From: ahabig@bigbang.astro.indiana.edu (Alec Habig)
Subject: Re: Scattered Pops in INL- I vote NO!
Organization: Indiana University Astrophysics, Bloomington, IN
Distribution: rec
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 11:04:19 GMT

In article <C1E4H6.5rE.1@cs.cmu.edu> spot@CS.CMU.EDU (Scott Draves) writes:
>Alec> This is not a fair comparison.  The 40 second pop thing is a bug
>Alec> in the server code that some people have learned to exploit.
>
>it's no bug, it's how they wrote it.  not that i think that matters:
>we should consider and test each change carefully, and only adopt
>those we think make the game more fun.  i think this change makes the
>game less interesting, and have posted evidence to back this up.
>where's yours?

While I still feel that it was coded at 40 sec simply because it was easier
(the #ifdefs in the bronco source are from when people decided to move it to 10
sec), I agree that it's the impact on the game that matters.

Your argument is that knowing that you have 40 sec. in which to do something
forces you to make some tough choices about what to do.  This is true.
However, the choices would be even harder and more interesting if you had no
foreknowledge of when the pops would occur.  It would be, "Well, they're bombed
flat, is R0 with 2 kills dangerous enough to risk an unattended pop while I ogg
him?".  You might get lucky with no pops during this time, get really unlucky
with a pop-o-rama, or one planet could pop and it would be a race for the army.
Sounds exciting to me.

>yes, the "most clued" actually do try to play well.  i don't see what
>lag has to do with this.  in fact, your statement is a rather
>transparent attempt to turn this argument into "the high-clue is
>trying to maintain an unfair advantage over the rest of us".  that's
>ridiculous.

This was not an attempt to mutate the argument, it was a lead in to my football
analogy, sorry if it got taken wrong.  I ain't had no English class in many
years :)

>finally, you suggest the adoption of the "mathematically clean"
>poisson distribution.  if you're interested in cleanliness, just flip
>a fucking coin.
>
>Mergatroid

Huh?  Using the poisonnian is as close to flipping a coin as a computer can
come (they being short on fingers for a few years yet).  The point of using
this instead of a 10 second pop is to eliminate all granularity (although it
would be hard to take good advantage of a short time scale).  If you're trying
to simulate a random process, do it right, otherwise we'll have this debate all
over again in a year when someone finds a way to exploit things differently.

If you want to take the 40 second pop scheme to its logical extreme, why not
eliminate the randomness althogether?  Agris get an army every x seconds,
normal planets every y seconds, reset the clock upon bombing them.  This would
allow the alert scout bomber to play all sorts of fun games.  It would also
eliminate the excuse of "your planets popped more than mine".

	Alec
	(Entropy)

heh - kinda appropriate : Entropy is arguing for the side of proper randomness
:)

PS - any server out there want to implement the poisonnian thing?  Email me and
I'll help with the coding, although it's trivial.  Much easier than doorstop's
kill tracking code, which seems to me is the same kind of debugging/improvement
of the original code.
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