What I learned from playing only Orc for a few weeks.

[Peregrine]

Uh yeah i think the smarter player usually wins yes. Dovekie talks about "skill" by which he means "ability to kill stuff"

He says skilled players lose, and the smarter the players in a game, the more its left up to chance

But there is only one skill in ffa: increasing your chances.

I dont have the best micro but i got 1st or 2nd in all my games this season (including my stupid semi loss)

Which is why it annoys me that soso, who is of course a good player, lucked his way into finals with 1 win all season

But dovekie i think we should table this topic until you actually play in FML. I dont doubt youll do well, but right now youre speaking from a very clear experiential bias

[Peregrine]

Small note: of course there are games when a dumb player wins simply because he was underestimated or because two people suicided or whatever, but overall i think the smarter player with the best decision making and great micro wins FFAs. When a player with clearly superior micro is allowed to tome someone and dominate a game, then that is a dumb mistake by one of the remaining players.

[junkerzam]

That is indeed whats implied and ideally that's what would happen, except for the fact that it doesn't.  And if it does, can you get away with it 2 games in a row?  And if you manage that, which shouldn't happen, what group of idiots will let you win your 3rd game in a row?

It does happen though. There is always luck in FFA yes, but if you rewatch any 3 way you will find key moments where players could have easily won if they did this and that. Usually though players lack information to act upon or are too scared to fully commit to say eliminating a player even though it would have meant victory. Players who manage to identify these key moments and have the micro and guts to pull off a deciding move, almost always win.

Also finding and using a fail safe strategy is not allowed for long in any sport/game. You need to change up your play style as soon as it becomes predictable, again outsmarting your opponents.

I'm also curious to what you suggest Dovekie to promote your definition of skillful play in FML. I don't think anyone disagrees with the fact that long games are boring, especially from an observers point of view. But we are all hypocrites prone to hoard if we benefit from it, even you.

[zTsoso]

The ideal form of competitive FFA is imo like Seksi suggested:

- A larger number of skilled players that play in a tournament or ladder on anonymous accounts (the dream). However, this is just an ideal. We don't have a large FFA player base to make a strong competitive anonymous ladder. FML is the stronghold of competitive FFA and has been for a long time. That does not mean ladder cannot be fun/challenging.


I think it would be cool to experiment with the timer again because FFA games take way to long with relatively little action. This is my personal view of things because I think it would be great for attracting viewers/players to FFA as well as making FML games more action packed and fun to play for the players. I am not against base race scenarios and games up to 2 hours, but I do have a problem with sitting and waiting in one’s base for 2½ hours -4 hours. With the current format sitting and waiting is rational because sometimes sitting in your main is the best choice in a 3-way. At the same time, it would be good to make a format where FFA games develop at its own pace with room for strategic decision making and hoarding, which are important strategic elements in FFA that has to be preserved.

Too long games could perhaps be solved by making more 6-ways and 8-ways if one can somehow come up with a solution to the scheduling problem. I think all initiatives that make FFA more action packed and "unforgiving" if one plays passively and sits in main for a long time without hoarding or mining, are welcome.  FFA is after all not primarily about fighting skills and micro/macro, it is about playing smart to win and seizing opportunities. Why is that? Because skilled players will always make sure their chances of winning are good, which means more coordinated teaming and balancing in case one player is about to dominate.

[Dovekie]

I'm also curious to what you suggest Dovekie to promote your definition of skillful play in FML. I don't think anyone disagrees with the fact that long games are boring, especially from an observers point of view. But we are all hypocrites prone to hoard if we benefit from it, even you.

I don't think it can truly exist. A smart player wont let another smart player win twice in a row. You can't "outsmart" someone in an FFA multiple games in a row, you will see through their deceit or even believe they are deceiving when they are not, and team them anyway.  Say we have a player just so much smarter than everyone—who is going to let him win? No one is going to let him win, he will rarely win anything because people won't let him win. Because he is so good, he would be better off pressing random buttons on the tavern when choosing heroes in order that he play worse. 

Look at the last 10 FML championships, 9 different champions, 1 smurf (which is practically cheating). The only one who won 2 was magadansky.  Shouldn't there be more consistency? Shouldn't a player like tyrant win like 5 seasons? He is smarter than most of you guys, micros much better, macros much better, gets more gold, plays much better. Where are his many championships? Why doesn't he have more? Because a good player isn't going to let him win.

Here is a prime example of what I am saying.  Guess who hasn't won a game with me in it in like the last 2.5 years? Maga. When I first played FFA like 3 years ago, Maga lied and won because of his lies and manip his first 3 games I played with him. Why would I  ever let him win through chat again? Maybe if we played more and he kept losing then I would start to underestimate him again and he could possibly win, but it illustrates my example perfectly.  You can be the smartest person in the world but people will not let you get away with it more than a couple times in a row. Because the better you get mechanically, the more you get teamed, so the worse you need to play to compensate. The better you manipulate, the more people ignore and disbelieve you, the more it screws your chances of winning.  (maybe you can find some games, idk, but every single one I remember had him lose in it, but you know, that might have a lot to do with him playing Undead)

I'm not new to FFA games.  My friends and I, multiple times a week, would play ~8 hours of SSBM on weekends during late highschool/early college. 4 player FFA.  Mechanically the game was completely different, but the FFA part was (almost) the same, a difference in Warcraft 3 is you gain a little more from being aggressive (hero levels). We had to place rules on how to play because there is absolutely zero, or extremely little skill, in winning FFA games.  By letting other people fight instead of yourself, you would end up with more stocks at the end, and then people would just team you down anyway so the game would be decided in a few, critical key moves at the end, instead of everything that happened before (Hey, doesn't this sound familiar?). You could say those few, critical moves at the end are what defines the intelligence and skill of the player, but that is completely bogus and we all knew it was bogus as well.  Only 1v1 were a true match of skill, or if we placed more rules on the game it showed our skill more, such as counting kills at the end to prevent passiveness (i.e. no one would consider someone a winner with only 1-2 kills).  Our FFA has almost zero rules that actively affect gameplay.  Sometimes you will get an extra point if you kill more heroes, but of all the points handed out at the end of the game, these little objectives are worth like 2-5% of the total points max, instead of 80-100%.

Yeah I think some rules would help (and a time-limit should exist regardless, people have lives), but in my opinion, as long as you are playing against people you know, in only a relatively few number of games, where everyone is legitimately trying to win, arrogating the winner as most skilled player is just a giant circlejerk among you guys. The reality is: he may be, but more likely he isn't.  Those "few, key moments in a 3-way" deciding a game being what defines skill is more lack of intelligence OR patience of your enemies, rather than your own brilliance 9 out of 10 times, if not completely random.

[Peregrine]

Dovekie just equated intelligence to using deceit and manip

And "skill" to killing shit again

I respect peoples opinion's but when someone suggests putting rules like counting kills then it becomes immediately clear to me that the person is biased towards a very aggressive solo style of play

Go stick to solo if you dont think FFA requires skill. A guy like Camp_and_Spank who went solo AM and tried to mass tp everyone out of the game is as legitimate a player as anyone else. The beauty of FFA lies in the outrageous number of strategies and outcomes in any given game. When guys like Dove (and hes not the first person who has done this) argues that the game needs to be played a certain way, he is trying to kill the randomness, chaos, and variability that makes FFA beautiful.

Retarded arguments like "why didnt tyrant win 5 championships?" when the guy only played a couple FML seasons wont get you anywhere and make me LOL. Very few of the best champions in FML history (Fly, Htrt, Tyrant, Target) played in many seasons. And the ones who did, like Maga or Wreck HAVE won multiple times. The fact that Maga and Wreck have won 3 titles in a game that mathematically has a 18-25% chance to win (4-6 players) is a testament to their SKILL in FFA.

[Dovekie]

Yeah what kind of sports have rules? What a stupid idea—completely absurd really. When games are played without rules, only then is true skill is shown due to the beauty of randomness, chaos, and variability. -Eshan

[Tleilaxu]

Lol @ using Tyrant as an example when he played ONE season of FML. You need to refine your sampling Dove.
FML does have rules, but please this is getting retarded.
If you think FFA ladder actually rewards skill more than FML you are just deluded bro. I mean, why the fuck are we arguing about this? FFA of all types is very random, and adding SHITTY rules like counting kills won't make it better. We play FFA because we enjoy it (it's the only type of game where you consistently get to run around with 100 food armies in wc3), not because it's the epitome of skillfull battle.

[Dovekie]

Yeah you and Eshan are getting really worked up over nothing. I literally agreed with what you are saying twice laxu. I said in organized FFA, especially as it stands, it is too random to reward skill in any meaningful way. Nowhere did I say rewarding hero kills would show skill better (that's a way we did it in a fighter game, it's called an example or comparison). If tyrant hasn't played much that only furthers my point. Throw 3 people of laxu's skill level and tyrant in a game now and tyrant will likely lose if the other 3 players play to win. Saying wreck won 3 is another prime example. He won 2, then lied about who he was to get rid of what everybody thought about him, giving him beyond a massive advantage as a high level FFA player, and THEN he won. I mean, it was a great, smart idea, don't get me wrong, but gave him so much more of an advantage than you think.  In a playFFA cup nooblex did the same thing and won, but that was just obviously coincidence.

But if we are talking about what takes more skill, then yeah, I completely agree that DV's 84% run on ladder is much more impressive than cumulo winning last FML.

as far as rules, what was really on my mind was what soso thinks:

-Some form of Anonminity
-Some type of limiting factor to the keep the games from being longer than it takes people to run marathons
-A larger amount of games played.

Not actually anything that affects gameplay unless it contributes to the limiting factor.

[noexxx]

Ffa is a psychological marathon, if you don't like boring 3 way games, just stop playing ffa, those long games are beautiful because you don't see the outcome and it reflects people character, putting a timer would be the worst idea in whole w3 history. who would like to obs a game`? when the game cannot be finished. It is like putting a timer in tennis, it would just be overly stupid

[Tleilaxu]

Yeah you and Eshan are getting really worked up over nothing. I literally agreed with what you are saying twice laxu. I said in organized FFA, especially as it stands, it is too random to reward skill in any meaningful way. Nowhere did I say rewarding hero kills would show skill better (that's a way we did it in a fighter game, it's called an example or comparison). If tyrant hasn't played much that only furthers my point. Throw 3 people of laxu's skill level and tyrant in a game now and tyrant will likely lose if the other 3 players play to win.

Lol @ the amount of backtracking here. Actually I think Tyrant might've played more than one FML season, because I remember him doing a nice rush on Ludix a while back.
Anyway I don't even know how you would make a tournament work with anonymous participants. Like, PBM would have to send a private message to everybody saying "Congratulations, you are now anonymous number #35. Please save this message and remember your number" and people would have to message an admin before every game confirming their number. Sounds fucking awful.
I don't even know why you're pushing for anonymous, I think you're in the category that benefits from names being known.

But if we are talking about what takes more skill, then yeah, I completely agree that DV's 84% run on ladder is much more impressive than cumulo winning last FML.

Of course you do, because you are biased. Fucking scrub. DV's solo games are impressive though.

I do agree that a larger number of games would be nice though.

[zTsoso]

I think Eshan and Laxu are conservative when it comes to changing rules and the format of FML. The way it is now an average FML game takes almost three hours. It is often boring to watch it through - even at 8x speed. If we want to attract more people to FFA and make FFA casts more enjoyable, we have to think in terms of action and implement some rules to avoid long boring 3 ways. 3 ways are rarely beautiful - most of the time three players sit in their main and discuss who to team next for an hour before something happens.

Another thing: show Dovekie some respect. He is a tough opponent and a skilled player. In my opinion his skills in combat surpases both of you (Eshan and laxu). He also has a point about the coordinated teaming that less skilled players benefit from. I can't even believe you are arguing about this. Seksi already made clear points about this. He also said medium skilled players have a better shot of winning fml games. I consider seksi to be one of the toughest players I ever faced in all aspects but he never won FML.

[Peregrine]

Some points:

Regarding rules: Every sport has rules. In basketball you can't dribble the ball out of bounds, run with the ball, or kick it.
In soccer you cant touch it with your hands, in tennis you must use a raquet and wear ugly shorts, in american football you have 4 downs before you turn it over.

In WC3 FFA, you must kill your opponents buildings to win, you cannot go over 100 food, you are taxed 60% of your income over 80 food, your heroes max at level 10, you can team, you can chat, you can build whatever units you want, and use whatever strategy to achieve the aforementioned goal of killing your opponents buildings.

Those are rules. What you are suggesting is a specific version of FFA played by the organization known as FML. Much like FIBA, the NBA, and the NCAA all have slightly different rules when it comes to basketball, you are suggesting imposing an FML set of rules on FFA.

FML already imposes rules: no PM chat, no preteam, 25-10-10-5 point system, no unfair colors, etc

Moreover, this season, Maga implemented some extra rules: bonus points, malus points, random heroes, a PM teaming round.

Most of these affected the original core game of FFA very very slightly. The changes you mention would affect it greatly, and I am opposed to most of them.

Re: "I think DV getting 84% winrate on bot is more impressive than cumulo's FML win"

So you just took the very best bot achievement, and compared it to one of the luckier easy finals games in FML. K. Fine lets examine that:

DV himself admitted he got his record by carefully choosing which maps and games to play, by going UD and overwhelming opponents in pubstomp bot games, and he is an enormously skilled player who has beaten grubby and is a top FFA player. Suddenly his 84% doesn't look that impressive at all. IDK if I could get 84% but playing with that kind of focus and discretion, I'm sure I could get 75% atleast.

Meanwhile, Cumulo might have gotten an ez win that game, but he played well - and also had to play well all season to even be in that position against top players. On top of that, he was basically unknown and flew under the radar the whole time (which, in your comments about Wreck's smurf, you admit to being extremely important)

All of this fun jibberjabber aside, can we get this Finals underway so the next season can start soon and Dovekie can just play in FML

Why do people keep saying FML games run 3 hrs when we just provided graphs that show the average game was around 1 hr 20 mins.
Even if FML games averaged almost TWO hrs, I would be happy to play a two-hour game once every week or two for FML. I think thats totally fine.

Finally - "If we want to attract more people to FFA and make FFA casts more enjoyable" - LOL, this is not the point of FFA. I don't give a shit about obs or casts, I dont play FFA for them. I play FFA for myself, for the game itself, and you're not gonna turn FFA into some huge phenomenon. So dont ruin the game just cause ur trying to make it more exciting for observers lol. FFA is not a spectator sport, its a video game type for the people who play it. And regarding casts, its easy to make casts more interesting - just don't do it live. Instead, cast a replay at 2x or 3x and suddenly it becomes extremely fast paced and exciting with tons to talk about.

[Dovekie]

Some points:

Regarding rules: Every sport has rules. In basketball you can't dribble the ball out of bounds, run with the ball, or kick it.
In soccer you cant touch it with your hands, in tennis you must use a raquet and wear ugly shorts, in american football you have 4 downs before you turn it over.

In WC3 FFA, you must kill your opponents buildings to win, you cannot go over 100 food, you are taxed 60% of your income over 80 food, your heroes max at level 10, you can team, you can chat, you can build whatever units you want, and use whatever strategy to achieve the aforementioned goal of killing your opponents buildings.

Those aren't rules in FFA.  Warcraft 3 already supplies those things as absolutes. They exist in the same way a basketball falls at 11ft per second per second once it reaches its highest point.  Level 10 heroes is like saying a human being can only jump 5 feet off the ground, but in the the majority of cases, only 3 feet (level 6 heroes).

Rules are "no private chat", or "no preteaming", or "no suiciding with no intention of winning".  What you are giving are not rules in anyway.


Also, that is partly DV being modest. Htrt did him much better with 91% win rate on totally fair maps never choosing anything but normal heroes.   I would be extremely surprised if you could go 75% for 100 games, Eshan, extremely surprised.

[Tleilaxu]

I think Eshan and Laxu are conservative when it comes to changing rules and the format of FML. The way it is now an average FML game takes almost three hours. It is often boring to watch it through - even at 8x speed. If we want to attract more people to FFA and make FFA casts more enjoyable, we have to think in terms of action and implement some rules to avoid long boring 3 ways. 3 ways are rarely beautiful - most of the time three players sit in their main and discuss who to team next for an hour before something happens.

Another thing: show Dovekie some respect. He is a tough opponent and a skilled player. In my opinion his skills in combat surpases both of you (Eshan and laxu). He also has a point about the coordinated teaming that less skilled players benefit from. I can't even believe you are arguing about this. Seksi already made clear points about this. He also said medium skilled players have a better shot of winning fml games. I consider seksi to be one of the toughest players I ever faced in all aspects but he never won FML.

I am not really conservative, I'm just opposed to implementing rules that change the game in shitty ways. Anonymous just sucks ass. I can see why it's required for bot to avoid having trolls, pre-teamers and hackers (unless their hacks also reveal names) ruin the games for legit players trying to climb the ladder every single game, but for FML? Fuck no. I don't care if there is indeed a slight correlation between being unknown and being underestimated. Playing against anonymous 1, 2 and 3 simply isn't fun.
Also, timers would suck too. If games are decided by score, you might say that players will be incentivized to fight, but they might as well be incentivized to hoard for the first 1 hour and 45 minutes (assuming a 2h timer) and build huge bases with 100 towers so they can't get eliminated.
Also, imagine if a game went to a really close 3 way or 1v1 like in that game where Maga had one destroyer left and there was one farm left or something. Wouldn't it suck ASS if such a game was decided by a timer instead of the moves by the players?

Lastly, I do agree that many games are boring and needlessly long. This is a mentality problem, not something you simply rule yourself out of.