This sounds really interesting!
When we were talking about thugging earlier in the thread I started thinking of an idea for laying mantraps/snares in the streets to foil characters if they stopped on certain squares (not passed through), specifically to stop thug spam. It sounded cool in some ways but utterly broken and messy in others, like putting traps on buildings and in front of them. Bleurgh.
Love the sound of The Powderhouse though, I’m a Saboteur nut.
Yeah, I like this too. I’d be concerned against an opponent with a fully upgraded Powderhouse and Bank though. Traps. Traps everywhere.
Ooo. Me likey. So traps are cheaper at level 1 and steal lanterns at level 2? I can imagine this leading to some interesting decisions when lanterns are tight, for you and your opponent.
Count me in for beta testing.
@geggis Yeah was tough knowing you had both trades and the bank so far away from me. D:
gg @Otthegreat, I had surprisingly good luck this game. Even held all 3 trade houses for a turn! :p
gg! Yeah I can’t say I’m especially surprised to see that result :)
Hey there - I’m a veteran of this game but I’ve got 2 questions I’d like to ask:
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Has anyone ever had their win (I play live match) not only not record, but also lost skill points afterwards as well?? It has happened to me twice now… the only thing I can think of (if its not a bug) is that I took too many turns to beat a low rating player?
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Just then I had a game where my opponent managed to burgle an estate with 1) no vision 2) without using a move point of his master thief (I was looking at it the entire time when the jewelry ping happened); not to mention my gang was guarding the only access too. Is this a glitch/cheat or is there a way to steal with the saboteur or something that I’m not aware of?? Thanks
On another note, does anybody else find the starting spawn of Big City too close to each other? Win or lose, I’ve had by far the most amount of fast anti-climatic games there.
I know the Saboteur used to be able to steal jewels and art but I thought that was removed a long time ago. I don’t see any other way a player could burgle an estate without access or vision.
Not played any live matches and I don’t watch my skill rating much either so I can’t really comment on that!
Big City is definitely a cosy map but I’ve found it can be one of the most exciting because of the focus on the three main VP types. The outer streets open the door to lots of sneaky play too.
This can happen when you play someone whose MMR is much lower than yours. Antihero uses a TrueSkill-alike algorithm for calculating MMR - you can see more details here: Computing Your Skill
(You don’t have any control over who you automatch against, so this can definitely feel “unfair”… I’m wondering if perhaps I simply shouldn’t be exposing players’ MMRs, because it leads to this sort of - totally justified - confusion!)
Edited to add: the only thing that’s taken into account, MMR-wise, in Antihero is whether you win or lose the game. Number of turns, how thoroughly you win or lost, etc is not used.
First of all, thanks for the reply - but this definitely should be changed… it never makes sense to punish a player for winning, I use 30 minutes of my time beating an opponent (which I have no control on the matchup as you said), not only is my time wasted, I lose a boat load of points which takes like 5+ consecutive wins to recover from?
Give me 00.01 points or whatever, subtracting points is straight up terrible not just from a personal player POV but it also means the skill leader ranking board is not reflective of anything then, because it becomes about who’s been fortunate to be able to dodge these matches.
Sorry I had to rant :(
Okay I asked on the Facebook page, so this is their answer:
“A saboteur can burgle buildings, but only those that you don’t already have vision of (otherwise he sets a trap)”
Guess you can learn something new even after over a hundred games :o
Yeah, I know about that but can they steal jewels and art? I didn’t think they could any more.
Well, apparently it still can!
It’s not feasible to fix this: it’s simply in the math behind ELO and TrueSkill and any other MMR system that deals with uncertainties and probabilities.
Blizzard’s games, for example, get around this by hiding your true MMR (which is still used behind the scenes), and assigning you a rank that goes up and down in very predictable, observable ways. (This requires all sort of other scaffolding like seasons and leagues and whatnot.)
Exposing MMR is a double-edged sword. I originally hid it entirely from players, but exposed it after several requests. The game needs this sort of system on its backend to make matchmaking work well, but exposing those numbers to players occasionally involves bad experiences like what you’re describing. I’m not sure if the tradeoff is worthwhile.
Then these matches where the MMR gap is too big simply shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the first place? Can a range limit not be imposed on the matchmaking? Because what merit is there at all for the higher rated player? Not only is it a lose/lose situation whether you win or not, its also highly likely that its not going to be an enjoyable game due to the skill difference.
I had to win many many consecutive games to make up for that “loss”, it feels absurd that I need to spend 3+ hours just to make up for a match that shouldn’t even have existed =/
Its funny you bring up Blizzard games as a reference though, they are well known to have atrocious matchmaking and ranking systems that pretty much nobody likes =p
Also, I’d like to ask if there are some exploitable bugs/glitch with the turn ending, I’m running into more and more people (when they’ve lost) that keeps the game stalled forever at that phase, its very annoying and lame =/
In ELO you never lose points for winning. Maybe I’ve misunderstood what you’re trying to say?
Ah - I may be mistaken about ELO. But matchmaking systems that represent your skill alongside an “uncertainty” value, like TrueSkill, have this property. “I won but my rating went down” will tend to happen more at the top of the leaderboard, where there are fewer players with similar ratings.
It is perhaps folly to even expose this rating in a “leaderboard”, since it leads to this confusion. But there’s lots of info online about TrueSkill and this phenomenon:
@geggis, @lordkosc, @Otthegreat, anyone else interested in beta testing “The Powder House” (new saboteur building) – are you guys cool testing this on Steam? I can just create a new beta branch over there. The update is ready to go.
The testing will happen on a different server, where the player base is 0… I’ll be jumping into games to help test, but it’ll mostly just need to be you guys. I’m hoping to have people play a handful of games each and get a sense for whether the “Traps steal 1 lantern” ability on Level 2 Powder House is appropriately balanced.
Ready and willing!
Sure, you can count me in. Happy to help!