then black shall always fold unless he cheats or knows his opponent is a worse player. If you make it impossible to fold until round 10 or impossible for black to fold then you're changing the goal from checkmating buddy's king to maximizing points, this would ruin most of the current strategies. I'm trying to say I really wouldn't want to play chess if score was increased dependent on how many turns it takes to win, I wouldn't even like the reverse because it changes strategies. Ante would make chess too complicated and remove over 90% of the strategies. ---- Ante chess problems are really not that much different than what is in kdice. The main differences here are there's more bad players at the top and there's more incentive for unfair play. Ante is worse in kdice than chess imo. Also, how are you going to solve the problem where an active (1000 games) point maximizing player now gets >= 10X points than an equally skilled but inactive (100 games) player? It's not even *possible* to do this now without getting very very messy. |
