Muratus del Mur

vote results will be published again later this week, you could start placing your bets

you mean, to adjust the vote power to be the popularity score? So someone with -100, when they vote, they burry anyone else?

I know, just saying

life hurts your feelings all the time, I know its "better" just to give everyone the impression it all evolves around positive feelings and such, but i'm not like that, so md is not like that.

yes, exactly, and thats why i didn't publish the recent votes. I don't want people to vote just to "adjust" whatever results they see. Its so tempting, the new results are very very interesting.. but i will publish them later as Ledah suggested.

Actually what i get by this method is to increase the sensitivity of the extremes. I lose the entire middle range votes, indeed, but the ends of the spectrum become more highlighted. In a version where everyone could sort everyone by numbers, all wpuld get some sort of vote/rating. In this version, only the people that made someone vote them in place of everyone else will show up on the list, completely eliminating the middle range. Obviously its not the only wau to achieve the desired result, but right now i think that voting too much too often is not a good thing. Having to vote two people only (up and down) keeps things simple and less annoying.

Think of it this way. One person can mess with 2 votes, one good, one bad. Two votes mean a lot if there are few total, but mean nothing if there are more. If a group of people act together, then its more than just a personal hate issue.

voting repeatedly for same person is not a problem. On each round others vote too, and getting constant negative votes, or positive votes, its a sign you still have that sort of influence on those people. Imagine, if your haters get bored hating you and find better people to hate, they move on, but if they don't, then you are someones obsession..and that needs to reflect in your score somehow. Just some people are "haters" by nature, not so many. Sad thing is that with just a few people, the power of the crowd will be less obvious.. but with a fair amount, having someone obsessed downvoting you will not be noticeable. If you have several people downvoting you constantly, then its you having a problem, not them. Voting yourself negatively is not an option and never will be. The ideea of this mechanism is to force all to decide in terms of good and bad. You can only vote two people, so your area of influence is limited to your own good&bad. I will be careful not to consider the negative votes as a sign of "really bad" because they are often just a sign of "really don't know much about that guy" (that actually means just 'unpopular', not 'bad') Of course someone could risk creating an alt just for dumping bad votes of others (don't), but then, the good votes will still mean what they mean, and thats what i am after actually. After eliminating alts, several possible problems got solved, but there is still a problem of "too popular" , i have a plan for that too, when the situation demands it. There are many things still experimental with this feature, but i will see over time if it makes sense using it for what i had in mind or not. The more votes it has, the more accurate this will become... but i will still give it room for absolute error. So far it looks good.

These are not final, there might be others that could vote but didn't logged in yet. Also, there will be no decision made based on these results, maybe when there will be enough votes, over a longer period, i will do something about it. I plan to work on integrating these results into role dispatchers and shared item rules.

Here are the voting results of the first "popularity" voting. Only those with minimum 3 consecutive days got to vote or to be voted. Please don't ask who voted who because those details will not become public. I am thinking to create a page, maybe in log room, where you will be able to see such stats monthly, or realtime.

Are you still getting this? Maybe you tried while it was in work

try it out, its a small map 9x9 but with 1 human and 3 ai players. The small map makes it more fun i think.

First kingdom map is ready. currently the fights are limited to a couple of variations, no AI difficulty change and no landscape change, but you can play smaller and larger maps and mostinteresting is the 1 vs 3 ai fights There is nothing at the end of winning the kingdom map yet, but i'll be working on that soon. Next step is to make AI players use different/configurable ai, so the kingdom map makes sense and areas are harder and harder to defeat. Right now, the AI, even in 1 vs 3 mode, is super easy to beat once you understand how it works. It lacks the aggressiveness and its not taking advantage of obvious opportunties. This won't change too soon, i don't want AI really difficult to beat, its supposed to be just a replacement when there are no players to fight.

Kingdoms page - currently in work It will be a map with settlements and fortifications that can be conquered by players in pvp or vs AI fights. I still need to decide the final visual style and other concepts. I will update here when i will have first art ready. Current progress: preselecting artists for the map Dev speed: super slow, expect weeks or months till completion, unless i expand the team with a new coder. Suggestions are welcome

it has already happened, but at the same time its "identity-less". Imagine all this as a "plane" of possibilities, crossed by routes that connect "checkpoints". One idividual can go one way or an other, changing his own path, having free will, and create his own series of checkpoints on this plain. I believe time is not linear, we just see it as linear because we can only interpret it based on our experience, and see just its causal nature. For one individual, there is past present and future indeed, but if you could look from above, this is just a road on a field of events that already exists, like a map. Things could be more boring than it looks like, because this field of possible events, its not some fantasy map, its just the "area" between "existance" and "nothing". At this level things can gen really complicated to visualize, but give it a try. I discovered long ago that a strong feeling can create "checkpoints" on this event field, and while you might think a strong will or desire can get you where you want, this is just partially true. You could create an attractor on this time field, but its not given that you will be the one that reaches it, this still depends on your actions. Someone else might be attracted and its path could be changed, based on something you wished into reality. When the cell splits in two, might just be a checkpoint of that path. Think that people evolve based on their DNA, and most of the times a child continues the curses and blessings of his parents, they are part of the parent path, as well as distinct individuals on their own path. I don't know what to consider the start or end of such a path to be, but i know the overall form of how these things work. Long..complicated..talk. Many things to understand, and so weird to discuss this in writing without knowing if the one reading this follows the chain of thoughts or not

I'm not participating for the wp, but here are mine Excuse the incredible mess!! I could blame my little one for it but its just me i guess :)))

thanks for the report. It was due to a module i was experimenting with, for now i disabled it so things should be fine It looks that the reason for this is that the creature icons on the creatures page generate too many requests and this triggered the lock. I am not sure yet how to disable this just on that script, maybe Chew finds a way later (mod_evasive in apache)

retrocausality either you agree that events in the future are "stronger" (maybe more real) than events in their past, then it means that whatever you experience in the present is following a purpose in its future, and everything are just "roots". or you consider events in the past "stronger" than whatever might follow them, meaning that everything in the future is totally meaningless and just a causal result of whatever happened before. The second version is what people find easier to accept and the first is for some plain outrageous. There are niche experiments that proved events in the future change events in the past (scientifically, look for "quantum eraser"), there is religion that talks about similar concepts (regardless of religion). However, direct, simple, observation can only tell the story of causality, you do one thing then the next event is the effect of what you did, cause and effect. My personal belief is that viewing things as causal, is dark ages level. I strongly believe that we observe reality (or our side of what we call reality), in a single, causal way, but it actually holds both sides. I think events happen at some point in "time" then spread their roots into the future AND the past, joining "threads" that will eventually confirm their existence and lead to it.

super hard to accept indeed. I say the system chooses its winners, because if you change the rules even just a little, an other winner might emerge. Its equally hard to accept that elements of randomness such as coin flips, or of free will, such as players, somehow have some degree of "awareness" about what the other, unrelated participants, do. Grab the first coin you find and flip it... you have 50/50 chances to get either side.... yet do this on a pile of coins, and you will see an abnormally even distribution of results, as if the coin flip "game" you just did had a knowledge of what side to pick next to achieve such an even distribution. In the organized form i proposed, having one of the participants that _always_ flips on one side, its equally strange. Again, all this is mathematically logical and not abnormal, but from a huma perspective, its not so logical. The explanation, in my belief at least, is that the outcome is so "fixed" that it causes its roots in such way. In reality, a coin can land on its side sometimes, or two players deciding on a draw, but in this example i eliminate such possibilities from the start, so the "genes" of such an event, are simply not there, so the final outcome can not be one of draw or undecisive flip. What happens in the coin flip experiment, is that we eliminate all possibilities that don't match the rules.

Let me explain this again differently. If you have a pile of coins and you flipp each 4 times, you would normally think that it is not mandatory that one coin will flip 4 times on the same side, why would it, right? However, if you do the same thing, but just flip them in a different order, like the game described above, it IS mandatory that one will flip 4 times in a row on the same side....how crazy is that. This is the endless fight between probability and chance, and i must admit i am having a hard time to understand it properly. You have equal chances to flip one or the other side, so in theory you could flip 1million times on the same side, or alternate sides 1mil times,right? No, not right.. if you distribute all possible outcomes, some scenarios happen more than others, but one happens just once.

I am not sayibg this, because in this example, nobody has free will, all fights, or coin flips, obay strict rules. Having free will in this example would mean to be able to land a coin on its edge (thats happening in reality), or both participants simply not show up for a fight (also happening). Maybe this is more of an example of how things would look without free will, its hard to tell what its relation to free will is. Its clear to explain it mathematically, and there is no mystery about why it happens or how...but still its hard to accept that its happening at all. I will do this experiment with coins, actual physical coins, and see what happens. If i am right, then one coin in a very large number will have to always land on one side. I am curious what would happen if a cheating coin is introduced, or other factors. Maybe childish games that a matematician would laugh at..but i suck at math, i like practical

@Fyrd Argentus yes, thats the math, i dont argue with that, i am just more interested in the philosophical conclusions. From this its clear to me that system is always picking its participants, not the other way around. There is no "room" for multiple winners, and more interesting, one is forced to be as part of that system. @Lazarus nobody is pushing anything to anyone. MD is my only community of friends and gamers, and this is an other project i do, same as i work on md. I see nothing wrong in talking to you md people about it. Consider it advertising if you dont understand what i just wrote.

Its obvious what is going on, the less obvious thing is the final outcome, regardless how it is explained, its still a fact that the winner is somehow forced into a streak of lucky tries, and as a big picture, such a system will always yield such a player. Think of it, given enough participants, you could break any world record of consecutive flips. The numbers become outrageous, but the "luck" comes out with mathematical precision every single time.

As i was building tournaments section of this game, at some point i needed to find a better way to present a tournament, than to show the total number of maps to be played in it. For one individual player, the total number of maps played is not that relevant, as it is to know how many maps he has to win to win the tournament. Lets imagine this for a bit. There are 8 players, and they play in pairs of 2, a total of 4 games. This would be the first round. Then, the 4 winners of the first round, play in the second round of 2 games, and obviously just 2 players win. There are no draws, you either win or lose. The remaining 2 winners, join a match for the final fight, and as usual, only one wins, lets call him John. John wins the tournament. So far nothing abnormal, every match has 2 players, and one winner. Overall the tournament has one winner. Maybe its obvious for you, but for me it was not obvious without specifically thinking about it, that all John's fights are consecutively won fights. John had to win every single time to reach the end of the tournament. Imagine this was not about strategy at all and it was a game of coin flipping and pure chance. Imagining this as a game of coin flipping excludes any possible explenation that one of the participants is terribly skilled in any way, so lets think of it in this way. All 8 players flipp a coin and only heads move forward to the next round, and so on. Over 3 rounds, the winner would have always flipped heads, against all odds. Flipping a coin and heads 3 consecutive times, its not big deal, but if you follow same rules, and increase the initial pool of participants, the winner would need to get more and more consecutive heads to reach the end of the tournament. The winner of a tournament with 100 rounds for example, would have hit heads 100 consecutive times, each time having 1/2 chances to hit either heads or tails. Seen from the start to end perspective, nothing looks abnormal, as each time one wins one loses, but seen backwards, from the winner perspective, the chances to flip just heads so many times, is insane. I've been thinking about this, and i realised that regardless how you put it, given enough number of initial participants, you can "force" one participant to hit just one side of the coin, every single time...every...time. Its irrelevant how lucky that person is, you could bring together the most unlucky people on the planet, and one of them will always be the one that at the end hit heads every single time. ...crazy no? It is as if you could force the luck into one person just because you put him the right competition. Any thoughts on this?

I consider the food issue solved. If anyone things otherwise please provide exammples/screens.