GreenAsJade

The Round 1 AARs will be availble within an hour or so, barring last minute hiccups. As a tantaliser, this from Walpurgis Nacht on "Across Moltke Bridge". Read and weep, my fellow bridge-crossers: "The design on this one seemed totally imbalanced to me, in the allied favor" Where's the "bawling my eyes out" smiley?? He didn't even use smoke!!! GaJ

In all seriousness, it would be good to have all the AARs from previous ROWs hosted in one place. If someone has them and wants to burn them on a CD and send them to me, I'd take a look at what could be done. GaJ

Ah - "Ahem. Is this thing turned on? yes? oh OK." The hosting site is ready, and the pages are in place and working (thanks to Cpl Carrot). As he has said, Ace is in the process of uploading them all. That is 120Mb of uploads, somefink like 200 files to be uploaded. Many are in uploaded already. I can see them, and they're very nice I have to say I would really like everyone who submitted an AAR to be able to see theirs up there published at the same time as everyone else. So I am currently planning to open the site when Ace tells me they are all there. That will be some time "real soon now". It will be worth the wait, I can assure you. GaJ. (edit: OK, it's 200 files not 300. That means somefink like 20 people didn't submit AARs ... SHAME ON YOU) [ June 30, 2005, 03:42 PM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

All - I will be slow getting started, sorry. Don't panic: I'll get there. Focus on your other games first, and that will leave you space to dispatch me later GaJ

I agree with Grim on the pick of a great bunch being Moltke & Edouards. I'm also looking forward to reading Maleme AARs to find out what the heck I missed. It doesn't suprise me that Walpurgis liked Maleme. As I mentioned in my AAR, I think that this was one where people with highly refined infantry assault skills could excel. Without those it was all a bit aimless for me I liked Moltke & Eduoards because they embodied for me what ROW seems to offer: really interesting unique scenarios. Neither could have been a QB in a blind fit. Richie: DONT WARN THE RUSSIANS ABOUT THE GERMAN REINFORCEMENTS!! That suprise was fantastic! (Some GERMANS have claimed they didn't see their own reinforcements. THAT should be corrected for sure. There's really no reason for a player to know about his own forces). GaJ. [ June 24, 2005, 08:17 PM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

I really didn't like not having my AARs published last time around, and not being able to read about the battles while I could still remember them. So I have, almost literally, put my money where my mouth is and obtained a hosting account where we can publish them. Ace has kindly collated and PDFed them. Cpl is in the process of the website design. It's my sincere intention that all of them be available within a week or two at the most. Of course many things could get in the way, including Ace having time to upload 120Mb of files, but we're doing all we can. GaJ. [ June 24, 2005, 01:43 AM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

Describing a scenario that someone put a lot of effort into as "silly" and then publishing your own very silly approach to the scenario is, in itself, very silly. GaJ. [ June 23, 2005, 05:24 AM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

It's not actually a silly membership, it's a very worthwhile one. IMO. GaJ.

Hi Cpl ... thanks! Let's compare notes by email. (My understanding is that your hosting options fell through, which is why I have stepped in! I see you're in my timezone, near enough - that will make it easier!! ) GaJ

I'm in. (email sent)

Are you a hot-shot web site designer? Or even half know what your doing and are willing to give it a go? Would you like the chance to build a site that's guaranteed to be visited by the top CM crowd? We're about to publish the Round 1 ROW V AARs. Ace has collated them all. I've arranged hosting - fingers crossed should be a high availability, high bandwidth site. Is there someone with web design skills who'd like to make the page work well, and can throw something together in the next few days? If no-one steps forward, I'll do a basic publishing job (I'm no web site guru!) ... could be as simple as a folder listing all the AARs alphabetically and you pick the one you want (at least they're all named sensibly, so this could be OK). Ideally I'd like to be able to say "show me all Fred's AARs" or "show me all AARs from this scenario", and maybe even have the ability to add comments/discussion (like cmakdb). Contact me if you can help... put your handywork on display! GaJ.

PUBLISHING ROUND 1 AARS Ace has collated them all. I've arranged hosting - fingers crossed should be a high availability, high bandwidth site. Is there someone with web design skills who'd like to make the page work well, and can throw something together in the next few days? If no-one steps forward, I'll do a basic publishing job (I'm no web site guru!) ... could be as simple as a folder listing all the AARs alphabetically and you pick the one you want (at least they're all named sensibly, so this could be OK). Ideally I'd like to be able to say "show me all Fred's AARs" or "show me all Moltke AARs", and maybe even have the ability to add comments/discussion (like cmakdb). GaJ.

And do the rest of us get to play the finals scenarios? I vaguely recall it was "everyone else can play to increase the sample size for Nabla"? GaJ

The difference between Wet and Maleme Nabla scores was nothing to do with the size (in case this what someone is saying - I'm not sure). Consideration of size as a factor in significance of scores is a whole new idea. It might be worthy of consideration, but it's nothing to do with the original issue being debated (just to be clear). IMHO a sceanrio is a scenario... each is worth the same as the next in a tourney. However, on the original topic: The difference between Wet and Maleme was that the Axis average was way higher in Wet, limiting the maximum score that the best Axis player could achieve. The direction of discussion has been to explore how Nabla can counteract this by limiting/squeezing/flattening the scores so that the best Allied player can only score as much as the best Axis player. I've come to think that this is not especially appropriate. It is certainly much harder to achieve the outstanding score as Allied Wet than to achieve the maximum score as Axis Wet. It's simply the case that the room for exellence is less in Wet for the Axis. That is WHY the average was higher. The flattening approach is (as someone observed) a move in the direction of rewarding consitency but not recognising extreme skill when the opportunity to flex that skill presents. I actually think this is not the best approach. I think the real solution is to have an Axis and an Allied winner in the tournament, and only compare people who played the same scenario against each other. Then the focus would be on using maths to take into account the difficulty of the opponents each person faced. IE such an approach would be new - *instead* of compensating for scenario balance, compare only people who played the same scenario and compensate for the differences in opponent strength. Note that such a new approach *removes* one source of "unfair" comparisons (unbalanced scenarios) and allows the issue of differening opponent strength to be cleanly tackled. Nabla doesn't even start to address the issue of opponent strength. Summary: for me the outcome of this discussion is that the original Nabla method was OK in what it tried to achieve, but we've learned a lot about its flaws, and seen that there is a completely different approach that could be much fairer in rewarding excellence of play. GaJ [ June 17, 2005, 08:58 PM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

If it's really true that the AAR score bonus is a percentage thing, then there are two interesting observations: 1) People with a Nabla score close to, equal to, or less than zero are really not going to benefit at all scorewise 2) People with that kind of Nabla score weren't going to be affect in any case by the AAR bonus, except in their pride (for example my muddy thinking was that the AAR bonus might make my score positive instead of negative, but a % change won't do that!) GaJ

All this recalculation can't be right. My score is still negative. GaJ (On a serious note, I think a system where you have to calculate then recalculate would be going too far. Given that the original system (prior to losing the DOS program) appears to be doing a good job, the conclusion I would reach is that it was well thought out and should be readopted now that we have the opportunity to do so.)

You're trolling me about that plane, aren't you? You know my opinion of aircover in competitive matches. In this case it was a massive blow to me. (You can read about this in this sneak preview AAR) GaJ [ June 16, 2005, 02:51 AM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

I agree - the setup is the toughest. It needs disicpline, attention to detail, good forward thinking... and all the gratification (if any) is delayed... In fact, I'm sure I'd be playing more right now if I didn't have to set the beggars up!

(Mostly for Walpurgis benefit, but maybe other latecomers to the thread too...) This question, while already partly answered, deserves reinforcement of its anwers. 1) No-one is saying anyone was cheated. Many people have specifically made a big point of saying this already in this thread. We all signed up for ROW with the rules how they are. The winners of round 1 are all deserving winners. 2) The high scores that outstanding players such as yourself were able to acheive from the underdog position in an unbalanced scenario have shone a spotlight on an unexpected aspect of the current scoring system - one that people find less than ideal once they really think about it. If you haven't gethered, it's this: people assigned to the underdog side of an unbalanced scenario have a much larger scoring potential than people on the favourable side. This means that you can conceivably be an excellent player, but end up assigned to the favourable side of all scenarios, and simply be unable to score as much as your opponents EVEN IF YOU GET 100% in every battle. Yes - you can end up in the middle of the field in ROW even if you got 100% in every battle, if you happened to have the favourable side of 5 unbalanced scenarios. That is what this discussion is all about. Obviouusly, the example above is extreme, and because mostly people end up with a share of favourable and unfavourable psotions in scenarios the truely excellent players bubble to the top. This is demonstrably the case in ROW V. Nonetheless, the players hot on their heels, with aspirations to do well, and those who just want their efforts fairly represented, are now realising that the current ROW scoring has some shortcomings in that respect. That's why we're talking it through. While I'm here, I would strongly advise against applying any other formula to the ROW V scores. It's much better to take a hypothetical set of scores and work with those. Rearranging existing real people and their scores is almost guaranteed to cause unintended hurt. GaJ [ June 16, 2005, 01:09 AM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

Indeed - a truly vexing problem, one that I've been pondering. There's more to it than just "how do we know it's balanced?". There's also the point that a scenario that's perfectly balanced but with no real chance for either side to score a win is worse than one slightly imbalaned, but with a reasonable chance for both sides to win! I think that Push actually falls into the latter category. A lot of matches of that scenario, resulted in an imbalanced looking median but a good win was possible from both sides (it appears). I can't see how the apparent imbalance could have been predicted. Even if it could have, I think that it is worth it from the point of view of the opportunity for both sides to win. I withdraw my "borderline" comment, which was made purely on the basis of the published median. (Wet is a different kind of thing altogther, but staying on topic...) I can conceive of a very balanced scenario of forces opposing each other in trenches and grinding away at each other. Always results in 50/50 outcome and is boring as heck. The need to provide the opportunity for each side to win opens the possibility for one side having an easier time to do that. Which just goes to show how awesomely difficult is the art of of coming up with good scenarios, and just deepens my (and I hope everyone's) appreciation of the designers who attempt it for us. It also emphasises the importance of geting Nabla right, because scenario with imbalance are an inevitable and even desireable part of tourneys. GaJ. [ June 16, 2005, 01:04 AM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

Doh - you are absolutely correct. It sounds like a fun solution as well. I can relate to being one one side or the other! GaJ

I don't play it but I do miss the shockwaves too.

This is the key point. Combine it with the fact that extremely unbalanced scenarios are 1) No fun 2) Not a test of anyone's skills and you conclude 1) Nabla, with the magic forumula is good 2) Make sure that scenarios are not too unbalanced. GaJ [edited out illconsidered opinion] [ June 16, 2005, 01:07 AM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

I think Treeburst's revelation of the missing "step 6" really explains how we got to where we are. Nabla put his great mathematical mind to coming up with a scoring system that deals with unbalanced scenarios. It seemed hard to believe he would have completely missed this aspect. And indeed, it appears he had a magical means of dealing with it that didn't survive translation from his DOS program to the next tool. Of course, we don't know how well Nabla's magic formula did deal with the situation, but since it never raised eyebrows, one can assume it was reasonable. It would be great if someone could look at the forumula and provide some interpretation of what its doing. It might be the right starting point for "the next version". GaJ

Unfortunately this doesn't address the problems being discussed here at all. The issue being discussed is the extra scoring range available to the "disadvantaged" people in unbalanced scenarios. It is not the case that all scenarios will be unbalanced in favour of Axis or Allies. GaJ