Brace yourselves, here comes another on my long-winded posts
Power of the Rank Exploit
First, some comments about the power of the Palace rank bug. I consider this exploit to be in a league of its own. When deliberately exploited, on a map where it can have a lot of impact, its effect is hugely greater than RCP or any other semi-exploit mentioned in this thread.
As an example of how powerful this exploit can be note that the current top three Deity games in the HOF (
click here) are all based on the exploit. Moonsinger and I each reached over 3 million gold. Moonsinger set the income record, making over 16,000gpt at the end of her game
This kind of result is obviously not quite right
All three of those games (SirPleb, Moonsinger, Mazarin) have writeups in the HOF discussion area. If you want to know about the mechanics of exploiting the rank bug,
my writeup here is fairly detailed.
Minor vs. Major Effects
The bug can have a wide range of impact depending on how heavily it is used. At one extreme when used on an appropriate map and fully exploited, the impact is huge. At the other extreme, the bug may have only a slight effect, depending just on a small difference in city density around the Palace and around the FP.
At the small effect extreme note that the bug can even have a negative impact. Some games have undoubtedly suffered an accidental penalty due to the bug, getting worse city rank numbers in their FP region than they should have.
Impact on GOTM Play
Overall I think this bug has had little impact on GOTM play so far. The majority of players have avoided thinking about it (and that's a good thing!
) Most players have unknowingly gained or lost a bit due to the bug but at this level (non deliberate use) the effect of the bug is, I think, in the same league as RCP. I.e. it can have a noticeable effect but not greatly imbalancing. Good play without gaining an advantage from it will win over mediocre play with the advantage every time. The effect is large enough that it would be nice if we could get rid of it. But we can't. And the effect is not so large that it wrecks the competition. So we can just live with it.
For some players, particularly the top scorers, the effect of this bug has already been stronger. When I first understood this bug, I found that I couldn't bring myself to build an FP at all. I felt that I'd be watching every town's placement to avoid unfairly gaining or losing a bit due to the bug and it would take the fun out of the game. So I played one GOTM without an FP at all. Then I played for a while by deliberately underusing my FPs to avoid the bug. In the meantime I played that HOF game where I flagrantly exploited the bug and that got it out of my system
After that I was finally able to ignore it again and play normally (but making sure never to gain much from the bug.)
I think that the bug may have been a contributing factor to losing other player(s) from GOTM. Maybe there are other factors too, but we haven't seen Qitai here much since he discovered it. It sure seems sad that this bug may have been a Pandora's box for its discoverer, who did an admirable job in chasing down some anomalies in the game and publishing the results instead of using them for personal gain.
When Should a Game be Disallowed?
I think the GOTM staff have taken an excellent approach to the problem in this thread.
Although it can be argued that a very specific rule is required, a rule which can be measured in black and white for any particular game, I think that:
1) Such a rule is almost impossible to define.
2) Even if a specific technical cutoff rule could be defined, it would be bad for the spirit of GOTM to do so. The point here should not be to draw a line which many players would then try to get as close to as possible. It should be to establish the
spirit of the game, and thus to discourage people from even thinking in those terms.
3) In practice there isn't a lot of grey area which matters. When the bug is exploited for large gain, it will be fairly obvious that the player set out to exploit it. If it is exploited for small gain (roughly equivalent to RCP gain) we can't distinguish that from some kinds of normal play. But at this level, it isn't earth-shattering. At this level it is like cheating other GOTM rules where cheats can't be detected. It may allow someone to gain a few steps up in the standings but it won't gain them a lot. The vast majority of people here won't sacrifice the spirit of the game and their integrity to gain a few steps in the rankings. So as regards minor use of this exploit, I'd say we don't need to worry about the grey area, just assume that minor gains from the bug are side effects of legitimate play, as they almost always will be.
So it seems to me that the rule the GOTM staff have worked out is very good. (Well done AlanH
) If in their judgement a particular game has used the exploit deliberately, that's that, the game gets excluded. I don't think anyone needs to worry about being falsely accused. Non-deliberate gains from the bug won't be mistaken for exploiting it for large gains.
Personally, I'd be more ruthless than the staff have been so far. I'd retroactively ban games which have exploited it in the past, at least in the unreported games GOTM26 and GOTM27. If anyone has used it in those games they might of course be upset by such a ban. My reply to them would be that I don't believe they had any doubt when they used it that they were using an exploit. They've taken an approach of doing something which we all know is wrong (using an exploit for advantage in competition) and gambling on asking for forgiveness afterward instead of asking for permission in advance. This is supposed to be a friendly level playing field competition - most players here are careful to ask permission in advance for actions they think might be questionable. So why reward the players who do the opposite? (My apologies to those players, particularly Bremp, for being so harsh here. But I stand by what I'm saying. To Bremp in particular: You play so well that I'm sad sad to see you using this for competetive advantage. Finding that you will use in competition something which you know is an exploit and which you know your competitors have avoided using, undermines your standings in my view.)
I see this exploit as a case where it makes sense for GOTM and HOF to take different paths. GOTM is (I think
) about being a friendly competition where many kinds of players compete in a "normal" Civilization III environment and discuss their approaches to a comparable game. HOF is for extreme games which don't allow for many different approaches - there's a focus there on particular kinds of maps and on score as an ultimate goal.
The Future of Moving the Palace
It is interesting (and sad) to note that moving one's Palace will almost always be a bad thing to do in Conquests. At least, that's how it stands with the 1.15 patch.
A few people have mentioned legitimate uses for moving the Palace in this thread. E.g. strengthening one's cultural hold in new regions while taking them over. It looks like this technique will be a thing of the past when we eventually get to Conquests.
In the meantime, I think it is great that the GOTM staff to continue to allow those techniques here. They could have made an easier decision - the rank exploit's power would be greatly reduced just by saying that moving the Palace is not allowed. The decision they've made leaves the game richer, at the expense of more work on their part to ensure that the rules are followed.
I do think that if this decision creates too much work for the staff, e.g. if a lot of people were to start pushing the spirit of the rule, changing the rule in future to say "no moving the Palace" would be an acceptable alternative. Because that's what we'll probably be faced with in the long run anyway in Conquests.
