Post by Anon on Aug 25, 2008 19:35:12 GMT -5
forums.vgames.com/thread.jspa?threadID=73142&tstart=0
This is the description provided for the hero glitch:
To anyone who thinks about it, it's obvious that this glitch should not be bannable. However, since the current policy is that it is bannable, I will first address the poor description provided, and then argue as to why it clearly should not be bannable.
The very first problem with the description here is that no one bothered to spell check it. The fact that no one ran "spell check" on an official document such as this is sad. I run "spell check" on my long posts, not because I am bad at spelling, or because it matters very much if I have an occasional typo or a misspelling, but because it literally takes only a few seconds. The cost of running spell check is so low that there's really no excuse to not run it for any kind of official writing, or any kind of formal writing. If anyone's wondering, "heros" is the misspelled word, as it should be "heroes". It's not a big deal, but it is pretty unprofessional (that, and it's shocking that a native English speaker didn't catch this, as not only does this violate a very well-known grammatical rule in English, but it's also a word that most kids in learn to spell in grade school, if not in kindergarten). There are other grammatical problems, such as the use of "on" where "of" should be used, generally poor phrasing and word usage, et cetera. I really hate to pick apart grammar and usage, as it's usually a method of "argument" completely devoid of any merit--except in one case, when you're looking at an official document, especially a document like this in which a large number of people are looking to for guidance on what is legal.
Now that we have that out of the way, I'd like to address the ambiguity of this glitch. The player with more than one hero needs to be informed, and must delete the extra hero(es), in what amount of time must this happen (since no time is specified we must assume that the definition is a "reasonable" time, which is incredibly subjective)? What if they're away from the keyboard (which is entirely possible, in very long games where people can easily make two or more heroes accidentally going afk for a short while is not that uncommon)? What if, since they did not realize that they had multiple heroes, they can't find the extra hero(es) in a reasonable period of time (if a player makes 2 or more heroes without knowing it, we can reasonably assume that it's a very long game with a lot happening, and with the player in question being spread out everywhere as eventually happens in most long games)? What if the extra hero(es) is(are) killed before the player can delete it(them), is it still a glitch since they didn't delete the hero(es) or are they in the clear? We can also conclude from this that "no glitch" happens if the player is not asked to delete his heroes, even if he's bragging in chat saying "Haha I own you noobs with my multiple heroes! I dare you to report me!" Nope, no glitch there, if they tell him to delete the extra hero(es) and he takes a longer than "reasonable" amount of time to do so, there's a glitch, though. Or how about this, what if the players don't speak the same language? How can a player who speaks only German be expected to understand that he's being told to delete his hero(es) so that he's no longer glitching when he's being told that in English? Quickly minimize EE (and depending on your Operating System risk EE crashing, and getting two cursors), find an English to German translation program, and enter in the English phrase hoping to get something understandable in German back (online translators are notoriously unreliable, especially if you want the exact meaning)?
Ok since we're done with problems regarding the description (and actually, design) of the current ban, let's compare this ban to the criterion listed by sirlin to determine whether or not something should actually be banned in the first place (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/intermediates-guide/what-should-be-banned/).
Enforceable? I'll say yes on this one, although it's never going to be 100% enforceable (unless the players report themselves
), no matter what description you use.
Discrete? This one is arguable, actually, but for the purposes of time let's just assume that it can be completely defined in an adequate fashion.
Warranted, however, is another issue. The most important issue, actually. If it's not warranted, it doesn't matter whether or not it's enforceable or whether or not you can completely define it, at least according to sirlin (and the rules of logic and reason--if there is no reason to do something, you simply shouldn't do it, so you don't even need to determine if you can do it).
First, to anyone who's played the game it's obvious that the hero glitch provides only a minor advantage, especially how it's usually used (2 warrior heroes). The arguments I've heard for banning this glitch from the "we need this ban" crowd all center on a player with 2 warrior heroes, because "strategist heroes suck" (this right there clues anyone who's actually understands the game into the fact that the players making this argument are scrubs and/or noobs). They argue that the two heroes can be used on the same front, which makes killing one hero "useless". They also argue that two heroes can be used on separate fronts, when the player has a split army. To address the first argument, it's pretty obvious that your hero shouldn't be dying except due to extraordinary circumstances (which would own 2 or 3 heroes just as hard), at least not if you control it properly anyway, so the only people whom this would be an advantage for are people who are bad at the game and usually fail at hero control--for everyone who can control their hero properly, the resources on that second hero are better spent elsewhere. Which leaves the second common argument, a split army with split warrior heroes. In any sort of team game (which the examples I've seen are all set in), this tactic should fail massively. There is no way one player can defeat two or more players with a split army and a hero at each front, unless those players are very bad, bad enough that they would have lost anyway. If it's a 1 vs 1 game (on tournament variant anyway) and that happens, I will agree that there is a slight advantage to the player with two heroes, then again, this advantage can only be afforded because the player with multiple heroes was actually able to afford them. This either means that the two players weren't attacking each other or doing anything (in plain English: they were bad), or that the player who could afford the two heroes was dominating the other player. Hey look, yet another example where two heroes is only possible and good when the players involved are bad (or just one of the players is very significantly worse than the other, which is comparative badness).
I'll now move onto another very weak argument I've heard. It goes like this "everyone will just mass warrior heroes and kill EVERYONE with them". This is downright laughable. It's not even possible to do this in a no rules game, unless the opposing players are incredibly terrible. Even if they are that bad, it's not even a guarantee that the player with a hero swarm would win--the terrible players have probably gathered enough resources by now to have a sizable army, and to continue to produce units for some time (if they can produce enough in a short enough timeframe, they can utterly defeat hero swarm). In a no rush for a very, very, very long time game, I'd hope that no matter how bad the other players are, they can create an army large enough and create units quickly enough to defeat this. The only "real" game I can imagine hero swarm winning (assuming good players, not some of the worst imaginable) would be a super-long no rush game with no siege, religion, or any other types of units that can quickly kill heroes--you might even have to ban hospitals and towers from that game, too.
So far, the only reasons we have for banning this glitch are "noobs get owned by stuff that's bad, and this is bad and noobs get owned by it" (Can we ban people for making Bombards in Industrial, please? Oh right, that'd be silly), and "in wholly degenerate games that will never happen, it could in theory be the best tactic". Both of which aren't good reasons to ban anything.
So now, let's move onto the arguments I actually haven't ever heard, at least by people who want this glitch banned (I have heard them by people who want this glitch to be LEGAL, but are arguing the other side of things for the fun of it). This is actually one argument, but it's sort of two... It's either 1 warrior + 1 strategist hero, or 1 warrior + X strategist heroes where X > 1. This is actually a convincing argument, and I can see how it would provide a minor advantage in a game once you take into account the costs for your extra hero(es) (the costs being: attention, time, and resources). I can't even deny that this would give a slight advantage when used, assuming the right conditions are present, because it is entirely true. (Although, it's also obvious that since you never saw top players in competitive games doing this back when the glitch was legal, which both illustrates how minor of an advantage it actually is, mostly due to the fact that the circumstances where it's actually an advantage in top-level play hardly ever exist).
Even if we assume those circumstances exist every single game that lasts past 45 f11, everyone has equal opportunity to perform the glitch, meaning no one actually has any real advantage anyway, assuming every player is equal.
Any way we look at this, we arrive at the conclusion that: for players of equal skill levels, multiple heroes can offer a slight advantage but generally does not, with the likelihood of it offering an advantage decreasing as skill levels increase, and all players can use the same bug to gain the same net advantage if they are still of equal skill levels. It's really, really a colossally small bug as has been demonstrated--a rock solid case can be made that use of the speed glitch is orders of magnitude more advantageous than this bug.
That, and the worst consequence of allowing this bug would be 1) scrubs whine about "cheap tactics" which they'd do anyway, with the benefits of 1) some people get to goof off and make multiple-heroes, something they think is fun, and 2) you add an interesting and non-degenerate dynamic to game play, assuming the glitch actually offers enough advantage for people to really use it in tough games.
I realize I've written a ton of text here, but I had to do my best to hammer home the really, really obvious point regarding this glitch, which is that it's insignificant and doesn't ruin the game in any way, shape, or form, unless you're a scrub and play your own personal copy of the game that exists only in your mind (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/intermediates-guide/introducing-the-scrub).
I can't even imagine how anyone who's even been half-good at any game, much less EE, and can understand the very basics of EE, could think banning this glitch was a good idea... Which is why I've written too much and am going to stop now.
This is the description provided for the hero glitch:
Multiple Heros Glitch, also known as hero glitch, this glitch consists on building one or more heros when the game defines that only one should be made. IF this glitch is enacted by accident, it is the player's obligation to delete the extra hero.
*It is necessary to have chat logs indicating you informed the player of their second hero and asked them to delete it.
*It is necessary to have chat logs indicating you informed the player of their second hero and asked them to delete it.
To anyone who thinks about it, it's obvious that this glitch should not be bannable. However, since the current policy is that it is bannable, I will first address the poor description provided, and then argue as to why it clearly should not be bannable.
The very first problem with the description here is that no one bothered to spell check it. The fact that no one ran "spell check" on an official document such as this is sad. I run "spell check" on my long posts, not because I am bad at spelling, or because it matters very much if I have an occasional typo or a misspelling, but because it literally takes only a few seconds. The cost of running spell check is so low that there's really no excuse to not run it for any kind of official writing, or any kind of formal writing. If anyone's wondering, "heros" is the misspelled word, as it should be "heroes". It's not a big deal, but it is pretty unprofessional (that, and it's shocking that a native English speaker didn't catch this, as not only does this violate a very well-known grammatical rule in English, but it's also a word that most kids in learn to spell in grade school, if not in kindergarten). There are other grammatical problems, such as the use of "on" where "of" should be used, generally poor phrasing and word usage, et cetera. I really hate to pick apart grammar and usage, as it's usually a method of "argument" completely devoid of any merit--except in one case, when you're looking at an official document, especially a document like this in which a large number of people are looking to for guidance on what is legal.
Now that we have that out of the way, I'd like to address the ambiguity of this glitch. The player with more than one hero needs to be informed, and must delete the extra hero(es), in what amount of time must this happen (since no time is specified we must assume that the definition is a "reasonable" time, which is incredibly subjective)? What if they're away from the keyboard (which is entirely possible, in very long games where people can easily make two or more heroes accidentally going afk for a short while is not that uncommon)? What if, since they did not realize that they had multiple heroes, they can't find the extra hero(es) in a reasonable period of time (if a player makes 2 or more heroes without knowing it, we can reasonably assume that it's a very long game with a lot happening, and with the player in question being spread out everywhere as eventually happens in most long games)? What if the extra hero(es) is(are) killed before the player can delete it(them), is it still a glitch since they didn't delete the hero(es) or are they in the clear? We can also conclude from this that "no glitch" happens if the player is not asked to delete his heroes, even if he's bragging in chat saying "Haha I own you noobs with my multiple heroes! I dare you to report me!" Nope, no glitch there, if they tell him to delete the extra hero(es) and he takes a longer than "reasonable" amount of time to do so, there's a glitch, though. Or how about this, what if the players don't speak the same language? How can a player who speaks only German be expected to understand that he's being told to delete his hero(es) so that he's no longer glitching when he's being told that in English? Quickly minimize EE (and depending on your Operating System risk EE crashing, and getting two cursors), find an English to German translation program, and enter in the English phrase hoping to get something understandable in German back (online translators are notoriously unreliable, especially if you want the exact meaning)?
Ok since we're done with problems regarding the description (and actually, design) of the current ban, let's compare this ban to the criterion listed by sirlin to determine whether or not something should actually be banned in the first place (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/intermediates-guide/what-should-be-banned/).
Enforceable? I'll say yes on this one, although it's never going to be 100% enforceable (unless the players report themselves
), no matter what description you use.Discrete? This one is arguable, actually, but for the purposes of time let's just assume that it can be completely defined in an adequate fashion.
Warranted, however, is another issue. The most important issue, actually. If it's not warranted, it doesn't matter whether or not it's enforceable or whether or not you can completely define it, at least according to sirlin (and the rules of logic and reason--if there is no reason to do something, you simply shouldn't do it, so you don't even need to determine if you can do it).
First, to anyone who's played the game it's obvious that the hero glitch provides only a minor advantage, especially how it's usually used (2 warrior heroes). The arguments I've heard for banning this glitch from the "we need this ban" crowd all center on a player with 2 warrior heroes, because "strategist heroes suck" (this right there clues anyone who's actually understands the game into the fact that the players making this argument are scrubs and/or noobs). They argue that the two heroes can be used on the same front, which makes killing one hero "useless". They also argue that two heroes can be used on separate fronts, when the player has a split army. To address the first argument, it's pretty obvious that your hero shouldn't be dying except due to extraordinary circumstances (which would own 2 or 3 heroes just as hard), at least not if you control it properly anyway, so the only people whom this would be an advantage for are people who are bad at the game and usually fail at hero control--for everyone who can control their hero properly, the resources on that second hero are better spent elsewhere. Which leaves the second common argument, a split army with split warrior heroes. In any sort of team game (which the examples I've seen are all set in), this tactic should fail massively. There is no way one player can defeat two or more players with a split army and a hero at each front, unless those players are very bad, bad enough that they would have lost anyway. If it's a 1 vs 1 game (on tournament variant anyway) and that happens, I will agree that there is a slight advantage to the player with two heroes, then again, this advantage can only be afforded because the player with multiple heroes was actually able to afford them. This either means that the two players weren't attacking each other or doing anything (in plain English: they were bad), or that the player who could afford the two heroes was dominating the other player. Hey look, yet another example where two heroes is only possible and good when the players involved are bad (or just one of the players is very significantly worse than the other, which is comparative badness).
I'll now move onto another very weak argument I've heard. It goes like this "everyone will just mass warrior heroes and kill EVERYONE with them". This is downright laughable. It's not even possible to do this in a no rules game, unless the opposing players are incredibly terrible. Even if they are that bad, it's not even a guarantee that the player with a hero swarm would win--the terrible players have probably gathered enough resources by now to have a sizable army, and to continue to produce units for some time (if they can produce enough in a short enough timeframe, they can utterly defeat hero swarm). In a no rush for a very, very, very long time game, I'd hope that no matter how bad the other players are, they can create an army large enough and create units quickly enough to defeat this. The only "real" game I can imagine hero swarm winning (assuming good players, not some of the worst imaginable) would be a super-long no rush game with no siege, religion, or any other types of units that can quickly kill heroes--you might even have to ban hospitals and towers from that game, too.
So far, the only reasons we have for banning this glitch are "noobs get owned by stuff that's bad, and this is bad and noobs get owned by it" (Can we ban people for making Bombards in Industrial, please? Oh right, that'd be silly), and "in wholly degenerate games that will never happen, it could in theory be the best tactic". Both of which aren't good reasons to ban anything.
So now, let's move onto the arguments I actually haven't ever heard, at least by people who want this glitch banned (I have heard them by people who want this glitch to be LEGAL, but are arguing the other side of things for the fun of it). This is actually one argument, but it's sort of two... It's either 1 warrior + 1 strategist hero, or 1 warrior + X strategist heroes where X > 1. This is actually a convincing argument, and I can see how it would provide a minor advantage in a game once you take into account the costs for your extra hero(es) (the costs being: attention, time, and resources). I can't even deny that this would give a slight advantage when used, assuming the right conditions are present, because it is entirely true. (Although, it's also obvious that since you never saw top players in competitive games doing this back when the glitch was legal, which both illustrates how minor of an advantage it actually is, mostly due to the fact that the circumstances where it's actually an advantage in top-level play hardly ever exist).
Even if we assume those circumstances exist every single game that lasts past 45 f11, everyone has equal opportunity to perform the glitch, meaning no one actually has any real advantage anyway, assuming every player is equal.
Any way we look at this, we arrive at the conclusion that: for players of equal skill levels, multiple heroes can offer a slight advantage but generally does not, with the likelihood of it offering an advantage decreasing as skill levels increase, and all players can use the same bug to gain the same net advantage if they are still of equal skill levels. It's really, really a colossally small bug as has been demonstrated--a rock solid case can be made that use of the speed glitch is orders of magnitude more advantageous than this bug.
That, and the worst consequence of allowing this bug would be 1) scrubs whine about "cheap tactics" which they'd do anyway, with the benefits of 1) some people get to goof off and make multiple-heroes, something they think is fun, and 2) you add an interesting and non-degenerate dynamic to game play, assuming the glitch actually offers enough advantage for people to really use it in tough games.
I realize I've written a ton of text here, but I had to do my best to hammer home the really, really obvious point regarding this glitch, which is that it's insignificant and doesn't ruin the game in any way, shape, or form, unless you're a scrub and play your own personal copy of the game that exists only in your mind (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/intermediates-guide/introducing-the-scrub).
I can't even imagine how anyone who's even been half-good at any game, much less EE, and can understand the very basics of EE, could think banning this glitch was a good idea... Which is why I've written too much and am going to stop now.