To push the "bridge" analogy perhaps too-far forward... I think it's conceivable that certain teams may develop pre-game "play-communication" strategies, for example, "The knight I move first will indicate which opponent we should attack first". THIS is the kind of "communication" that should be a part of (if not the essence of) team play.
Private chat in team play needs to go...
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yea you might as well disable skype, arrows, partnering up with friends...
and you would have to make the game anonymous so top end players who have alliances can't communicated but they can prob code their identity and alert potential friends of their prescence to each other through moves like 1. a3 anyway...
So basically, there are tons of practical problems with your suggestions and its not gonna work sorry bud
Nov 10, 2017
0
#5
In a perfect world, this could be worth considering. But unless you can shut Skype down, it's not practical. All you can do is ensure the time controls are fast enough that chatting gets difficult.
ensuring the time controls to be too fast would detract from the quality of the game
Why would that be a problem? It's team play!
By the way I have been the puppet master of a team, and I can tell you it's a lot more fun, and a lot better to have to strong players.
I dont even consider playing with a weaker partner who will implement his failed ideas on my games.
The problem with team play is that in the opening, it requires a lot of precision or else you will get mated quickly against strong players. Like, a LOT of precision. So weak players will not enjoy it very much becsause you cant just play random purpusless moves like in free for all and expect to get away with it.
So what this means is that strong players will enjoy playing team, and weak players will prefer free for all.
But removing the communication from the game is complete non-sens. It's TEAM play. TEAM. And besides, even if you did remove all sorts of communication, that would mean strong players would be forced to partner up only with fellow strong players that they dont need to explain anything to. So weaker players wouldnt get the opportunity to learn from teaming up with stronger players, since they wouldn't want to play with them.
The lesson you should be getting from all this is this: chess is a competitive game, and the better player's ideas are generally better than the weaker player's idea. You need to accept that. Team play 4C is not like free for all. You don't get to win by luck against much better opponents. This is what's fun about it.
Nov 10, 2017
0
#10
Bad_Dobby_Fischer wrote:
in bughouse you can help each other
Bughouse has two boards moving simultaneously. If you're spending a lot of time telling your partner what to play, you're both going to be down on time. And if you're down on time, you're going to lose.
Nov 10, 2017
0
#11
Thanks for the feedback. On further reflection, the only behavior I'd really like to zap is overt puppeteering: one player dictating the vast majority of the other's moves. Things like "Careful, your bishop is hanging!", "I need help quick!", or "Let's get blue!"... I can see that as truly in the spirit of "team play." But "Queen h4. Now castle. Move king pawn forward two." That's not team play.
From a policy perspective, I'd
1) Loosely define "puppeteering" as one player mostly (or completely) controlling both players' pieces
2) Indicate that such behavior is discouraged: it detracts from the team aspect of the game, and is an unfair advantage to those who do engage in it.
3) Draw an unequivocal line; both accounts may be locked or banned if that team is found to have engaged in "overt puppeteering", meeting one of the following conditions:
* Any game in which over 25% of one player's moves were dictated moves (where a 'dictated move' is defined as a communication that unambiguously specifies what move to make immediately prior to that player's turn; and that specific move was the one made).
* Any game with a string of 3 or more consecutive "dictated moves".
The remaining problem is detection/enforcement. A fairly simple solution: The transcript of the other team's private chat can be requested if both members of the "victim" team suspect puppeteering. If a review of the transcript convinces both members of the "victim" team that "overt puppeteering" was engaged in (meeting aforementioned thresholds), and they both report it, then it is sent on as an official complaint and formally reviewed. If the accusations hold up to scrutiny, guilty parties are perhaps warned / locked / banned in scale to the transgression. Naturally, consequences for making unfounded accusations (not backed by transcript) ought to be every bit as severe as the consequence of puppeteering itself.
@Ne2willdo, you wrote:
"You don't get to win by luck against much better opponents. This is what's fun about it."
What amount of my aforementioned victory (over a 1250 and 1350 opponent, as I recall) would you attribute to my chess-playing skill?
dude, give it up, no one is gonna do anything about puppeteering, this game is much more tactically intensive than normal chess and the top players are very strong classical chess players to begin with (2000+), you gonna need some sick calculations just to survive the opening and puppeteering gives the weaker player a chance to learn, otherwise they all just lose in a few moves like most do.
No chess.com staff is gonna bother to implement all those changes for you when its so impractical and most people prefer there to be communication to make it more fun, so forget it.
This game would end up being mainly for strong players who would understand each others moves and plans anyway...
A 1200 partnering up and getting puppeteered by a 1600 is going to have a tough time against two solid 1500s anyway, because the 1600 would end up having to calculate both players to survive and this game isn't exactly slow time control.
A simple solution for the most relevant issues is to limit team chat to a set of "emojis". In Bughouse, I frequently use emojis like "Stall" and "Knight" to convey what I want without much issues.
In Teammode, these emojis can be used as a restrictor. Comunicate using them, or all chat only.
Teams with partners should only be queued with teams with partners in any scenario. But I am not quite sure if the player pool is large enough to allow that anyway
Nov 14, 2017
0
#16
@TheOriginalSoni,
Yes, a great idea. For most of what I'd consider "legitimate" team-play / strategizing, a canned set of high-level expressions should suffice. "Let's get blue!" "Watch your back!" or "Send help!!". The cases where this doesn't work, where something more specific is desired, are honestly the exact scenarios where the communication is probably bleeding into the ethically-questionable zones.
@MGleason,
You couldn't, of course.... No more than you can stop 2PC players from using an engine. What I'm suggesting is to make it clear that it is considered a form of cheating (or, at least, is heavily frowned upon); and players who are caught engaging in it risk penalties (up to and including account-bans).
Besides, there are ways to detect cheaters no matter how sneaky their strategy. Casinos don't catch card-counters at the blackjack table; they catch based on the fishy patterns of how/when they win. Consider two players, Jennifer and Olivia, who pair up frequently and are both in the top-10 with ratings of about 1900. However, while their rating when playing together is about 2000.... when they're paired up with anyone else (or playing FFA) Jennifer's rating is about 1700 and Olivia's is about 1000. Fishy, no?
Anyway, a stated policy alone, even without any form of enforcement mechanism, would have a big impact. Just knowing that it is considered cheating (sort of like knowing that using a chess engine is cheating in 2PC, however easy it might be to get away with it), is probably enough to discourage most players from engaging in it. In random pairings, I'd wager that most strong players who attempt to dictate a weaker teammate's play will be met with "Um... can you knock it off? I don't want to cheat to win."
@Lincher - right, sharing ideas and discussing strategy is one thing. But one player flatly dictating their partner's play removes any semblance of it being a "team" game.
Perhaps an analogy can help make my point a bit more clearly.
Consider a swimming relay race between two teams. The first team consists of four NCAA top-16 swimmers. The other team has Michael Phelps... and three infants who can't swim. No matter how good a day Phelps has, I think we'd all agree that his team is too weak to have any possibility of winning. At least, that's how it should be... he *should* be delighted at the opportunity to swap out the 3 infants with 3 mediocre swimmers. Doing so *should* improve his team. But in the case of this particular "relay race", there's a strange loophole. Teams that choose to do the relay conventionally and have all 4 swimmers each swim 1 leg will receive a final time equaling the total of the four splits. However, the loophole is that teams *can* choose to just have one swimmer do one leg and receive a final time of that individual's 1-leg-split, multiplied by 4. With this loophole in place, which relay team would you bet on now? Would Phelp's team be improved by replacing his 3 teammates with stronger swimmers? If he were teamed with three high-school kids, how rewarding would it be to them to be on the #1 relay team in the world? Would they be justified in feeling proud of acquiring such a ranking?
Leaving aside that far-fetched case; consider the impact of such a loophole on two teams that are roughly equally matched. If both teams really want to win, then the best strategy is to just let their best athlete swim one leg. In which case the "relay race" between any two "teams" will just reduce to an individual competition between the best swimmer of each team.
... wtf why the hell there should not be good communication? It would only become a frustrating game
Nov 18, 2017
0
#18
This is really only an issue when one partner is really good and the other one sucks. Two strong players against one great player and a puppet can take down the stronger player because they can analyze more scenarios in the same amount of time. Two heads are better than one.
If the issue is high rated players puppet mastering really lower players, simply put in a limit on the max difference in partner ratings for rated games.
When playing with opponents of different ratings, you should assume the higher rated opponent will be making suggestions to the lower one. Almost like they're teaming up...
I feel private (intra-team) chatting will be the death-knell of team play.
1) A single player controlling both sides has an innate advantage over two opponents controlling their own respective sides (the single player has perfect/instantaneous/effortless communication with "partner").
2) Eventually (if it hasn't already happened), an already-strong 4-PC player is going to find a willing "puppet" partner.
3) The team will be controlled completely by the puppet-master, who will call out moves to the puppet in private chat.
4) Both puppet master and puppet benefit: the "team" will be virtually unbeatable (with the exception of other "puppet" teams who might have a better puppet master); both will quickly rise to the top of the leader board.
I should note - this scenario is the "end-game", where I think things will wind up. However, symptoms of it already run rampant. My last 4PC team game, I was a 1200-rated player matched with 1450-rated player. This partner called out every move from move 1. Each move made good sense, and partner *was* high-rated, so I followed his suggestions. We checkmated in < 10 moves.
This was the least-fun and most demoralizing win I've ever had in chess... in fact, so bad a taste did it leave that I haven't played a game since. "Just ignore the suggestions", you might say. That's like working on a Sudoku puzzle while a Sudoku expert is helpfully telling you what values go in each box.
I think team-4PC should be more like the card-game "bridge", wherein ANY game-related/strategic communication between teammates is considered cheating. The only communication in bridge is communication via how one plays. Far from detracting from play, this forced-radio-silence is actually one of the best and most appealing features of bridge; great teams are those who are able to infer what their partner is up to and act in a synergistic fashion.
I should note, even disabling "private chat" mode doesn't totally solve this problem. The puppeteering team still has the exact same advantage if puppet-master communicates puppet's moves on "/all" chat (that is, the puppet master can still call out moves... yes, everyone will see that, but if there aren't rules against it, what difference does it make?). To that end, any communication which in any way hints at what a teammate should do should be considered cheating (and should be flag-able by opponents such that routine cheaters can be penalized/weeded out). Yes, processing "cheat accusations" adds a layer of complexity to game-design; but there is precedence for this. Online bridge exists; I'd recommend studying and emulating the controls used to discourage casual cheating in that realm.