Tumblolole Races

Peak

@Daeir evened the playing field quite a bit with his mapper add-on

Https://gist.github.com/Ephemeralis/9719087

But even still, it seems pretty lame to have it done the same way.

@Tecton @Makarios @HBIC ,

Can we have a tumble race maze that is new to everyone?

Peak

Obviously.

Antonius

I don't get how it's a race if it's in some randomly generated area that nobody knows their way around. Then it's mostly just dumb luck, rather than any actual skill, that decides the winner.

Shirszae

Antonius said:

I don't get how it's a race if it's in some randomly generated area that nobody knows their way around. Then it's mostly just dumb luck, rather than any actual skill, that decides the winner.

The way it is now, it isn't any actual skill either. 

Tesha

I liked the riddle-like hints that were in 600's tumblerace. I hope the changes aren't just more difficult riddles because I'm kind of terrible at those.

Antonius

Shirszae said:

Antonius said:

I don't get how it's a race if it's in some randomly generated area that nobody knows their way around. Then it's mostly just dumb luck, rather than any actual skill, that decides the winner.

The way it is now, it isn't any actual skill either. 

I'm not saying things don't need to change, I'm just saying this isn't the solution if you do want it to actually be about player skill rather than mapping/scripting ability.

Sena

Antonius said:

I don't get how it's a race if it's in some randomly generated area that nobody knows their way around. Then it's mostly just dumb luck, rather than any actual skill, that decides the winner.

It doesn't have to be pure luck, there are ways to require some strategy. There could be hints about where to go (either all given at the beginning, or hidden in the rooms as you go, maybe in room descriptions or invisible items), there's squinting/glancing/observing (there's some tradeoff there, since glance/observe take eq and slow your tumbling, but tumbling in the wrong direction could be worse, and squint doesn't show exits), the area could be mapped in-game so you could see a few rooms out from you but not the entire area (maybe even altering the map command for the event, forcing a certain width/height or adding a balance), etc.

It would require a lot of thought in the layout to make most of those things meaningful, but it could be done.

Jonathin

Disable gmcp messages.

gl hf

Jacen

Tumble to Meropis.

(Unless those changing ocean areas aren't randomly generated)

Tharvis

they are @jacen, but the annoying thing is that there is a random chance of you getting knocked back quite far, for example, I had the amazing luck to be on the last Tear, and get knocked back to the second

Blujixapug

I view the tumble race as a footrace across the continent. Tumbling is merely a limiting factor to give everyone, in theory, the same moves/second. It's the Cannonball Run of Achaea, with stuff like worm warp, gallop, and celerity stripped out.

Staging the race in a special arena would mitigate automation, but places all the emphasis on tumbling, and completely removes the navigation of the known world aspect, which IMO is the main point of the race.

Sena

Blujixapug said:

Staging the race in a special arena would mitigate automation, but places all the emphasis on tumbling, and completely removes the navigation of the known world aspect, which IMO is the main point of the race.

I agree, but having the navigation able to be perfectly automated based on a publicly available map means that you don't have to have any idea of where you're going, so the navigation aspect is basically removed anyways.

If there was a way to prevent the use of any sort of mapper/pathfinding, that would be great, but I don't see how it could be done. Even forcing everyone to use plain telnet wouldn't prevent it entirely.

Nim

Blujixapug said:

I view the tumble race as a footrace across the continent. Tumbling is merely a limiting factor to give everyone, in theory, the same moves/second. It's the Cannonball Run of Achaea, with stuff like worm warp, gallop, and celerity stripped out.

Staging the race in a special arena would mitigate automation, but places all the emphasis on tumbling, and completely removes the navigation of the known world aspect, which IMO is the main point of the race.

I bet if they removed GMCP room messages during the event, without letting anyone know in advance, that would cut out 99% of the automation, although to be fair I don't know how mudlet mapper works.

That said, with public maps, unless the race includes super secret destinations that only the most hardcore explorers even know about, I don't think there's much of a navigation aspect in the current race anyway, especially thanks to @Daeir's lovely public donation.

Sena

I wasn't there to see the tumble races, how well did the new changes work out?

Tesha

It was a riddle-like hint with a lot of vagueness, which led you to finding a plinth. Then you touched the plinth and got a room name for the final destination. 

Tecton, the Terraformer says, "In this first race, you'll find the plinth in a sandy expanse encompassing a mirrored crater."

Tecton, the Terraformer says, "In this final leg, you'll find the plinth in a verdant valley on the west bank of a winding river."

Tecton, the Terraformer says, "In this final leg, you'll find the plinth in a place where water and vowels fall like rain."

I assumed west bank meant literally right next to the water, but apparently it was in the southwestern part of the pash valley, so I missed that one completely. But the other two were next to Ashaxei's Mirror and in Aeraithian Falls (I walked by it for a full minute because someone webbed me the second I went into that room and I paid more attention to that than looking for the plinth.)

There was also a new thing called tumbleweb, which just delays your next tumble. It worked out okay, but I wish there were more races and less vagueness. It really made it a bit luck-based and emphasized the advantage you can have if you have a lot of people working together; since it was pretty much random in the area, one person finding it meant the whole team knew where to go next (which is exactly what happened with Ashtan). Having more races would have been cool, since I think 600 had 4-5 and this one was meant to have 2 (the third was a tie-breaker), and a little bit less vagueness would have helped reduce the "team" impact in one of the only two "solo" events.

The points were like...

Jarrod 22

Jhui 21

Dunn/Kross/someone 20

Tesha/Kafziel 19

Nim, Nimala, someone 6

Rom

Are you sure about those points? Ashtani dudes said they were tied when Jarrod quit, unless I misunderstood.

edit.Nevermind it doesn't really matter.

Tesha

No, it might have been 21, I didn't get a look at Jarrod's score before he quit. If they say they were tied, they probably were.

Rom

Same result either way! I liked the tumble races but I was really awful at them. The tumbleweb was cute but not very noticeable, and I'm not sure if it was a bug that you could start tumbling before you got balance back. I guess they wanted these races to be really short.

Eld

Tesha said:

It was a riddle-like hint with a lot of vagueness, which led you to finding a plinth. Then you touched the plinth and got a room name for the final destination. 

Tecton, the Terraformer says, "In this first race, you'll find the plinth in a sandy expanse encompassing a mirrored crater."

Tecton, the Terraformer says, "In this final leg, you'll find the plinth in a verdant valley on the west bank of a winding river."

Tecton, the Terraformer says, "In this final leg, you'll find the plinth in a place where water and vowels fall like rain."

I assumed west bank meant literally right next to the water, but apparently it was in the southwestern part of the pash valley, so I missed that one completely. But the other two were next to Ashaxei's Mirror and in Aeraithian Falls (I walked by it for a full minute because someone webbed me the second I went into that room and I paid more attention to that than looking for the plinth.)

There was also a new thing called tumbleweb, which just delays your next tumble. It worked out okay, but I wish there were more races and less vagueness. It really made it a bit luck-based and emphasized the advantage you can have if you have a lot of people working together; since it was pretty much random in the area, one person finding it meant the whole team knew where to go next (which is exactly what happened with Ashtan). Having more races would have been cool, since I think 600 had 4-5 and this one was meant to have 2 (the third was a tie-breaker), and a little bit less vagueness would have helped reduce the "team" impact in one of the only two "solo" events.

The points were like...

Jarrod 22

Jhui 21

Dunn/Kross/someone 20

Tesha/Kafziel 19

Nim, Nimala, someone 6

To the bolded, Tecton did say the clue would lead you to an area, and the plinth would be somewhere in the area. Nothing in Pash is very far from the river, anyway.

Jurixe

I somehow managed to get points despite doing horribly in most of them (wandered right around the southwest part of Mhojave from the crater, and completely missed the falls one) and getting webbed (I'm looking at you @Kaitali!) so I'm pretty happy with that

I don't have a comparison as this was my first tumble race ever, but I thought it was pretty fun. I think it's natural to assume that people would be helping their own citymates  (as with all of these events), so obviously encouraging more from your own city to participate will work better for you, which overall is a good thing participation-wise. You still have to physically get there yourself, anyway.

Cahin

Why are we pretending that pretty much all but one of the YXX0 games can't be heavily assisted by extensive scripting? 

Kei

Those points can't be right, since I know I had 9 points and didn't even appear in the top ten if someone with 6 did, but that's neither here nor there in the end. But I was having a lot of trouble getting the points to display in the end, so I'm not sure how it actually worked out.

(Ed: And by that, I mean I think I misunderstood how TUMBLERACE RANKING was displaying points.)

That aside, the races were fun, even if I totally and utterly fail at riddles Although I tried Daeir's script and it just broke for me, so I was tumbling manually the whole way through.

Kafziel

I think the riddles were good. @Daeir's script didn't work. I'll have my script ready for Y700 (first time in a tumble race had no idea what to expect besides tumbling and racing).

Antonius

The riddles are probably the only way to mitigate the effects of automation. If they're all on the level of the ones Tesha posted then that's not so bad; I knew two of those and my knowledge of geography is total crap.

Dunn

@Daeir's script was coded to tumble on balance gain as far as I saw. The thing with tumble races is that you can tumble off balance so over the course of the ~50 rooms you had to tumble, you lost about .8-1.2 seconds waiting for balance to tumble again. Now, if you tumbled on GMCP room change...

Tirac

Kafziel said:

I think the riddles were good. @Daeir's script didn't work. I'll have my script ready for Y700 (first time in a tumble race had no idea what to expect besides tumbling and racing).

Daeir, ultimate troll.

Thanks for letting me place in some of the tumble races while everyone else was spamming tumble while not moving.

Jurixe

Well, uh, it did kinda even the playing field...I guess... *hides*

Sarapis

Daeir said:

Oh.

Well. Shit.

=D>

Jhui

Dunn said:

@Daeir's script was coded to tumble on balance gain as far as I saw. The thing with tumble races is that you can tumble off balance so over the course of the ~50 rooms you had to tumble, you lost about .8-1.2 seconds waiting for balance to tumble again. Now, if you tumbled on GMCP room change...

Makarios

Your script wasn't ever going to work under the tumble race format, because tumble race tumbles don't require or consume any balance. It catches out just about everyone in their first race.

Sarapis

I doubt we'll see tumbleraces in year 700.

Putting them in a special event arena defeats the entire purpose, which (was) intimate knowledge of geography and knowing how to get from A to B in the most efficient way possible. Kind of irrelevant in the day of ubiquitous mappers.