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Good article. Definition: What is Depth? A multiplayer game is deep if it is still strategically interesting to play after expert players have studied and prac
by highCs 11y ago
Good article.
Definition: What is Depth? A multiplayer game is deep if it is still strategically interesting to play after
expert players have studied and practiced it for years, decades, or centuries.
We often talk about skillcaps. The more skillcaps a game has the better it is. Ideally, you want a game to have an infinite number of skillcaps. A skillcap is a level of expertise which allows the players in it to dramatically beat the players which belong to the lower level of expertise. The idea behind skillcaps is that, if you, as a player, are in a lower skillcap, it means you're not entirely exploiting all the possibilities of the game. Many skillcaps means that increasing things like reflex is not enough. The player needs to increase its understanding of the game. Incidentally, that game is very deep.
Also, there is a measure for player expertise called the Elo rating system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
Definition: What Is Balance? A multiplayer game is balanced if a reasonably large number of options
available to the player are viable--especially, but not limited to, during highlevel
play by expert players
Well, not really in my opinion. A game is balanced if you cannot find a single way-of-playing to beat an equally-expert opponent more than 50% of the time when the opponent is not allowed to use that same way-of-playing. (Note we are talking here about robots which automatically play each game with the exact same level of expertise.)
EDIT: oh the author calls that fairness. Fair enough then.
- Hasu 11y ago>A skillcap is a level of expertise which allows the players in it to dramatically beat the players which belong to the lower level of expertise. Where are you getting that definition? I've always seen "skill cap" defined as the highest possible level of skill, beyond which no increased skill can increase performance. "Skill cap" is also not a measure of players, but of game mechanics and games themselves. We might say that checkers has a lower skill cap than chess, or that the bishop has a lower skill cap than the queen, but we wouldn't say that Magnus Carlsen is at a higher skill cap than I am. He's just more skilled. We want unreachable skill caps, so that there's always room for improvement. I'm not sure any game has an infinitely high skill cap.
- Retric 11y agoUnlimited skill caps become boring. Ideally you want players to use and face a range of strategies over time, but in an unlimited skill cap game with no single dominat strategy or hard counters players get stuck perfecting the same approach over time.
- derefr 11y agoI think it's by analogy to the chess piece version you mentioned. A strategy has a skill cap. Therefore, a player who only knows some subset of strategies, where the max skill cap within that set is X, will always eventually be beaten by some other player who knows a strategy outside that set, with a higher skill cap. That player can be said to "have" the skill cap of the highest-skill-cap strategy they're currently aware of. To put it another way: a "perfect" player with mastery of every strategy they are aware of, but with imperfect knowledge of the space of possible strategies, will have a skill level at the game equal to the highest-skill-cap strategy they're aware of. Or, if you only practice the strategies you already have, you'll only ever get as good at the game as your best strategy is powerful. It can be much higher-ROI to explore the game's strategy-space to find higher-skill-cap strategies. Imagine a game where a player who has 80% mastery of a large number of strategies, beats a player with 90% mastery of fewer strategies. The 80% player probably won because one of the strategies they were competent at had a high-enough skill-cap to dominate the other player who didn't know that strategy.
- qznc 11y agoI do not think that ELO is a good choice these days. There are better systems and the Wikipedia page lists a few alternatives.
- digi_owl 11y agoUgh, i don't like it when viable gets used in game balancing talk. This because it is highly context sensitive. For instance, winning 1 in 10 may allow more options to be considered viable than if one insist on a 1 in 5 ratio.
- anonymoushn 11y agoWhat does this mean? Is there some tournament game where one side only has to win 10% of games to win the match?