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Post by toyotami on Sept 8, 2007 20:33:46 GMT -5
To Taliesin, generally, of course i agree with your response, however, what is left at the bottom of it? Are you to suggest that we are all essentially the same warlocks, with more fewer deficiencies? I am attempting to disagree on a fundamental line that there is no perfect weave, nor player that can emerge from analysis, only styles of psycological probability. There are rules laid on top of rules and, like the natural law of gravity or relativity, it pays to know and understand them - however, in a game like warlocks, an underlying chaos can be responsible for turning games. To become the ultimate Warlock, you must win the most majority of games...and while unwise risks are often unwise...
"It's all trade-offs, and anyone with a working knowledge of the game and the nerve for wild gambles can defeat someone much better than them by that gambling - not always, but at least sometimes." -- Taliesin
I disagreee, not better than them...it is the player that tries to make some sense of the chaos behind the natural laws that can defeat every warlock, for there will be none better than them.
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Post by Rycchus on Sept 8, 2007 20:45:28 GMT -5
To Taliesin, generally, of course i agree with your response, however, what is left at the bottom of it? Are you to suggest that we are all essentially the same warlocks, with more fewer deficiencies? But isn't that how play style is defined, by our mistakes? The aim, in theory, is to be perfect - so we differ from one another by having different deviations from perfection.
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Post by Slartucker on Sept 8, 2007 22:09:24 GMT -5
Shortly after I started playing, Yaron put the question to me -- still a new player -- isn't there always an optimal move? Is there really a place for psychology and style in warlocks? Initially, I argued for free will and Yaron for determinism. My further exploration of that question ultimately turned into the article on strategy that gave birth to the Refuge.
Clarifying question: when you (here and elsewhere) talk about 'playing psychologically' do you essentially mean trying to predict what your opponent is going to do, and responding to that with an assumption of correctness, rather than responding to an analytical array of possibilities?
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taliesin
Ronin Warlock
Grand Master
Posts: 156
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Post by taliesin on Sept 10, 2007 6:27:58 GMT -5
To Taliesin, generally, of course i agree with your response, however, what is left at the bottom of it? Are you to suggest that we are all essentially the same warlocks, with more fewer deficiencies? To an extent, yes. Let me explain. In chess, if you got together a dozen Grandmasters and asked them to evaluate who had an advantage in a given position, the answers would largely be the same; in well-studied positions such as main lines of openings, they'd be almost certainly identical. If Warlocks were as mature in its study as chess, two top warlocks ought to value a position identically. This is not always the case even among the best. Moreover, in many situations, the Grandmasters would recommend the same course of action as the "best" next move. Warlocks is chess with both sides moving at once, blind to the other's move. This introduces a certain extra element of chance and bluff, but it's largely outweighed by the importance of understanding the relative values of game positions and elements. And yes, if we had a hypothetical population of super-advanced warlocks who all understood the game equally well through vast analysis, they would spend a lot of their time studying their opponents and trying to deduce how to take advantage of the heuristics they employ, but this is not what we have currently; most warlocks are not very well-educated even with regard to highly analysed positions and employ weak heuristics which leave them vulnerable to better understanding of the game. Chess grandmasters already spend a lot of time preparing to face one another, looking for weaknesses in others' favoured lines, but none of this preparation would be necessary to trounce a bunch of club players. What separates grandmaster from club player is not the painstaking psychological research of an opponent, but the depth of knowledge of the game itself. Slartucker has commented on the past on how badly certain players with relatively high ELO usually fare against high-ELO opposition, when from their rank you would expect a much greater percentage of wins. These players are not bad at predicting what someone with a similar understanding of the game to themselves will do, but tend to utterly fall apart against someone who understands the game better than they do and can punish their gambles. I am attempting to disagree on a fundamental line that there is no perfect weave, nor player that can emerge from analysis, only styles of psycological probability. While there's no "perfect" player that can rise solely from analysis, there's no player who can even approach perfection without having a deep and nuanced understanding of the game. Attempting to predict merely psychologically without having a sound knowledge of which positions are superior and what outcomes are desirable leaves you a weak and useless player. Put another way, it is better to allow your adversary to achieve every goal he sets himself as long as he is working futilely in a direction that does not harm you than to deduce what he is working towards and try to foil it without considering its impact. I disagreee, not better than them...it is the player that tries to make some sense of the chaos behind the natural laws that can defeat every warlock, for there will be none better than them. Agreed, but I suspect you don't understand the chaos here. You're advocating the equivalent of picking lottery tickets. Bookmakers, awash in chaos, attempt to set odds such that no matter what the outcome is, they still win. This is the correct way to deal with uncertainty - minimisation of risk, maximising gain, done as coldly and precisely as possible. Study the probabilities where they're clear, and randomise truly; no warlock can use psychology to predict your 50-50s if you flip a coin. And even then you won't defeat every warlock, any more than it's possible for someone to always pick the correct lottery numbers - people are unpredictable, and the same warlock will make different moves when he's bursting with life and analysing everything into the ground to the moves he'll make when he's depressed and lethargic and can't really be bothered and is just playing to pass the time; as his concentration and appetite for risk wax and wane, so will his play change, and one who hoped to predict that infallibly would be more deluded than optimistic.
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Post by xade on Sept 10, 2007 19:08:24 GMT -5
Slartucker has commented on the past on how badly certain players with relatively high ELO usually fare against high-ELO opposition, when from their rank you would expect a much greater percentage of wins. These players are not bad at predicting what someone with a similar understanding of the game to themselves will do, but tend to utterly fall apart against someone who understands the game better than they do and can punish their gambles. woohoo! yeah! high-five!
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Post by toyotami on Sept 11, 2007 8:44:33 GMT -5
Thank you all for your very interesting and challenging responses on this thread and the other. (Except you Xade, you womb-crowder) - Ultimately i agree that a finely tuned logic machine is the best way to win this game, which sees me folding most of my hand in this debate.
But that won't stop me from rambling.
Because the moves are simultaneous, any comparisons to chess should be carefully crafted - in chess a grand master wouldn't WOULDN'T be beaten by an intermediate, but in this game, i swear, five or six clever/(EXTREMELY lucky) risks in a row and even Talisin will go down. That is something that will not happen in chess. You can minimize and minimize but if a guy picks you 6 times in a row, those minimum risks stack up. Picking when to risk isnt easy and I, like Taliesin and Slartucker, will take the safe road most of the time against lower players, because, i do believe given enough time, i can overcome the risk my opponent took.
Being the only active warlock with ELO near 1900-2000 that plays consistent friendlies and ladders against all ranked players, i can tell you...every 10/15 wins, the dice don't roll well a few times. Natually, my own deficits are largely responsible, but still...what am i trying to say here...well, it goes back to what i was saying earlier. If Taliesin or Slartucker or Exdeath (who did have an amazing record as Sasuke) played 100 battles against sub 1800 players (Beginner/early Intermediates)...do you think you would win them all?
Using your full powers of analysis...what do you think?
I think 1 of those games you stand a good chance of losing.
Is that luck inherent in the game? Taliesin wrote that people are not predictable...I'm not sure about that yet. Every game has a philosophy or at least every match-up has a chemistry. I think there is a strength there that increases in potency along with the skill of your opponent if you possess a predictive sense of risk. Predictive sense against a newbie is basically unneccesary. But when two players of high standing battle, it is often the difference.
As Taliesin wrote, sadly enough, there is little need to explore the idea of heuristics. Let me set it down here anyway: any time i play a Master, his mindset and my gut still count for more than the nuts and bolts and machinations of a complex weave. And that is where I seperate as a Warlock from Taliesin.
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taliesin
Ronin Warlock
Grand Master
Posts: 156
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Post by taliesin on Sept 11, 2007 9:45:54 GMT -5
Because the moves are simultaneous, any comparisons to chess should be carefully crafted - in chess a grand master wouldn't WOULDN'T be beaten by an intermediate, but in this game, i swear, five or six clever/(EXTREMELY lucky) risks in a row and even Talisin will go down. This very much depends on the rest of your play. If I'm stomping you because you're making suboptimal moves elsewhere, it's possible the risks simply won't be enough. Nonetheless this is true, not least because of ParaFoD, which cannot always be defended cleanly against and sometimes must instead be handled with a shower of 50-50s. 3 50-50s makes for a 1 in 8 chance of getting through. If you find yourself in such a situation against me, and you normally lose games against me at a frequency of more than 7 in 8, it would make sense to push for that 50-50. It becomes less true where the risk is amortised over the course of a longer game - poor heuristics tell more and more as the number of moves increases. Is that luck inherent in the game? Taliesin wrote that people are not predictable...I'm not sure about that yet. Every game has a philosophy or at least every match-up has a chemistry. I think there is a strength there that increases in potency along with the skill of your opponent if you possess a predictive sense of risk. Predictive sense against a newbie is basically unneccesary. But when two players of high standing battle, it is often the difference. You're kind of there, but you're phrasing it oddly. When you play a player who understands the game pretty well, but routinely takes risks that open him to potentially game-losing consequences, it is necessary merely to sit tight and minimise your risk, and he will lose the game for himself. Conversely, if your opponent gives little away in risk, you must either weigh the risks of "conservative" play better than he does (i.e. if completing that counter puts you in a position where you will almost certainly lose the game anyway, it isn't really the "safe" play) or understand the positions better than he does (it is no accident that a great many of my won games against you featured me letting you do a little damage so I could get the monster you undervalued and defeat you with it.) Knowing your opponent can make a big difference, particularly if you know he always opens thus, or defends Disease such-and-such a way, or Permanency like this, and you have developed an offence that advantages you greatly against what you know he'll do. However, in the game itself, you are not playing the opponent but his spellflow: if the spellflow of the moment shows his attitude to risk is lax, you deal with it thus; if the spellflow is cautious, you threaten and tease and scare holes in it, yet do enough to keep it cautious. As Taliesin wrote, sadly enough, there is little need to explore the idea of heuristics. Let me set it down here anyway: any time i play a Master, his mindset and my gut still count for more than the nuts and bolts and machinations of a complex weave. And that is where I seperate as a Warlock from Taliesin. I have scored far too many of my victories against Masters by knowing how to set up PDWP FoD, or defend SPFP/xDFW, or exploit the openings they use, to go along wholly with this. If you're in a position where the complex, much-studied weave applies, you are often lost in a matter of moves if you don't understand why it has been much studied. If you're not in that position, well, no, of course it doesn't count for anything.
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Post by xade on Sept 11, 2007 19:03:10 GMT -5
When you play a player who understands the game pretty well, but routinely takes risks that open him to potentially game-losing consequences, it is necessary merely to sit tight and minimise your risk, and he will lose the game for himself. woo! yeah!
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Post by vermont on Sept 11, 2007 19:04:15 GMT -5
Hey you. Go take your turn instead of posting here! ;D
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Post by xade on Sept 11, 2007 23:10:21 GMT -5
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