Wow, knyte, nice work! Especially the first post. What's the methodology you use for that (self-organising map? neural network?), and in what way is the data flawed? More than just sample-size issues?

I now see that my "There are... MDL templates that I haven't even played yet" comment was a massive understatement. Maybe I'll try it sooner rather than later after all....

But based on the templates I do know, it's hard to see the logical connection. In the top left you see Malvia and Battle Islands together, which makes a lot of sense as they are fairly standard and have a lot in common. However, with them sits Elitist Africa (hmm... maybe I'll join when they change the colour scheme) and Georgia Army Cap - two templates which are unusual in very different ways.

join now, veto africa

Didn't know you can veto templates. Soon....

It's a network graph (like a social network graph- code snippet for generating it can be found at https://gist.github.com/knyte/0936802177ae53d132dffbd540e9abf9#file-mdl_clustering-py). The connections between the nodes represent the strength of the correlation of player performance between them. I think the small sample size is the main issue.

Also can't really explain why it does that weird stuff with regard to mechanics. I don't have a lot of confidence in these exact clusters + due to the clustering algorithm used, some of these color-coded groups shouldn't really be together (as you can see with Unicorn Island being closer to most of the yellow than the greens). I can't really speculate as to why performance on Georgia Army Cap seems to have a comparatively strong correlation with performance on Battle Islands V- it could be the player pool, some weird similarities in the winning strategy, or just noise since even at this point in the MDL you can't really get accurate individual template-specific ratings for a most players. Since there's so much noise from the small sample set, it's much less likely for a specific conclusion (e.g., "Georgia Army Cap performance correlates closely with Greece LD performance") to be correct than for a general one (e.g., "The templates aren't all similar"). Don't really know how to solve this problem, even if I redid this with 3x the data, so for now I think we'll have to settle with broad-strokes interpretations of the data.

You can see some of the internals of this- a visual representation of player ratings on each template ("Ratings (Visual)") and of correlation of performance between templates ("Correlation (Visual)") at https://bit.ly/mdl-analysis.

I'll just put the images here for convenience, though. Here's the performance correlations between templates (note that even the really green tiles are relatively weak correlations by normal standards- that's partly due to noise and partly since no one template really predicts any other close to perfectly):



And player ratings on each template:







The ratings suffer from the same inaccuracy/noise issue as the correlations, so we can't *really* be sure that (for example) Timinator is as good as he appears to be on Battle Islands V, but we can be much more sure that Timinator was, as of the time of this analysis, pretty good at the template and better than the average player. Don't have enough data to be confident in narrow conclusions, so just have to settle for being more confident in broad-strokes ones.

Edited 2/26/2018 21:10:56

"maybe tom brady should try womens volleyball" was easily the best thing i've ever posted on the internet and it gets downvote hidden lol

I guess that tells us all we need to know about the rest of what you've said on the internet.

btw kicorse there are 7 vetos

#supportAfrica

fireice82 has been stalling full 3 days in our ladder game. as soon as i made this thread, he took his turns quickly. now he's stalling again.

scared he was going to get called out i guess.

there you go -- quit stalling.

Stalling by playing slow or stalling by playing slow in a lost game?

Playing slow isn't stalling.. playing on in a lost game is

All games vs. Wally are lost games. He's the greatest player ever.

If you take 2 days and 23 hours every single turn, you are stalling.

And he's only playing vs me like that. He's completed a bunch of games since our started.

Picking territories, first turn etc. There is no reason those decisions take 2 days 23 hours.

Stalling by playing slow or stalling by playing slow in a lost game?

It's not a hopelessly lost game, he might even think he's going to win.

If you take 2 days and 23 hours every single turn, you are stalling.

I've played like that in games I'm winning

if you were doing it intentionally and were not just really busy or something, then you were stalling.

makes no difference if you're winning or losing.

Stalling is the manipulation of the ladder rating system by intentionally playing significantly slower when you're losing than when you're winning. Not only is it hard to measure as-is, there's no good reason to expand the definition to just playing slowly.

People have lives they need to worry about. Why not just take advantage of this and find some hobby that lets you play at the same pace as these people? There's no way you can consistently make them all faster.

if you were doing it intentionally and were not just really busy or something, then you were stalling.

makes no difference if you're winning or losing.

Man the definition of stalling has gotten so broad these days. So if I am able to play the game I must play the game!! otherwise I'm stalling? :P

The rules gives me three days and I'll play at whatever speed I like for whatever reasons... And if I lose I surrender the game, simple as that.

Maybe try and ask your opponent to play faster if you want to finish faster, instead of jumping directly to accusing and throwing dirt on a player. If someone asks I tend to play faster.

Stalling is the manipulation of the ladder rating system by intentionally playing significantly slower when you're losing than when you're winning.

That is not how I define it. Just because what he's doing doesn't meet your strict definition of stalling, doesn't make it ok.

People have lives they need to worry about.

That's clearly not the reason he''s taking 2 days 23 hours per turn. As I said, he's completing other games at a much faster pace.

Edited 3/1/2018 04:10:42