Rules questions

[Ribannah]

I just took the time to read the rules again. I don't know if there was ever a vote on these rules or how they came to be as they are, but I am not content with some of them.

Under 'allowed' I find ao (1) Right of Passage abuse, (2) Free palace jump and (4) Ship hopping.

(1) and (2) are, to me, very much against the spirit of the game (even though the AI sometimes abuses a ROP, too). I will never do these, and IMHO they should be forbidden.
(4) is a bug exploit and has no business being on the 'allowed' list, period.

Under disallowed, strictly speaking we cannot even save & reload to take a break! Clearly this is an unintended oversight, but I am not particularly happy with the emphasis on reloads anyway, because of two reasons: (a) it is very easy to cheat bigtime with a minimum number of reloads, and (b) there are a zillion of valid reasons to reload a save without cheating in any way.

Personally I feel like being at the disadvantage just because I can only play short sessions of Civ, which causes my reload count to go through the roof once turns get longer. Now that my submission of GOTM#14 (where I had the fastest space victory) is ignored without any explanation (Cracker, where is your reply to my PMail?) other than 'reload frequency' I am certain that things have gone too far.

IMHO the best and only way to check for irregularities is to require the (top) contenders to submit a timeline. Silly examples of cheating (we've seen 5 cities by 3600 BC and the like) can then easily be spotted.

There is no way to do anything against more clever ways of cheating - which do not show in the reload count at all - so we should not even endeavour to provide 100% security where there is none. Beyond the obvious we simple have to trust in honor. (And, people who cheat are generally lazy and will have a hard time providing a game log.)

Missing under disallowed is IMHO the two-step rush (first a Spearman for 1 pop, then on the same turn a Barracks for the second, when you can't rush a Barracks right away).
Diplomatic exploits like intentionally offering a zillion a turn for a number of techs only to immediately declare war, is another thing I think is inappropriate.

 

[MadScot]

RoP abuse results in a rep hit, so you get penalised by the AI anyway. And since it can happen by accident (war triggered by MPP when I have one worker in enemy territory, say) how would you apply a ban?

Palace jump costs you the accumulation of culture etc in your capital - all the 1000 year multipliers are lost.

Ship hopping is hardly going to break the bank, and is such a hassle to set up I can never be bothered with it. Are you going to require that we all "load" ships too, rather than sitting one tile offshore and walking into them - another 'abuse' which makes you move fractionally further.

While it could be perhaps better worded, why do people keep saying they can't save. It's quite clear to me that the ban is on attempting to obtain different (better) results by reloading and REPLAYING part of the game.

And since GOTM-14 contained accepted games with <<10 turns per reload I don't see that being used as a mindless cut-off criteria for submittals.

Since the AI won't accept a zillion gpt if you dont make that much, and the rep abuse would make it a once-only deal, I see no problem with an abusive deal-breaking. It has, after all, been known to happen in real life too.

 

[Nightfang]

I want to know how they come by the reload count, anyway.

Like you, I have a lot of short time spans to play. I play for about thirty minutes in the morning, thirty at lunch, then off and on during the night. I may load the game back up 6 to 8 times a day. I tend to micromanage a lot, so my turn rate is real low (like 5 or 6 turns per load). As the game progresses, I spend more time per turn, and therefore more reloads per turn overall.

Add to that the occasional map glitch that will not show new resources, and you have to save and reload again.

 

[Ribannah]

Originally posted by MadScot
RoP abuse results in a rep hit, so you get penalised by the AI anyway. And since it can happen by accident (war triggered by MPP when I have one worker in enemy territory, say) how would you apply a ban?

In that case the AI was the aggressor, to do so at its own risk, so it is not an abuse.

Palace jump costs you the accumulation of culture etc in your capital - all the 1000 year multipliers are lost.

If done early in the game, you can still gain a decisive advantage.

Are you going to require that we all "load" ships too, rather than sitting one tile offshore and walking into them

Why would I do that?

Why do people keep saying they can't save.

That''s no what I said. I said 'save & reload'. That saving is allowed is not of any help if you can't reload the save afterwards, is it?

It's quite clear to me that the ban is on attempting to obtain different (better) results by reloading and REPLAYING part of the game.

So why not phrase the rules accordingly?

And since GOTM-14 contained accepted games with <<10 turns per reload I don't see that being used as a mindless cut-off criteria for submittals.

I'm still waiting for Cracker's explanation. I have no idea what my own reload count is.

Since the AI won't accept a zillion gpt if you dont make that much, and the rep abuse would make it a once-only deal, I see no problem with an abusive deal-breaking.

The reputation hit is irrelevant if it wins you the game on the spot.

 

[Skyfish]

I trust cracker's judgement in the fact that your game had MANY MANY more reload then all the other games. I really hope that it is the case.

IMHO, as you would say, the "milkers" will always have a higher number of reloads because they play until 2050AD and that at the end of the game the turns can take a huge time. Therefore justifying a high number of reloads. Your game is a quick victory and not a milked game and also not a conquest/domiantion game where you could justify long wars and huge movements which take long turns and many reloads.
I have to sympathize with you though if you NEVER reloaded once to replay a move, there is nothing you can do to prove yourself innocent except destroy everyone on MP.

My conclusion to this is that you have to consider GOTM a "VERY SPECIAL" game which can NOT be played under conditions where you save and reload every other turn. Even if you don't cheat : you just can NOT do it !
I agree with cracker that a game where you reload every 2 or 3 turns can only be highly suspicious. Because you have to take into cosnideration that at the beginning of the game you can easily play 10 to 20 turns in one session which means at the end of it you have to reload every turn to get to a low 2/3/4 average.
Sorry but it's too suspicious.

 

[Ribannah]

Originally posted by Skyfish
[IMHO, as you would say, the "milkers" will always have a higher number of reloads because they play until 2050AD and that at the end of the game the turns can take a huge time.

I don't know about that. It seems to me that at some point your cities just keep producing wealth and nothing of interest happens. We'll have to ask the milkers about that.

Your game is a quick victory and not a milked game and also not a conquest/domiantion game where you could justify long wars and huge movements which take long turns and many reloads.

Actually I was almost constantly at war from 310BC onward. A reload count of 2-3 (if that is what it was) by itself doesn't raise any suspicion with me. It's what happens in the game that counts, like conquering a whole continent with a single Swordsman or getting a Settler from every hut. Thos things are suspicious.
My wars in this game didn't go that well at all, which in the end may have helped (although at the time I got pretty desperate) since this kept the AI on the research path. They were building spaceships in the 15th century too, you know, in other people's games the AI only got around to that centuries later.

My conclusion to this is that you have to consider GOTM a "VERY SPECIAL" game which can NOT be played under conditions where you save and reload every other turn. Even if you don't cheat : you just can NOT do it !

I'd prefer to change the conditions so that people like me can participate, too.

 

[MadScot]

Originally posted by MadScot
RoP abuse results in a rep hit, so you get penalised by the AI anyway. And since it can happen by accident (war triggered by MPP when I have one worker in enemy territory, say) how would you apply a ban?

Originally posted by Ribannah
In that case the AI was the aggressor, to do so at its own risk, so it is not an abuse.

The case I was considering is I have a worker in territory A, and an MPP with civ B. A attacks B. I am required to declare war on A. (No option). I am therefore declaring war with units in enemy territory - RoP abuse, in theory - and will get a rep hit. The AI does not have the human concept of 'the agressor' - it simply considers where your units are when you declare war.

QUOTE]Originally posted by MadScot
Are you going to require that we all "load" ships too, rather than sitting one tile offshore and walking into them[/quote]

Originally posted by Ribannah
Why would I do that? [/b/

It has a similar effect, of enabling me to move my loaded ship slightly further than its movement rate would allow. Which might make a difference in how many turns it takes to get somewhere, similar to the ship hopping - and a GREAT DEAL easier to do (as I said, ship hopping is too hard for me to set up. Off shore loading is easy to do)

re Palace Jumping - you would have to ban ever disbanding your capital. That could make the initial build-it-or-move-it decision critical, and make it something of a guess. What if one location will later allow an iron works, and one won't. If I want to take the penalty now of disbanding, for a later gain, why shouldn't I?

Incidentally, I consider 'milking' against the 'spirit' of Civ - but recognise that it is perfectly acceptable for the GOTM. The fact that I
(a) never get to a position to milk; and
(b) am just too damned lazy anyway
doesn't alter the fact that it is an acceptable (and accepted) practice.

 

[cracker]

Ribannah,

Many of your concerns here are valid from a general concern perspective to all players. Not much work has been done in the area of player support and rules clarification since August of this past year. I assure you that we are looking at clarifying the rules of the game to try and keep it simple but at the same time make things very clear where the limits of expected behavior would lie.

It is a natural process for you to perhaps try to dissect the existing rules and pick faults, but I urge you not to do this instead of doing a self inspection on the game play mechanics that are raising red flags in your games when they are compared to your peers.

Please do not attempt to turn these discussions into a public trial of your reload counts in you past five game submissions because it is out of respect for you as an individual person and a player that this was not done. Your Gotm14 submissions received more personal attention than another other game for this month and the final game results were held from Friday until Tuesday just to provide extra time to review your game alone. Your GOTM14 game could not be considered valid and included in the game results because the reload count was five times higher than the typical player average for a victory of the type that you chose to submit and it was also in the same range as the games that we have excluded in the past for other indications of play conduct issues. Games like yours are not excluded flippantly or without having staff members spend a number of hours reviewing many factors other than just the reload count. Ultimately it came down to a decision of whether we presented a valid set of results for Gotm14 that did not include your game versus a set of results that we could not confidently say were valid because your game was included.

Demanding replies from me in a public posting is not a wise decision when you consider that there are well over 250 players in the current Gotm player pool and all of these people deserve just as much attention as you do. The time period at the beginning of the month is very busy for the administrative tasks in the background and to avoid disrupting the main population of players, I have not been delaying other tasks to focus on disciplinary and conduct issues that we will be working with you in the coming weeks. My last responses from you by PM or email were on January 2nd and then your Qsc15 game save file on January 7th.

If you wish to discuss this issue further and to obtain help in ways that you can legitimately reduce the risk of having future games excluded, please contact me by PM or email. If you still feel that you may have been unfairly treated in these issues you may contact the site administrator or discuss the conduct issues in the Site Feedback forum according to the Forum Rules .

-- cracker

 

[Ribannah]

Cracker,

I sent you a p-mail yesterday. How can I keep this private if you don't recieve my mail? Besides, it's not just about me. As you said yourself, others have been excluded, too, because of reload count alone. This is a rules issue, more than a personal one.
Please comment on my suggestion to require a timeline instead of this awkward and arbitrary reload counting.

My game was not typical 'for this victory type' because I had more wartime than many a domination or conquest player. So 5 times the average doesn't sound too bad to me. And you still haven't said what my reload count actually was.

------------
Edit: I just sent you another mail. The tracking facility shows that you did read the mail I sent you yesterday.

 

[cracker]

Originally posted by Ribannah
Cracker,

I sent you a p-mail yesterday. How can I keep this private if you don't recieve my mail? Besides, it's not just about me. As you said yourself, others have been excluded, too, because of reload count alone. This is a rules issue, more than a personal one.
Please comment on my suggestion to require a timeline instead of this awkward and arbitrary reload counting.

Yes Ribannah, I received your PM late last night/early today but just have not gotten to you yet in the queue. This is hardly worthy of any comments of no response.

Your comment about the "awkward and arbitrary reload counting" is totally false and misleading. I assure you and every player that there are no arbitrary guidelines being set in this process and that very few games are actually being flagged or excluded from the results. It is almost as if we have to look across 200 or 300 different games and then pick out only the worst 1 or 2 examples to find games that might get excluded.

As to the suggestion of requiring timelines for every player, that concept would basically add a required inconvenience to every player without providing us with new tools that we do not already have built into the game to review many of the replay events. We have included the Qsc event as an optional game element that holds other benefits for players who choose to provide a timeline in the early game but this is not used as a criteria to determine games that may or may not be valid.

In general, the game play of 85-90% of the players is well within the expected range of behavior that we have developed by looking at how most players seem to play the game.

Ribannah, you may post additional discussion of general rules and game issues here in the forums, but any further discussion of personal disciplinary or conduct issues will be considered a violation of the forum rules because there is a separate process for those issues.

Give us the time to provide you with the extra support that you may need to submit valid games and I assure that we will attempt to do this. For most players of any skill levels, these issues do not seem to be creating any major difficulties or conflicts.

 

[Woody]

This month was the first time I have played the GOTM and after reading this it might be my last. My problem is that on my system when playing CivIII and/or PTW I will lockup at any time for no reason. Because of this I save after every turn during peace and after every city I take during war, not because I want to replay the event and hope for a different outcome but because I dont want to loose the time it took to get to that point in the game. Sometimes I can play for hours without lockups but other times it will lockup within five minutes of starting the game, I have just gotten in the habit of saving often to avoid having to replay many turns again. In the current GOTM there was probably about four of five times it locked up and there was no time that I can recall that reloading from one of my many saves changed the outcome of the game.

I guess my question is does this "reload counter" keep track of the number of saves or the number of loads? I am sure I will have way above average saves but my reloads are probably not any more than average.

 

[col]

Originally posted by Woody
I guess my question is does this "reload counter" keep track of the number of saves or the number of loads? I am sure I will have way above average saves but my reloads are probably not any more than average.

The latter. I'm sure you need have no worries on that score. Its prudent to keep a number of extra saves. Indeed there is a growing trend for people to follow Zachriel's wonderful example and publish their games on a web site complete with commentary and pix. This inevitably involves lots of saves which can later be reloaded to provide the screendumps at crucial moments.

Its how many times you reload that is counted not how many times you save - I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong here.

 

[Ribannah]

Cracker,

Again, I'd prefer rules that don't create major difficulties at all, instead of just for most players.

There seems to be a minority of players (10-15%?) that play lots of short sessions, whether for special reasons or just because it pleases them, as opposed to the bulk of the players that virtually start a game at 4:00 am and don't stop until it's over.

Please make rules to accomodate every honest playing style.

In the meantime, please don't subject submissions to rules that are not stated as rules anywhere. All of us put a lot of effort in playing this competition, and much of the enjoyment is lost if we are excluded from the results.

Timelines wouldn't have to be very detailed after say 1 AD, since by that time it is already determined whether you can get a top score or not. And they have the additional advantage of helping each other to improve our game, which I see as one of the attractive features of this competition.


Woody,

Reloading doesn't change any outcomes unless you unlock the random number generator (something which should also be
explicitly forbidden), or if you change the order of hut popping / battle engagements / anything else that uses the RNG. So if you crash during mid-turn, take care not to change the order in which you did these things and you should be fine.

 

[cracker]

Woody,

The concerns that Ribannah is raising here have nothing to do with saving the game to prevent data loss. You can save the game 100's of time each turn without creating the signature that looks like you have reloaded the game to unfairly manipulate the results of future events.

Look closely at how the information in the results page was phrased and you will see that the emphasis is on using this statistic as a flag to help identify the games that have been played in a way that is substantially different from the hundreds of other players who have participated in the events.

Most players are unlikely to ever be inconvenienced or even remotely effected by this screening because it is effectively the number of turns played per session that will provide a rough indicator of player conduct. Most players encounter periods in their game were they play only 1 or 2 turns per session but when these are averaged together with the other periods where 30 or 40 turns gets played in one session the game averages are consistently above 10 turns per session.

Do not let Ribannah's issues concern you to any great detail here because even the session counts of all our new and novice players do not come close to approaching the high levels that have been demonstrated in his submitted games.

This session count is not a major focus of the game of the month and in fact fewer than 1 player out of every 10 even comes close to warranting having us contact them to gain further information. No game has ever been arbitrarily or unfairly excluded from the GOTM results and that will not be the management practices that we adopt during this year.

 

[Ribannah]

Cracker, since you yourself continue with off-topic comments on my game, without providing any info whatsoever or responding to my questions, please give me the relevant info right here and now.

What was my reload count and what else, if anything, did you find suspicious about my game?

Moderator Action:
Ribannah, I instructed you three times to take this sort of discussion of your personal issues with the decision to not include your Gotm14 game into the correct forum and not to discuss those disciplinary and conduct issues here. Your posting privileges will be restricted for three days to give you more time to relax and process these issues without ignoring my instructions and the forum rules.

I have removed the added comment you editted into this message in between the time the restriction was implemented and when it took effect.

 

[Skyfish]

Woody,
To support Cracker's argument I can tell you that I played a lot of short sessions on GOTM14, a lot more than what I would normally do.
The difference is that I had an average of 19 turns/reload whereas Ribannah had probably around 2 to 5 !
It's a huge difference !

 

[Yndy]

Just a short comment on this thread for lurkers that may pass by:
Please note that I am not blaming Ribannah

The review of results is a process that takes a lot of time and cracker dedicates a lot of time for this task alone.

If anyone's playing patterns are questionable they risk to have specific game(s) not ranked. Keeping a timeline or keeping additional saves can prove crucial (but again they may not be enough) in the decision whether your game will be ranked or not.

If a game is questionable and the result is not published you are not excluded from the GOTM event. You can still play on and submit other games thus proving your innocence.

There were players that were found to have cheated in many succesive games and won trophies that later had to be withdrawn (I am not referring to Ribannah but to Valeri Kousnetsov). On one side i'm sure we do not want to deal with that on and on and on the other side I'm sorry that good players had their scores dissalowed because they went 'a bridge too far' and cheated to get the top score.

Edit: I slightly rephrased my post

Happy civing to you all

 

[Ribannah]

Originally posted by Yndy
Edit: I slightly rephrased my post

Thank you, Yndy.

And since Sirian has phrased my concerns more eloquently than I ever could, can this thread please be closed?

 

[Thunderfall]

Closed as requested.

Welcome back Ribannah.