I don't think Szeweningen advertised any different than he actually rated the templates.

Obviously, I disagree. Moving on....

The issue of this is that his opening posts are relatively vague, leaving him with the power to grade the templates as he wished.

On this I really disagree. He left the criteria *very* open, which means he *does not* have the power/right to arbitrarily tighten/close-up those criteria later on. Especially when he writes things like this: " i'll let the creators decide what they think is strategic and what is not."

That is pretty much saying, "Hey guys, show me whatever you got. If you can show why you think it's strategic, I'll go by your standards."

Now, I happened to interpret that more narrowly, as "I guess it's up to the scenario maker to put forward a good case [for strategicness]," but that's just my own interpretation, a personal challenge to myself to try to make a 100% luck template that was clearly strategic in some way. But some other participant needn't have adopted that narrower interpretation. They might have taken Szew's post at its word; literally, "creators decide what they think is strategic and what is not."

To then go on to judge it according to "Well, actually, what you think is strategic is entirely irrelevant, and really it's just up to my personal whims that I happen to be feeling today," is *changing the deal* between contest host and contest participant.

If he had originally said, "it's up to my personal whims that I happen to be feeling that day", then no one here would have a right to complain if he did exactly that. But he didn't write that originally. Instead, he gave very broad and open terms. That's not giving *himself* free rein, that's giving the *participants* free rein. To later renege on that comes across as a 'cheating' move, a broken promise.

Now, let me make it clear that I don't actually think all the participants should have been given free rein on what 'strategic' means, and I also don't think that Szew actually *meant* to give them free rein. I'm saying that what he wrote *could be interpreted that way*, and at the very least it implies a much more open interpretation of what 'strategic' might mean than the interpretations given by you or Beren, or for that matter, by the actual judges on the day of the stream (personally I felt MoD was most 'in the spirit' of the original posting, though; I find myself much more in agreement with his votes and reasonings than the others').

I think a better rating system should be put in place next time

Honestly, I wouldn't have a problem if he/whoever just openly said, "it'll be based on my own personal judgment of 'strategic'". Fair enough. I would be less likely to try to submit something to such a contest, though, unless perhaps it was someone whose judgments tended to be ones I highly valued. What attracted me to the contest in the first place was the openness of what could qualify as 'strategic', especially in connection with using different/unusual settings, which he also made clear (well it was *written* clearly, anyway): "I really don't want to put in specific rules for settings.... possibly some things we think of that are not strategic on a general principle, may work in a very specific situation.... Maybe there will be some other new and original ideas or a mixture of those."

That's pretty damn open! It's in stark contrast to Beren's "I don't think using a setting for the sake of using it qualifies as a reason to use it," philosophy of what settings should be allowed.

I'm not against a more sophisticated rating system. My main concern would simply be consistency. If you say you're going to judge by criterion X, then you should follow through on that and judge by criterion X. If you say that X will not be strict, then you shouldn't later judge X strictly. It's about keeping one's word, and "managing expectations".

If these players had received good scores without any reasons, I highly doubt we would see as many complaints.

This does not contradict what I said, though. I didn't say that "any score, given without reasons, is what people are complaining about", I said "If good reasons had been given for low scores, and the scores reflected those reasons, I don't think anyone would have complained about it. It's when *bad* reasons are used to justify low scores that people feel cheated, betrayed, insulted, etc."

I think it is not the players rating the templates that are flawed, but rather the rating system itself.

Maybe others feel that way, perhaps, I don't know. But I suspect they felt more like I felt, which is more about the *changing* of the expected criteria of judgment to something entirely unexpected that is more at the heart of it. (Also, I think others felt it more strongly than I did, because I really didn't care or expect to get a decent/winning score in the first place. I had less emotion invested in the outcome. But I *did* expect to get a *good reason* for whatever score I got. I may not have *complained* if I got a high score for no good reason, but I certainly wouldn't have had any respect/pride in such a meaningless score; I would have probably suspected the judges just didn't really care about the template and were just trying to 'be nice' with a meaninglessly high score, kinda like those 'participation' ribbons they give little kids in kiddie competitions.)

Again, if Szew had said up front, "This contest will be judged by my personal judgments/whims alone", and I had submitted my template and gotten 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10, or any number in between, I would have been fine with that because, hey, I 'signed up' to get Szew's personal judgment, and even if his reasons were dumb, that's fine, those are his own personal reasons. I might lose respect for his opinions in such a case, but I wouldn't complain about the contest. What's to complain about?

It's the switcheroo that stung. The bait-and-switch (or so it seemed from my/our POV).

In many cases, they used solid reasoning

They just didn't use the same *kind* of reasoning they advertised they were going to use.

Thx JSA! I really appreciate that you detaily analysed my template. And I am really glad that you think that it does work! I hope you will find more when we try it in 1v1 game. Three things to discus now:

1) Local Deployment - yeah, I dont like it too. But the main thought behind this template was to allow each player to develop only one territory (out of 12 randomly given) and the LD (combined with low initial income) is nescessary to implement it. Of course LD has conisiderable drawbacks (turns take longer for instace) but it also has it own strenghts (like the fact that one have to plan his attacks in advance by gathering troops in certain areas) which may add for strategic value.

2) Replayability - my main aim was not to awe community by "look how crazy template I have made!". The reason for implemanting randomly given territories was to ensure every game looks different (the whole rest of this template was then designed to reduce the luck factor from random distribution which was mainly achieved by allowing to develop only one (or maximally two) territories). Therefore on every game players start with different set of randomly given territories out of which they choose the best one to develop, which is also besed on initial decisions of their enemies (picking phase is "open" due to spy card given at the start and lasts practically 3 turns- it is ment to allow player to choose his starting territory based on the information what his opponent is planing). Therefore I think that this template should not suffer from reduced replayability. The main problemm here be the map though.

3) The map I have choosen worked well in 4players FFA's played on this template, but only lately I have realised that it is not perfect for 1v1 - it lacks "around the world" interconnections (like from the left to the right edge). When the number of players was greater it was not the problem, as participants naturally tried to avoid starting in the middle of the map (in order not to end up between two enemies). Things look different in 1v1 - since there is only one enemy, players tend to avoid corners because if they were "cut off" there from the rest of their map by their enemy, this could reduce thier potential to develop This favours starting close to the middle part of the map which in turn decrases the number of potential strategies and decreases the replayability (a bit). Ill look for another map though to solve that issue (any suggestions?)

Edited 12/5/2015 09:40:04

I wrote:

I don't think any of those with complaints are actually complaining about their scores. They are complaining about the *reasoning* (or, more accurately, the *lack* of reasoning (stemming from not actually trying them out)) that went into those judgments.

@JSA:
Okay, I think I now understand why you wrote what you wrote in response to this. I probably used wording/phrasing that was unclear and didn't communicate what I really meant.

When I said "lack of reasoning", I didn't mean literally "no reasons were given". I meant "reasons were given but they were not 'reasonable'; i.e. the person giving the 'reasons' was not actually 'reasoning' well; i.e. there was a lack of 'reason', not a lack of 'reasons'."

Hope that clarifies, and hopefully shows the connection to my later emphasis on 'bad reasons' as opposed to 'good reasons'.

Edited 12/5/2015 09:42:16