No worries at all. Just glad to continue the convo, I think it's an interesting one.Treamayne wrote: ↑8 months agoI'm sorry for the delayed response. I had a number of things to do this weekend that kept me away from the computer, However, I also wanted to try thinking of a way to say what I felt needed to be said without giving offense. I feel the best I can do is to provide feedback and hope you will receive it in the intended context - non-accusatory feedback to consider. I'm sorry if I cause offense as well.
Maybe I should state this clearly - basically everything here is opinion. If I did a poll and every other commander player said "wtf are you talking about, I would happily play nobody-plays-to-win commander and enjoy it exactly as much, or more, than when everyone is playing to win" then I really would have no leg to stand on as this is purely a psychological question.I think you are conflating opinion and fact.
I am unsure if this is unintentional or just an effect of your inherent confidence in your beliefs. It is possible that it is a lack of understanding for groups and thought-patterns that are outside of your "normal."
My main argument tactic here is to point to extreme examples that I think we can agree on, and then extrapolate those agreements to more normal settings in the hopes that we can find understanding. But if you don't agree on the extreme examples, or if you have some reason why the agreement doesn't extrapolate to the normal world, then I can't do much except disagree.
I do think I understand better than you think I understand? But figuring that out is part of the meat of the conversation. That's why I want to drill down until we either come to an understanding, or we find where the chasm lies.
I think it retrospect I've been inaccurate with my language on this front. Of course it's very possible to have an enjoyable time playing magic with friends even with no competition, for the simple reason that it's possible to have fun being with friends without playing magic at all [citation needed]. In fairness, I also don't think it's true that it's impossible to have fun in the context of the game itself even with no competition, in the same way that it's often enjoyable to play a video game on invincibility mode for a typically short time.This is opinion. We've beaten this horse to death, so I won't delve too far down the rabbit hole. Necessary, to me, is the "opinion" word here. I agree that by the terms we defined over the last page of conversation means that competition is inherent to the game (just as dice are "necessary" to play craps - because that is the basic rules of the game structure), however, the implication with the way you use it implies "necessary to the player." If I am wrong in your implication, then I apologize. If that is what you are implying, then just know that this is not a fact - not all players find competition to be a necessary component of games - including MtG.
So let me revise my own statement a bit - it's not necessary to have competition to enjoy playing magic. But I think it's necessary to have legitimate competition to get the most enjoyment out of magic. If you're compromising the competitive context with intentional misplays, I think you're hurting everyone's enjoyment, at least in the long term.
These aren't contradictory, they are different models for viewing the same information.This is also opinion, not fact. Notionally, if destroying X increases a player's chance of winning by 5% and destroying Y increases their chance only 3% - making the second choice has not lowered anything. It may not have been as large an increase as possible, but it also has not "lowered that chance."DirkGently wrote: ↑8 months agoIt's sufficient to establish that you have a % chance based on playing optimally, and making suboptimal plays lowers that chance.
But I think the second one isn't as helpful because you're giving zero weight to removal in hand, which seems equally silly to me as assuming that a 5/5 on board has zero weight because it might never attack or block. If you're not assuming that cards will be used in a productive way, how are you calculating the % chance to win in the first place? (theoretically, of course)
My model would say they always had a 5% increased chance to win from the removal in hand, using it correctly maintained their chance, while using it on the other target reduced it by 2%. To put this into a hypothetical game, I think it reaches good conclusions: say it's a 1v1 and you have a Terminate and your opponent has a 10/10 and a 2/2, while you have a 4/4, with 20 vs 20 life and no player having other cards in hand. Makes sense to me that, in terms of winrate, this board state is equivalent to one in which your opponents 10/10 is dead and you don't have a terminate, which is how my model would calculate it. Would you really argue that using the terminate on the 2/2 has increased your chance of winning?
I've said before that I believe different players have greater or lesser tolerances, but I believe that everyone has some limit for intentional misplays, beyond which the enjoyment of the game is dramatically lessened. Maybe playing one game where your opponent is putting up zero competition is still reasonably fun, and from which you might conclude "I don't need competition to enjoy this game", in the same way you might have fun in the short term playing a shooter on invincibility mode. But after you've played against that same opponent for 20 games and they've never put up any fight whatsoever, would that not start to get kinda boring? In the same way that playing a shooter on invincibility mode will eventually get boring?This is also opinion, or your perception. I doubt most players even notice an intentional misplay. Of those that do, I posit it is a small percentage for whom this "taints" anything. Other posts in this thread indicate the same - and also show some players commiserate with your position and do find that their enjoyment of the game has been lessened through intentionally poor play.
Either way, it's a far cry from a universal effect of the "intentional misplay" cause.
Extrapolating from this, I believe that, while it's not easy to perceive, that first game was also less enjoyable than a competitive game. It's just that, especially without the option to relive the same game with and without competition, the lessening of enjoyment wasn't necessarily large enough to detect. This is, admittedly, unfalsifiable, but without a good way to test I think it follows from the more extreme examples, in much the way that one might point to fossils with significant evolutionary gaps between them and extrapolate those in between.
It is an opinion, but one I feel confident about. Do you know anyone who prefers a bad, poorly-fought game?Another opinion stated as fact.
Fair (acknowledged above)I posit that, even if your hypothesis is technically true ("some degree" is essentially impossible to disprove, since a notional 0.1% still technically meets your hypothesis)
Many commander players aren't able to pay close attention to the game. Many will not notice if someone makes an intentional misplay that isn't extremely egregious. And hardly any would consciously think about it in this way. But their lack of awareness doesn't mean they wouldn't care about it if they became aware of it.there is a not-insignificant percentage of players (including me) that never consider game integrity in any situation short of your extreme hypotheticals.
Case in point - I have had games where someone had an on-board win and intentionally didn't take it. The other players (or a subset of them), being commander players, failed to notice. Sometimes the sandbagger acknowledged what they were doing ("I want to win some other way", "I want to let the game last a bit longer" etc), and sometimes I did. But once everyone saw what was happening, scoop city. People usually don't want to play a game that is no longer competitive.
I have no interest is debating the definition of "throwing the game". I care about ideas not definitions.Yes, a lightning bolt to yourself at two life would make almost anybody consider that the player was "conceding" without using that phrase. However, if their position were that precarious, I don't know that it could be called throwing a game either.
I used that example because it was, presumably, a clear example where we could both agree that the player is throwing the game, and thus potentially reject the "player must actually lose the game" requirement of the definition - though as I said I don't want to argue definitions.Well, in this case, the way you present the "lightning bolt" scenario implies that you think I am either stupid enough to do such a thing, or stupid enough to beleive that such an action does not indicate a player is throwing a game
Extreme examples allow us to find common ground and work inward. I prefer to phrase them as questions (i.e. "would you enjoy a game where your opponent plays only basic lands?") so that I'm not asserting your positions for you.
Why not?An extreme example that has such a low possibility of actually happening isn't a "test" of anything.
I've revised my statement above such that I believe it now incorporates this data point.But if the question is simply "can I enjoy zero competition?" - then yes. As previously mentioned, well over 90% of my games for the last few years have been goldfishing decks on MTGO. No opponents - just playtests.
I can appreciate that you're in a subpar situation magic-wise, but were it an option would you not prefer to have competitive games where all players are on roughly equal footing?
I haven't played online (outside of some arena a couple years ago) so I wouldn't presume to guess. I largely consider online play (arena and mtgo) to be separate games with the same ruleset as paper magic. I don't speak to them because I don't play them.Please tell me if you can find a way to accomplish this in an environment where every game is three random opponents and you can't have a pre-game "rule 0" converation with any of them - beyond asking in the game notes: Casual (or some other more-definitive descriptor(s)).DirkGently wrote: ↑8 months agoOf course people don't want to get steamrolled, but the solution is to accurately match power levels.
Typically players only concede if they think they have functionally zero chance to win, at which point it's not a misplay to any appreciable degree. I do find it somewhat frustrating when someone concedes while they still have a solid chance to win based on board state. I assume others do as well, though they may not be as able to identify whether the opponents' scoop was warranted.- Being "given the victory" through a player intentionally throwing a game is usually considered a bad thing by most (?) players, but (ironically) conceding isn't considered throwing a game (even though it is essentially the same result).
Of note - I've said before that playing competitive is a matter of procedure. If the whole game was played competitively, and then someone scoops at the end, that doesn't necessarily invalidate the enjoyment of the previous game. It can certainly be disappointing - say someone has to leave for a doctor appointment - but the gameplay up until that point was still within the framework of competition so it still stands on its own. Winning is not the purpose.
Case in point, we had a really enjoyable game last night that ended with an exciting standoff situation...and then a couple players had to leave and the game ended abruptly and somewhat unsatisfyingly. But that was okay because the rest of the game was still a blast. I would have preferred that it ended better, but the purpose of the game was still fully accomplished regardless.
There's a non sequitur being created here by changing uses of the term "playing competitively". We've been using the term "playing competitively" to mean "making a good faith effort to take the moves most likely to result in victory", without any implication about investment in winning the game. You seem to be using the term in that way before the semicolon (or if you aren't, then you're arguing with someone else because that wouldn't be my position). But after the semicolon, you're using it almost exclusively to refer to (over)investment in winning the game.- For some players, playing competitively is as important as the competition inherent in the game itself; for other players "playing competitvely" is considered a detriment to the game when that competitive drive leads one player to pursue their enjoyment at the expense of one or more other players in the game. Most players are likely to be near the middle of this continuum.
Nobody has argued that players should be invested in winning, and certainly not overly invested. I think most players find some enjoyment from winning, but whatever enjoyment someone takes from the format is fine by me, so long as it's not adversely effecting the game. If you do not care whatsoever about winning and just want to hang out, that is 100% fine. Just play the best you can and have fun.