Been catching up on the forums and came across a couple of threads from new people trying to figure out how to win.   Lots of good advice given, but most of it is situational and bound to be misunderstood, misapplied or forgotten. 

What do you all think about the concept of mentors?   By that I mean, someone new has an experienced player watch their game and give them advice before each turn?   There are pros  and cons  with the concept.   I think it would be a very effective way to teach.   But, it could also be considered unfair to their opponents to have a top player play their game for them. 

I can imagine more or less formalized ways to implement it.    Maybe some games could be set up as mentoring games so that the stats don't count.  Or, maybe a reverse way of doing it is to invite new players to watch the game of an experienced player which, depending on the fog level, could require giving them the same visibility.   Or, maybe one could annotate a "teaching game"  with comments which are private during the game, but visible to all after the game so that a new person could not only review a completed game, but understand the reasoning for the strategy being applied.  

One of the nice features that warfish had that I've not seen (or noticed) on wargear was that when watching the history of a game, the comments made during the game would be presented on top of the map as a move and in the sequence in which it was made.    So, you could see exactly the state of the game and understand the context of the post.  A feature like that could allow one to create an annotated teaching game. 

Not a high priority, just throwing it out there to see what thoughts it generates. 

 

Mostly Harmless wrote:

One of the nice features that warfish had that I've not seen (or noticed) on wargear was that when watching the history of a game, the comments made during the game would be presented on top of the map as a move and in the sequence in which it was made.    So, you could see exactly the state of the game and understand the context of the post.  A feature like that could allow one to create an annotated teaching game. 

Not a high priority, just throwing it out there to see what thoughts it generates. 

Click on the Image icon in the upper right corner of an in-game comment and it displays the board image at that time.

Yertle wrote:

Click on the Image icon in the upper right corner of an in-game comment and it displays the board image at that time.

Thanks I didn't realize that... interesting.

In case it wasn't clear, though, that's not what I was suggesting.   In warfish, as you stepped through the history of a game, when you got to a point where a message was posted, the message would display in a window right on top of the map.   So,  for example, if someone posted, "why'd you attack me?" or "damn, that was dumb",  you could see exactly what they were referring to.   With wargear, when you're reviewing a game, there doesn't appear to be a correlation between the messages and the moves.   You can see messages below the map, but you have to look at timestamps or something to figure out when they were posted relative to the history you're reviewing. 

Even if wargear worked the same way, it still wouldn't be useful for annotating a game as only public messages could be viewed by others and you wouldn't want to be publicly explaining your strategy during the game.   So, you'd need some other mechanism in addition which let you create comments during or after the game that could be displayed inline and viewed by others.    It could make for a useful way to provide not only training demos, but tutorials for a new map.  

Again, just brainstorming and, as is often the case in such exercises, the energy spent thinking can be disproportionate to the value of the ideas that emerge.  

 

 

I think there was a thread that explained how to record the play of game to a video.  If you could do that, you could upload it to youtube, and I guess there is some way to add popups to that?  I don't know.  It's probably a lot of work to figure out, but if you knew how to do it, it probably wouldn't take too long to put together and would be neat.  I'd do it for some of my maps/games if we could figure out a reasonable workflow.

Adding post- game history-synced messages would obviously be simpler from a user point of view, but requires Tom's intervention.

Mostly Harmless wrote:

Been catching up on the forums and came across a couple of threads from new people trying to figure out how to win.   Lots of good advice given, but most of it is situational and bound to be misunderstood, misapplied or forgotten. 

What do you all think about the concept of mentors?   By that I mean, someone new has an experienced player watch their game and give them advice before each turn?   There are pros  and cons  with the concept.   I think it would be a very effective way to teach.   But, it could also be considered unfair to their opponents to have a top player play their game for them. 

I can imagine more or less formalized ways to implement it.    Maybe some games could be set up as mentoring games so that the stats don't count.  Or, maybe a reverse way of doing it is to invite new players to watch the game of an experienced player which, depending on the fog level, could require giving them the same visibility.   Or, maybe one could annotate a "teaching game"  with comments which are private during the game, but visible to all after the game so that a new person could not only review a completed game, but understand the reasoning for the strategy being applied.  

One of the nice features that warfish had that I've not seen (or noticed) on wargear was that when watching the history of a game, the comments made during the game would be presented on top of the map as a move and in the sequence in which it was made.    So, you could see exactly the state of the game and understand the context of the post.  A feature like that could allow one to create an annotated teaching game. 

Not a high priority, just throwing it out there to see what thoughts it generates. 

 

You're right in that there is currently no formal method of teaching/mentoring other players. I think we have bits and pieces of the process (new player first game group, reviewing of history, private games, etc.). I'm interested in the idea...maybe we can flesh it out a bit more. Would this system just be for new players or for anybody who's interested? Would it be board specific or maybe more genre based? How would one go about requesting a mentor? And how is Blackdog going to handle so many requests? :-D

one idea is to start with a list of people who agree to take on a protege.  Then there can be a link , "Select a menotr", where new players can choose from that list

I like the idea of mentors (and the specifics MH laid out), but it seems unrealistic. I can't imagine anyone would have the time for that. If I find enough time for WarGear, I'll invest energy in coordinating (or coaching if they are newbies) my team mates in the team games I have going. That can easily take half an hour per message. So coaching someone for a game you are not involved in is quite an investment.

However, I'd like to suggest a different approach: chess problems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_problem)

In chess there is a tradition of singling out specific interesting board states and using them as puzzles. The goal for the reader is usually to identify the right course to a checkmate. 

We could offer screenshots of board states of past games to newbies and ask them to pick the right choice of moves for the scenario and argue their decision.

The whole thing could be made into a competition with a jury of 2000+ players.

Among the greatest benefit of the undertaking could be the argument of the pro players amongst each other in arguing the quality of the contributions of the participants. The review process should be done publicly;-)

 

ps. a rather enjoyable reading for those interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_the_Century_(chess)

Great idea, poq!

 

There was a great example where this happened recently and got a pretty good response rate:http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/1910/Antastic:_What_do_we_do_here

(In the original post it was not fogged, not sure why it's fogged now).

 

AttilaTheHun wrote:

(In the original post it was not fogged, not sure why it's fogged now).

I have to agree, the fogged version is of limited puzzle value. ;-)

It would be great to have different difficulty grades, ranging from basic (starting moves for an A&A position) to advanced (pickled game states that would get the most seasoned wargear veteran thinking).