BOTM Gauntlet #1

[Obormot]

I want to announce a special challenge for people who are going to play BOTMs.

The rules are simple:
1. Take the CHALLENGER save.
2. Play the game according to GOTM rules, and submit it as usual.
3. There will be a chosen VC each time, announced before the game starts. The winner of the gauntlet will be the one who gets the fastest victory of that type.
4. It would be great if everyone could post their saves at say 1000BC and 1AD after the game is over, so that we can compare different games in more detail. I will not make this rule compulsory for the first game, but we'll see later.

The chosen VC for the first game will be DOMINATION.

Good luck!

 

[Balbes]

A "Victory Condition of the Month" is a good idea - but are there enough players who would pick Challenger to begin with? I am kind of worried that the restriction may scare players away.

 

[Frederiksberg]

A "Victory Condition of the Month" is a good idea - but are there enough players who would pick Challenger to begin with? I am kind of worried that the restriction may scare players away.

I agree with this. Picking the Challenger game won't make much of a difference on Prince level - it will be easy anyway. So why not open this challenge for Contender as well. That way any player going for domination will also participate in this gauntlet including players who worry about eptathlon and rankings.

Great idea though!

 

[Gnejs]

I am in for the challenger challenge.

 

[da_Vinci]

Then there is the question of how that opens up "free awards" to the rest of the field. This creates four "polymorphisms" (to borrow a term from genetics) of the awards: won on contender, won on contender when that VC was gauntlet, won on challenger, and won on challenger when that VC was gauntlet.

Do we need four polymorphic epthathlons? If we have enough in the challenger division, do we want separate awards in each division? Not saying yes to either, just putting the questions on the table.

And not that I am ready for challenger, but those changes also affect the chances of the contender players (maybe to our benefit).

dV

 

[Obormot]

A "Victory Condition of the Month" is a good idea - but are there enough players who would pick Challenger to begin with? I am kind of worried that the restriction may scare players away.

We don't need many players. My idea was to make the challenge a little bit "special".

Then there is the question of how that opens up "free awards" to the rest of the field. This creates four "polymorphisms" (to borrow a term from genetics) of the awards: won on contender, won on contender when that VC was gauntlet, won on challenger, and won on challenger when that VC was gauntlet.

The difference between challenger & contender is not that high, so if the challenge becomes popular, it will split only the players into two parts, not four. I think it is a good idea to a certain extent, because the players are already naturally split into two groups, by their attitude towards the game.

 

[ngraner42]

Is the "free award" issue really a problem. Yes, there is an element of cheapening the award, but there is also an element of "retiring" the great players and making room for others. Years ago a freind of mine was a big guitar enthusiast and the magazine for such people, would pick a guitar player of the year. Once someone won the award three times (going from old memory so the details may be a littel off) they became ineligible to win it again. This did not seema like a bad thing.

 

[LowtherCastle]

So is there going to be any friendly pre-game discussion or this a cut-throat competition? I propose an additional award: The SirPleb Award, going to the winner who boldly and daringly describes their winning strategy in advance.

 

[Denniz]

This is a bit off topic but in regards to "Free awards", maybe there just needs to be a minimum players finishing with the appropriate Victory Condition for a given award to be available.

 

[Obormot]

So is there going to be any friendly pre-game discussion or this a cut-throat competition? I propose an additional award: The SirPleb Award, going to the winner who boldly and daringly describes their winning strategy in advance.

I think there is no point in having a separate pre-game discussion for the challenge, we can discuss everything in the normal thread. Actually I didn't really think about the strategy yet. But I do plan to write a post-game analisis of different games (if only I'll have enough time for this).

I picked domination for the first game because it seems to be the most standart victory type. Also the logistics for this kind of map (big and small) is fairly complicated, which adds enough depth for the military strategies, despite the difficulty level being low (conquest would have been too tedious with all the small islands, but domination is OK, I think).

 

[Lexad]

Great idea! I'm in

 

[Niklas]

Alright, why not! If you never try, you never learn, and here's the chance to compare and learn from the best. Wouldn't miss it for the world.

That said, I've never won an award, only started playing GOTMs 2 months ago, and I've never won a game by domination (except a SGOTM). Won't let any of that stop me though.

 

[ainwood]

Guys, I don't want to sound like the fun police here or anything, but we are discussing the implications of this in the GOTM staff forum.

With the suggestion that this has an 'award' attached to it, this is certainly not an 'official' award (well, not at the moment, because the first the staff new about this idea was when we read this thread!)

Secondly, we do have reservations about the balance for the competition. If this generates some kind of split between the challenger & the regular (adventurer & contender) players, then it may distort things like the (official) awards (in particular, it may devalue the eptathlon), and the global rankings (in particular, the speed rankings).

Finally, isn't this like the HOF gauntlet (except that everyone has the same starting save?) We don't really want to have implicit competition with them...

 

[LowtherCastle]

I don't think there's any belief in this discussion that the "award" is official, any more than the Wimp of the Week aWard from a few GOTMs ago was.

The Challenger version is available. Players are setting up internal challenges to make it more fun. What's new about that? We just had a discussion in a different thread, as some of you full well know, about possibly making the eptathlon challenger-specific. You guys were silent as midnight snow on a windless Christmas Eve.

Now you're going to start squawking?

The will of the people is speaking.

Btw, it was discussed in August as well and Obormot made his preferences well known, so it's surprising to hear that it's such news to you guys (unless you're talking only about the award aspect).

Oh yeah, imo, this is nothing like the HOF gauntlet. Zero, Nada, Zilch. This is a GOTM. No replays. No mapfinder. No second chances. A game full of flaws, fatal oir otherwise.

 

[ainwood]

Now you're going to start squawking?

No, I'm not squawking. I am making it clear that the staff are not endorsing this, at least until we've had some discussion about it internally. My initial post was actually meant as a heads-up recognition that we've seen this, are discussing it, but have some reservations about the whole idea.

The will of the people is speaking.

A statement like that actually feels like a justification of an ultimatum. We consider the will of the people, but this isn't a democracy - its a competition organised & run by volunteers who give up a lot of their free-time. And this idea isn't necessarily the will of the people, its the will of some people. We do try to listen and make decisions that benefit the community, but we don't endorse every idea.

Btw, it was discussed in August as well and Obormot made his preferences well known, so it's surprising to hear that it's such news to you guys (unless you're talking only about the award aspect).

Its not surprising to us as an idea; it is surprising to us that something that could have knock-on implications on things like global rankings, fastest-finish rankings (which was a community-lead idea that we officially adopted - see we do listen) & eptathlons was set-up independently of the staff, without contacting us to try and get support before starting it.

If we decided to support it and integrate it as an official event (presumably there are some who would like that?), then its going to take some work to organise, and we will need systems to track it etc. However springing it on us, without warning will create work. This close to xmas (& holiday breaks for some of us) is not ideal timing (not that I consider it a fait-accomplait anyway).

 

[LowtherCastle]

I understand your point of view. I still don't get why there was so much silence on this in the first thread I mentioned and now suddenly you're discussing it. All I see is:

Some guys, probably not a whole lot, deciding to collectively take the long-neglected Challenger version seriously. Collectively, because individually, the challenger settings are too hard to go off to the dark side of the moon and play by yourself. So they go off and do what top players have done for eons in CivIII--agree to a common Challenger-level challenge.​

Now why in the world would you guys, having conscientiously offered the CHallenger version all this time, suddenly clutch up about it? How could rankings and awards rank higher in importance than players having fun and good sport, within the framework you guys have carefully and dutifully established? ANd why do you have to support it? You already do. It's your Challenger version. It's your BOTM. People are and have been champing at the bit to play a BOTM and now it's here!

I don't get it. Btw, I must admit that I have some pent-up charge on the subject, because we had a pretty serious discussion on this recently and it felt to me like it was all falling on deaf ears. Finally, I decided it was pointless because you guys had no intention of acting on it, especially if top players didn't voice their opinion, and they didn't. Now this...I just don't get it.

 

[ainwood]

There is a clear difference between encouraging a group of people to all play the challenger version, and encouraging a group of people to play a parallel competition that happens to use the challenger save.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Okay, and which did you see Predator-level players doing back when it was still going strong? I saw the latter.

EDIT: Forget it. You guys do a great job and you obviously have the best interests of the community in mind. Kudos to you. Instead of disagreeing with you, I'll just put out my view on the matter.

I'm delighted that Erkon and Obormot have decided to do this, because I can hardly wait to learn from the gamnes they'll play and the write-ups they'll hopefully post. I expect to learn things that I don't expect to learn from HOF gauntlet threads and games (just one way of comparing the two types of competitions). Just to expand on that a bit, there's an element of strategy that's hard to pick up from the HOF gauntlet. It's the element related to making decisions in novel situations, where you have to make guesses, hypotheses, and whatnot. I think these gems of strategic wisdom are divulged when games are truly comparable. The closest we can get to that is top-level players playing the same game, same settings, with the same VC. Particularly fascinating would be if they also did a QSC write-up for decisions up to 1AD.

 

[ainwood]

Okay, and which did you see Predator-level players doing back when it was still going strong? I saw the latter.

EDIT: Forget it. You guys do a great job and you obviously have the best interests of the community in mind. Kudos to you. Instead of disagreeing with you, I'll just put out my view on the matter.

I'm delighted that Erkon and Obormot have decided to do this, because I can hardly wait to learn from the gamnes they'll play and the write-ups they'll hopefully post. I expect to learn things that I don't expect to learn from HOF gauntlet threads and games (just one way of comparing the two types of competitions).

That wasn't done when a new competition was just kicked-off, it did not promise some award (official or unofficial), it did not make the suggestion that it was going to be an ongoing competition across a number of victory conditions that was going to have knock-on effects to the global rankings, and it most certainly was not going to have the same implications on the eptathlon award.

Do you not see that this runs a real risk of cheapening the eptathlon? The 'winner' of this will get an eptathlon (well almost, aside from the cow) that will have been earned going against a group of people who specifically set-out to compete in the same victory conditions at the same time. There may be other people who aim to get an eptathlon by purposely going for other victory conditions, as there will be less competition.

Will these people be viewed as having achieved equally by the community?

Edit - your edit was posted after I wrote the bulk of my response, and ajax picked it up....

BTW - I want to make it clear that my main issue is not what is being proposed, but how it is being proposed. I think some issues need to be debated. No, I didn't debate them earlier, but I did read them. I don't really think a clear consensus was reached though.

 

[SteelHorse]

Hats off to the Erkon and Obormot for proposing the challenge. I think this is a way to both make it more interesting/competitive for the elite players as well as allow the moderates to have a chance at getting a medal.

ainwood and staff - this is probably a easy way to find out if a multi-tier system really will provide more interest to the GOTM community at large. if it is good and the staff can support great. if it is not good, it will die of its own accord. it may morph into something different - and thats fine too. there was a lot a great discussion the last few weeks on how to improve. I see all the discussion and interest as a sign that the GOTM community is alive and well and looking to make GOTM even better.

I think the GOTM staff has been phenomenal. My suggestion to the staff is to encourage this type of activity as this type of evolution is natural and good. If it works great. If the staff can then support even better! If the staff have more and better ideas - great - lets discuss.

And I like the "Mutineer Challenge" as title as Mutineer seemed to be the single Elite player not afraid to risk a medal for a more challenging game on a consistent basis. Two Thumbs Up!