Being able to abandon games

[Travis Hall]

I never saw this before, it's interesting. I have often heard people say that 3p is harder than 2p. I don't think this makes sense on any variant.

That goes back to your definition of “harder”. If you mean “less likely to get 30 when played skilfully”, 2-player is undoubtedly the harder. If you mean “requires greater understanding of the game to achieve the highest possible probability of 30”, I can certainly see a case for saying that 3-player is the harder.

Unlike when we compare 3-player to 4-player, where I suspect 3-player is harder under either definition.

[Travis Hall]

Right now the best masters on BGA play the same conventions again and again, and it’s mostly about paying attention, not figuring out something new. I do this too. It’s pleasant to relax in your comfort zone. So the repeated complaint is playing with people who don’t have the conventions memorized as well as you.

No, mastery of 5-player Hanabi requires more than just memorising the conventions. Being able to properly evaluate your strategic choices within those conventions makes a huge difference.

Furthermore, unless you are talking about something like the best half-dozen players, there’s definitely still a lot of scope for our masters to improve their understanding of the conventions. Like, 900 ELO (legitimately earned, not using tactics like abandonment) is still a huge distance from mastery. A huge number of masters don’t even properly understand layered.

[Wreckage]

When they say it's harder, I do think they mean harder to get 30 points. And it is harder for them, because they stick to silly rules like you can't save a 2 or 3 on chop unless it's unique. Which does hurt your chances of success.

No, mastery of 5-player Hanabi requires more than just memorising the conventions. Being able to properly evaluate your strategic choices within those conventions makes a huge difference.

I think this means the same thing I'm saying. Looking carefully for opportunities to fully use the conventions you already know.

This sounds like a criticism, and it is. I am encouraging getting a team of the same few people and trying some different things. Finding a new trick that's really effective is a eureka moment, and that's fun.

I'll admit that most of the time I am staying in my comfort zone and just using the same conventions over and over. But the most fun I've had is implementing something nobody else is doing, to find an advantage.

[jgpaladin]

Travis Hall wrote: ↑27 March 2023, 13:40
No, mastery of 5-player Hanabi requires more than just memorising the conventions. Being able to properly evaluate your strategic choices within those conventions makes a huge difference.

I think this means the same thing I'm saying. Looking carefully for opportunities to fully use the conventions you already know.

I don't think it's the same thing. At the top levels I would argue the better players are the ones who know when NOT to clue. Allowing others to clue instead of you, or maybe to force their hands to remain unchanged for you to clue next round, or as a way to control tempo is super important.

[jgpaladin]

So I do get stuck in games far more frequently than I'd like. I don't like to abandon, and I don't do it because of "mistakes." But when it's clear that we're playing a convention-based team game and there are players at the table who are playing a different game than I am, yeah I'll consider it. FWIW I just checked and similar to Travis I used to abandon more, so I'm at around 20% overall but this calendar year I'm under 9% in just under 160 games. Still too many for my tastes and I can't go back and justify every one, but I'm far from a serial abandoner, and I've taken plenty of lumps when games didn't go my way. I have never once abandoned a game because the deck was too difficult or we were approaching the end and weren't going to get a 30.

Yep, quoting myself...

I thought about this some more and realized I'd forgotten a couple more points regarding abandoning games.
- I'm not a fan of holding people hostage in a game if they aren't having fun. If someone is strongly pushing to abandon and it's not purely an elo-saving situation, I'm typically willing to acquiesce. Here is where I part strongly from the no-abandon group because I think that many people there have the attitude that their fun trumps anyone else's fun.
- If you're out of time, you have no ability to reject the request to abandon. So some portion of my abandoned games are literally just because someone requested it and I'm in the red and stuck...

[Romain672]

At one point if you want to define what mean to master X, you would need first to know what is your objective:
- some people want to always explore, try to find things that nobody else did/things they don't know. By doing it, you can regularly ruin games by doing things others players don't understand/don't trust, even if it is optimal. The main upside is you improving over time since you often are one step further.
- some people play to have something similar to winstreak ("complexity cost"): to do that, you need at one point to said to yourself that things became too complicated and decide to not do them, even if you know they would be better, the risk of doing a clue that a single player on the table missinterpret can cause 2 bombs (mainly if another thing is going on, and a player do something unexpected from it). Some players will try to have the highest winrate, while others would do that in specific time (winstreak) which let them relax a lot more when nothing else is going on.
This require to be able to concentrate and rarely make (simple) mistakes.
- some people learn to be good at interpreting clues from new players/new situations. It make you lower the trust of every player, but make you instead think about probabilities of you having anything. Per example, you can assume that your next player know he has play in 80% of the cases. Knowing that, depending of the situation, you can do the best action which follow (if your next player got a 5 in chop, if you are in those 20% remaining, that's bad). This skill can be used too when an error is occuring during a game. You need to resynchronise the team, and to do it, you are forced to check differents possible state of the game for every player.
You can sometimes have a middle ground where you got defined conventions, but those one give lots of liberty of how to play them.
- some people learn to play with weird variants.
- some people saw that hat guessing exist, and lose interest on playing the game normally.


And just to put that here: better conventions (out of hat-guessing) seem to give clues which doesn't touch the card you want them to play: it give not only a play, but information on the other card of the hand.

[Jellby]

- I'm not a fan of holding people hostage in a game if they aren't having fun. If someone is strongly pushing to abandon and it's not purely an elo-saving situation, I'm typically willing to acquiesce. Here is where I part strongly from the no-abandon group because I think that many people there have the attitude that their fun trumps anyone else's fun.

I just want to point out that it's not a matter of holding hostages or having fun. (This is a general comment for every game and player, not directed at you or Hanabi.) Every player in the game commits to finishing the game in time when they accept, so "I'm not having fun" is not an excuse. I mean, sure, it's a valid reason to request an abandonment, but if it gets refused, just deal with it, the only person forcing you to play is yourself when you entered the table.

[Blacktango]

I agree with Jelby. I don't mind when a player ask for abandon.
But they should not complain if someone refuses it, and then continue the game.

[Travis Hall]

I agree with Jelby. I don't mind when a player ask for abandon.
But they should not complain if someone refuses it, and then continue the game.

Yes, I agree with Jellby and Blacktango.

But furthermore, those who really find it so arduous to play out a game still are not forced to do so. They have the unilateral option to quit. I don’t mind if some players want to be a little more lenient and acquiesce to requests somewhat more than I do, but the fact that I am fairly strict about this does not mean I am forcing anyone to do anything.

And also, playing with an expectation that a quarter, a third, for some players even half of their games will go wrong and just be abandoned often leads to distorted play from these players. Many will often give wild clues, or wildly guess at plays, or apply bad judgement in a variety of other ways, secure in the knowledge that the game will end immediately if it goes wrong. The challenge of properly considering the risks of a move is part of the fun for me, so entering the game with the expectation of ready abandonment is already taking the attitude that their fun trumps mine.

If they want to negotiate which form of fun has priority before the start of the game, that’s fine. I’ll stay out of games where this is stated up front. Without anything explicit, though, the default is what the BGA mods and admins have laid down, and that’s finishing games unless everyone agrees to abandon, or one person quits.

[orchid]

Here's one that can help everyone in games of any player count with no black powder. If someone gives you a 1 clue at the start, and it hits three 1s, which do you play? Most of you would immediately say the right 1. But what if you played the middle one, or the left. What can you be telling them by playing out or order? We’ve used it to mean if I play middle, save your chop card. If I play left, save two cards. So it’s possible to save a 5 and a 2 without spending those tokens, and move the game forward at the same time.

Playing with weird restrictions can open your eyes for the first time to all the possible ways to clue you’ve never considered before. I have given a single clue to mean save different cards in slots 2, 3, and 5. Or save chop and play leftmost. Or play slot 2, then slot 1.

Now, I know you can’t do anything new when you are playing with different people every day. But, if you have the same team play together a couple times a week, there are things to discover, and that’s fun. Right now the best masters on BGA play the same conventions again and again, and it’s mostly about paying attention, not figuring out something new. I do this too. It’s pleasant to relax in your comfort zone. So the repeated complaint is playing with people who don’t have the conventions memorized as well as you.

Respectfully disagree. I think the best masters are able to see the entire board, predict what other players are going to clue/play (and when) and then react accordingly. If given a new clue for a convention they have not yet learned, they can analyze why it was given and what might be the expected response. Re: your example/conventions specifically, these are arbitrary rules made and memorized. Might be interesting to play 1-2 games like this, but not long-term, for me. They're not logic-based conventions you can build upon or learn from. I disagree that this makes someone more skilled to make up conventions to memorize and play like a bot "if this, then that". It's the deductive reasoning that makes hanabi so challenging and fascinating to most 5p masters, and why many of us don't prefer 2p games where mostly only direct play/save clues are given.

The second thing is this arrogance against players playing 2-player games. I get it. I understand it. They are not doing finesses, and for you, that's the whole game. It is a different game. But this doesn't give them any advantage in ELO. It's not an easier game to reach 30 points. And it's not an ELO boost.

I will admit I hold this arrogance as I believe a 5p master joining a 2p table can fare better than a 2p master joining a 5p table (*I fully acknowledge I don't play 2p games to fairly make this assessment). However, I frequently see 2p masters falsely believing their elo experience means they know how to play a 5p game well, which is where my more frustrating games occur. I agree with Travis that these 2p masters would do everyone a favor by joining lower-average-elo 5p games first, to learn. While I personally never initiate an abandon request, I can see how other masters may not want to continue in these games.

I try not to accept abandon requests in general either, as I usually prefer to play the game out to teach (if they're open to discussion) or so the offending player can lose the elo that they so desperately want to maintain. Ideally, they drop low enough that they no longer qualify for the masters-only tables I join. But I am not going to hold an entire table hostage, especially when there is toxic drama unfolding, so I don't understand why players get so worked up and adamant in their stance to refuse abandons. I'm not here to parent strangers.

I think a possible solution might be if we can implement table settings that restrict players with less than an x% of completed games join, the same way we restrict tables by reputation.

Or the RT button exists. I use it freely. I don't know why the "hanabi no abandon" group finds it so tedious to RT players who abandon but yet have ample time to rant to a forum. If you're RTing players based on these posts, sure. But a quick glance through a player's history can tell you what you need to to know. If I see a player I don't recognize, I check their 10 most recent games to see who might be a 2p specialist, abandons frequently, or if their last few 4-5p games bombed out. Then I decide how willing I am to teach today.