1. The Gnuff Argument: If you play enough and win enough to improve certain key stats, irrespective of winning percentage vs other players, fairness, strength of competition or game stalling, you can put together a resume and hope to persuade like-minded players that you are the best. Most important stats: Ladder ratings/ranks, tournament victories. Numbers matter most. But only some numbers. Which ones? The ones I choose.

2. The JSA Argument: Ladders, 20 Tournaments (in which only half the top players ever play at the same time), and LIVE tournaments (in which time zone and unregulated teammate selection determine if you play or even win) determine who is best. Gnuffone has the resume, he is best.

3. The Dead Piggy Argument: 1v1 Medium Earth.

4. The FFA/LD/MA Argument: Why is there such great emphasis on so-called "strategic" templates? FFAs require strategy. LD requires strategy. MA requires strategy. If you aren't good at these, are you really the best?

5. The RP Argument: Roleplaying is a form of playing WL. There are good and bad roleplayers. So there could be best and worst roleplayers.

6. The Qi Argument: WL is like boxing. The best boxer of all-time depends on weight class (in WL: 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, FFA, MA, LD, etc.), era (ie, the quality of your competition at a certain time), the moment (activity). Mike Tyson lost to Buster Douglass because he didn't focus or take his opponent seriously. Muhammad Ali fought past his prime (in WL: playing while drunk, high, suffering from sleep deprivation or exhaustion) and lost fights. Just like in boxing, where one punch or a wicked combination of punches can determine who is the best at the moment, in WL one game or a combination of games in succession could determine who is the best at the moment...and then you play again to see if that person is the better player in the next game too. The moment you stop playing or become less active you stop being the best. Activity is a key component to being the best. This is why when Gnuff asked me who the best players are, I didn't mention him or me. Neither of us were active enough. You can't stop playing and still be the best.

Edited 3/5/2014 05:29:02

Warlight games have so many options. It is clear to us all that the condition/definition of "best players" for many of us are different

Under your definition, you are right. Gnuffone/JSA are also right under their terms of conditions.

GUI you are a great player, you are great at logical thinking, you frequently bring up good debate topics, but somehow I wish you could bring up something more positive too... not just criticism.

Best player argument: Establish true ELO or make it possible to play for money. And all arguments will cease.

+2 myhans

Bow to your new overlord!!!! uhmm points in the other direction

1. Highly suspicious especially with current ladder system. As predicted long ago, current rating system is insufficient since when more and more players mastered medium earth template, they all started to cheat the system. I am looking at community tab from time to time and I see ratings blown out of proportion, which truth be told makes it easier for me not to come back to competetive play :) (knowing that you basically have to cheat to get to #1 spot). overall I'd say without taking into account potential future rating inflation, on current settings on 1v1 ladder with more/less best play you should land ~2200, maybe stable 2250 would be possible, but 2300+? It's impossible given the settings and the nature of the game.

http://warlight.net/MultiPlayer?GameID=5616028
http://warlight.net/MultiPlayer?GameID=5616037
http://warlight.net/MultiPlayer?GameID=5672421
http://warlight.net/MultiPlayer?GameID=5779831
http://warlight.net/MultiPlayer?GameID=5790094
http://warlight.net/MultiPlayer?GameID=5802027

Since I am not active I don't know about all delayed games, but that ladder looks really disgusting now.

2. Among the ones you listed that may be the best argument, as long as every of those competitions is in fact competetive. Round robins seem to be the most convincing since there is no efficient way to postpone the games, thus settings of 20 league are very close to perfect. Unfortunately it does not take into consideration a long time you have to commit and more often than not people leave halfway through the tournament. Also why does Gnuff has the resume? Most live tournaments won =/= best performance in live tournaments since he also competed in most by far. If anyone I think Timinator and me were most consistent in live tournaments considering win rates (btw. I checked current stats, they are not correct).

3. Please

4. I do not know what MA is. LD can be easily attached to strategic, however games are even more reliant on picks. They are strategic, just less strategic. FFA? I don't really know much about that...

5. See argument 3

6. The analogy is not correct for a few reasons, the easiest one of them being objectivity. While in boxing there is no single moment before you win when you can be certain of winning (always possible to get countered by a lucky hook) in warlight there are plenty of positions which are technically winning. More than that, you can actually tell if the decisions were good or not regardless of opponent, which is the key difference. I agree that the competition is also important. For example Impaller became a warlight legend because of lack of real competition in his time, sort of a Paul Morphy of warlight. However I'd dare say it also prevented him from being a better player, not having to really

myhand+1, if games for money will be possible, I'm definitely coming back

7?
Let me share a little bit of my perspective on the subject. First, I'd like to know there are many similar discussions like that in the world of chess, those discussions primarily revived by our new world champion. For example:
http://www.chess.com/blog/smurfo/forgetting-bobbby
The advantage of chess is that there is a decent ELO system. The disadvantage is that it undergoes ELO inflation over the years. That makes comparisons of past and present players very difficult. Most disputes are not resolved since personal preferences are decided by subjective opinions, however since now after 200 years of developing chess theory we posess unprecedented computing power and strong chess programs, we can actually rank moves from best to worse with a very good degree of certainty. That allows for an objective comparison of the moves regardless of era. Of course some of the context is lost, player styles are not taken into consideration (computers will always prefer Capablanca's moves to Alekhine's) etc.. Warlight is very similar, however we do not posess computer programs that'd allow for objective evaluation of moves. The closest thing that could serve as a good AI would have to be a powerful neuron web, but it likely will never happen since it is very costly. Now with all that in mind we should ask ourselves what exactly is warlight in terms of game theory. By the very definition it is a strategic game. That allows us to search for some optimal strategies of at the very least Nash equilibrium in randomised strategies. Since all games we consider "strategic" are 1v1 or team games, then we should say that we are successful if we do not see any possible objective (regardless of opponent's strategy) improvement in our game and given our strategy we had >= 50% chance to win. And truth be told with enough warlight knowledge and a sharp mind we can do it in post-game analyssis or even during game. Experienced warlight players can very quickly discern good solid moves that are based in positional foundations from irresponsible risk taking. During my time here I only found one player that had that kind of objectivity similar to mine, hence I said he was the best player. However he got lazy and underperformed/got booted/dicked around for a while giving way for Gnuff to shine :). In others I always managed to find small inaccuracies, risky expansion (Salah), bad micro (Qi), playing too safe (zibik) playing too agressive (dunga) etc. Also on a separate note, those small inaccuracies might only buy you 5-10% of winning chances so they should not be absolutely decisive by any means, consistently good moves are mich more important which I learned the hard way by losing concentration in season 2 of 20 losing to dunga and Desert.

Overall only the most competetive players would be motivated enough to even try to find an objective way to determine who was all-time best. If you really want to find it, you should compare strategies, not players and the easiest way to do it is to play with them and learn how they think. Right now I don't even feel competent enough to say who was the all-time best being away from the game for so long, I'm sure many new great players rose to power :)

MA is Multi-Attack, Sze

Have all the forum arguments about who was best been straight faced all this time? I thought it was just gnuffles and jsa bickering and everyone else standing around sarcastically mocking them before going back to having fun.

I intuit who is best having played with them or watched their games as a side effect of trying to improve. I only play strat 1v1 therefore i judge "who is best" on their 1v1 performance. I noticed this and made light of it with sarcastic grandiosity. It was very entertaining for a while and now it seems to be getting in the way. I care about who is good only so that i can find players who will beat me or talk intelligently with me about wl. I suppose the BEST would be the one who beats me most soundly. ATM that is ruthless bastard, but there have been many. There was a time when gnuffone beat me 12/16 times in one night, and for the evening he was the best player, which is to say i wanted to play with him very much. He caused me much introspection and was the beginning of a huge overhaul in the way i play, now i have internalised his lessons.

I am currently doing this: "only the most competetive players would be motivated enough to even try to find an objective way to determine who was all-time best. If you really want to find it, you should compare strategies, not players and the easiest way to do it is to play with them and learn how they think." I think sze is right, except where he uses the words "objective" and "all time best" a theoretical abstraction that should be "current best".

Edited 3/5/2014 13:37:30

i don't expect a lot of people will understand the analogy: who is the best poker player?
- Phil Hellmuth: he has the most WSOP bracelet (13), 80% of wich in NLHE. So he might be the best NLHE Tounament player (aka - 1v1 ME), but he is being crushed in cash game nlhe and other type of poker. He is claiming to be to be the greatest player of all times
- Phil Ivey: only has 9 wsop bracelets, but has been crushing everyone both in online and live poker, both in cash game and tournament, and in every type of poker: NLHE, Omaha, stud, deuce to seven, mixed games..., for 15 years

You don't get to be the greatest player by being the best in only 1 specific type of game

Phil Hellmuth won most of his bracelets before the internet boom aka when texas hold'em was not nearly as popular as now. Nowadays it is practically impossible to win WSOP main event twice in a row (10 times more contestants, most of them pretty strong). He gets great tournament performance, because his playstyle is extremely effective against weak players, but anyone who was watching "Poker after dark" or similar regular events will quickly understand how he was outplay by Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan and the rest of the pack. Phil Hellmuth is a bit like Impaller had Impaller continued playing and not improved. Also, he has a much bigger ego than mine which says something. Ending with a simple questions, Phil Ivey won all his 9 bracelets after 2002, how many bracelets did Hellmuth win since then?

actually Phil Hellmuth is continuing to have a lot of success in tournament, he won 6 bracelet after 2002, including WSOPE main event in 2012 for 1.3M$, and finished 3 times runner-up in 2011. Everyone says that he only won that much bracelet because at the time no one knew how to play, but his results proves the critics wrong. He is a great nlhe tournament player, but he can't compete if you throw him against the top pros in cash game or any game that isn't nlhe

Impaller was better than Teddy. Teddy came back and dominated.

Impaller could come back and beat Gnuff in a best of series on 1v1 ME. When Impaller came back the last time, his level of play was at least as good as Gnuff's record breaking run. Did you watch Gnuff's six losses? Gnuff said.

Boxing analogy. Think in terms of rounds. If you compare WL games to boxing rounds, it makes more sense. Boxing has strategy and risk taking very similar to WL.

Game theory: All the programmers, mathematicians, and statisticians are good or great players. But the best players have backgrounds in social sciences. To make a computer beat top WL players, you need the computer to use intuition, to read the language of troop movements and deployments, and to play the player as well as the board. Sze, your strength is game theory. Understanding it helped you become a top player. But it also is your weakness: an overreliance on any theory means you are less able to rely on intuition and random guessing (which should throw off game theory calculations).

If game theory were so powerful, our head to head record would be different: you would have my winning record and I would have your losing record.

Edited 3/5/2014 15:12:33

I dont agree with this Qi, perfect game theory will always prevail against "feeling" players. I started with the poker analogy because poker and WL are very similar in lots of ways. Both have mathematical and psycological aspects. 10 years ago, everyone said poker was a game of adaptation, where you have to play the players as much as the cards & the board. Everyone said no computer could ever win long terme against top pros. A few months ago was released a program based solely on game theory optimal (GTO,based on Nash game theories) , and it has been crushing everyone for the past 6 months (of course a lot of people says it is rigged). Same thing happened with chess and backgammon programs, every masters were saying a computer can't beat the best humans, because of the psychological part of the game. Today people skills are measured through those programs. WL hasn't reach this level in term of game theory (and probably won't) so great "feeling" players can still be the bests. But in a vaccum game theory beats psychology

My "feelings" are based on reading hundreds of books on history and philosophy. War evolves in time and place. I see certain situations in games and think of Alexander the Great or Napoleon or certain historical battles. The strategies we use in WL are historical strategies. You can use game theory to innovate (in your own mind, because the strategies are new to you) or you can have a database of historically successful strategies and adopt and adapt them to WL (and the particularities of the board you are playing any given turn). Most of this I have internalozed to the point where most of my moves are based more on intuition and less on thought. If you want to consider this "feelings," I don't mind.

But the notion that game theory is the best approach to WL is not wise. How do you program a computer to read different maps and understand where is best to pick? At some point patterns from past games have to be used I assume. And that is no different than using actual history as a guide to WL. Patterns from past games is history, or art of war, not game theory.

The art of war is a science too. If a WL-playing computer were developed that could beat every player every time, I would say it mastered the art of war, not game theory.

Edited 3/5/2014 16:12:47

warlight has absolutely nothing to do with the "art of war". conquering a territory is determined on probability, not on your troops healthiness, spirit, the quality of equipment, their leadership, the resilience of the natives, weather, alliances shifts or any other factor real war have. The board is set at the begining of the game, and from this point every scenario can calculated and anticipated in theory. The thing is it is impossible for a human to play optimal game theory, human makes mistakes. And because human make mistakes, it is exploitable. And thit is where the psychological part of the game is important, to exploit your opponent mistakes. Game theory doesn't makes mistakes,it only choses the best theoretical moves for a given board. Of course an optimal game theory for Warlight doesn't exist yet, probably won't ever, but i can't see why there wouldn't be one in theory.

edit: by "feeling" i don't mean that in a bad way, what i mean by feeling is trying to get in the head of your opponent.

Edited 3/5/2014 16:33:31

Read 孫子兵法 in the original classical Chinese. Be open to not only what is explicitly mentioned but also pay attention to the Daoist and other strands of Chinese philosophy that Sunzi gets his words from. Next, keep these ideas in mind and apply them as best you can to your readings on war in other times and places. Lastly, try to apply these ideas to WL. If you did all that, you would disagree with your assessment of what the art of war is. Art of war is game theory plus military science, history, psychology, sociology and philosophy.

If you understand game theory so well, apply it to your games and win more. If you have the secret to winning, why sell yourself short?

Edited 3/5/2014 16:41:09

well i knew at some point my results would come up, that's what happens when someone lacks arguments for an abstract conversation.I guess you have trouble understanding the things i said, so i'll try to say it again so that you can understand. Human makes mistake, human are not machines. But human can understand how the machine works and can make the machine. Does it mean the programmer of said machine is better than the machine he has created? NO. Because the programmer is human and doesn't have the calculation capability of his machine. Human can get better by experience,by putting a lot of work into his game and try to get closer to optimal game theory, wich he will never be able to reach.

So of course you are eager to speak about me as a player and not about my ideas, because you are the great Qi, you've been around forever and think that your reputation gives you authority for everything you say. I'll respond this to you: No i don't know the optimal game theory for WL nor have the skills to creat it, and even if the optimal game theory for WL already existed, i don't have the time to try to master it. Try to humble yourself, nobody cares that your read the art of war in fucking chinese, or that you know all about Napoleon, especially because it isn't relevent to the conversation.

I've been playing warlight for 3 months, and the ladder for 2 months, so no i'm probably not as good as you are yet. There you go, you are the best Qi!

Edited 3/5/2014 17:32:59

I am the Great Qi. I have existed since time immemorial! Heed my words, little man! Bow before me!

I don't know who you are or your results/stats, and frankly I don't care. I was being facetious. Sze says he plays using game theory. I think it is simply a logical theory among many influences that give order and clarity to his thought process. Since I doubt anybody can apply pure game theory to WL, I jokingly asked you to do so, knowing full well nobody can.

Art of war is all encompassing. Machines require a man made brain, which requires a special language. Sure, game theory could be that language. But when you apply it to WL it is art of war. There is no pure game theory in WL. There can be pure art of war.

Chinese is relative to the conversation. If you read Art of War in Chinese and English, you would be amazed at how profound the Chinese is compared to the English. The translation loses so much. There is no strategic equivalent in the English language. But, since you seem to prefer cussing and simple assumptions about me, my ideas, my jokes, etc., I don't think foreign ideas especially suit your intellect.

So, let's go back to your first assumption: art of war does not exist, only game theory exists, and therefore game theory is the greatest way to win in WL, because WL is a game and game theory has the theory.