RR and live games

[Chaqa]

Is there any thought on RR and live games being a bit touchy? I had missed one phase yesterday due to memorial day stuff in a regular game (mea culpa), and then I missed two in a live game just now due to something coming up and my RR has plummeted from 100% to 75%. I get the idea, but are live games fair to be included, especially so harshly?

Is missing three phases (two in a live game) really adequate to say I am only 75% reliable?

[Durga]

Yeah my RR is yikes rn

[FlaviusAetius]

Same sorta thing happened to me. They're looking at improving or adopting a new system for live games. Right now the current idea though is that you shouldn't join live games with no excused turns. Which sadly are none.
I've mainly stopped joining live games for this reason ;(

[Chaqa]

I'm someone who's played hundreds of live games - and while it's unfortunate, missed turns DO happen, somewhat frequently. Sometimes things come up in five minute intervals and you can't always account for it over the course of 2-4 hours.

[FlaviusAetius]

Yes! Games sometimes last a LOT longer than I expect, and it forces me to begin multi-tasking, then I get lost in what Im multi-tasking in, and the game completely escapes my mind.
I just think there should maybe be separate RR rating for the two, with live games having more leniency.

[jmo1121109]

What's your proposal for live games instead?

[Chaqa]

Well, I think having a hard minimum of 1 excuse for live games might be reasonable, as it's pretty likely anyone will miss at least one phase in a live game on average. Outside that, perhaps split the RR between live (less than 12 hours/phase perhaps) and non-live (others).

Live games could work with a much more lenient amount of misses before penalties, and maybe not have as severe 10/12% penalty hits against misses?

I'd need to think some more about it if a different system would be better, though.

[jmo1121109]

I can make changes for live, my main concerns are

1. not making them take longer then they do with even 0 excuses delaying it with some phase resets.

2. still having some discouragement for CD's, specifically, from preventing someone pretty quickly from going CD, taking back over, delaying, taking back over, going cd, taking back over, on repeat causing a never ending game. That's currently only possible 3 times before you hit that 4th unexcused and then you can't do it anymore because you're temp banned. And from there on out you can't do it at all.

I could add a column called liveGameMissedTurn and just have it be true if it happened in a live game and make it so those missed turns only have a hit to base % and don't count toward temp ban overall, but will still result in a 24 hour temp ban each time someone abuses it? But I'd want someone playing in live games to come up with proposals instead of me just blindly stabbing at it.

[Chaqa]

Let me think about it a bit. I'll PM some other live game frequents and see what they think too.

[ubercacher16]

I agree that the system needs to be tweaked for live games. Not sure how to do so though.

[Carl Tuckerson]

What are the issues y'all are seeking to resolve exactly?

jmo, what are the knobs that can be tuned under the current RR system? (e.g. minimum/maximum number of excused turns)
Also thanks for reaching out and opening the floor to live players, very cool to have admins willing to listen to the playerbase on issues like these.

I've enjoyed the new system greatly as-is but am not attached to it, and would like to help bridge any divide in sentiments on the system and provide feedback on potential system improvements.

[FlaviusAetius]

I think the main problems right now are two-fold;
1) Live games are lasting too long(due to the phases continually being extended)
2) Severe RR deductions for things that happen quite often in live games(missing turns)

I think the best solution is to have separate ratings for both live and regular games. And for the live one having less harsh deductions
The timing aspect is a tricky one to pass, the main problem is people not readying their orders in build phases and retreat phases

[Foxcastle]

One small change for live games that could help make up some time would be to not un-ready other players. That way when someone is late, they can just finish up their orders and hit ready and the game moves on.

[Carl Tuckerson]

On the subject of time, the issue is really that people don't Ready orders in my experience. Gunboats do take a while sometimes, but I am very confident the extensions due to NMRs aren't the main culprit. If you're setting the game to allow one excused missed turn per player, then an individual player can only extend the game by at most 10 minutes before being kicked from the game. That doesn't seem like the reason games take an hour or more longer than one would expect (which is roughly my guess as to why they do, from my own experience).

To that end I think the few minutes saved per game from setting players to Ready instead of Save wouldn't do much. And if people are hitting Ready, then it's probably actively good to set them to Save instead of Ready, so that the game won't progress without them having an opportunity to change orders in light of an NMR. Part of the reason for the new system was to mitigate the imbalances created by players leaving abruptly by making sure everyone knew that the player had left or NMRed.

Gunboats do take some time but I think the main culprit is the players and not the new system. Unfortunately I don't see a realistic solution to that on the site's side. I think it is just on us to encourage people to Ready as a policy.

~~~~~

On the subject of the penalty, I have a question--what exactly do we intend different reliability ratings to communicate to people who are creating games? Not to be obtusely deconstructive, but on its own, a 70% RR vs a 30% RR vs a 90% RR doesn't really "mean" much--it tells you that the 90% guy misses orders less often than the 70% guy and the 30% guy, but that's just a comparison between players. What does it "mean" to have a "70%" RR? Is that "reasonably reliable but prone to missing a phase every now and then"? Is that "misses 30% of his orders"?

Chaqa offhandedly addressed this in his OP, asking if missing three phases recently makes him "only 75% reliable." Does it? Is that even what RR is intending to represent? I don't actually know how to answer this question.

I can't even tell you why I do this, but I read RR like someone's grades in school. Someone with a 90+% RR is golden. 75-89% is reliable enough, prone to occasional absences but good enough for most games, and probably the errors are in good faith when they occur. 65-74% is borderline to me and anything beneath 65% is dicey. I have often wondered why people start RR50% or RR60% games because I don't see how that gates unreliable players off at all. RR70% is what I normally set when I bother with the setting.

But there's nothing inherent about RR that makes my set of interpretations correct. It is ultimately an arbitrary bar, and I can't even promise you I'm completely consistent with that set of groupings.

I think that question has to be addressed before we can talk about tuning the per-miss penalty though... how are we to know what the penalty should be without knowing what we are intending the penalty to represent?

~~~

Regarding live vs nonlive games, I think this is another issue that's best handled by the users. In the acknowledgment that live games are more prone to people getting distracted and missing a turn, just set more excused turns, or set a lower RR threshold for playing. It seems to me that the tools already exist and maybe we aren't optimizing them and that's the crux of the issue. I am not sure that live games are so substantively different from nonlive games that having separate penalties or even separate RR systems for each type of game is necessary, and each has an additional problem. With separate penalties, the information that RR communicates becomes muddled; a guy with 90% RR who only plays live games has a different record of missing turns than a guy with 90% RR who only plays nonlive games. And with separate systems, we add a lot of extra work to the devs.

~~~

That is my 2c on the issues so far. I am especially interested in resolving the second one ("what does RR communicate and what do the different values mean?").

[Swede03]

I agree. The same thing happened to me. Also, I think that RR should be based on percentage of phases missed. I play a lot of games, and so I have missed a few phases, but my RR is 65% because I lose 11% for each miss regardless of how many I don't miss. For example: Player 1 plays in 2 games and misses a phase in one of them. His RR is still 89%. Player 2 plays in 60 games and misses a phase in three of them. His RR is 66%. This doesn't seem very fair to me

[New England Fire Squad]

On the subject of time, the issue is really that people don't Ready orders in my experience. Gunboats do take a while sometimes, but I am very confident the extensions due to NMRs aren't the main culprit. If you're setting the game to allow one excused missed turn per player, then an individual player can only extend the game by at most 10 minutes before being kicked from the game. That doesn't seem like the reason games take an hour or more longer than one would expect (which is roughly my guess as to why they do, from my own experience).

To that end I think the few minutes saved per game from setting players to Ready instead of Save wouldn't do much. And if people are hitting Ready, then it's probably actively good to set them to Save instead of Ready, so that the game won't progress without them having an opportunity to change orders in light of an NMR. Part of the reason for the new system was to mitigate the imbalances created by players leaving abruptly by making sure everyone knew that the player had left or NMRed.

Gunboats do take some time but I think the main culprit is the players and not the new system. Unfortunately I don't see a realistic solution to that on the site's side. I think it is just on us to encourage people to Ready as a policy.

~~~~~

On the subject of the penalty, I have a question--what exactly do we intend different reliability ratings to communicate to people who are creating games? Not to be obtusely deconstructive, but on its own, a 70% RR vs a 30% RR vs a 90% RR doesn't really "mean" much--it tells you that the 90% guy misses orders less often than the 70% guy and the 30% guy, but that's just a comparison between players. What does it "mean" to have a "70%" RR? Is that "reasonably reliable but prone to missing a phase every now and then"? Is that "misses 30% of his orders"?

Chaqa offhandedly addressed this in his OP, asking if missing three phases recently makes him "only 75% reliable." Does it? Is that even what RR is intending to represent? I don't actually know how to answer this question.

I can't even tell you why I do this, but I read RR like someone's grades in school. Someone with a 90+% RR is golden. 75-89% is reliable enough, prone to occasional absences but good enough for most games, and probably the errors are in good faith when they occur. 65-74% is borderline to me and anything beneath 65% is dicey. I have often wondered why people start RR50% or RR60% games because I don't see how that gates unreliable players off at all. RR70% is what I normally set when I bother with the setting.

But there's nothing inherent about RR that makes my set of interpretations correct. It is ultimately an arbitrary bar, and I can't even promise you I'm completely consistent with that set of groupings.

I think that question has to be addressed before we can talk about tuning the per-miss penalty though... how are we to know what the penalty should be without knowing what we are intending the penalty to represent?

~~~

Regarding live vs nonlive games, I think this is another issue that's best handled by the users. In the acknowledgment that live games are more prone to people getting distracted and missing a turn, just set more excused turns, or set a lower RR threshold for playing. It seems to me that the tools already exist and maybe we aren't optimizing them and that's the crux of the issue. I am not sure that live games are so substantively different from nonlive games that having separate penalties or even separate RR systems for each type of game is necessary, and each has an additional problem. With separate penalties, the information that RR communicates becomes muddled; a guy with 90% RR who only plays live games has a different record of missing turns than a guy with 90% RR who only plays nonlive games. And with separate systems, we add a lot of extra work to the devs.

~~~

That is my 2c on the issues so far. I am especially interested in resolving the second one ("what does RR communicate and what do the different values mean?").

Gunboats typically have a phase length of 5 minutes - with zero excused turns this is only a 10 minute delay, and that happening 2-3 times isn't the end of the world. Press games are usually 7 minute phases, and there was a suggestion that was being taken seriously to make 0 excused phases impossible for live - this would mean that any nmr would delay the game by 21 minutes at minimum in a 7 minute phase game; now that happening 2-3 times would suck. The time issue is pretty real for live press games. Gunboat at least I can dick around on the internet while I wait.

[Squigs44]

There are two types of people in this debate
Type 1: Games take too long because other people are unreliable
Type 2: I get penalized too much when I am unreliable

Why don't all the type 1 people play together, and not have delays, and all the type 2 people play together and not worry about RR? RR is meant to sort type 1s from type 2s.

You can't make both complaints either. You cant complain about other people being unreliable when you yourself are unreliable.

The only changes that should be made to RR is if you think the rating is inaccurate. The point about the straight 11% being too harsh on long term players is a good point there

[Carl Tuckerson]

Gunboats typically have a phase length of 5 minutes - with zero excused turns this is only a 10 minute delay, and that happening 2-3 times isn't the end of the world. Press games are usually 7 minute phases, and there was a suggestion that was being taken seriously to make 0 excused phases impossible for live - this would mean that any nmr would delay the game by 21 minutes at minimum in a 7 minute phase game; now that happening 2-3 times would suck. The time issue is pretty real for live press games. Gunboat at least I can dick around on the internet while I wait.

I forgot press live games exist, mea culpa there.
I do think zero excused missed phases should be permitted for live games still. Seems like another situation where people who don't want to wait and aren't worried about missing orders can start no-excuses games and people who want the breathing room and don't mind the wait can start 1+ excuse games.

There are two types of people in this debate
Type 1: Games take too long because other people are unreliable
Type 2: I get penalized too much when I am unreliable

[...]

The only changes that should be made to RR is if you think the rating is inaccurate. The point about the straight 11% being too harsh on long term players is a good point there

The issue I see is that it's not clear what an accurate rating looks like, and so it's difficult to say that the rating is inaccurate. How do we know a penalty of 11% is too harsh?
Look at my admittedly arbitrary reading of RR in my last post. An 11% drop for someone previously at 100% puts them just below what I would consider "golden," at the high end of "reliable but prone to occasional absences." The penalty doesn't hurt them at all in my view of what RR means. I don't evaluate people with 89% RR meaningfully differently from people with 100% RR.
Someone previously at 75%--the low end of "reliable"--goes to 64%--"dicey" and "unreliable." I do tend to see those as distinctly different.
Maybe, under my reading, the penalty is fine: people who get one penalty against them aren't meaningfully treated differently, people who get a penalty with a record that's already blemished might get a second glance before getting into a game. Or maybe it's too harsh because there aren't a lot of discrete steps.
Maybe other people don't care about the difference between 65% and 100%, in which case three penalties doesn't affect them. Or maybe some people have a low tolerance and view even 90% as unreliable, in which case a single 11% penalty could be very harsh.

It's up to the players to give meaning to discrete values or ranges of values for RR so that this conversation can even be had. It seems to me that the current system isn't matching everyone's intuition for what RR "should" look like, but at least so far there hasn't been a concerted effort to answer the question of what that intuition is.

[Claesar]

Exactly, it's up to the players to give meaning to the RR. I wouldn't join a game with less than 90%RR requirement right now, even though I can't myself..

[FlaviusAetius]

My rating is 65%, this is due to 3 games, all live, all of which I immediately joined back and finished the game to the end, and one in which I went on to even be cut into the draw.