Widgets vs Cheating

katastrophe: Ah yeah, that also lost OrangeSky. :(
I expect quite a few people just gradually played less and less as they found it less fun after superfluid.

/off topic

I think that as long as widgets arn't a have-or-lose thing then they can be allowed, ofter they become so sopiticated that they excel human players by a wide margin there could be a widgets disabled matchmaker and a widgets disabled option in autohosts and lobsterpots

quote: So since I'm being wildly over analyzed yet again, I'm going to simplify, yet again. I want all parties to be catered for in this discussion. I don't have a problem with people enjoying ZK or widgets. I do believe that ranked should have a widget policy. I do not speak from an objective reality. What I have expressed is opinion, equal in worth to all those here. My posts are not an invitation for a deep character analysis. Please treat me with the same decency and grain of salt as every other person in this thread as I have actually been doing towards you. I don't think that my rating makes me a better person than you/anyone. It does however suggest that I have been playing Zero K better. Nothing more, nothing less. This may lead me, right or wrong, to believe I have enough experience to speak about certain game issues, balance, meta, with a little more experience. Live with it.

I'm glad to hear it Dregs. I had to ask because the insistence in your posts is a step above the rest of the thread. As I think I've said elsewhere, I prefer it when people advocate precisely for what they want rather than advocate fiercely in the direction they want, irrespective of the size of the change required. If you write theatrically enough there is the risk that I'll take what is written seriously.

quote: I think it is clear that there is a problem at present that needs fixing. For me at least, the game is very much spoiled by the mere notion that some players can obtain an unwarranted advantage over others in competitive play. The playing field must be level, and it seems steps must be taken to enforce this. That a small group of elites can code away and make use of PEW's that the little new guy cannot stinks. I am already irritated to think of the times I have been micro-controlling units and my opponent(s) may have been benefiting from AI-assisted micro that I was not even aware of. I am, of course, conscious that I am a bad player because I possess a low level of skill. But however small the unwarranted advantage obtainable by widgets, it should be removed to level the playing field. Cheating by any degree, however slight the competitive advantage obtained, spoils things for everyone.

I am pretty sympathetic to this, with the issue being what to with all the sad elite coders? Widgets exist in this limbo where players are allowed to write them provided that nothing they write is all that useful. Based on history and the path of least resistance I expect the solution to be some combination of:

• Surgically ripping stuff out of the widget API to break the particularly powerful local widgets.
• Adding unit AI to the game itself so that the particularly powerful local widgets are obsolete.

As I said in "scraping the bottom of the barrel", these tasks are no longer easy and will likely come with a slight degradation of the default UI. If nobody steps up to do these tasks for too long then something more drastic might be required.

quote: Apologies if the above does not take into account implementation specifics that I am not aware of.

Unfortunately I don't think you have enough experience with widgets to comment much on the technical subtleties. Nothing has been conflated into the concept of a widget, that is just how widgets actually work. The splits and separations you are talking about would be completely artificial and take a massive amount of work to implement and enforce. I do not know what you mean by 'public' widgets. How is the publicity actually implemented? I think you'll have to either look into how all this works or take our word on what is technically feasible.

quote: quote: The ones in the game have been taken in to account when balancing the game I am not convinced this is true in the general case... I think the vast majority on non-default widgets affect game balance very little.

The widgets in ZK by default are designed parts of the game and the game is balanced around them. The game is also designed so that most player-widgets are not going to do any better than people using the default. However, once someone writes something that is more powerful than the default it doesn't matter that the vast majority of non-default widgets affect balance very little. Hence this thread.

quote: Dregs Lynx: quote: I don't know of anyone who uses widgets that is also good enough at the game to be a consistent worry to me as a non widget user The highest ranked widget user here who benefited a lot from less-known default widgets is probably Kingstad who used the "B" building option to bury mexes a lot (before the recent terraform nerf).

dyth68 please stop using words this way. Nobody else is using the word 'widget' here to refer to anything that is in the default UI. You don't even need to ever open the setting menu to use "B" and you don't even need to disable simple settings to learn about it yourself! Using and configuring the hotkeys of a game is not new, next you'll be calling the Starcraft 2 camera hotkeys a widget. I think you are attempting to have a conversation that is too technical for many in this thread and mostly end up confusing people that lack a deep knowledge of how all this works.

Area Mex + Solar is one key combination. Feed the wiki instead of calling it a widget in this context. You have to see that there is a massive difference between a modifier key for Area Mex and a counter-battery widget for locating and killing enemy artillery that only one player has. Also, you shouldn't just listen to Anarchid for practical advise on how to best "help development".

quote: I'm still having trouble with the "not available in a meaningful sense" distinction. Is a widget that's "enabled" by default, but that you need to go into the simple menu to have do anything, a widget that is "unavailable in a meaningful sense"? If I had the idle con assist widget be enabled by default but had whether it does anything be controlled by a tickbox in the unit AI menu (which would be unselected by default), would that count as available?

For the sake of clarity, a widget is available in a meaningful sense if it can be made to perform its function by no more than exploring the ingame menu with Simple Settings disabled. Note that Advanced Settings is not enabled (yes, we have ended up with three filtering levels) and the widget list is unavailable.

quote: I created a widget to show where allied missiles are going and where allied nukes are landing just today as well as their expected area of effect. If regulations are to take place, may they not take place in the lobster pot. It's a really perfect testing ground for live widget testing. There's plenty of stress and potential situations that you may not foresee.

@_Shaman this is (probably) a perfect example of a widget that doesn't actually help development. If so, then the lobsterpot testing ground is only helping you in this case. This is based on my assumption that the widget is doing one of two things:

• Tracking projectile positions and calculating trajectories.
• Constantly polling missiles to see whether they have an attack command.

The first one is far too expensive. I am not sure how reliable the second approach is given that nukes only have their command for a split second (maybe it is never visible to lua, idk) and missiles can also be launched by the Missile Silo directly or by Fire At Will. Do you do range checks to account for a mobile Syclla or an Eos that is (for some reason) targeting a mobile unit? How do you handle Scylla with a Set Target command?

If I were to implement this I would add a gadget that simply sent an event to luaUI for players on the appropriate allyTeam whenever a relevant unit fired. The event would contain the appropriate information and there would be a widget on the receiving end to draw and provide some configuration. Perhaps it could use the widget marker API with an extension for AoE. There would be no expensive polling or dealing with edge cases, and much less chance of later changes coming along to break the UI.

If I'm wrong and you have found some fancy trick for cheaply and cleanly detecting allied nuke and tacnuke launches then I'd love to include some polished version of your widget. Otherwise I would like anyone looking to make such a feature available to everyone to follow the gadget route. How often does live lobsterpot testing result in pull requests?

katastrophe [Spoiler]

@Kurosei it is a shame you have trouble reading. Unfortunately for you this is the medium of discussing and understanding the situation.

quote: allied missiles are going and where allied nukes are landing just today

Jasper:what does allies firing to a spot have to do with fog of war? This sounds like great to have (gadget/widget/whatever), as too many times allies nuke a spot without telling, killing half your army that was moving towards that spot.

a label for allied players, wehre the currently lauchen nuke was tergeted will be helpful...maybe even with the red circles around it so you CANNOT MISS IT.

edit: ha, you were 30secs quicker than me to respond

I don't know how one would gadgetize something like that though. Maybe with unitrulesparams and watching for it in gameframe? The list of units affected by the desired change are in so infrequent numbers that I think the impact of that would be minimal. The issue is I'm not good at all with openGL. Last time I tried, I broke the minimap.

Some of the code for drawing the circles might be reusable?

I wouldn't trust the quality of chicken code, and this seems to support my wariness:

_G.chickenEventArgs = {type="wave", unpack(args)}
SendToUnsynced("ChickenEvent")
_G.chickenEventArgs = nil

To see it done a bit better search the whole repository for the string 'HavenUpdate'. Or just follow this recipe:

For synced luarules:

SendToUnsynced("HavenUpdate", teamID, etc)

wherever you want to send the event.

For unsynced luarules:

gadgetHandler:AddSyncAction('HavenUpdate',WrapToLuaUI_Haven)

in initialize.

gadgetHandler:RemoveSyncAction('HavenUpdate')

in shutdown.

if (Script.LuaUI('HavenUpdate')) then 
    Script.LuaUI.HavenUpdate(teamID, etc)
end

in

local function WrapToLuaUI_Haven(_, teamID, etc)

For luaui:

widgetHandler:RegisterGlobal("HavenUpdate", HavenUpdate)

in initialize.

widgetHandler:DeregisterGlobal("HavenUpdate", HavenUpdate)

in shutdown.

local function HavenUpdate(teamID, etc)

to handle the event.

There is a technicality to watch out for when calling widgetHandler from widgets with 'handler = true'.

quote: As has been pointed out a number of times in this thread, 1v1 ability depends a lot on attention splitting and micromanagement. I expect that if you control for number of games you'll find ELO correlates little with understanding of game balance (as experienced by the average Zero K player) or how to make the game more fun (it could well anti-correlate with these).

Is your point here to say that I infact, don't have a basis upon which to contribute to balance discussions?

Maybe you're overlooking the fact that in 1v1, you get to measure each factory against another with no distractions. Example: Cloak vs Shieldbots, how does it fare? Rover vs shieldbots. Etc. By going through these very isolated match ups, you learn exactly what works and doesn't work in each factory on a unit by unit basis. If you play enough 1v1, you eventually get the full picture of how each unit is performing in all of it's matchups.

To those people still arguing that 1v1 is just raider rushing: Have you been paying attention to the ridiculous scope of games we've begun to see high level 1v1s ascend to? With evenly matched players we're often seeing 3-4 factories, striders, silos, izi bringing out the nukes, you name it. It's on the cards these days.

How much further do we need to go to raise this disqualification you're imposing dyth68?

I didn't address the ELO part of your statement, allow me briefly. I could not disagree more: See Randy, see UG, see ATOSTIC. Hell, see anyone who's identified how balance drives meta and then implemented said meta. They absolutely, 100% gained elo through understanding of balance, because they applied that understanding when they picked the factory that they did, knowing it would be overly effective on the map they were playing. Every time Randy made fencer ripper rushes, he did so because balance dictated it would give him and advantage and he made words to those effects. When he, although disliking hovers, switched to them anyway, he did so because balance dictated that he should and he reaped ELO for it. When players like izi, atostic and UG all jumped on the shieldbots wagon, they did so because they know that balance favoured them - and they understood it well.

Seriously don't think you're giving 1v1 nearly enough credit or why you're bothering to discredit it in the first place.

Dregs : I guess I should have been less unclear.
You certainly can (and have) contributed to balance discussions and I have little doubt that your contributions have made top level 1v1s less samey.

I have two points:

1. That many other things other than understanding of unit interactions goes in to ELO. As the extreme example, someone with disease that prevents them making precise movements could have a way better understanding of unit interactions than @Godde, but still not go above 1500 ELO. Those at the top of the ladder will be those with a combination of many traits, one of which is understanding of unit interactions.
I expect Firepluk, for example, has an excellent understanding of unit interactions despite his low ELO.

2. The other bit is: "as experienced by the average Zero K player"
Top 20 1v1 is a different ballgame from the 50th percentile 1v1 (let alone a 3v3 amongst some friends) and flows very differently. A top 10 player's in-depth understanding of game flow and psychology of top level play could be actively misleading when trying to understand mid-level experience. As an example, Phantom is grossly imbalanced for low level play and newbies really struggle to deal with it.

It may be that I'm using the word "balance" unconventionally and a "balanced" game (in the conventional sense of the word) is one where the top players will find every unit and factory useful, as opposed to one where the mid level players find every unit and factory useful.

Does that make sense?


PRO_rANDY : I don't see how those two quotes contradict each other if that's what you're implying.

dyth68 It appears in one of the quotes you are saying you value your ELO as it validates your comments with regards to balance, in the other you appear to be saying that ELO does not correlate with the understanding of balance. I saw your downvote, forgive me if my comprehension is lacking and please explain what I'm missing.