GUESS THE GUILD WARS SKILL!!!! RULES

1st Official Post

    I'm gonna start doing a forum contest where I give away a bunch of armbraces to the first person to guess the random GW skill I think of. I'll answer one "yes/no" question per day, either until someone guesses the skill or y'all run out of guesses. Example:

    Day 1
    (I randomly think of "Incoming!")
    Misty: I'm thinking of a skill!
    Midget: is it Spiteful Spirit?
    Giant: is it a spell?
    Medium: is it from a Prophecies profession?

    Day 2
    (I randomly decide to answer Medium's question)
    Misty: No, it is not from a Prophecies profession.
    Midget: is it Spiteful Spirit?
    Giant: is it a spell?
    Medium: is it from a Nightfall profession?

    Day 3
    (I randomly decide to answer Midget's question)
    Misty: No, it's not Spiteful Spirit... although you should already have known that, since that's a necro skill =P
    Midget: is it Critical Defenses?
    Giant: is it a spell?!
    Medium: is it from a Factions profession?


    ...and so it goes on, until someone gets it right, or you run out of guesses. The person who guesses correctly will win the prize, or if nobody got it, it'll be added to the prize for the next game. If someone was successful, I'll give you one less guess next time, but if nobody did, I'll allow one more guess.


    I'll try to keep the rules brief and simple - if anything's not clear, ask and I'll try to clarify.

    1. All disputes about whether or not I answer a question "correctly" will be settled by the skill's wiki page (as of the revision on the day the game started) - if I make an actual mistake, I apologise in advance, and I'll give an armbrace to the first person to point it out.
    2. The skill will always be one that can be equipped in an outpost and pinged in a build.
    3. Questions must relate to the game itself, rather than the way players use the skills e.g. you can't ask if a skill is part of current SC meta, but you can ask if it existed when Factions was released.
    4. Questions cannot be multi-layered e.g. you can't ask "is it a Factions elite?" or "does it cost less than 10 energy and have less than 10 seconds recharge?"
    5. Each person can only ask one question per day - if you ask more than one, I'll ignore all but your first.
    6. I'll randomly answer one question each day, choosing from any valid questions that have been asked. If I don't answer your question, that doesn't mean the answer is "no", and you can ask it again the next day if you want.

    WTB pcons

    IGN: Shadow Of The Owls

    Edited once, last by Misty (July 28, 2016 at 8:52 AM).

    Quote from Marty Silverblade


    What does "run out of guesses" mean? Is each game only running for a certain number of days or something?

    The first game is a maximum of 20 guesses - if 20 days go by without anyone getting it, the prize will be added to the next game, and I'll grant an extra guess, so there'll be 21 guesses next time, and so on... assuming someone gets it before the time is up, next time you'll have one less guess, so if you got it in 13, for example, next time there'll be only 12 guesses.

    Quote from Marty Silverblade


    To prevent an unnecessary load of posting it might be better to have questions not expire if unanswered.

    Unfortunately that doesn't really work, because unanswered questions become less useful over time, e.g. if you ask "is it a warrior skill?" and I answer "is it a spell?" instead... well, if it is a spell, you know it's not a warrior skill for sure, so you would want your question to expire. That's an extreme example, but in almost all cases it's true.

    • Official Post
    Quote

    Unfortunately that doesn't really work, because unanswered questions become less useful over time, e.g. if you ask "is it a warrior skill?" and I answer "is it a spell?" instead... well, if it is a spell, you know it's not a warrior skill for sure, so you would want your question to expire. That's an extreme example, but in almost all cases it's true.

    Certainly not "almost all cases". There are a number of questions people could ask that don't interfere with each other, for example skill types, campaign of origin, profession/attribute, elite status, energy cost/recharge time, etc. Certainly some will become redundant but plenty won't. Your logic doesn't make sense anyway - why should it matter whether if a question is in an old post or not? Newer posts will contain more specific questions due to greater information and so you'd probably favour those, but the older ones can remain relevant. For example, do you really need someone asking if it's elite every single day? Requiring people to repost questions is of literally zero benefit.

    Hey, I'm continuing here a discussion about the rules started on the first game thread :)
    So, I personnally think that giving the right skill should make one auto-win, regardless of the randomly picked question of the day. That is notably to prevent the disappointing situation where one would give the right skill, not be answered, ask a different question like "is it green", then get "stolen" by someone giving the same answer later in the game. Of course it would lead to people starting giving skills earlier in the game, to the detriment of the clues. That's why I think there could be a rule like "no more than 5 skills guess per person per game" or "one can't follow a skill guess by another one".
    I know it complicates the whole thing, but really, imagine someone giving 4 times the right answer and not getting picked :/ it's more fair if the first to say it gets it :) Also, think about the players who would want to stick to an answer they think is right, but would also like to keep participating in the questions for clues... :0 That would spoil the game a bit right?
    Sorry for any english mistake and I hope my point doesn't look too stupid ^^'

    Edited once, last by Lovegood (August 8, 2016 at 1:09 PM).

    Starting with the next game, there'll be a few rule changes:

    A) Questions cannot be about the name of the skill e.g. "Does it start with an A?"
    This is for reasons of... let's say balance and localization =P

    B) If you make a direct guess and get it wrong, you're out of the game - you may no longer guess or ask questions until the next game starts.
    This is to encourage people to ask questions that help everyone, rather than selfishly trying to win with a lucky guess. It still makes sense to wildly guess, once there are only a few possible skills left. The current rules encourage players to do this prematurely, though. That said, it seems like people are mostly willing to work together and not get competitive, so maybe this rule isn't necessary. Perhaps we'll try one game without it and see how it goes.
    To balance out the harshness of that one:

    C) If anyone makes a direct guess, I'll ignore all non-guess questions that day. I will answer ALL guesses straight away, without even waiting for the end of the day.
    That means as soon as we get to the "wildly guessing" stage of the game, we can push ahead and stop wasting time with questions. Unfortunately, this does tend to favour players who get on shortly after I answer the latest question, but so long as people start guessing fairly early, this effect shouldn't be too noticeable, it at all.


    These changes are up for debate (as are all the rules, really) - if you think there's a better way to do this, let me know! (= My job is just to throw money at you people; I'm down for anything that's more fun, so long as it doesn't make me bankrupt or require me to refresh the website all day.

    • Official Post

    only issue I have is that people might start by asking "is it word of healing" as the first question...if you then ignore all questions narrowing down the field the 'wildly guessing' stage will happen at question 1 or 2 thus making it almost impossible to make an educated guess. I would say that perhaps not until say, question 10, that you would start that so that the options could be narrowed down before the wild guesses start.
    (or if you eliminate those folks asking the direct questions at the beginning ...you will find that only one or two people will still be playing by question 12..and that by question 15 there will be no one posting as everyone has been eliminated.)

    Not allowing anyone to guess for 10 whole days is a very harsh limit; it's entirely possible to narrow the skill down much sooner with just a few lucky questions. I would hope that people aren't silly enough to waste questions right at the start - I know it's only the first game, but so far people haven't been excessively selfish or irrational, so I'm optimistic =P

    • Official Post

    10 was an idea, 5? 8? just saying that people might start picking skills at question 1, there should be some kind of limit before we can only guess which skills they are. If someone guesses a skill on question 1 then your rules say we can only guess skills and not narrow it down (and by question 10 there probably wont be anyone posting ....). So some kind of point where you can still narrow it down even if someone guessed an exact skill.
    so how about for the first 5 questions you can guess anything...after that if you guess a skill then only skills can be guessed?

    • Official Post

    Problems with the current format in no particular order:

    -You don't seem to have made up your mind whether this game is meant to be for individuals or a team effort. The existence of a prize defines this as an individual contest. In rule suggestion B you say "This is to encourage people to ask questions that help everyone, rather than selfishly trying to win with a lucky guess", but why shouldn't we be selfish? Prize only goes to one person. Logically, I want to take whichever course of action benefits me the most and everyone else the least. However, that isn't possible because all info is public. If you wanted it to be a team exercise (presumably trying to guess the skill with the least number of questions), your format doesn't work either - our success will be defined by which questions you choose to answer. In either case it doesn't matter if someone asks a really clever question - from an individual perspective it doesn't help because everyone learns the answer and from a team perspective it may not help because you may pick a less efficient question. You need to clearly decide whether this is an individual or team and define the rules for that purpose.

    -Due to the number of skills in the game we have no choice but to ask the same narrowing down questions every time. The chance of guessing the skill correctly without having had 8-12 questions answered is so remote it isn't worth trying. It's going to take a week and a half before it actually gets interesting. Furthermore, given you only answer one question a day, we might as well just leave the narrowing down to one person and then all jump on board once the possible options are down to a dozen or so. If you want to keep a similar format to what you have currently, what you should do is to choose information to reveal each day and leave player interaction solely as guesses. This would also give you the freedom to provide as much or as little information as you want. You could also do something a little more abstract, for example make statements such as "these two guesses have something (the same thing) in common with the answer". That would make it more of a puzzle as it would be up to each person to determine what the clue is referring to. You're still going to have the above problem though.

    -The possibility that someone could correctly guess the answer first and then not win is utterly nonsensical. You must confirm guesses either way at the first opportunity, otherwise it just becomes a matter of favouritism. The person who wins is decided entirely by you, as opposed to solely the merits of the participants. However, this biases the competition to people with a similar availability time to you. You could wait until 24h from your previous post and then pick randomly (via a random number generator) from the correct answers if multiple people get it right.

    Food for thought:

    Games of this format fall onto what's known as a skill-luck matrix. Chess, for example, is a high skill-no luck game and poker is a high skill-high luck game. Both of these are played competitively at a high level. Your format is a no skill-moderate luck game, which by definition are uninteresting. This needs to be remedied one way or another. Here's how you could create a high skill, moderate luck game: keep everything strictly individual. Users ask questions/guess solely via PM and you also respond via PM. The objective is to guess the skill with the fewest questions. This alleviates the above issues entirely. Downside is that everything happens behind closed doors so while it's a much better game it doesn't really work as well as a forum game.

    ...this all seems to be assuming that people are playing 100% rationally, and only focusing on getting the prize. Nobody should be taking it that seriously - it's just a fun game to win a bit of money. However... your points are still valid, and perhaps this game really doesn't work on a forum. Maybe people aren't enjoying it and are only participating because of the prize. With that in mind, should I stop running this game and instead throw my money at something more exciting, like... I take a screenshot, and players have to find the location and take a screen of themselves there... then after a week or whatever, I randomly select one of the people that got it right, and they get the prize.

    Quote from Marty Silverblade


    You must confirm guesses either way at the first opportunity, otherwise it just becomes a matter of favouritism. The person who wins is decided entirely by you, as opposed to solely the merits of the participants. However, this biases the competition to people with a similar availability time to you. You could wait until 24h from your previous post and then pick randomly (via a random number generator) from the correct answers if multiple people get it right.

    You realise that's already what I do, right? I count the number of questions and then /roll in my guild hall to decide which one I'll answer. I'm not selecting them based on which questions or players I prefer.

    • Official Post

    I was looking at it through a technical game theory/design perspective so my comments may seem harsh in comparison with the attitude people have when playing it. I'm not trying to tell people how they should be playing, be the fun police or anything like that. I don't know how other people feel about the competition, but I certainly like the idea, it's just not really functional in it's current iteration. If people are enjoying it then by all means continue with the current format.

    Here's another idea, based on Mastermind: you pick a skill. This skill has four properties - energy cost, campaign of origin, profession and skill type (casting time and recharge time would work as well if it works better with more properties). Each player can submit one guess per day. You pick one of those guesses at random and say how many things it has in common with the skill you picked, but not which one(s). For example, if you pick Hypochondria and I guess Pensive Guardian then you'd say (if you select my guess) I've gotten three correct. Interestingly though, you're better off trying to guess a skill with nothing in common with the skill you're trying to find so you can definitively wipe out those options. For skill type, grouping some of them together may make for a better game, though I haven't thought about it in a lot of depth, for example Spell or Attack or Shout/Echo/Chant or Stance/Signet or Glyph/Form/Ritual/Trap/Non typed.

    If you're more into the puzzle aspect rather than the competition you could also consider creating puzzles on a third party website and linking them here.

    What I want to do is provide a fun game for people to play on the forum, such that people who aren't superactive can still win. I'd like it to require some luck and some skill, and it should relate to Guild Wars. If I can encourage people to work together and learn more about the game, even better. For this purpose, I'm happy to throw money at people for this purpose, but I don't really want to spend time devising puzzles.
    I think after the current game ends I'll just start doing the screenshot game... and if there's sufficient demand, I can always bring this back.

    I think the B) and C) rules you introduced are perfect for balancing the game. The issues pointed out by cosyfiep and Marty make sense but shouldn't actually be problematic though, as in my opinion everyone is going to keep it entertaining and won't try to winwinwiwnwin absolutely. So I think you should keep the game running with your new rules, and stop it only if there are actual cases of unfairplay.

  • bsoltan April 15, 2021 at 7:11 PM

    Closed the thread.