GreenAsJade

Is the "posting on the Web of AARs" solved? If there's a risk they all might not appear in a timely fashion, I'd like to help out. GaJ.

Ironically, it was not so much the one very high score that caused the investigation, but rather the highly improbablye distribution Nabla Allied compared to Axis high scores. WN will get an unbelievably high score with any system, unless it's one that has a clause like "If your initials are WN divide by 10". Also, it's worth noting that with 5 scenarios, *every* player has a reasonable chance of being on a "disadvantaged" side to some extent. The good players make the best of this and get the high Nabla score from it... GaJ.

Just to agree with all above and add emphasis: the whole Nabla discussion has nothing to do with the current results for ROWV. We've had 4 other ROWs to discover this issue: if it was a showstopper kind of problem, it would have been found long ago. I One of the reasons I started a new thread for the discussions was exactly this: it's a discussion about how a scoring system might be improved in the future, not to be tangled up with ROWV. It's a subtle thing, which really only stood out when someone posted the Nabla scores for a round by side. As you will see, if you look in the other thread, the maths and rationales involved are complicated... it's not so easy to take everything into account, and even when you do, there is debate about what is "fair". The basic fact remains that the people who did well would show up as doing well no matter what. The winners won fair and square. CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU ALL - YOUR CM SKILLS ARE AMAZING, and your ROW results are well deserved. GaJ

Is that a bad thing? Why? I don't have a good feel for whether the German defense had a range of options or not ... is there some feeling that it was not so interesting for the Germans? I thought the "lack of tactical options" was referring to the fact you had to cross a bridge... GaJ.

"Tactical Options" By this do you mean "different routes you could take"? That's not the only kind of tactical options there are. There is the choice whether to use smoke or HE. The choice of whether to go in a large mass or in smaller spread out groups. The choice of whether to support with tanks from behind or up front. The choice of whether to put the smoke down first, or scout first. I reckon there were plenty of tactical options in Moltke. GaJ. [ June 12, 2005, 06:04 AM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

Flens, you've hit the heart of it. What is fair in this situation you describe? Note that this is a tourney. You've just given WalpugisLike a score of 10 points in a scenario because he scored 100% in a game where the average for his side was 10% , and the LondonerLike a score of 1 because he was on the opposite side, and scored 100% in a game where the average for his side is 90%. Now tell me how that's fair. Due to the scenario balance, LondonerLike could not have scored any more than 10% more than the average. This means that the pure luck of which side he drew ruled him out from moving to the finals while WalpurgisLike goes to the top with his fantastic score. Again - how is that fair? I would argue its fairer that the person who did the bestest on the side WalpurgisLike was on should get the same score from that scenario as the person who did bestest on the opposite side. Nabla scoring is INTENDED to allow use of unbalanced scenarios in a tournament. That is what it and ROW are all about. It's not as if unbalanced scenarios are throwing it all out. Unbalanced scenarios are supposed to be taken care of. But we've just seen that even with the current Nabla method, unbalanced scenarios give unbalanced results: in fact with the system as it is, it is a big advantage to be assigned to the "worst" side in an unbalanced scenario. It's overcompensated. I guess this debate is about how to find the best way (if any) of compensating properly. GaJ PS No, that's just wrong. ROW and Nabla are supposed to allow a "fair" competition even with unbalanced scenarios. The person who by luck is assigned to the easy side in an unbalanced scenario should have no more chance of winning the tourney than the person who lucked the hard side.

BigDuke, you've explained some ways in which different scenarios can give the players different opportunities to score differing amounts. Confirming, as it were, the phenomenon. Confirming that Nabla doesn't deal with it entirely. Having recognised that this happens, in a way that was unanticipated - subtle - and not noticed till now, my thinking is that "someone should do somefink". I've proposed a solution. Can anyone shoot it down? GaJ

Ya gotta admit, doncha, that this is pretty funny in retrospect...

0.85 total Nabla score is nothing to be ashamed of, Simo! There's just some darn good bastiges out there!

(third post in a row, sorry!) ... I would suggest that a scoring type person try my adjustment to the ROW scores. I bet you will find that the result mix looks more balanced, and that the obvious good players still stand out ... but *also* that some of the excellent performances on the "easy" side of unbalanced scenarios get a bit more recognition. IE I would expect to see some Axis players in the higher ratings of Wet after applying this adjustment, because I'm sure some of them did an outstanding job of holding off all those tanks, yet they had limited ability to outshine the rest of the mob scorewise for doing so. GaJ. [ June 11, 2005, 09:40 PM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

I do think it means that the Nabla system needs an extra scaling step based on the maximum possible score differential. The maximum possible value of this difference needs to be calculated, and the final Nabla scores of each player in that side for that scenario divided by it. This means that the maximum Nabla score for a player for a scenario would be 1.0 ... independent of how balanced the scenario is. At the moment the maximum Nabla score you can achieve is unbounded, and determined by how unbalanced the scenario is. In retrospect its obvious that this adjustment is necessary: if you can demonstrate that Nabla can result in different maximum scores for different scenarios (which we have done) then you've demonstrated that it doesn't factor out scenario imbalance. GaJ.

Europa, you have put your finger on the problem: Mal's analysis seems to indicate that this is not the case. The more unbalanced the scenario, the more you can stand out from the crowd if you're on the "disadvantaged" side, the higher Nabla score you can get. A highly unbalanced scenario, like Wet Triangle, demonstrated this effect. Put a great player like Walpurgis on the disadvantaged side, and he can exceed the average score by a staggering amount! GaJ

Kingfish, Let me join the rush to say no-one is suggesting a conspiracy! In fact the opposite: given the *sure knowledge* that the players were assigned randomly, we're looking for an explanation about the strange result of ROW V round 1. The strange result is that the *fundamental basis* of Nabla is that it is supposed to factor out any influence of scenario balance on the results. If players are randomly assigned sides in scenarios, you would then expect the results show a random spread of good players across Axis/Allies. The ROWV Round 1 results seem to show that all the good players were Allies. That is what the fuss is all about. Malakovski seems to have argued that But the whole reason for using Nabla is to allow fairness in unbalanced scenarios! If you were having balanced scenarios, you could just use the raw scores to assess the players. Thus it would be a great help if someone with the time and ability could assess Malakovski's reasoning & shed some light on this. GaJ

I had made the assumption (perhaps wrongly) that "normalised difference from the mean" didn't have any implied extra calculation. IE it is simply a division of the individual's difference from the mean by the maximum difference from the mean. If this is really applied, then the arguments about higher Nabla scores being more likely in harder scenarios (where one player is able to achieve something others can't) don't quite hold water. That player's "difference from the mean" will be "normalised", so his outstanding achievement due to the fact that the situation was really tough is normalised away. The most outstanding player in another situation, where it was easy and all players got a raw score of >90, so only 10 points separates them, still should get the same Nabla score as the most outstanding player in a scenario where some people got 10 points and he managed 60. Rambling thinking out loud! GaJ.

Great explanation: thanks! GaJ

If you would be kind enough to post your thoughts on our strange Nabla result in this thread it will keep the discussion of that topic together, and not clutter up this thread with it... GaJ.

People have started to wonder whether Nabla in fact favours the players who have the harder battle in an inbalanced scenario. "If it is hard to do well, and you manage to do well, then you get a high Nabla score". This has some appeal. But if it is true it would mean that: 1) The Allies had the harder time in all 5 battles _and_ 2) At least 5 people assigned to Allies managed to do way better than all the others. Is this/could this be the case? GaJ

The Nabla scoring system is one in which players are given a score based on how they performed compared to other people who played the same scenario on the same side as them. IE If you played Allies in "Station Haapsalu", then your score is compared to the score of all the other allied players in that scenario, and the better you did compared to them, the higher your Nabla score is. The difference from your score to the average score is the basis for your Nabla score. This is supposed to mean that the Nabla score selects the best players in a tournament, irrespective of which side they get assigned to, and irrespective of whether the scenarios were balanced. Sounds like a great idea. It's the basis for the ROW tournament. Over in the ROW V thread, an interesting result was published. It showed that of the 25 slots that make up the top 5 positions across the 5 games in round one, 23 of them were occupied by Allies, based on Nabla scoring. This can be interpreted as saying "for all 5 scenarios, the 'allied' side just happened to be assigned to the better players". At first glance, this is too much of a coincidence to be believed. I'd be interested to hear people's analysis of what this result means, and whether our assumptions about what Nabla scoring is doing are correct. GaJ.

Sorry if it appeared I was inducing hysteria. I just wanted to make sure the topic got picked up. I'm thinking "let's have a separate thread to explore this topic". Here in this thread we'd probably rather talk about scenarios, scores, AARs etc... GaJ (goes off to create a thread).

This is too wierd! How can it be that across 5 tourney games the top 5 players in each one just *happened* to be assigned Allies in 23 out of 25 slots!???!? It can't be. I can almost buy Elmar's explanation for Wet, but what about the overwhelming improbability of the rest of the result? My faith in Nabla just took a big blow. I hope there's a good explanation! I'm hoping for "programming error" rather than some fundamental reason we didn't think of why Nabla doesn't really pick the best players... GaJ [ June 11, 2005, 06:16 AM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

(I thought JonS's list must have been mistaken, but didn't realised that it is an ordering by Nabla score!) [ June 11, 2005, 06:06 AM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

"Me too!" on the Allied commander oblivious to the counter attack coming from the left, in Moltke! OMG what a feeling that was, when I clicked on one of my waiting reserves and found him "Pinned"! What a superb piece of scenario design! I reckon if it hadn't been for the fact that Wet Triangle handed me a win, which I couldn' resist enjoying despite feeling awful for my opponent, I would agree completely with JonS's list, notwithstanding the fact I wuz whupped in Moltke. GaJ [ June 11, 2005, 04:34 AM: Message edited by: GreenAsJade ]

I dunno why everyone's keen to see the a list ordered by raw scores. Here's the list that really tells you something as far as I'm concerned: the players ordered by Nabla score. I see myself at the top of the players with negative scores. :eek: So close to escaping mediocrity! Can writing those last to AARs save me!? (I too would like to know why it matters what group you are in ... why it's not just the top people Nabla-wise going to the finals?) GaJ

My enjoyment of the scenarios was: 1) Motlke. Brilliantly conceived, I thought. 2) St Eduoards. Lots of interest, great ebb & flow. 3) Wet Triangle. Hey - I won, for a change! 4) Highlanders. Nice map, solid scenario I didn't enjoy: 5) Push to Maleme.... slow, dull, and included aircover I move that aircover be banned in ROW scenarios. GaJ.

Is this because he's keeping them in command? It looks like the kind of spacing you could expect if you don't have command bonuses...