How would you go about it.

I've made a little program that takes 3 dates. An elimination start date and the two dates that would frame the options for potential first strike dates.

As soon as the elimination date shows up, it will start eliminating days and hours from within the first strike time frame.

The time of the next elimation for both days and hours would show up on the screen, in effect a countdown to when the next elimination (day or hour) will occur.

Once the date is within the first strike time frame, each time there is an elimination comes with a chance that the first strike date and time will be set. Two people/leaders from both alliances will at that point get an SMS/email stating the FS time.

Thoughts?

e.g for next set:

Elimination Starts: 21st Feb
Time Frame for War: 26 to 31st of Feb

When the clock ticks over 21st, it will calculate how many war days there are (5) and take how many total elimination days there are (10) and come up with a ratio of 2 (total days / war days) that will be used to calculate the first elimination date (would be 23rd Feb).

On the 23rd Feb, one day is chosen at random and eliminated. And 1 hour out of the 24 is also elimnated (although that will happen earlier as it obviously has a divisor of 24).

I would take the first day you possibly want to war and the last day. Maybe you want the war to start sometime between day 14 and 42... so you set the probability density function to k=dayofround-14 and lambda = (lastday-firstday)/2 (so (42-14)/2 in this example).

And the reason I choose poisson instead of gaussian is that you can skew the odds of having the war to being higher shortly after an intended prep time if you prefer... so maybe you want it to be in week 4 or 5 but you want higher odds of week 4 then poisson is built for that (and in that case you'd want to set lambda to be equal to 3.5)

Isn't it much easier just to set an agreed time between 2 alliances, if they truly wanted an agreed war, instead of all this random stuff?

I don't see any advantage/disadvantages to having a date pseudo-randomly picked out for you.

Indeed Xin

Everyone ignore this post. He is attempting to hijack the thread.

Go create a separate thread on the merits of random vs not. This thread is about implementation of random.

This would be interesting if it was intergrated into the game, as a way for controlled mutual wars (if there was an ingame declare war option for example).

I believe that this could create issues out of nothing.

What if a leader doesnt get a message?
What if a random date given isnt a good one and puts someone at a horrible disadvantage?
What if a leader is attempting to be sneaky, and claim a date given isnt actually the date they recieved?
Even better, what if a date is given and is was accidently misread?

what if the randomly selected date was during game 7 of the Stanly cup? The servers would be down while Pang and QZ were crying and we would literally have a war where nobody showed up

why servers would be down on that day?

How is he "trying to hijack the thread"? He simply posted his opinion on a random prearanged war which seems much more on topic than the usual stuff posted in threads :)

How is that a hijack? There has been no mention of why implementing this would have any merit to begin with, and if there are no merits, it would just be wasting the developer's time. I could make a thread to suggest how there should be BLAH, or BLEH, but without any supporting reasons, it would be silly to do so.

Instead of posting a useless post, please rationalize how this feature would be better over a fixed agreed time between 2 alliances.

If a suggestion has merit, I will support it, just like how I supported Dagga's Ingame War Declaration suggestion thread.

Did not realize Feb had 31 days.

Xinhuan, I just think this method satisfies some of the opposition against fixed first strike times. i.e. every is online! If you can introduce at least a little bit of randomness, then the alliance that can coordinate the quickest will get an advantage.

I'm going to try and get my little random war generator bot hosted somewhere and let people have a play.

Leaving war to chance on randomness could potentially solve the problem when 2 alliances are unable to agree on a mutual time to FS.

But there hasn't really been many pre-arranged wars in the server to begin with.

I'll ponder a bit over this.

"But there hasn't really been many pre-arranged wars in the server to begin with."

I think it's because the fact that they are so scripted, it takes the excitement out of it a bit. Maybe with a bit more randomness, and making it a bit less of a 'love fest' and more of a serious option for two rival alliances (instead of a paranoid gangbang), maybe we could move to an era where spiteful, arranged (but fairly even) wars can keep the enjoyment factor in it.

i agree with dagga. this has been discussed before and is a great idea. nobody wants to do arranged wars because the FS is nothing but everyone sitting in their country waiting for the other side to make the first move based on who they think may or may not be on.

this will prove which side is better at war, war prepping, and dedication to warring. it give advantage to neither side.

naw stupid idea all together, war should be left up to chance not planned, it's the emotional factor that makes war-WAR! the hate, the glory, pre-planned wars and this is soft.

next set SoL vs the server for a big happy birthday slap in the face.

I think this is a huge chance to fix the issues of the server if we can come up with a way.

I am not holding my breath waiting for pang to dazzle us with his 'grand plan'. We're still waiting for the facebook app ffs.

This server would be much better off for netters and warmongers if spiteful wars were still possible, pre-arranged but with enough randomness to keep the thrill of the FS / CS involved. Think of the great wars you have fought in. It was either an all-encompassing coalition vs coalition world war or a top notch 1 v 1.

The underlying thing that made it great? The best side won because they were better. Not because they played dirty politics, had FOP allies or started gangbangs.. but because in an even contest they came out in front.

I'll try to get a working version up shortly..

Dagga, wow man, this is a pretty good idea. Good job man. I'll await the finished version. :)

if we are programming stuff for mutual wars maybe we can add a ELO system based on past results to help set the situations for fairer wars

for instance let's say alliance A vs alilance B is decisively alliance A victory, the simulator will tweak the results until the wars are completely even.

kind of like a ELO system that games like league of legends and starcraft 2 uses to match up players to find fair fights...

honestly if war in this game is set up like a sc2 fight it will probably be more fun for all

ELO for about 15 clans? Really?

The discussion of the merit/necessity of a random method is not the topic of this thread. The topic of this thread is implementation. This thread is now a waste of developer time because there is no need for them to read it or consider it. This is simply a thread for discussion of *how to implement* a random war time system - *not the merit* of a random war time system. I am not sure why that is so hard to understand...

of course, if you plan for this game to suck then that's the mentality to take.

blizzard didn't go "oh let's aim for 15 players for sc2 so let's not build a elo system"

in order to get players, you have to build the infrastructure for them

I am not smart enough to add anything to this convo other than to say I am glad people are trying to bring war into an official status and take away the crying over how and when a war start's. That is just awesome and can only help the cause of growing the game.

This is insane and not growth in any way.

Any developer time spent on this so-called "feature" is entirely wasted.

A war starts when the FS starts - nothing more. Keep it simple.

i still think a ELO ranking of war abilities based on the factors (networth/members/fs/etc) will be good.

that way when big alliances pick on smaller ones and win they don't build much elo ranking and their "war prowess" won't move up much.

also gives an official incentive/number for war alliances to achieve just like what netgaining alliances have right now with TNW/ANW

You're just being unnecessarily thick here. It would be a waste of time to discuss the implementation if the thing to be implemented is a bad idea.

The implementation is necessarily tied to the merits/demerits, if it was implemented well, it would be worth it, if the implementation sucked, then it wouldn't be worth it. For an implementation to be worth it, the system has to have merit.

I'm not sure why you don't understand that. For example, you suggested the distribution function to be poisson over gaussian. If I suggested the distribution function to be a decaying exponential function, it wouldn't be as good a system and isn't worth implementing because it gives almost no merit over a fixed date since there would be an extremely high probability it would be at or extremely near the chosen starting date.

As another example, Hanlong suggested an ELO system and I did not agree with it. Such an implementation might not be worthwhile to implement, because there are only 15 or so alliances in the game. If this grows to 30 or 100, it would maybe have merit to be worth the time to implement.

Furthermore, a good game developer will always weigh the pros and cons of implementing any game feature, and feedback on whether the community thinks any idea has merit or not is always appreciated.

I'm sure Dagga intended this discussion to be about finding the right implementation. But to find the implementation, you need to discuss the merits and demerits of each possible implementation, to be able to conclude whether the whole idea is good or not.

So you're saying that purely academic discussion has no merit? You think thought experiments are a waste of time? You don't think that people can have a hobby of discussing random measures of determining things and that you changing the topic isn't trolling? That is some hubris there.

For an implementation to have value, the system must have merit, I agree... this thread is not advocating the implementation of any system - just simply how such a system would be implemented.

That is rather arrogant of you to be sure you know Dagga's intent when it is not what he specified. I do think this is a topic that Dagga has thought over and that when he said he wanted to discuss random systems that is actually what he intended.

Go drag your knuckles elsewhere pony boy!

i think with a ELO system we would have a measured war ranking which will then make warring a part of this game and also a measured ability.

right now warring in EE is rough around the edges because there is no ingame "i win" mode for war winning.

i said this analogy before to you before, it's like playing starcraft 2 without the victory/defeat screen.

so all people would do instead is see how mcuh vespene gas they can mine instead... that's pretty much what EE is like :p

you know why i like the ELO system? because it doesn't CHANGE this game. it will still play the same way, the turns and formulas are all the same.

it is just a NEW leaderboard that war based alliances can use to determine their worth. i seriously doubt it will hurt anyone and will not change any game balance.

changing DR times and turns you can store, etc. have bigger ramifications of balance in this game...

Dagga asked for thoughts. I provided thoughts that question whether such a system has merit. You felt I was going off-topic and "hijacking the thread". I felt it is not.



I could also claim that you are arrogant when you say that you THINK Dagga's thread is about discussing the implementation and not on the merits of the idea, and what you THINK he intended.

When I disagreed with Hanlong, he justified his ELO system by providing merits. Likewise, Dagga has justified the merits when I questioned it (about whether the system is better than a fixed date).

To each his own.

I want a war scoring system; and I want more leaderboards, more public stats, more public rankings; the blizzard model is actually what i've been looking at.

These are good ideas :) keep going :)

(and then somebody summarize lol)`

Qzjul, the thing is, the current leaderboards as provided by EE are not really meaningful apart from the "Best 3" leaderboard. More leaderboards is cool and all, but they have to be meaningful in some way.

For example, a leaderboard for "attack success rate" is not particularly meaningful, especially when most of the attack failures for any good player typically result from using missiles on countries with moderate SDI in war.

I know the thread on war scoring formula suggestions have been up there for a good portion of the year, can I ask what has come out of it?

lol

qzjul: you know i wrote like half of the battle.net achievements leaderboard code ;P