Personally, I’m in favour of the “transparent model”, where private diplomatic discussion between the players is visible to the referee and spectators. My feeling is that a large part of the interest of this game is in these “asides” where the audience knows more than the players. Continuing with the “dramatic analogy”, I agree that “ghost players” shouldn’t have bearing on the game.
I think the players should even be encouraged to write private asides about their strategy, alliances, planned betrayals etc. for the benefit of the Kibitz Garden. I certainly intend to :3
A central part of the game also seems to be in how information from various sources can be combined and abbreviated to be represented to the audience in a way that conveys a meaningful, concise, and entertaining picture of what’s going on.
Personally, I agree that this would be nice, but with the way this forum works it becomes very clunky to do this. Probably with the current 8 players, there will be at least 40 to 60 or so private chats to follow. I don’t want spectators to influence the game, which is a larger risk if they are invited to the private chats. And to be honest, I’m not sure if I have the time to copy-paste everything from the private discussions myself. It should also be said, that I had some very long discussions during last game, so keeping up with the sheer amount of discussion may be difficult as well.
Just having 8 players submit a summary / kibitz log / Malkovich log is a lot easier to deal with for me, and a lot more insightful than having to follow all the discussions.
Last game I did explain my thought-process in my Malkovich log a couple of times. But I believe only Vsotvep’s Malkovich log was made visible to the kibitzers.
Sorry, it wasn’t clear to me that you wanted that Malkovic log shared while the game was going on, or if you were intending to publish it later. When HHG started that, they did not have me added, so it was just their private notes. Later, they added me so that I could give you access to see their old notes. However, even though I was a part of that thread, I assumed that it was to remain private notes, to be released after the game was over.
In the game thread, I spoke of both a “Malkovic log” and “Kibitz log”, where the former would only be published after the game, and up to the player to do so, while the Kibitz logs were to be sent to me directly with the clear intention to share with the spectators.
As for explicit Kibitz logs, only @Vsotvep wrote extensively, while @Haze_with_a_Z submitted just one entry. The other players did not send me any.
For this upcoming game, I plan to write in a kibitz log, and I hope others do as well.
Kibitz Logs are a concept that I introduced for the first Diplomatic Go game. Basically, players could write log entries that would be shared with the spectators in the kibitz thread just for the sake allowing the spectators to follow along with what might be going on behind the scenes in private negotiations.
So the option I didn’t think about but which maybe works better is rather than players gaining points for helping to capture stones, instead the player whose stone is captured loses points per stone captured.
For the first game we used area scoring (so exactly the same as on the go variants server), for the second we’re effectively using stone scoring (almost the same as area scoring, except for a group tax and some other minor strategic implications). The idea of captured stones being minus points (for the captured player) is part of both, although it’s not explicitly spelled out, it’s just a natural effect of counting stones on the board as points
I suppose that makes sense on the one hand that if your stones are removed, they are no longer points. Is it exactly equivalent to a territory scoring where you lose points?
Normally in two player go whether Black gains a point for capturing or White loses a point when the stone is captured is equivalent, since the score difference doesn’t change.
I’m imagining a case with equal scores and maybe a ko.
Area Scoring
Black and Blue have 56 points. White has at least 55 points (could be 56 or 57), it all depends on the ko.
Cases:
White connects, Black 56 - White 57 -Blue 56 – White wins by 1 point.
Black captures and connects (somehow). Black 58 - White 55 - Blue 56, – Black wins by 2 points.
Blue captures White and Black recaptures. White fills the last point. Black 57 - White 56 -Blue 56 – Black wins by 1 point.
Blue captures White and Black recaptures, Black fills the last point. Black 58 - White 55 -Blue 56 – Black wins by 2 points.
(I think this is most of the net results of how the corner can be filled. The last one is an equivalent outcome to black capturing and filling but I’m keeping it for comparison for the territory rules.)
Territory Scoring with captures losing a point.
Black, Blue and White have 6 points.
Cases:
White connects, Black 6 - White 6 -Blue 6, three way draw (with no komi).
Black captures and connects (somehow). Black 6 - White 5 (6-1 for losing a stone) - Blue 6, – draw between Black and Blue.
Blue captures White and Black recaptures Blue. White fills the last point. Black 6 - White 5 -Blue 5, – Black wins by 1 point.
Blue captures White and Black recaptures, Black fills the last point. Black 6 - White 5 -Blue 5 - Black wins by 1 point.
It still changes the outcome in some cases the same way there’s some cases where Chinese rules and Japanese rules score games differently. (I don’t actually know what the perfect strategy would be for fighting the ko for each player would be - I feel like with the three move submission thing it give you a lot to think about…)
That’s fair enough, but it still gave me the idea to avoid the ko problem which came up when I suggested multiple people getting points for captures. Instead just have one player lose points for getting captured.
I might’ve just overlooked it because you pointed out the life and death situation issue. In any case, in the example above (edited because I actually gave black 7 points of territory by accident) there’s more options for Blue to get a better result, as opposed to when they just have to let either Black or White win.
In theory they can play for a three-way draw, try to exlcude White and get a two way draw, or for some reason decide to try help Black to win.
You could just go into a special life and death phase after agreeing to score, where plays are hypothetical, but the end result is accepted. If Black loses a group that they claimed was alive it’s pronounced dead, but any throw ins etc needed to actually capture don’t lose the points they normally would.
I just think it’d be nice to get a working alternative. I don’t think you have to score a game exactly as if a superhuman bot were playing it. It would be sufficient to score it to the ability of the players at the time.
I don’t even think there can be an absolute way to score a board either, since there’s nothing to force a player to play rationally, especially if they want to get back at another player for some earlier treachery etc.
It feels like we’re talking through each other here; territory scoring and area scoring are very similar, so using territory scoring would be lots of extra complexity, without fundamentally changing the game.
I have no idea if this gets closer to what you’re interested in with territory scoring, but here’s an example of something we could do quite simply, which drastically changes the nature of captures:
Calculate each players score as [area score] - [captured stones]. This kind of means that each captured stone is worth -2 points (instead of just -1 like in territory or area scoring).
The effect is a game where you really have to think twice about sacrificing stones. Let’s say your own territory is completely settled; you don’t even have any dame left to play. Now another player is asking you to help kill one of their enemies. The stone you would place to fill this enemy’s eye, which will subsequently die a few turns later, wouldn’t normally affect your own score, so you would decide to help or not based only on how it affects the scores of the other players. But with this new variant, that stone would be an extra -1 point for you. It might be the case that you are only leading by one point over some other player, in which case you can’t afford to give up that one point.
Personally I prefer normal area or stone scoring rules, but it’s always interesting to consider alternatives
Yeah I mean originally I wanted to see some benefit to helping another player capture where you don’t directly benefit with territory yourself.
Maybe you and the first place player are in a similar situation with no dame left, and very close scores but you can’t outright capture any neighbouring stones to make gains. Capturing something on the other side of the board won’t help you either if someone else will get the territory. So if there was points to gain when you aid a capture you might help someone in 3rd, 4th 5th place etc capture rival stones to gain points.
But gaining points is problematic, and losing points actively discourages you from teamwork in some cases like you mentioned. Maybe this doesn’t come up much on small boards packed with players though.
It is an interesting puzzle to think about how we could achieve this. But I think the fact that there is no such benefit in the current rules is actually a good thing. If everyone wanted to capture everyone else, living would get harder and harder the more players are in the game. But with the current rules, you are pretty safe as long as you have more eyes than neighbours.
Basically, it’s hard enough to get 3 eyes or so, an 8-player game where you need 8 eyes to be safe would be… brutal
