From: esj@cs.brown.edu (Eugene Santos Jr.)
Subject: On Justifying CMU's Arrogance and a note on life.
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1992 03:39:20 GMT

I sometimes wonder if the cause of all the "arrogance" emminating from CMU
didn't start from all the non-CMU'ers in the world. This arrogance, IMHO,
didn't really come to nearly full power until this past year with the formation
of INL for "high-clue games". There are many "world-level" netrek players
outside of CMU each whose individual skills in the game are as good as if
not better than the players at CMU. For example, Berkeley has been noted
to have the best dog-fighters around. INL intensified comparisons by
forcing together all the players to play against each other instead of
at their normal server of choice.

Since CMU, at the formation of INL, probably represented the largest
faction of netrek players in the world, the definition of high-clue,
game tactics and even possibly objectives were defined around CMU
style and very importantly, the Bronco server. (One of the biggest
block of players to suffer, IMO, are the chaos players of utexas and KSU.)

Well, because of this, this certainly gave CMU the "home-field" advantage
so to speak. But, so what? If CMU didn't exist, I believe that such
an advantage would have gone to the next largest faction. Maybe Berkeley
or UTexas which would certainly change the nature of the game.

With this advantage of sorts, CMU certainly has the most experience in this
type of game (from playing internal tournaments, etc.). EXPERIENCE is the
key that anyone trying to argue about who is best must be considered.
CMU players have played lots and basically know the styles of other
fellow CMU players. New CMU trainees undoubtedly inherit styles from older
combat veterans in the game. Hence, for the most part, it is still true that
if you field a CMU team with fairly high clue players, the odds would
favor them when playing against non-CMU teams. Only now is there a possibility
of non-CMU teams truly defeating CMU ones. This is from having 2 successive
INL seasons to harden the new yet highly "individually" skilled
player into veterans. 

I think it's very very hard to put together a non-CMU team whose players
do not either play on bronco(rwd4 now) or rarely run into each other on
said server. Furthermore, a team should at least have some hardened
veterans who know and understand tactics/strategies which work on bronco-style
servers. This way, knowledge can be passed on to newer players.
While playing with GG for SINL this summer, I did my best to pass on info
about bronco-style strategies and point out various enemy character
strengths and weaknesses. I think GG should flesh out to be an excellent
team in the coming INL seasons.

On that point, it would be cool and somewhat grown up, if more "clueful"
players from CMU went and played on non-CMU servers and try to
give pointers to those people who are willing to "learn" the game.
Just sticking to your own home server and just being arrogant is like
refusing to distribute the NETREK source code or binary because you've
hacked something really neat into it and am afraid that some other
server might steal and use it for the enjoyment of others. Tell me what's
to be gained from that? You want high caliber games? Spread the knowledge
around and you'll see results. 

Finally, there are a couple of "cool" :) people from CMU out there who
have done just that. In that way, I am certainly one of your humble
students.

Cheers.

uucp:	...!{ihnp4,decvax}!brunix!esj		Eugene Santos Jr.
bitnet:	esj@browncs.bitnet			PO Box 1910, Computer Science
arpa:	esj%cs.brown.edu@relay.cs.net		Brown University
csnet:	esj@cs.brown.edu			Providence, RI 02912