King Of The Planet Series - Sunday April 13, 17:00 UTC

Discussion in 'Planetary Annihilation General Discussion' started by cptconundrum, April 7, 2014.

  1. zaphodx

    zaphodx Post Master General

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    Well I do apologise. I was happy to let the game play out and entertain the stream in the meantime.

    Perhaps we need to discuss the rehosts. Personally I think it's best to keep fair spawns as much as possible so each game is fair. I feel that just letting you take whatever you get given first time adds a fair element of chance as you take the dice rolls and whoever gets the best set of spawns has a higher chance of winning. Typically best of X games is to allow you to find out who can do best rather than who can win a single game.

    Perhaps as you say caster can veto one game if spawns are horrifically unfair and each player gets one veto if they think their spawn is too poor.
    carlorizzante likes this.
  2. godde

    godde Well-Known Member

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    Deal. So will this match be held in place of this weeks King of the Planet or before that?
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  3. godde

    godde Well-Known Member

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    Well I don't always agree with your decisions of whats fair and not. First off. What is unfair? It is hard to analyse. Just because starting conditions are different doesn't make them unfair.
    What is unfair terrain? If 1 player starts in the sea while the other one starts on the land is that fair? What if 1 player have easy access to both land and sea while the other player only have easy access to 1?

    http://www.twitch.tv/zaphodx1/b/519561379
    At 01:44:30 is a tough call for you. I really think those starts are fair. Yes metal distribution is different where Matiz had more mexes in his immediate start position and I had more mexes around my starting area. I think you basically decided that the walking distance were too far for me. But fabbers are fast and a 2 mex, energy plant, factory start is viable. Not too mention that you can go air to grab some sneaky mexes on the other side of the planet. You can adapt your build to different situations.

    At 01:48:30 Matiz started on a horrible spawn. I somehow feel he could have started on the middle island with the isthmus but didn't want to because he didn't like that position. So I think he probably much rather choose a horrible start to restart the game instead of going on the middle island but who knows. Would that that middle island start position be fair to my starting position? Yes, I think so.
    shootall likes this.
  4. matizpl

    matizpl Well-Known Member

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    1:44 situation was indeed relatively close, with maybe just minor advantage for me. It's still better to have close mexes than those a little bit more far away.

    Actually in the 1:48 situation I didn't mind my spawn that much because I could secure this peninsula easily. I didn't want to spawn there because just one turret could completely cut me out of any kind of expansion. I decided to spawn at the location that allows me to have more breathing room, I could expand in all directions and have safe peninsula. After re-watching it I believe I was right with thinking I should take this spawn.

    The thing is we can't really judge it ourselves since we don't know the spawn of opponent, we have to rely on Zaphod doing it, I believe this time those two decisions were indeed slightly debatable but in general Zaphod was doing great job in previous tournaments and I fully support the idea of rehosts.
    Clearly unfairness is very subjective topic and untill this get fixed by uberent, we will have to struggle with this but it's better to rehost 4 times than to loose because you had no chances because spawns were completely unfair.
    mot9001 likes this.
  5. godde

    godde Well-Known Member

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    It would be nice if players could start wherever they wanted in 1v1. Although we would need a way to deal with ways when the players chose the same starting positions or start very close to each other.
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  6. carlorizzante

    carlorizzante Post Master General

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    Watching now the reply of the three match. Great games. And great casting as usual. ZaphodX is simply that good.

    But I would say that with two casters it is even better, like the previous event, with ZaphodX and Metabolical. Perhaps you should always have a third caster as backup, just in case. Or you could invite an external, if none of your official casters can take the chair.
  7. Martenus

    Martenus Well-Known Member

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    I have some ideas on my mind that i will present to kotp organizers first before letting you all know.

    I think that in future i can try to dual cast with Zaphod if he lets me. And if you guys think my voice is pleasing enough.
  8. cptconundrum

    cptconundrum Post Master General

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    I have no idea why they weren't using ladder maps, which is pretty disappointing. I understand the need to have the lobby host choose maps before the players are ready to keep things moving, but PA Stats maps reward players for practicing and have better metal distribvutions than random maps. It those maps are a problem, ColaColin accepts map suggestions in his PA Stats thread.

    As far as casting goes, dual-casting is obviously better than one person when it is done well. The problem is that our other caster ended up playing and two casters that haven't had a chance to work together could easily get awkward.
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  9. godde

    godde Well-Known Member

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    This shows that it isn't enough to just look at the amount of mexes near the starting positions.
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  10. Quitch

    Quitch Post Master General

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  11. soliderfighter

    soliderfighter Member

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    Too many rehosts :)
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  12. zaphodx

    zaphodx Post Master General

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    Thanks for the feedback. We are going to work hard on an overhaul that makes thing simpler and fairer for players and easier for viewers also.
    Martenus and cptconundrum like this.
  13. wpmarshall

    wpmarshall Planetary Moderator

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  14. wpmarshall

    wpmarshall Planetary Moderator

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    It strikes me that as with that instance, you still only take into account proximal metal...
  15. cptconundrum

    cptconundrum Post Master General

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    We just need to stick to maps with good known starting points. Bigger maps help to cancel out a lot of the spawn issues, and bo5 means that luck can be less of an issue as long as you get a better spawn in the next game. A lot of people are worried that the best player will get to the top and stay there (although a lot of people assumed that was Godde), so a little randomness might not be a bad thing for this series as long as it doesn't discourage the players.

    If you get a couple unlucky starting spots and lose the game, we will consider removing the map from the pool and you can go back into the player rotation and try again when we call you up.

    I've also heard from a lot of people that are looking for an official player rotation or at least a set of criteria we use for choosing challengers. I don't think we should be doing this yet because there are just so few people out there that can compete at this level right now. We also recognize that players are people too and they all have their own lives and schedules to worry about. We'll be naming challengers that we know have a chance at winning and are available to show up, but figuring all that out is actually quite a lot of work and needs to be done flexibly and without any real system.
  16. trialq

    trialq Post Master General

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    Let both pick at random, and if they are too close get both to pick again, maybe disallow from picking the previously picked area to minimise pre-game stalemates. It's the only fair way I can think of, what other ways are there that don't leak information to the other player?
  17. philoscience

    philoscience Post Master General

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    I'd be happy to see a rematch, you are great players and it seemed like Godde wasn't on his best that day. Maybe Matiz had just found a really killer strat - Godde was hamstrung throughout, unable to expand and unable to deliver his signature drops. This put him in the weak position of having to go all or nothing on drops, only to be repeatedly wiped out by superior air or ground force. In all it seems like Matiz's macro game was really just beasting Godde - I wonder if he switches it up to focus a little more marco and harassment with less early drop focus if it could tie up. Try to get a solid 1:1 ground/air confrontation and then tilt the balance in your favor with drops when they are least expected. Perhaps part of the problem is your drops became very telegraphed; it was obvious to Matiz that you were gonna go all in for a drop so he prepared accordingly. I think the game where you did the best was the second one, which had a much more even ground war going on. I think we're going to see some new meta come out of these matches.
  18. Martenus

    Martenus Well-Known Member

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    We had a meeting yesterday within eXodus, well just like any other day :p, and we figured out a new way of hosting the matches - map wise.

    We will introduce you and especially the players to the changes once we put then into fancy written form. I believe we came up with the most fair system we currently can. It will be transparent and it shouldn't cause any trouble. Also, the rehosts should not happen at all during the live session, so we will also save time and avoid the rehosting dullness.

    We will discuss the suggestions with Founding Fathers and publish them soon after. Stay tuned.
    godde likes this.
  19. carlorizzante

    carlorizzante Post Master General

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    So, how does it work? How do you do? How can you do it before the Live Session?

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  20. cptconundrum

    cptconundrum Post Master General

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    They haven't had a chance to talk with us about it yet and I think they just want to make sure eXodus and the kotp team are planning the same things.

    It's a little complicated because the team running kotp isn't actually in eXodus, so the arrangement right now is basically one where both groups decide what we think is best and then meet somewhere in the middle. It seems to be working out really well so far, because things went well Sunday. There were problems with how we did some things of course, but we will learn from them (and make new mistakes the next time around). ;)

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