Kragg said:

If this ain't trolling then why are you falling for every flamebait I use? Rigth BigV ?

OMG i'm a uber-nerd-troll. I'm going to kill myself. So i can be an Emo-Troll.

Maybe Troll Vomit?

And where's the whine about bolt thrower? Seriously, if you're so sure that FFG has made a mistake start a new thread about cancelling this FAQ and if you're right many people will support you (pun not intended...).

I think archer boyz are OP, we must nerf them.

ddm5182 said:

Words to live by.

ddm5182 said:

I think you are wrong about a single right answer (though that may be why you put it in quotations), and about one optimal line to play, it is an unknowable thing. This isn't Chess where you are afforded perfect knowledge. Every piece is not on the board with clear understanding that each adjustment to position leads to potentially multiple paths to a checkmate but often only one which is the shortest, or the most assured based on the moves your opponent made before. Never knowing what cards your opponent has in their hand, will draw from their deck or whether placing it in one zone or another would have resulted in a different outcome means no person can deduce the true optimal line of play. At best you can play a few thousand games exploring different tactical choices based on the cards drawn and start to get an idea of it.

Part of the problem is just how probability works. We can work out what the probabilities of any given card being drawn is based on how many cards are in the deck that are not that card and how many versions are, but until you start playing games counted in the hundreds if not thousands you won't see that number approached.

We can see this with genetics, the odds are that one out of every two babies will be a girl. But only in a very large population will close to half the children born be girls and half boys. In any given family there may be eight girls and one boy.

Each side of a die has a one-in-six chance of landing face-up. Based on these odds a computer can calculate the average outcome of a given number of throws. Because dice land in an unpredictable, random way, however, the average outcome predicted by the odds and the actual outcome are sometimes very different – particularly over a small number of throws. But over thousands of throws, fluctuations tend to average out.

This demonstrates the laws of probability: the more times you repeat a procedure with a random outcome, the closer the average of your results to a long-term or theoretical average.

What all of this boils down to is that the discrepancies between the empirical testing of one groups playing something and another groups playing that exact same deck, against the exact same decks is going to vary for any number of reasons, including but not limited to just "luck of the draw." Unless each player plays following the exact same strategy with no variance against the exact same decks, played exactly the same with no variance, over a thousand games, PER specific match-up, there is no way to accurately tell what the ideal play is and how a given deck is going to perform over time. IT is entirely possible that every instance of a deck being played within one playgroup is in fact an anomaly and that another playgroups experiences are truly fitting the average.

Until someone devises a program that uses an AI to play both sides of a match-up a thousand or more times we're all just going off of gut and our personal experiences which need to be recognized as both subjective and questionable... and that is part of what makes these games fun, not knowing if you are making the optimal decision on what deck to bring, how you built it, what you will face, how those decks are built, and how you both play them, and of course what cards show up. As soon as you believe that you know the answer to those questions, that you have the best deck and know the optimal line of play, the fun goes away... because why bother playing the game until new cards come out and add osme possible variation in the match-ups.

I'm certainly not going to tell you how to play the game, but I'd posit that your approach actually leads to greater dissatisfaction without any greater end result than players who constantly approach the game as if it was open with multiple decks sharing the top level and multiple pths to any given victory. Just something to consider.

You were right as to why I put "right" in quotation marks. I'm oversimplifying for the sake of making the point.

Obviously the game is far too complex to actually solve given any reasonable amount of resources and time. That doesnt mean there isnt a solution though. My goal is to get as close as possible. That doesn't mean I only ever play & tune one deck; on the contrary, in order to find the best deck I have to play & tune *all* of the decks, or at least as many as can be reasonably assumed to be competitive (and probably a few that arent) each time we get a new cardpool. Optimal deck selection is a function both of the internal power/consistency of a given deck and of the expected field you would play against - as above, a problem that has a solution even if it is both hypothetical and unrealistic that we would ever have enough resources & time to prove it.

Same point for technical playskill. We may not know the right answer, but there is a right answer, and we can strive to get closer to it as we learn and discuss the game. (In this case, "right" translates to "highest EV line of play" or "most likely to lead to a win").

Does all this make sense? I'll freely admit that, from some povs, I have less "fun" playing the game this way. In fact, the game may not even be designed to play this way, e.g. the designers may not give a crap how balanced the meta is, trusting to informal player contracts to keep playgroups balanced. To that, all I can say is: oh well. That's how I'm wired; I dervive my fun from solving the puzzle. We'll all be better off if we respect that there are multiple approaches to the game and none is more or less valid than another. (Appreciate your quoting that bit of my post too).

Yeah, I get where you are coming from. I don't look to try and reach perfection in something that one could never know whether they had achieved their goal. Literally you could have already run across and dismissed the best deck and means of playing it because probability ran against you for fifty or sixty games (if anyone is interested I can give examples of how easy this is to do with some computer simulations of a MUCH simpler means of generating random yet finite results). Not saying you have mind you, just that the never knowing makes the quest pointless to me, now.

I did used to play Magic the way you play this game... I just got bored with it (this is also how we are wired differently, I am not trying to state I'm on some more "elevated plane" or any crap like that, just illustrating differences). It was too easy to build broken decks that just ran over everyone if you had the money to spend so I started restricting my expenditures, and then eventually just stopped purchasing on the second market entirely.

I have much more fun now taking decks that others consider substandard or break "rules" of deck building and still beating my opponents.

I'd rather look at the cards, get a feel for what would be a fun deck and as an intellectual exercise build and then refine that deck single deck until I can get the results I want, and then I set it aside and work on something new. This usually involves 2-3 months of building, tweaking, testing, re-tweaking, and re-testing adding and removing cards until I'm beating my opponents about 5 to 2. This includes my own learning curve of playing the deck as well as I get closer to my end goal my opponents specifically tech-ing their decks against mine. When I can get it to 5:2 despite this meta-gaming I'm ready to declare myself the "victor" of that puzzle and move on. The decks that I care most about though are those who I can't seem to push past 2:5. I don't just fix on those decks I fixate on them. They are the challenge. How can I improve my own play and tweak those decks to get it to a 5:5? 5:4? The holy grail of 5:2? Admittedly it is pretty much an arbitrary ratio, but beating someone at more than two to one reliably and regularly is as close as I can get to knowing I'm there without making my regular opponents want to punch me in the face and burn my deck.

I never give up on any deck. I never dismiss a deck. I only truly set it aside when I've tuned it to an inch of its life and my opponents no longer want to play it.

My playgroup is about half competitive players and half social players, and that is a mix that I enjoy. If it was all about taking the proven top-decks and throwing them at each other all the time I'd get bored quickly because the fun social players would leave.

So how is in to programm Monte Carlo for WHI?