I can’t tell if this post is a request for more feedback for you in future, or trying to open a more general discussion about what norms and conventions exist around giving feedback, or if it’s about you wanting to see people give more love to other creators.
I was trying to do all of these things simultaneously.
The second graph you link to seems—unless I’m missing something? - to confirm the point you’re trying to use it to rebut: set the x axis to five years and you can absolutely see a massive jump where Milei changed the exchange rate.
(Regardless, strong-upvoted for picking holes and citing sources.)
Just realized I forgot to mention this: I really like how the interactive handled the Bonus Objective, i.e. if the player is thinking along the right lines their character automatically makes the in-universe sensible/optimal decision for them (which means you can set up a fair Bonus Objective for players who don’t live in that universe and so don’t have all the context).
Notes on my performance:
. . . huh! I was really expecting to either take first place for being the only player putting serious effort into the right core mechanics, or take last place for being the only player putting serious effort into the wrong core mechanics; getting the main idea wrong but doing everything else well enough for silver was not on my bingo card. (I’m also pleasantly surprised to note that I figured out which goblin I could purge with least collateral damage: I can leave Room 7 empty without changing my position on the leaderboard.)
There were only three likely hypotheses based on the problem statement: A) adventurers scout one room ahead, B) adventurers take optimal path(s), and C) adventurers hit every room so all that matters is the order. Early efforts ruled out C, and the Bonus Objective being fully achievable under A but not B made A a lot more plausible; however, further investigations[1] made it seem like that might be a fakeout[2], so I (narrowly) chose to max-min instead of max-max; even in retrospect, I’m not 100% sure that was a bad decision.
Notes on the scenario:
I have strongly ambivalent feelings about almost every facet of this game.
The central concept was solid gold but could have been handled better. In particular, I think puzzling out the premise could have been a lot more fun if we hadn’t known the entry and exit squares going in.
The writing was as fun and funny as usual—if not more so! - but seemed less . . . pointed?/ambitious?/thematically-coherent? than I’ve come to expect.
The difficulty curve was perfect early but annoying late. A lot of our scenarios commit the minor sin of making initial headway hard to make, discouraging casual players and giving negligible or negative reward for initial investigations; this one emphatically doesn’t, since pairing high-traffic rooms with high-challenge creatures was an easy(-ish) way to get better-than-random EV. However, the central mechanics of “dungeoneers scout one room ahead” and “loud fights alert” interfered in ways that made it hard to pin either of them down: more rows and columns might have made this smoother (imo a 4x4 or 5x5 dungeon would probably have been easier than the 3x3, especially for reliably distinguishing between hypotheses A and B), as would having more simple and easily-discoverable rules to use as a firm foundation (“When given a choice, Adventurers will always choose rooms with Sirens, and never choose rooms with Tar Pits”?).
The timespan was a very good choice for the season (and I’m absolutely doing things this way next time I run an end-of-year game) but paired badly with the premise. Your last Christmas scenario was, in retrospect, a really good match, because (possible spoiler for any reader who might want to play it)
it was puzzle-y and un-random enough that a player could be 100% confident their inferences were correct, so it wouldn’t occupy mental real estate once they put it down, and they wouldn’t mind waiting for their answers to be confirmed
but this one was kind of the opposite.
There was one aspect about which I have unreservedly positive feelings: the chrono effects, the hag poem and the varying numbers of adventurers were all excellent red herrings, seeming like they might hint towards subtle opportunities for performance improvement (and/or a secret Bonus Bonus Objective) but being quickly dismissable as fingertraps. (Yay verisimilitude!)
In summary, I think I’d put this one at about a 3⁄3 for Quality and Complexity . . . though I suspect others might have radically different opinions depending on how all the above happened to hit for them.
I found a row where Adventurers were clearly choosing an easy path starting with Orcs over a hard path starting with Boulders, and took this to mean “adventurers take perfect paths under at least some circumstances” instead of “there’s some predictable condition for which Orcs<Boulders”. Whoops!
“You tried to play the GM instead of the game? Doom! Doom for you!” ← what I thought you might be thinking
Enemy HP: 72⁄104
Fractionalist cast Reduce-4!
It succeeded!
Enemy HP: 18⁄26
I’ve procrastinated and prevaricated for the entire funding period, because, well . . . on the one hand . . .
Lightcone runs LW, runs Lighthaven, and does miscellaneous Community Things. I’ve never visited Lighthaven, don’t plan to, and (afaik) have never directly benefited from its existence; I have similar sentiments regarding the Community Things. Which means that, from my point of view, ~$2M/yr is being raised to run a web forum. This strikes me as unsustainable, unscaleable, and unreasonable.
The graphs here say the number of monthly users is ~4000. If you disqualify the ~half of those who are students, lurkers, drive-by posters, third-worlders, or people who just forgot their wallet . . . that implies ~$1000, per person, per year, to run a web forum. (Contrast the Something Awful forums, which famously sustain themselves with a one-time entry fee of $10-$25 per person (plus some ads shown to the people who only paid $10).)
I suspect Rationality is one of those things you get less of as you add more money; relatedly, frugality is one of the more reliable defenses against Chapman-style capital-S Sociopaths, and Zvi-style capital-M Mazes.
But on the other hand . . .
It’s a really good web forum; very plausibly the best that exists. This walled garden is impeccably managed and curated, and has an outsized impact on the rest of the world.
If just a handful of the mundane UI innovations prototyped here caught on in the wider internet, that could justify every penny being asked for and then some (I’m thinking particularly of multidimensional voting and the associated ability to distinguish “this comment is Good” from “this comment is Right”).
LW has had a non-negligible and almost-certainly-net-positive impact on my personal and professional lives, and I think that should be rewarded.
I’ve decided to square this circle by giving $200 but being super tsundere about it. Hopefully the fact that this is about a fifth of what’s implicitly being asked for, while being about five times what I’d consider sensible for any other site, serves to underline everything I’ve said above.
Typo in title: prioritize, not priorities.
Here’s Claude’s take on a diagram to make this less confusing.
The diagram did not make things less confusing, and in fact did the opposite. A table would be more practical imo.
10 chat sessions
As in, for each possible config, and each possible channel, run ten times from scratch? For a total of 360 actual sessions? This isn’t clear to me.
Regardless: a small useful falsifiable practical result, with no egregious errors in the parts of the methodology I understand. Upvoted.
Oh, and as for
the Bonus Objective
if I’m continuing with my current paradigm I’d guess it has something to do with
an apparent interaction between Orcs and Hags which makes a path containing both less dangerous than might otherwise be expected
possibly such that
I could remove the Goblin in Room 7 without making the easiest path any easier
but
I have low confidence in this answer
and
I have no idea how I could get away with purging the second Goblin
Built a treebased model; trialled a few solutions; got radically different answers which I’m choosing to trust.
The machines seem to think that the best solution I can offer is
BOG/OWH/GCD
and I’ve
found a row which confirms the adventurers-scout-one-room-ahead paradigm is, at the very least, not both eternal and absolute
so I’m making that my answer for now.
Did some more tinkering with this scenario. It is remarkably difficult to be 100% confident when determining the basic mechanics of this scenario, i.e.
whether adventuring parties can see more than one room ahead.
And I’m beginning to suspect that
some adventuring parties always take the optimal path, while some others are greedy algorithms just picking the easiest next encounter.
( . . . and IQ tests, and exam papers, and probably some other things that are too obvious for me to call to mind . . . )
You might want to look into tests given to job applicants. (Human intelligence evaluation is an entire industry already!)
D&D.Sci, for Data Science and related skills (including, to an extent, inference-in-general).
“What important truth do you believe, which most people don’t?”
“I don’t think I possess any rare important truths.”
On reflection, I think
my initial guess happened to be close to optimal
because
Adventurers will successfully deduce that a mid-dungeon Trap is less dangerous than a mid-dungeon Orc
and
Hag-then-Dragon seems to make best use of the weird endgame interaction I still don’t understand
however
I’m scared Adventurers might choose Orcs-plus-optionality over Boulders
so my new plan is
CBW/OOH/XXD
(and I also suspect
COW/OBH/XXD
might be better because of
the tendency of Adventuring parties to pick Eastern routes over Southern ones when all else is equal
but I don’t have the confidence to make that my answer.)
Oh and just for Posterity’s sake, marking that I noticed both
the way some Tournaments will have 3 judges and others will have 4
and
the change in distribution somewhere between Tournaments 3000 and 4000
but I have no clue how to make use of these phenomena.
On further inspection it turns out I’m completely wrong about
how traps work.
and it looks like
Dungeoneers can always tell what kinds of fight they’ll be getting into: min(feature effect) between 2 and 4 is what decides how they collectively impact Score.
It also looks like
The rankings of effectiveness are different between the Entry Square, the Exit Square, and Everywhere Else; Steel Golems are far and away the best choice for guarding the entrance but ‘only’ on par with Dragons elsewhere.
Lastly
It looks like there’s a weak but solid benefit to dungeoneers having no choice even between similarly strong creatures: a choice of two dragons and a choice of two hags are both a bit scarier than hag-or-dragon. (Though that might just be because multiple of the same strong creature is evidence you’re in a well-stocked dungeon? Feature effects are hard to detangle.)
Also
It seems like there’s a weirdly strong interaction between the penultimate obstacle and the ultimate obstacle?
I still have a bunch of checking to confirm whether this actually works, but I’m getting my preliminary decision down ASAP:
CWB/OOH/XXD (where the Xes are Nothing or Goblins depending on whether I’m Hard-mode-ing)
On the basis that:
Adventurers should prioritize the ‘empty’ trapped rooms over the ones with Orcs, then end up funelled into the traps and towards the Hag; Clay Golem and Dragon are our aces, so they’re placed in the two locations Adventurers can’t complete the course without touching.
I once saw an advert claiming that a pregnancy test was “over 99% accurate”. This inspired me to invent an only-slightly-worse pregnancy test, which is over 98% accurate. My invention is a rock with “NOT PREGNANT” scrawled on it: when applied to a randomly selected human being, it is right more than 98% of the time. It is also cheap, non-invasive, endlessly reusable, perfectly consistent, immediately effective and impossible to apply incorrectly; this massive improvement in cost and convenience is obviously worth the ~1% decrease in accuracy.