Won the BnG, I think we'll pick elite next, so it's gotta be a time when me and nino can come on. Any date works for me, nino?

Quote from: franz on April 13, 2012, 10:08 PM
combining schemes into grouped ratings makes no sense. I understand that all this started from people disliking hysteria, but grouping hysteria into another scheme's rating is not the solution. nor is grouping every other scheme just because you can; that's just making more of a mess for what seems to be no real benefit. if we go by scheme popularity, I can see the case for removing a scheme like Shopper, and maybe that should be argued, but I wouldn't want it to just be bundled into another scheme's rating just because it's unpopular -> it should either get removed or somehow fixed.

and that's what I'm thinking: just remove a scheme due to popularity, or try to fix the scheme itself. right now BNG and SHOPPER are the least popular and deserve some sort of action. BNG right now is just unpleasant to play. Games are often long, played on flat maps making them repetitive and less exciting, and the rules try to make games fair and balanced, but all they do is make everyone feel uneasy and feel 'cheaped.' BNG could do with a lot more excitement, just removing rules and playing on more creative maps, and at least go up to 2 worms each, if not more.  SHOPPER? I'm not a great shopper mind to figure out how to make it more competitively appealing to everyone, so if anyone has a great idea, we probably could really use it. SHOPPER needs a lot of help. And if nothing can be done, maybe it should be removed from classic.

ROPER by the way, I also believe needs to go up to 2 worms each. That's how it is in clanners, and it should be consistent.  Just like how in ELITE, you don't just double the amount of worms per player in clanners making it 8v8.  I believe ROPER singles also benefits from the added strategy of having 2 worms, such as piling, and it also makes those far crates more interesting if there's another worm pile on the other side of the map (try to unpile or not?).  this is getting long enough, so I'll stop here for now.

Scheme classes do make sense once there are too many schemes, it's not that confusing. Still, this idea is only assuming most people don't want to abandon any schemes, but I'd fully support removing shopper as a start. That would bring relative weight of other schemes to a more respectable level.

Hysteria is still a major problem, it's too damn hard to get rid of without some suitable replacement. I think in the end, we have to let it stay until we can find something more worthwhile. But for most of us, playing it feels like flipping a coin, so I think the hate is going to continue.

And to respond to the idea of individual leagues, I love it. It would increase the overall skill level of WN, make things more competitive, and allow for more accurate league systems. But it wouldn't be best for the game. Currently, we just don't have enough people to make it work, it would be hard for people to find games when everyone is just looking to play one or two schemes.

The good thing about an all-round league is that people compromise and play schemes they normally wouldn't play, and this is also where a lot of people grow to love schemes. And there are actually some schemes that only work in an all-round setting, that people only want to play occasionally to show their skill diversity. For now we need to continue with a reasonably populist approach to the main league, or face the game dying out.

Quote from: MonkeyIsland on April 13, 2012, 12:51 PM
Mablak this is my deep point of view about schemes from what I've experienced in these years. I have never had a favorite scheme and as chakkman says, the variation of schemes always keep me excited and I've played a fair amount of each whenever I had a chance.

When someone play a specific scheme over and over, he'll get more familiar with it, gain experience, get to know the not-to-do list and so on. (captain obvious)
All these years, almost all the whining about a certain scheme came from the people who were new to that scheme. I can't stress that line enough. Also you are a very good case/player to know this because you're pretty good in Intermediate. I've had enough debates about how noobish Intermediate is. You know how many times people pointed out that Intermediate is a lucky scheme because it has random placements. Many people never bothered to look one step ahead of random placements to see that actually one of the skills is to manage random placements.
That being said, these arguments happen time to time about specific scheme and always starting from people who are new to the scheme and get confused about the events in the game and before they start gaining a little experience they start suggesting tweaks to the scheme which is way too soon.

One of the majors flaw people see in schemes is losing while having more worms or leading the entire game. When they lose a game they were leading, most of the times they think it is a scheme flaw rather than their own flawed tactics.

An example for that is when people lead in Intermediate with more worms and health point thinking their opponent is darksiding because he is doomed and has no choice, then SD comes and all worms become 1hp, now they lose because their opponent was actually wasting time for this moment. At this point, they get mad and try to tweak intermediate to have no hp reduction at SD. It is reasonable though, they were leading the game and in 1 turn they lost. But what they don't see is that the reason they lost was "not considering SD timing". More a tactic flaw rather than a scheme flaw.

The more we play a scheme, the more we gain experience, the more we see these tactic flaws and ultimately, we categorize that as less lucky, more skilled. (Generally speaking, not obvious cases like TTRR)

Now when you categorize the schemes like this:

Quote from: Mablak on April 13, 2012, 09:44 AM
Roper/WxW
Elite/Intermediate
Team17/Shopper
BnG/Hysteria
RR

The schemes are getting sacrificed for many people according to your point of view of schemes.
For example, you are truly an expert in TTRR and you have dedicated a category for TTRR because you know it damn pretty well. (I do believe that TTRR needs its own category) On the other hand, I've heard the phrase "TTRR is just a small version of WxW" several times. I'm sure it makes sense to many people here. So why not make it RR/WxW then? The reason is that you know TTRR deep to your bone and you are sure it has nothing to do with WxW.
I wonder how much Dario would accept the Elite/Intermediate category.
Team17/Shopper is the worst combination you made but clearly drawing your point of view. You are putting WxW and TTRR together there because you think "Team17 is just some version of Shopper". The post has gotten long enough, I won't go into details why.

So my question is this:
If we gather all "experts" in every scheme to make categories, wouldn't our final conclusion be like dedicating one category for each scheme?

I'll reply to other posts later. This post is long enough :/
@Anubis,
Are you planning to come back at all?

MI, to say that I'm not a good resource on Team17 is silly, you've probably never seen me play it. I don't think Team17 is just some version of Shopper: these class pairings are partly designed with the idea of personalized scheme weighting in mind. And as far as similarity goes, imagine listing every possible scheme that could exist (ordered by similarity) and dividing it into 5 sections, I think the split schemes as listed would fall into the same broad categories. I'm not saying the split schemes are equivalent, they're simply within 20% similarity of each other. And I've heard many opinions claiming WxW is similar to Roper, which I didn't think was justified at first, but with the advent of more difficult WxW maps, there's not much difference anymore.

Currently, since there are eight schemes, they have an equally-weighted 12.5% contribution to your rating each, which I think is very inaccurate. And even with all schemes being equal, you're forcing your own viewpoint on others, we can't really escape that. But with the scheme classes, your own activity helps decide what kind of contribution a scheme can get. If you never want to pick WxW, BnG, or Shopper, then those schemes will probably have an effective weighting of under 10% for you, depending on what other people pick. It will certainly depend a lot on which schemes are popular, but I see it as an improvement.

To try and even things out, I think it would be best to have at least 2 schemes to start off with in each category, the RR class could have RR, TTRR, and maybe Tower RR. And it would behoove us greatly to have some kind of balance requirements that say "you have to be good in all 5 classes to be a good all-rounder", though I'd first like to see if people agree that the current scheme weighting could be improved.

I don't think MI's proposed ideas would work too well; even though every scheme would be pickable, most people wouldn't agree to play unless both picks were one of the main schemes. We can easily bring in new schemes and phase out inferior ones without this system, and it's probably better that way.

Not every popular scheme needs playoffs, and if there were more than a few playoffs for players to deal with, they'd never get played. The main thing that needs adjusting is the relative importance of schemes in the all-round league. Some old schoolers like me want hysteria and shopper removed, though it'd be best for them to at least be playable since we need new players. We should group schemes like this:

Roper/WxW
Elite/Intermediate
Team17/Shopper
BnG/Hysteria
RR

So that clans and players only have 5 areas where they need points. This way, old schoolers wouldn't ever feel forced to pick hysteria or shopper for points, when they can BnG or Team17 instead. The BnG/hysteria grouping kind of combines two schemes that a lot of people really don't want to play, and it slightly lessens their combined effect on ratings. This wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be an improvement :0.

eS reported this TTRR as a win, not sure why. They lost, can someone change it to a win please? Thanks.

I'd like to sign up, got plenty of material :U

Thanks for being so diligent about playoff reminders franz, I know it's a thankless job.

So once again cfc and mm, I'm guessing weekends work best, I prefer the 20 GMT hour, any day is good for me at the moment. Maybe Saturday the 14th?

Ah you could beat this time Stat, you just have to use as few ropes as possible on those alley parts, and my ending was far from perfect. You did fall in your last run too, so I'm sure that took a bit off it. I'm always game for a record battle if you want to keep trying ;O

Alright cfc/mm, how about we try for Thursday April 5th at 20 GMT?

I can do any Thursday, but I don't know who else in mm can. Anyone? :v

Cfc and mm, maybe next Saturday 20 GMT?

Saturday is good for me, 20 GMT is my preferred earliest time.

Perhaps Joseph Ducreux can shed some light on this situation?

It was our lagout both times, but neither game was even remotely decided. I don't see why this was reported, should just be replayed.