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phoenix1 wrote:QUOTE (phoenix1 @ Feb 4 2013, 10:05 AM) So guys, be honest, how much would it cost and how much would you guys willingly donate to essentially remake this game from the ground up? And what kind of kickstarter rewards do you think would work?

This has been discussed plenty already.

it's not a problem of how much it would cost and finding the funds.

they're are 2 issues to solve:

first, this community doesn't agree on what "Allegiance is". in fact,what we have here is more a reunion of communities than a single community. They all play Allegiance but don't share the same views on what the game should be. solving this is very hard. only way is to 'ditch' a lot of people and build something new for a part of the community only.

and secondly, there is no "strong" leader to drive this project. if you look at the recently Kickstarter'ed space games, Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen. Each have a single leader with a strong grip on these projects. Chris Roberts for Star Citizen and David Braben for Elite Dangerous. We have no one.
We could find people to code , to build stuff, to write stuff, to design stuff, to test stuff, etc hell I could quit my job and lead the technical development if needed... but I won't as long as we don't have someone like Braben or Roberts to take the reins and lead the way.

someone needs to step up, someone with the adequate leadership skills and a strong vision of what "Alleg 2" should be and impose it. as of today, we don't have such a someone in this community.

and no this can't be a comity or a senate, these things don't work to build a video game.

cashto wrote:QUOTE (cashto @ Feb 5 2013, 06:29 PM) You said "lose less rank". That's exactly what AS does when you lose against a stack.

Of course wins get you rank. Wins are ultimately the only statistic that matters. I can bomb a lot of useless ops and kill miners long after the enemy has reached endgane tech but if it doesn't translate into a win, what good is it?

Even in a losing team in a game you can say that one player was better then an another, if they both have the same mu shu zu elo rank they will both take the same rank hit, my proposal is to use some metric so perhaps even in the losing team a good player can still increase rank or the very least lose less rank. In gameplay terms yes it might mean you can kill miners and ops even when the enemy team is almost certain to get victory but ask yourself is that really a bad thing to try and actually still fight instead of just giving up?

QUOTE I mean, let's say you get all the data you need. Let's say you get statistics that can distinguish podding a nan from chasing noob scouts through empty sectors, that can count the number of bullets you land on a bomb run and credits you accordingly for the kill. How do you weight the importance of events according to objective criteria? How do you calculate that killing a miner is worth n.nn times as many points as eyeing a bomb run? How do score someone who is a miner killer par excellence but posts resigns and actively works to demoralize his team after only a couple of setbacks? How does the system figure out that the guy who got podded a zillion times, who never flew anything but a scout, and never left friendly sectors is the guy who won the game for you because he was sitting with the miners, kept them safe and mined you to victory? How do you, in short, write an algorithm to untangle the chaotic web of a million possible interactions that could happen in a game in order to scientifically proportion credit for the one discrete, undeniable result that you care about? It's impossible.

There's something to be said for feel-good points and XP points which correlate more with time-in-game than any skill factor, but never in a million years would you use that info to balance teams.

HSharp wrote: Elo, Trueskill is poop for alleg

Says who? How do you know this?
[/quote]

First point is that without the data to play with I can't create an algorithm to play with. Just like Elo/Trueskill can't empirically be proven to be the best for Alleg I can't prove another algorithm to 'scientifically proportion credit for the one discrete undeniable result I care about'. What could be done though is much how people can rate players in team sports and that is by public opinion. It's hard to prove one footballer is better then another but you can watch a game and have an impression which one performed better and that would be some ideal ranking system, some AI that could watch all the games to apportion credit to the right players but I don't think that is possible.

Expert opinion could indicate if one algorithm is better then another much like peer review.

More metrics, more data, better algorithms. Without the data I cannot provide an algorithm, with it perhaps I (or someone else) could, or at least a better system then the current.

QUOTE That's because professional sports don't play pickup games. When the team composition is identical or near identical every game, Truskill is blind. Now if you randomized the players every game, Truskill is going to very quickly notice when one side has statistically worse players than the other.[/quote]

It doesn't matter about team composition, it doesn't even have to be professionals, when experts watch a team sport they can identify which players played better. Trueskill might actually get a chance if teams were randomized every game, but they aren't so a system that works when taking stack into account might be better.

Also there are other games which do use XP to match-make, I could lose every game in War Thunder or Call of Duty and still reach high ranks, I quite like War Thunder's model which is a points based system in a game with team sizes of ~15 players, of course that is randomized and for all I know there might be some secret Elo type ranking but even when losing I'm not punished and in-fact rewarded depending on my skill. Obviously easier to tell a skilful player as it's rather simpler and there isn't a support role.


Who knows maybe the best ranking system is letting players vote on other players after the game ends. Without data I can't test @#(!.

Rewrite all the code and replace all the assets, but don't change the gameplay?

I got a better idea. Let's make a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho ...

Yeah I agree w/ Kage.

Spunky I'll concede that maybe I had no idea what was going on back in 1999 as I was 13 years old. I just remember seeing ads in PC Gamer and finding the game on their "demo disc," and seeing a large # of people in the AZ-beta lobbies during this time. It had a shot. It really did. Maybe the marketing campaign wasn't the greatest, but with the internet all you really need is word of mouth. Had Alleg been the "diamond in the rough" we all think it is, word of mouth would have spread and it would have been a massive hit (think Minecraft). The thing is, it appealed to a niche. We are that niche, and that's why we like it so much. Niche games are VERY loved by their target audience, but not by many others.

Anyway, this idea is a loser. I'm sorry. I wish I could be more positive, but when it comes to Allegiance, I have my opinions and I have them for a reason. This game was great for what it was, and I think it had an impact on a lot of our lives moreso than most video games, but trying for a sequel is like trying to recapture lightning in a bottle. Alleg was Alleg because it came out in 1999 and was played by versions of us in 1999. It's 2013 now, and the world has changed. Alleg doesn't really fit anywhere, and as Kage just said, nobody here has a compelling vision on how to make it fit. It'd be amateur-hour trying to build a sequel, and I foresee a lot of people losing a lot of time and money if you actually pursued this.

Ryujin wrote:QUOTE (Ryujin @ Feb 5 2013, 08:25 PM) this is so true.
my rank is 15. either i antistack a very onesided game- which usually results in a misearble already lost game i play out, or I am a "stacker" if both team is even
me english and grammar are gooder

Thanks for confirming that balancing on plain player ranks doesn't work, because there is a huge difference how Allegiance calculates the imbalance (match quality) in game and how actually AllegSkill does for the leaderboard.

To slove this Imago started coding on it (early R6 beta, without ACSS support, so that feature was removed from release version) and later Spunkmeyer planned to work on (when he'll have some free time).

cashto wrote:QUOTE (cashto @ Feb 5 2013, 07:48 PM) Rewrite all the code and replace all the assets, but don't change the gameplay?

I got a better idea. Let's make a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho ...

Is this your suggestion? Where did I say anything like this?

pkk wrote:QUOTE (pkk @ Feb 5 2013, 11:52 AM) Thanks for confirming that balancing on plain player ranks doesn't work, because there is a huge difference how Allegiance calculates the imbalance (match quality) in game and how actually AllegSkill does for the leaderboard.

To slove this Imago started coding on it (early R6 beta, without ACSS support, so that feature was removed from release version) and later Spunkmeyer planned to work on (when he'll have some free time).

What he's confirming is that there's no good way for a strong player jumping into the middle of small game. This is not something that can be solved by pre-game autobalance. Ultimately, a solution to this would require Ryu to sit out until an equally skilled player was willing to join the other team to balance the game out. The fact that we don't enforce this in software is a much smaller problem.

Also, Truskill presumes equal sized teams, and has little to say on the topic of how many matics equal a BabelFish.

Optimizing for match quality is a partition problem and as such is in NP. Imago's approach was a greedy algorithm, so it only produced approximate results (which, quite frankly, weren't much better than the approximate results you get when just summing individual ranks).

HSharp wrote:QUOTE (HSharp @ Feb 5 2013, 12:00 PM) Is this your suggestion? Where did I say anything like this?

Not yours. P1's.

In response to your latest ... I guess I could talk until I'm blue in the face about the futility of trying to ad hoc a ranking system by assigning points to in-game events. I hope you do get the data you're looking for. I think that would be the only way to convince you ... for you to try to find, out of the exponentially large search space of possible permutations, the right combination of factors which people would look at and agree, yeah, that's a more accurate rating of kill than what Trueskill achieves.

(Tho frankly, you could probably get 90% of the way there by looking at kill-death ratio alone, because that's largely what people notice anyways -- dogfighting ability).

Edit: I should mention that there is an objective way to determine the validity of a ranking system beyond the "nebulous opinion of experts" -- use your ranking system to make predictions of game outcomes, and compare with the actual result. By random chance you would get 50% right. SgtBaker used to claim something ridiculously high, like 85%, which I never quite believed (even if Allegskill had zero error, which of course it doesn't, either pretty much every game is just massive stacked, or the weaker team is still going to beat the stronger team, by chance, something more than 15% of the time). But anyways your ranking system should do something better than random chance, and the degree it predicts games better than random chance is the degree it's better than another ranking system.

Alleg was an outsider when it first came out. now it is main-stream as the MOBA (this is what alleg is) gnare is taking more and more space in gamesphere. I can certainly see alleg working as a project however the question remains:

how is this going to be funded?

every moba out there to date has some kind of revenue plan behind it. it can be unlockables (LoL), pay2win (Savage2), pay2play (HON) or some other methods for generating cash flow.

Making alleg 2 seriously will require serious cash. It'll need skilled people investing big time into the project and these people will have to be payed for several months of their time. In addition, servers and bandwidth will have to be rented, advertising bought, et cetera.

Where is the money going to come from, not just on a one-time basis, but consistently to keep the project running?

Sheriff Metz wrote:QUOTE (Sheriff Metz @ Feb 5 2013, 10:29 AM) With current team sizes, 1 person is a stack.
Stacking is a lack of playerbase problem.
Stop being a moron and wasting time trying to code some antistacking crap, and work on something that actually attracts player.

lol this is so dumb

as to watching alleg, i've never been able to watch any recording done without being fairly bored, but I can't watch any other game recording either. Pretty much same with sports though. Unless there is a lot riding on it I would rather do something than watch other people doing something.

Watching alleg would definitely have to include the ability to jump into any pilot's view. It would also need like a 10 minute delay. IIRC there was some final match we had against i think RT(??) that was broadcast on delay and that got a good amount of people watching. None from outside alleg I imagine, but it helps generate excitement and gives worse pilots/squads a chance to learn something.

For the most part what omb is referencing is feel good points in other games. And those arent a bad thing. He's not talking about balancing but giving players incentive to balance themselves.

Say something like "Turtletech". It gives you mini3 hvy ints or something like it (maybe make it the most pimped out ship you can get of the techpath you are currently in) it takes 5 minutes or so research, makes a global announcement about it, and the team that does it loses all bases but their home and all antibase ships. They get 10-20 minutes to turtle then automatically lose. The opposing team gets that time to win and get double rank gain or something concrete that will carry over to the next games. So both teams can still have fun and have incentive to play hard, and neither really gets to be completely whored. Something like that I think would really go far.