Web Tiles feature request: 2nd attempt

[Maximus]

This request was met with resistance before but I can't figure out why. It doesn't seem like that big a deal and certainly doesn't do any harm.

It would be great if good players were highlighted when they logged into a Web Tiles server. Being a sucky player myself, I'd like to know if the current players on the server were significantly better than I am (ie. they've won). Yeah, anyone who is currently in the Realm of Zot is better than me but by the time they get there they have gotten too far for me to learn anything useful. I'd like to know if someone who just started a game is someone worth watching.

Or, what about a rating system? Even if it's as simple as a ratio of wins to non-wins.

Last time I asked for this feature someone told me that the only player worth watching who plays Web Tiles is "bart." Two things: Bart doesn't play that often and whenever we happen to both be logged in, he's often well beyond the part of the game I have the most trouble on and so there's not much I can learn. Second, I think the definition of "good player" is relative. To me, anyone who has won the game a handful of times is a good player.

[ebarrett]

1. Not everyone who won a handful of times is a good player
2. Some good players have relatively low win rates
3. The definition of a "good player" being subjective is a good reason this shouldn't really be an official feature
4. Good players will most of the time be deep into the game because they spend more time winning (or getting close to winning) than losing
5. You can learn useful things from watching good players no matter where they are because the game never stops being about being generally smart in how you approach things whatever these things are, this is not a shooting game where you try to copy a superplay as best as you can

Also, there are a bunch of really good tiles players these days. And I think you can watch console games through tiles (and vice versa) on CAO and CSZO anyway.

[Maximus]

1. Not everyone who won a handful of times is a good player

Everyone who has won a handful of times is a better player than me. No offense, buy why would anyone care who other people choose to believe is a good player? I believe that players who have won a handful of games are, on average, better than players chosen at random. Do you disagree?

2. Some good players have relatively low win rates

Point taken. Maybe the rating system isn't such a good idea. But that doesn't mean having a simple on/off toggle indicating the "good" players is a bad idea. Even here on the forum certain posters are color coded to show that they are "good" players. Nobody seemed to think THAT was such a bad idea.

3. The definition of a "good player" being subjective is a good reason this shouldn't really be an official feature

First of all, just because the definition of a good player is subjective, doesn't mean that there are not objectively good players and objectively bad players. Again, players who have won some percentage of their games (whatever you want that percentage to be) are, on average, better than players chosen at random, unless your definition of "good" is absurd.

4. Good players will most of the time be deep into the game because they spend more time winning (or getting close to winning) than losing

I think I made it clear that I understood this and that it was a problem for me (and perhaps others) because I really want to see how good players handle the areas of the game I have the most trouble at, which is much earlier in the game.

5. You can learn useful things from watching good players no matter where they are because the game never stops being about being generally smart in how you approach things whatever these things are, this is not a shooting game where you try to copy a superplay as best as you can

Agreed but if, like you say, getting far in the game doesn't make you good, then I'm still stuck not knowing who the good players are without just guessing, right? And if, like you say, some good players have low win rates, then they won't be spending as much time winning.

Again, I don't understand the resistance. Especially for a feature that is seemingly easy to add and that doesn't change the core of the game in any way. I agree that creating a rating system invites all sorts of social problems that other online games have but I don't see how a simple on/off would lead to the same thing.

It's hard for me to imagine other bad players or newbies not wanting this feature. Heck, it could even come with an opt-in so you can turn the feature on only if you want to.

All due respect, but none of the reasons you've stated above are actually reasons why the addition of this feature would be bad for the game. You've only stated a bunch of personal opinions regarding who you believe is a good player and what you believe is worth learning from and what isn't.

[njvack]

Better than this is probably: hang out in #crawl on IRC, ask who you should be watching.

The barrier to cross for adding a feature is a lot higher than "not bad for the game" because someone has to actually do the work and make sure it keeps working in the future. I can't say for sure, but this smells nontrivial.

[JeffQyzt]

Also - there's just been a tournament. You could go look at the tourney logs to see who did well and search them out.

[jwb]

Not everyone wants to hang out on IRC though - between the bots announcing random stuff, people querying the learnDB, and so on, it's a rather busy place.

And if the point isn't some kind of rating system, but to give a quick and dirty distinction in more and less experienced players, it seems fair enough to me.

The game already keeps track of a lot of statistics - there's a huge public webpage with winrates and average scores and all kinds of info on everyone. Not practical to check player's experience though, since it brings the webbrowser to it's knees for minutes while it works to display the thing. But the info is there, and I for one have difficulties imagining where the difficulties would be. Just saying.

[cerebovssquire]

All due respect, but none of the reasons you've stated above are actually reasons why the addition of this feature would be bad for the game. You've only stated a bunch of personal opinions regarding who you believe is a good player and what you believe is worth learning from and what isn't

Really, you should stop arguing from the perspective of "this doesn't hurt the game" and more from "this helps the game", it's better for the game for obvious reasons. In regards to IRC, just PM the bots (/msg [botname] [query]) if you want to ask for stastistics without being disturbed. In regards to the "Counsellor" title, it isn't given to good players, but people who give consistently good advice, and for a small community like this, that is easily established (in particular, there is only a small number of regulars). The servers, on the other hand, have tons of good players, because many good players don't visit the Tavern (but prefer IRC).

[Maximus]

I figured it was obvious I thought the suggestion would be good for the game, at least in the respect of helping bad players hook up with good players. A lot of suggestions have good effects that are off-set by other, bad effects. My point was that this is not one of those suggestions.

If you're going to say why an idea should not be implemented, you need to show why doing so would be neutral, at best, and detrimental, at worst and so my retort was aimed at showing that indeed the original suggestion was not "bad for the game." Meaning that, on balance, it did something positive without adding anything negative.

[cerebovssquire]

Uh, where did you get the idea that an idea is going to be implented unless reasons can be brought against it? Just because I can't prove that there isn't an invisible unicorn in your room doesn't mean I believe in it - as in the case of implementation, the burden of proof (or convincing) is on you. And in this case, the statistics are readily available on the Crawl homepage and IRC, easy to look into. There is even a "goodplayers" category on IRC, specified as "10 wins or more" - I guess displaying the number of wins next to a username isn't too horrible an idea, but none the less it doesn't make a good player, and some people have wins spread across many accounts, and this would ignore factors like winrate. Honestly, just use IRC, there everything is shown nicely (including stuff like alt accounts, winrates, and in some cases, information about cool stuff the player has done), and if for some reason you don't like talking to IRC users just PM the bots. If you dislike IRC still for some reason, it is on the akrasiac server's homepage, and tourney information is on seleniac.org - I don't classify this idea as detrimental, but instead as completely superfluous.

[Maximus]

Uh, where did you get the idea that an idea is going to be implented unless reasons can be brought against it?

Jesus, nevermind. I didn't have that idea. I was merely responding to the original retort.

I'm not a coder but this would be as simple as storing an array containing usernames and a number indicating the number of wins the user accrued on that particular server. Each time a user won, increment the number by one. If the number was above a certain threshold, print their name in gold or whatever, instead of the usual color. Done.

Just logging into a Web Tiles server and immediately seeing who the "good players" are is significantly more convenient that requiring someone to log into Web Tiles and then go one by one down the list of current games and check their stats on another server in some other database or whatever the f.

*I* would find the original feature request to be extremely helpful. If you're a coder and want to make at least one person happy (and apparently piss off a whole host of other people whose sensibilities would be offended), please implement this. Otherwise, don't.

[edlothiol]

I'm not a coder but this would be as simple as storing an array containing usernames and a number indicating the number of wins the user accrued on that particular server. Each time a user won, increment the number by one. If the number was above a certain threshold, print their name in gold or whatever, instead of the usual color. Done.

I don't want to go into details with this, but no, it's not that easy. The win statistics of a player aren't that readily accessible to the code serving the lobby page. It would certainly not be impossible or even very hard to implement, but I'm not going to do it anytime soon.

[crate]

FWIW "goodplayers" has been nuked recently, probably because it was not a very useful list of names any more. Greatplayers and greaterplayers still exist.

You are quite capable of finding out players who are good on your own if you use the CAO scoring pages or ask the IRC bots. With cszo and cao allowing you to watch console games from tiles and tiles games from console you have a larger list of players who you can watch with your preferred graphics than ever before.

If you think this idea is good enough to implement then you are free to attempt to implement it, but I doubt that any of the devteam thinks it is worth pursuing.

[Baldu]

Practical answer:
- Check tournament results page at:
http://seleniac.org/crawl/tourney/12b/overview.html
- Check out the 2 webtile servers that host the majority of the games for players on list:
http://crawl.dobrazupa.org
https://tiles.crawl.develz.org

[TwilightPhoenix]

Not sure I'd consider the tournament results page to be too practical. For the most part, yes, but there's some high-ranked players with really low win rates simply because they picked up the Swamp rune 80 times out of 300 games and then somehow pulled a 15-rune win. That and there's no doubt some very good players with low rankings because they didn't play as much as they could have.