I have no idea what you mean and I feel like you’re just trying to twist my words and ask trick questions. I’m not interested in answering trick questions or having my words twisted on an internet forum.
I believe you judge the play in restrospective, i.e.
It turned out that Blue and Red got too strong, so all other players failed.
It turned out badly for mafidufa, so they must have made a mistake.
Maybe mafidufa was aware of the possibility and decided to take that risk for the greater goal.
The first point is more complex, but I’ll say this much: Blue and Cerulean had an alliance early on, making it more difficult for others to cooperate against them. Then Cerulean being in a fight with Yellow, like you said, helped Blue even more. Red also had allies.
These alliances were profitable for both involved players.
It is easy to say “Well then the players other than Red and Blue should have formed an alliance themselves, and cooperate against Red and Blue”, but that leaves out all nuances. I imagine forming such an alliance is difficult, as is finding and agreeing on plans that are profitable for all four players.
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You’re the one who said mafidufa made a mistake, not me. I already said I was not interested in a discussion based on twisting each other’s words. Please stop.
It didn’t “turn out” that Blue and Red “got too strong”. There were much stronger from the beginning, due to the initial position. We all new this, and yet we did nothing. It’s not something that we noticed in retrospect.
Yes, this was definitely a mistake from Cerulean. I was afraid of Blue because you could have too easily hurt me in the Northwest or Southwest corner while I was busy defending my group in the centre. Orange offered to help defend me in the Southwest corner and I refused. I shouldn’t have. I also should have tried to find more peaceful solutions in the centre.
Yes. Again, a mistake. Both from Cerulean and Yellow.
Not that I could see, no?
I don’t understand your point. The game of go is a great game, and this 7-player battle royale variant is great too. Of course making a statement about a given game in one sentence will always leave out nuances. Still, we knew from the beginning that Blue and Red were ahead, and we did absolutely nothing to turn things around. That’s a huge mistake. Basically we didn’t even try to win. I’m not saying winning is easy. What I am saying is that not even trying to win is bad play.
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Ok
However I still want to say that I disagree with you on several points. I do believe that all players tried to win and do their best. And I wouldn’t say that anybody failed.
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Apologies if I sounded rude.
I’ve seen too many discussions on internet forums devolve very quickly, with most of the discussion being people misquoting other people and arguing for the sake of arguing. I was really afraid that this was the way the discussion was headed.
I would be interested in discussing strategies.
I don’t understand how you can come out of a go game and say that nobody failed. There is only one winner at the end, so arguably everyone else failed. Plus, the game is complicated enough that no one can pretend that they didn’t make any mistakes. The 7-player battle royale is maybe less deep than go on the tactics side, but has a huge diplomacy side in compensation. I’m pretty sure we all made several mistakes.
What I am saying is that there was one very-obvious mistake that was made. Blue and Red had an obvious advantage in the random start position, but the other five players failed to offset that advantage. The advantage was kept the whole game, and the game will end with either a red or a blue victory.
Not only did we fail to offset this advantage, but we didn’t even try. That’s an obvious mistake. I believe we can learn from this mistake if we accept it, and perhaps in the next game, the players who start with the best position will not be guaranteed to win.
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I want to avoid discussing the specifics of the ongoing game. I think any discussion about that game should be kept within that thread, for the sake of fairness to all of the players.
However, I want to express some generalities (and later I will discuss some specifics in the context of the current game, when that has finished).
I think that a large part of the disagreement comes down to differing perspectives and preferences about what outcomes players should be playing for. This comes back to the “winner takes all” (WTA) vs “best position possible” (BPP) mentality that we’ve discussed previously in the context of other multiplayer games, like Diplomatic Go.
Under the WTA mentality, a player would be focusing on maximizing their probability of winning, while exhibiting almost no marginal preference between the outcomes other than winning. In the WTA perspective, one would prefer strategy A among the following list of purely hypothetical potential strategies:
- Play strategy A, which yields a 1% chance of winning and 99% chance of finishing 7th (and 0% for the other positions).
- Play strategy B, which yields a 0% chance of winning, 40% of finishing 5th, 40% chance of finishing 6th, and 20% chance of finishing 7th (and 0% for the other positions).
Of course, the above is capturing the situation of a player in a very weak position, and the numbers are just arbitrarily picked to illustrate a point, and I’m simplifying away a lot of the nuance, etc. However, consider the BPP mindset, which would prefer strategy B.
A difference between these multiplayer Go games and Diplomacy is that Diplomacy has a much higher likelihood of draws, which I think changes the perspective on the outcomes, since even when a player has a little chance to win, they might still have a meaningful shot of helping to prevent someone else from winning, and living to be part of the draw (as opposed to being eliminated). In high-level Diplomacy games, I think drawing is the most likely outcome (I would guess solidly above 50% and maybe much closer to 75%, if everyone goes into it with the WTA mentality). However, in our multiplayer Go games (both Battle Royale and Diplomatic Go), the games are set up to always produce a distinct winner. I think that has degraded the WTA perspective, since maybe a lot of players don’t feel they have much to play for when their individual winning percentage is low, i.e., it is like a vanishing incentive problem. Hence, in past discussion, I believe that perspective has led to several players expressing preference for the BPP perspective.
Under a BPP perspective, it is quite natural for the crowd to collectively allow the leaders to run away with the win. It only serves the individual interest to stop the leader, if it also helps improve one’s own position. If stopping the current leader only knocks them down to let another take their place, then it seems less desirable to do so, especially if focusing efforts on attacking the leader wind up detrimental towards one’s own aims of surviving as long as possible.
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Right, sorry for discussing the ongoing game here. That was inappropriate of me.
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Nothing we discuss here is going to change anything in that game, so I don’t see a need to avoid talking about it.
Seeing what has happened and is happening in the current game, there were plenty of times where players could or did have an effect on the outcome of the game. Maybe we should not fix what is not broken.
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Here is another datapoint:
While generally I take a BPP attitude, I am wiling to deviate from it if I find something interesting to play.
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There is a rule change that I’ve been thinking about suggesting for a while now, but I’ll wait until the current game is finished to discuss the specifics 
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I’m curious about this suggested rule change.
Another thought that I had is whether some sort of “jury” mechanism could be devised and added. In a broad, vague sense, it would mean that the eliminated players would still have some sort of soft influence on the game. Like maybe they could vote to give a small special advantage or power (or disadvantage) to a remaining player. One possibility is voting to adjust the turn order, or maybe to hand a player an extra turn or a pass.
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What I’m thinking about changing is how eliminated player’s stones stay on the board.
The remaining stones make some very interesting situations tactics-wise, but I’m not sure I like the strategic consequences. (it makes such a huge difference whether a player is able/wanting to make their group unconditionally alive before being eliminated, that it makes a lot of other considerations irrelevant)
So I’ve thought about some alternatives, which are of course not necessarily improvements, but could be interesting to try, or at least to discuss:
Alternative A: When a player is eliminated, all their stones are removed from the board.
Alternative B: When a player is eliminated, all their stones (except the captured ones) become uncapturable.
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I agree that the random starting position created a big imbalance. But that was probably the idea in the first place, right? It depends if you want a balanced or imbalanced start.
Interesting ideas. Alternative A pretty much takes away the part where about-to-be-eliminated players need to decide how to go down (suicide big group or single stone). And it will be important to think about what happens after players are eliminated, and who will profit from it.
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I like this aspect, since it enhances the importance of diplomacy in the game. This final choice is kind of like a weak jury mechanism.
Hence, I would prefer to not use either alternative proposed by @antonTobi, but I do think they are interesting and see how these (particularly option A) might be favored by those who would prefer to minimize some of the diplomatic aspects.
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Another possibility is to play a “no-press” (or “gunboat”) type of game, where all discussion is forbidden, i.e., each player can only play their stones and all “communication” must happen only through plays on the board. Alliances can still possibly form, but careful coordination is often limited and allegiances are largely implicit.
To save time in the end game, it could be possible to coordinate outcome voting by submitting proposals to a neutral arbiter (this could just be the first player eliminated). The arbiter would put the proposals up to a secret ballot vote among the remaining players, with unanimous consent ending the game.
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Oh wow a big discussion here. The situation was resolved only when it came to the choice “kill right now or be killed right now”. There were other ways to play until that point.
Option C: When a player is eliminated, their remaining stones become all colours 
Another idea I’d like to try: Along with playing a move, players also choose who gets to play next. Only restriction is they must choose one of the players who have played the minimal number of moves among all players (which prevents a difference > 1 in terms of how many moves each player has played.)
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It’s a bit hard to put into writing what exactly I don’t like about how the current rules plays out - but in short I don’t agree that unconditionally alive eliminated groups enhance diplomacy.
Let’s imagine we play some relatively well-balanced variant with a nice mix of diplomacy and go tactics. Then on top of that you give each player a nuclear option of giving a huge number of extra points to another player when they are eliminated. However, only sometimes will they be “in time” to use this option, and it’s difficult for both the player themselves, their allies and their enemies to predict if they will be able to use this option. Hopefully it’s clear that the game could become less interesting under these chaotic circumstances (not saying that this is how it objectively is - but this is how I experience the current variant).
In contrast, with the alternatives I proposed, there is still lots of diplomacy to be done, but there is less of this unpredictability. This would IMO make the game more enjoyable.
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Automatically it’s imbalanced with n players unless you do something like a,b,c…,n,n,m,l,…,a in the turn order etc.
I’d possibly be more excited about another game, if it was like less of this 
No non-aggression pacts and agreements where the losing player or weakest players have nothing to do but wait to be killed.
I think this is why I prefer the idea of some capture limit + capture go. It can be very easy to have a quick backstab and the weakest player could win (still with some diplomacy of course involved - like “keep me alive and I’ll help do X” and then betrayal + 1 turn win).
However, I don’t want to derail the discussion too much, for what might still be an interesting variant to try out.
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