From: osyjm@cs.montana.edu (Jaye Mathisen)
Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek
Subject: From the councilboy:  Toss out home/away concept?
Date: 21 Aug 92 09:03:57 GMT
Organization: CS



The following proposal has been before the INL council.  No decision or formal
vote has been taken, so I'm trying to gather more input, and marshal a few
more arguments for/against it.

Please feel free to mail any thoughts/comments you might have to me, I'll
summarize and bring them up to the other members...


My proposal is to get rid of the home/away team concept, and therefore level
the playing field a little more.  This would be accomplished in the following
way:

1)  A set of "neutral, INL configured" servers will be set up, and all games
played at one of those servers.

2)  Given a set of 3 servers, say for example, 1 at berkeley, 1 at CMU, and
1 at KSU, that guarantees that no team has the "home-court" advantage in
terms of lag.  


Advantages:

1)  Level playing field.
	a)  No more 250ms vs 6.2 ms lag games.  while it's true that lag
		will never be equal, a game of 120 ms lag vs 70 ms lag is
		certainly not as skewed.

	b)  It reduces the home-team advantage (especially if you're a 
		school team) enough that perhaps the AL wins the tie-break
		rule can be dropped.

	c)  Makes it possible to determine who gets to pick race first
		in a completely "random" fashion.  Seems much more reasonable
		than the current way.  The server can even do the
		"flip" (Just another message to parse), at game time.

2)  Stats.
	a)  It would be very useful to have valid stats for each player for
		each game.  The INL server has been good at packaging up
		the important info and sending it to me, other servers
		haven't done so well (read, generally, not at all, although
		some have really tried). 

	b)  Stats would be timely.  People are still sending me stat files
		for the summer INL... I don'tneed them any more.  w/o all,
		or at least a vast majority of the files (in a format that
		I can use), they're worthless.

	c)  Stats could be used to rank players in terms of overall skill,
		plus give captains a chance to scope out the other teams
		strengths and weaknesses.

3)  Uniformity.
	a)  As I recall, even GB didn't play all it's games on INL servers.
		While not a rule in the current rulebook, so not strictly
		applicable to this case, it seems reasonable to me to expect
		that all teams play with the exact same handicap.

4)  Replication.
	a)  Against RS, We were waiting for them to compile the server, 
		right up until game time.  (to be fair, that wasn't the only
		thing we were waiting for).  If the home team can't get a 
		server running, then it's a mad scramble for another one.

	b)  If we had enough servers running, each game could be assigned
		say 2 servers, and if the first one is unavailable, fall back
		to the next one, in a calm orderly rational manner, rather
		than the scramble it was.

---

Disadvantages:  None. :)

1)  Good will of some server admins.  The plan requires that some helpful 
server gods out there make a server site available.

Frankly, I don't think this will be much of a problem.  The number of
servers out there is enormous, perhaps some of those people will want more
play on their server/machine, and run an INL server.

I think that an appeal to the netrek community would garner enough people
to make it worthwhile.  We don't need a lot, say, 4 or 5 spread out...

2) Stability of the INL server.
The INL server is getting better all the time.  Ray has spent a lot of effort
making the damn thing run, and it's doing pretty good.  The addition of
the new message parsing code for the captains is a giant step forward for
the server, it's getting close to the state where it runs itself.  I noticed
a few oddities in the game against rankscum that I think should be fixed, but
other than that, it works well...



Frankly, I can't think of any more serious ones.



Personally, it seems very reasonable.  It was annoying playing RS, and
watching their 8 torps hit me in a tiny little packet, while mine even with
the keyboard repeat cranked, are coming out spaced about 1/4" apart.  0-240
damage in an instant...

It helps level the playing field, removes some enormous home-team advantages,
and helps move the AL teams into the same "level-of-net-performance" range
as the school teams.  Al teams will never be able to compete with the
school teams in the sense of being ablt to yell across the room, but on the
other hand, that would seem to be about the only remaining advantage...

The school teams get a double bonus when they're home, under the current
system.  Not so under this proposal...

Again, let me know what you think.
-- 
 Jaye Mathisen, COE Systems Manager                (406) 994-4780
 410 Roberts Hall,Dept. of Computer Science
 Montana State University,Bozeman MT 59717	osyjm@cs.montana.edu