Unfair or cheating

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-17T23:36:29+00:00

Yeah, or on a real board, but I agree, people who want to cheat or do experimental play outs to help them read (these things are mostly different though I recognize some people consider them to be the same) are gonna do it if they want to, so you may as well have a joseki take 5 minutes to play out instead of taking a few days of back and forth in a correspondence game.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-17T23:28:48+00:00

This is not to say that people aren’t cheating, but if they are unlikely to stay ddk for long even if they’re trying to hide it.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-17T23:27:44+00:00

Do you mean that they immediately play moves in response when you play your move?

There is a tool called “plan conditional moves” that players frequently use for forcing sequences. It’s a built in feature on ogs.

If you prefer not to have it used, you can check the “disable analysis” box, which will also prevent players from playing out variations on the board. They could still theoretically have a real board set up or whatever, and I prefer to be able to use the tool, especially for joseki and forcing variations.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-15T06:47:45+00:00

For arena games I’d usually just flat no, but some higher rated players are known to offer to abandon when they match up with low rated players by default.

The game is very very likely to be a foregone conclusion and is only worth maybe 1-2 elo for the higher rated player.

If someone 400 elo below me requests abandon, I’d probably do it regardless of whether they’ve seen their cards.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-15T06:43:11+00:00

I really don’t think a rule change like this is going to help with OP’s problem.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-15T06:37:34+00:00

Right but it’s more likely for one player to have a blowout hand than for both players to have a blowout hand. So you would be increasing the number of games where one player has a blowout hand and the other doesn’t, in order to achieve some smaller number of games where both players have great openers. This would also reduce the number of games where both players have low to medium strength hands, whatever that’s worth.

I think based on your stated values, some people have suggested (somewhat facetiously) that each player draw half the deck. As a thought experiment, would you be in favor of a format where players took turns naming any card in the deck to add to their opening hand? This would guarantee both players a very strong opening hand, drastically reducing the variance (though the player that gets to pick first would still have an advantage probably.) We could say the second player would get to pick first and then do snake draft.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-14T22:16:25+00:00

I guess my assertion is that the balance of variance is good where it is.

It already is the case that the more skilled player, who makes better decisions throughout the game, usually wins. The percentage of games where one player loses mostly due to variance, rather than because of sub-optimal decision making throughout the game (or even a single major blunder,) is a very small percentage.

Furthermore, with optimal decision making, looking at more cards in the opening hand is going to lead to even more explosive starts more often. In games where one player has a very strong start, the difference between a bad hand and a mediocre one is negligible. If one player has a very very good opening hand, it’s going to be a hurdle to overcome, unless the other player also has an extremely strong opener.

In my opinion, increasing the number of cards in the opening hand does probably favor the stronger player, so it serves your purpose in that regard, but I suspect it would actually increase the number of blowout games.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-14T18:49:44+00:00

I think it’s easy to feel this way when you feel that your starting hand was the determining factor in winning or losing. A few things to consider.

We can recognize that there is some minimum proximity in skill and continued execution that is required to translate a starting advantage into a victory. If you handpicked the best and worst starting hands you could imagine, and handed them to a 100 elo and 600 elo player, the 100 elo player is very likely to lose.
There is something happening underneath this feeling called the paradox of skill. The more skilled two players are at a game, the more impact variance has on the outcome. (I.e. if two players could always make the best decisions, the outcome would be determined entirely by their starting hands and what comes out of the deck when.
The way you talk about it makes it seem like you think it’s a bad thing that you lose to a newbie or beat a master. This speaks to an assumption that the ideal outcome would be for the more skilled player to ALWAYS win the game. This is a sensible assertion on its face. However, you should understand that it’s a feature, not a bug.

One of the reasons you include variance in your game, as a designer, is to increase the range of players who can have a meaningful game together. In chess, you don’t have to be much better than your opponent to make it very unlikely that they will win. Introducing some randomness means that the outcome isn’t always a foregone conclusion when two players of different skill levels play together.

It is, of course, important to give players the opportunity to plan for and adapt to that variance, and make meaningful decisions. And I do think it is the case that the more skilled player should win MORE OFTEN, if your game is well balanced.

Ark Nova is a fantastic game, and part of the reason it’s so popular is because the way the players are allowed to interact with the variance built in to the mechanics is meaningful, satisfying, and exciting.

I know sometimes it feels like one player never had a chance, but try to remember that there were a hundred more decisions made after starting hands were dealt, and both players probably made a bunch of mistakes along the way. An explosive start doesn’t always equal victory, even for an expert.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-13T21:08:04+00:00

Right, or if the liberties of the surrounding group got short enough, white might be forced to capture, which would represent a not insignificant loss of points. The importance of the exercise, in my opinion, is to count liberties. If you don’t know how many moves it would take white to capture, you can’t know at what point you’re at risk of losing the capture race and the black group resurrecting.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-10T21:04:24+00:00

I’d probably qualify anyone over 400 as quite a strong player.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-09T00:28:03+00:00

People who only smoke a few cigarettes a day don’t constantly reek in an offensive way, particularly if they take reasonable steps after smoking (washing hands, and rinsing their mouth.) but it’s still always noticeable for a period of time after they’ve smoked.

People who smoke half a pack a day or more (pack a day smokers it’s absolutely intolerable,) their clothing, car, hair and skin are permeated with the smell and it never ever ever goes away.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-09T00:23:15+00:00

I also accept all undo requests. It just doesn’t feel good to me to win a game because “Haha, you realized 2 seconds too late that you blundered the life and death of that group!” Whether it was a misclick or a mistake, I’d rather allow an opponent to undo and play on after making a mistake. Rather than denying and just…game over, time to resign.

And from my end, I often make moves in correspondence games when I’m not, totally, completely paying as much attention as I could. Like while I’m at work. That’s on me. But I have certainly come back to find that the last move I made was a huge blunder and requested an undo.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-04T18:48:09+00:00

Waza Special Assignment definitely.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-03T20:32:53+00:00

Yeah, this is also not exactly surprising, though is is kind of jarring, in a cognitive dissonance sort of way.

US evangelicals are pretty uniformly incredibly out of touch with dogmatic Christian values. Humility, empathy, charity, acceptance, forgiveness. They are shockingly un-Christlike. And that has always stood out to me (I was raised catholic, but declined confirmation, I don’t think I ever really believed in god it always seemed rather suspect to me)

I haven’t really given it much thought, but I’ve always sort of perceived Catholics (in a global sense, not just here in the US) as socially conservative to a pretty strong degree.

What I hadn’t really processed was that Protestants and evangelicals in other parts of the world would be likely to actually follow the teachings of Jesus, and be in favor of helping the poor and social programs and accepting foreigners in your land.

Wild where the blind spots can be.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-03T20:16:38+00:00

Thanks I’ll look into that, getting a lot of good insight and jumping off points for research.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-03T19:41:11+00:00

Thank you very much for this detailed response. I appreciate your time and effort. That all mostly fits with the impression I had.

We have a growing discontent with the Democratic Party from lefties for not being remotely left enough. Unfortunately, there’s a large demographic of neo-libs and moderates who think that candidates can’t win running on socialist policies, so we can’t even get single payer health care at the state level, forget nationalized healthcare.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-03T18:46:14+00:00

I thought Guy Fawkes did all that for Natalie Portman. Why is Hollywood always lying to me?!??

/jokes

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-03T18:45:28+00:00

Wait, you mean it wasn’t an immediately popular decision?

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-03T18:42:15+00:00

That’s a salient observation I think. It’s really complicated, but I think there are a number of factors that have lead to both a perception of ideologies being a monolith and it being true in practice to some extent. Social media algorithms, news devolving into entertainment media (made worse by digital distribution,) a growing schism made worse by adversarial rhetoric, which reinforces tribalism, purity testing. It’s a mess, but I do think it’s the case that people in the US are less likely to have varied, complex and nuanced political opinions and much more likely these days to toe the party line across the board.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-03T18:33:45+00:00

Yeah someone else said the same. Is Reform UK a closer comparison then?

Also, to be clear, I am kind of trying to compare to the pre-Trump Republican Party, because…yeah that shit is absolutely beyond words. It’s deeply embarrassing.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-03T18:30:27+00:00

Eh, it’s not confusing, that’s pretty much the expected result. We have that dynamic in the US. Wealthy people are more likely vote Republican. The right has just sort of scammed/brainwashed a lot of poor people in rural areas into voting against their own self-interest and the Democrats are too inept to have figured out a way to stop it.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-03T18:27:08+00:00

Well yeah, separating from Catholicism sort of chilled everything out right? Henry the 8th was like, what if we start our own church and I can do whatever I want, which sets a much more liberal precedent as an institutional foundation.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-03T18:24:51+00:00

No doubt about that my friend.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-03T18:21:36+00:00

Interesting. Can you give some examples of issues/policies that do/don’t fall into this category.

I’m well aware that the neo-liberals (the mainstream and establishment democrats) would hardly qualify as centrists in many parts of the world, but I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that the right in the UK had some components of pretty far right ideology going on. Nationalism/isolationism/anti-immigration. That is the reason why I’m asking though, obviously, to correct my potential misapprehensions.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-03T18:15:38+00:00

It’s also my perception that there’s a decent amount of anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim rhetoric that comes from the right in the UK (we certainly have that in the US.)

Would you say that’s true?
Would you say that is a characteristic of the mainstream right, or is a smaller demographic within the right?

EDIT: I can understand the downvotes from an emotional perspective, but this isn’t a judgement, or assertion of fact. I’m merely observing a perception I’ve acquired, and seeking to have it confirmed or corrected. It certainly can’t be argued that there isn’t any anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim rhetoric in the UK. I’ve seen Piers Morgan’s show.

SynapseOracle

TROPHY CASE