Yeah Shiri, you did a hell of a job influencing..the problem was, you were the only one.

The zero sum game for debating is like in the picture below, I did it for Rock, Paper, Scissors so I didnt give everything away.

The table is in the position for Player A and shows that if he plays rock and Player B plays rock theres a draw, if Player A plays Scissors and Player B plays paper Player A wins and the result is 1 for player A, etc. etc.

If you want to learn the integrate details of this its undergraduate/A-Level Decision maths so check it up on the internet or one of the Exam boards for your area.


Basically since there is no play safe strategy it makes changing your mindset randomly so effective, since if you were to keep randomly selecting one mindset maths suggests that the best way is to pick each mindset a third of the time.

In aggressive debating (again giving an example with rock, paper, scissors) if you lose like on the table, logic states that you should then use the tactic that will win next time, e.g if you lose with paper against scissors its best to then pick rock. But then your opponent may predetermine this action and move again to what would beat rock on the table. So you have to think up to two or three steps ahead.

To do this on the table simple select say rock, this loses to paper as there is a minus one there so swap to scissors as that will beat paper then see what beats that and so on. This places you one step ahaed with each change of tactic.


With debating this is happening twice, with you debating them and them debating you so you have to play the offensive and defensive at the same time.

This probably sounds confusing so ill try and make it simpler and edit this post if I can. Just typing it quickly though.

Or you can look up basic game theory. That will have it all covered. It also is interesting since if you can program a way to detect the strategy that your opponent is using then game theory can tell you an optimal strategy to use against the opponent's strategy.

This is only true if your opponent is using a non-random approach to his mindset changes. Game theory is of little to no assistance in evaluating games of imperfect information with dynamic saddle points. The three-fold nature of the game also adds problems, as one is at no point forced to be on the offensive, so any predictive model would need to assume the opponent is operating rationally, which isn't always the case.

Basically it was just made so that the gains from winning offensively between winning big and winning small even out with the defensive losses. It's still very important to keep up a persistent defensive strategy, but it's not going to kill you to be offensively sound anymore either.

As Thorgal said YOU were doing good at influencing, if anyone mentioned progress positively it probably was to avoid IC discouragement. No reason to think badly until you lose, for the battle is not over until such a time.

I didn't say you were doing well, I said you were doing it properly by that time but didn't have enough time to make up for it due to influencing being made so it took less time. By the time Magnagora reclaimed Estelbar Serenwilde was using the right tactics, but they were still way behind (as is obvious since they lost).

Game theory will work if you know the distribution of your opponent's randomness. If you see they choose a certain mindset 50% of the time and the other two 30% and 20% respectively, then game theory (if I remember my days in college, which quite possibly is not the case) will tell you what distribution you should use to maximize your wins against that.

Sure, but if they're keeping to a standard distribution curve, or a plot in this case given the limited choices, they aren't exhibiting true random behavior. It's argued by some that the human mind cannot truly function randomly, but one can approximate it enough given the limited choices over a small number of selections to make interpretation based on weighted selection probability something of a shot in the dark.

in reality, a person will switch "randomly" in a very nice neat pattern.

This is what I teach Seren to do when debating.

#alias {ms} {#case $random% {mindset cautious} {mindset pedantic} {mindset analytical}}

Okay, I put the #case $random% thing wrong probably, but whatever it is when I actually remember the syntax actually works. Then I tell them that if someone debates them, mash "ms" that and keep sipping bromide.

It works.

With debating adjusted to be zero-sum, it might not work so well anymore. That worked because of the defender's advantage; without that, it's just flipping coins.

(I also suspect that it's going to spend slightly more time cautious than in the other two, because of how zMUD handles %random, but I don't care enough to go check. If someone wants to try using more pontification to see, maybe they'll win slightly more than they lose, but with the snowballing damage, it's going to be a lot more luck than anything else.)

well, it's also gonna be you're level of ego majorly.. so.. if you have that advantage your set

Wow, influencing is damn fast now.

67 minutes is damned fast? I sure as hell prefer an hour to 13 hours straight influencing.

Last time I recorded before the changes was about 5 hours, not so bad really.

5 hours is rather bad. I could deal with about 2, maybe.

I am so not spending an hour playing scissors-paper-rock .

I spose it doesn't matter though. I think the whole time I've played Lusternia, I've only been around for about half a dozen village revolts.