Zvi

• Zvi 16 Jan 2019 13:54 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Disad­van­tages of Card Rebalancing

  Thanks, this is very helpful feed­back. Re­quest for more such notes from read­ers.

  A lot of the mo­ti­va­tion for writ­ing it was, in fact, to figure out what my own opinions ac­tu­ally were.

  I do think a lot of this has im­pli­ca­tions out­side game de­sign, and I was sad that I couldn’t effi­ciently write this in a way that didn’t bog it down in a lot of game-de­sign-spe­cific de­tail, which means it will be hard for those not into the de­tail to ex­tract the im­pli­ca­tions un­less I come back to them in an­other form.

• Zvi 16 Jan 2019 13:50 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Hoagy's comment on: Sub­si­diz­ing Pre­dic­tion Markets

  Pay­ing in some rea­son­able in­vest­ment is an im­prove­ment, and in a world with differ­ent ‘right’ in­vest­ments would be a big­ger one, but ty­ing up the money that long in a suffi­ciently safe in­vest­ment is still pretty ex­pen­sive.

  It would be in­ter­est­ing if one could bet, say, shares of SPY US plus as­so­ci­ated div­i­dends, so you were leak­ing a lot less alpha. Of course, that changes the odds on long bets quite a bit if they are cor­re­lated with SPY US, which most of them will be.

Disad­van­tages of Card Rebalancing

• Zvi 4 Jan 2019 20:24 UTC

  6 points

  on: Two More De­ci­sion The­ory Prob­lems for Humans

  I agree strongly that, as a prob­lem for hu­mans, as­sum­ing that the con­se­quen­tial­ist model has all our real val­ues is not a safe as­sump­tion.

  I would go fur­ther, and say that this as­sump­tion is al­most always go­ing to be im­por­tantly wrong and re­sult in loss of im­por­tant val­ues. Nor do I think this is a hy­po­thet­i­cal failure mode, at all; I be­lieve it is com­mon in our cir­cles.

Ad­van­tages of Card Rebalancing

Card Re­bal­anc­ing and Eco­nomic Con­sid­er­a­tions in Digi­tal Card Games

• Zvi 29 Dec 2018 14:55 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Davis_Kingsley's comment on: Card Col­lec­tion and Ownership

  It re­mains to be seen whether they’re go­ing to go full blast on mak­ing lots of changes, and whether the changes they do make will be good go­ing for­ward—while these changes were net pos­i­tive by most ac­counts, even with the gi­ant crater they left in the color green, they do sug­gest a trap I’ll be de­scribing in my next post that I worry about.

• Zvi 29 Dec 2018 14:53 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: lifelonglearner's comment on: Card Col­lec­tion and Ownership

  There are a lot of hints in this se­ries, some of them quite ex­plicit.

  I have a whitepa­per, but it’s not cur­rently pub­lic.

  Of course, part of de­sign­ing a game is find­ing out that you’re wrong, and chang­ing it to make it bet­ter.

• Zvi 29 Dec 2018 14:31 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Dagon's comment on: Card Col­lec­tion and Ownership

  I don’t think that’s right.

  I do think that it helps with some con­fu­sion, but there is a core im­por­tant set of is­sues here re­gard­ing what is ac­tu­ally go­ing on and which sys­tems are bet­ter and worse in which ways.

• Zvi 29 Dec 2018 14:26 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Davis_Kingsley's comment on: Card Balance and Artifact

  Look­ing for­ward to the fol­low-up; you may wish to post it on the origi­nal blog post since it’s go­ing deep into such mat­ters.

  I to­tally get that there’s an­other per­spec­tive but have not heard a strong case for it.

Card Balance and Artifact

Card Col­lec­tion and Ownership

Ar­ti­fact Em­braces Card Balance Changes

Fif­teen Things I Learned From Watch­ing a Game of Se­cret Hitler

Re­view: Slay the Spire

Pre­dic­tion Mar­kets Are About Be­ing Right

• Zvi 3 Dec 2018 15:45 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: Benquo's comment on: Con­ver­sa­tional Cul­tures: Com­bat vs Nurture

  An out­right “You’re dumb” is a mis­take, pe­riod, un­less you ac­tu­ally meant to say that the per­son is in fact dumb. This round­ing is a pure bad, and there’s no need of it. Ad­ding ‘be­ing’ or ‘play­ing’ or ‘do­ing some­thing’ be­fore the dumb is nec­es­sary.

  Part of a good com­bat­ive-type cul­ture is that you mean what you say and say what you mean, so the round­ing off here is a se­ri­ous prob­lem even be­fore the (im­por­tant) feel­ings/​sta­tus is­sue.

• Zvi 22 Nov 2018 23:22 UTC

  3 points

  on: If You Want to Win, Stop Conceding

  Cu­ri­ous for your take on this ques­tion (I have my own an­swers but I want to not an­chor you): Why do we fre­quently see sports teams in (e.g. bas­ket­ball or foot­ball) effec­tively con­cede games by tak­ing ap­proaches with 0% win rate, when they have strate­gies that have non-zero (but very low) win rates?

• Zvi 22 Nov 2018 23:21 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: Ben Pace's comment on: If You Want to Win, Stop Conceding

  There is a spe­cial case where these thoughts are ac­tu­ally use­ful. If you are play­ing at less than full ca­pac­ity, you should con­sider avoid­ing com­plex po­si­tions and long chains of rea­son­ing, and seek var­i­ance slash try to get lucky in var­i­ous ways. Sim­plify the game, or force the de­ci­sions onto the op­po­nent. If you’re on the clock, don’t count on be­ing able to op­er­ate quickly later on.

  The other spe­cial case is, re­gard­less of why, not­ing you are not fo­cused can be a good mo­ti­va­tion to ac­tu­ally fo­cus, whereas you won’t fix it if you don’t re­al­ize you have a prob­lem.

  And of course be­tween rounds is of­ten a great time to hy­drate, grab a bite, get a few min­utes of rest or what not, and it can very im­por­tant to your suc­cess in the tour­na­ment to be­come aware of your needs go­ing for­ward. Then, af­ter the tour­na­ment, you do what Richard says and pre­vent it from hap­pen­ing again.

• Zvi 22 Nov 2018 23:15 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Davis_Kingsley's comment on: Re­view: Artifact

  I haven’t played. I think it is a cool idea and I have a lot of faith in Richard, so I am op­ti­mistic. I should try it at some point, hard to say more with­out giv­ing it a shot.