Pythia v1.3 - visual aid helper for 7 Wonders BGA

[yellososus]

I'll repeat what others have said: you would be ok playing against opponent in chess when he has a tool showing him your potential captures? Or engine eval (not the moves).

And again repeat: this is a timed game, automatized tools that provide you information are cheats.

[RicardoRix]

So I assume you are also against all the games that show the current score during the game instead of computing them at the end, like Kingdomino, Tokaido, Takenoko, ... ???

The difference is that EVERYONE is receiving that information and puts the game on a level playing field. Not everyone has this plug-in tool. It's a separate argument to say whether BGA adaptions should or shouldn't have various computer aids, the running score totals are just the tip of the iceberg. One important factor is that all these adaptions have gone through the BGA team approval process.
If you want to make it official, then you should get involved with the the BGA team and bring this 'enhancement' to the game for all to play with.

You wanna bring pen and paper to all your 7-wonder games then fine. Play fast real-time 7-wonders and tell me that it's the same - it's not.

More of a grey area, but this idea of 'it's just information you should know anyway' is not a viable argument. If you already know it, then why do you need the tool?

[Tisaac]

So these examples violates the BGA's rules and got approved ??...
That means there is some flexibility here so that make sense to propose this kind of new feature that could be added to the game (eventhough the bga admins would probably never have the time to do this anyway).

Of course the "it's just information you should know anyway" is a viable argument ! If you are playing a few games in turn-based mode, you would need to take notes or have a sheet of paper for each of them to keep track all these informations (unless you are not doing anything else). The goal of these kind of tool is to relieve you about storing this info, just as in Hanabi, so you can focus on the only thing that matter : strategy.
Of course for the fast-pace mode it's not the same, but 7Wonders in fast pace is no longer only about strategy...

[RicardoRix]

So these examples violates the BGA's rules and got approved ??...
That means there is some flexibility here so that make sense to propose this kind of new feature that could be added to the game (eventhough the bga admins would probably never have the time to do this anyway).

Like I said this is a different argument, and a grey area, you can read the BGA guidelines for yourself:
http://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/BGA_St ... assistance

You are of course welcome to try and add this feature to the game itself. Until then it's cheating - no question.

[yellososus]

So these examples violates the BGA's rules and got approved ??...
That means there is some flexibility here so that make sense to propose this kind of new feature that could be added to the game (eventhough the bga admins would probably never have the time to do this anyway).

Of course the "it's just information you should know anyway" is a viable argument ! If you are playing a few games in turn-based mode, you would need to take notes or have a sheet of paper for each of them to keep track all these informations (unless you are not doing anything else). The goal of these kind of tool is to relieve you about storing this info, just as in Hanabi, so you can focus on the only thing that matter : strategy.
Of course for the fast-pace mode it's not the same, but 7Wonders in fast pace is no longer only about strategy...

Would you be okay with playing santorini against an opponent who has highlighted all of your "threats"? This is information you can easily deduce.

[RicardoRix]

Would you be okay with playing santorini against an opponent who has highlighted all of your "threats"? This is information you can easily deduce.

Awesome, maybe we should petition the developer and ask him to add this, and a whole load of other things you can logically deduce. There must be a load of 4 moves to a forced mate situations. Then we can focus on the strategy.

[Tisaac]

So these examples violates the BGA's rules and got approved ??...
That means there is some flexibility here so that make sense to propose this kind of new feature that could be added to the game (eventhough the bga admins would probably never have the time to do this anyway).

Of course the "it's just information you should know anyway" is a viable argument ! If you are playing a few games in turn-based mode, you would need to take notes or have a sheet of paper for each of them to keep track all these informations (unless you are not doing anything else). The goal of these kind of tool is to relieve you about storing this info, just as in Hanabi, so you can focus on the only thing that matter : strategy.
Of course for the fast-pace mode it's not the same, but 7Wonders in fast pace is no longer only about strategy...

Would you be okay with playing santorini against an opponent who has highlighted all of your "threats"? This is information you can easily deduce.

Of course I would be okay !! I would personnally tell him about some obvious threat (like instant lose) ! I would not enjoy winning just because my opponent got distracted at some point, I want to win because my opponent has no chance of escaping. That's pretty much why we insisted that much of having a restart turn button at the end of your turn (without any timer for turn-based game) altough this was against BGA guideline.
If you have any suggestion to help people to play Santorini better, without telling them what to play (again this tool for 7Wonders is not telling you what is your best cards, not even which one is bad, which make your argument about Santorini out of subject by the way), feel free to talk about it in the forum, I would be glad to discuss and implement it.

[Karatecha]

I don't get how this would be any different than taking a paper along with you playing the game ???

The big difference is everyone sees you taking a paper and your playmates have a choice to allow or disallow that use during the game. With Pythia, your playmates don't know you are using it and have no chance to allow or disallow its use. Even in real time games, no one could prevent you from taking notes, but since it's a timed game, you are using your precious time in taking notes, so there is a cost for you doing that. With Pythia, there is no cost -- it's pure advantage but done in secret.

Why would it be superior to invest work in taking notes ? 7Wonders is not about who is the strongest at taking note, it's about making the best decisions during the game.

Perhaps a better word would be 'fairer' (or more fair?) than 'superior', for the above reason I mentioned. How do you make the best decision? By using the information you remember. And the decision which pieces of information to actively remember (since not everything could be remembered) that will impact your later decisions is a gameplay decision in itself.

This tool don't help you at all figuring out which card is important and which one is not, it's just showing everything on the same level. Again, the real skill is only being able to process these info to make the best decisions.

The updated version calculates the points guild cards would give. That's already showing which is better and which is not. Picking per se the highest point guild card is not the skill, it's a trivial decision. It's determining/calculating how many points the guild card would give, that is the skill.

I'm afraid Pythia will do more harm than good, in the long run. Players using it will no longer develop memorization skill - the playing skill helpful to do well in this game, as well as many others. Even simple calculations like how many points a guild would score is provided, dumbing the thinking process even more.

So I assume you are also against all the games that show the current score during the game instead of computing them at the end, like Kingdomino, Tokaido, Takenoko, ... ???

Personally, I would prefer end of age score updates, not turn-by-turn scoring update.

[yellososus]

Of course I would be okay !! I would personnally tell him about some obvious threat (like instant lose) ! I would not enjoy winning just because my opponent got distracted at some point, I want to win because my opponent has no chance of escaping. That's pretty much why we insisted that much of having a restart turn button at the end of your turn (without any timer for turn-based game) altough this was against BGA guideline.
If you have any suggestion to help people to play Santorini better, without telling them what to play (again this tool for 7Wonders is not telling you what is your best cards, not even which one is bad, which make your argument about Santorini out of subject by the way), feel free to talk about it in the forum, I would be glad to discuss and implement it.

Since you are not trying to understand what people are telling you, let me simplify this.

I was not talking about mates I was talking about threats.
Example how to implement it and a story: Santorini is a backward thinking type logical game, you don't have clear objectives how to progress (capture pieces etc) instead you know how the end state needs to look like, so you are taking it step by step from the "last winning move" depending on the setup. For example you are on stage 2 and you have 2 adjacent stage 3s (so you can be only blocked or one) or you have adjacent stage 3 that you can't be blocked on, so on and so on. But this is just mate threat, how do you setup for mate threat? Well there are patterns and they very from god to god. It is a pretty simple software to calculate mate in 3 setups for each god pair. And it is pretty easy to show if they are avaiable for your opponent. It will get more sophisticated with each step, but I believe in 5s, really hard to see to humans can be easily spotted. This is still not showing what move you can make, just telling you what you are in danger for. Is it cheating? Hell yeah. We can also imagine a software that tells you "you have mate in 4", doesn't tell you what to do, just tell you that there is something to look for. Is it cheating? Again hell yeah.

The best analogy to search for in online boardgames is chess, chess has a serious problem with engines, but all the sites do a lot to ban the cheaters, of course cheating by showing move is forbidden and this pythia thing is not doing that, but what it does is it elevates mental capacity of your game. Part of playing this game well is visualising hand, just like part of chess or santorini is mental calculation (you cannot make moves on board for your opponent). The restart feature is needed in online game like santorini, because of the implementation and how easily you can misclick, but there is (and shouldn't) ever be a way to simulate how the moves are going to go.

Speaking about information let's take a game like stone age, there you can calculate everything in points and pips. How would you feel about extension that shows you the pip values of each move and how different is that from chess/santorini engine giving you evaluation for each move and not saying which is the best one, just giving you a list. Also in santorini there will be god matchups and statistics, why not show the winning rate against each other for a specific player you are playing against? That is information you can calculate from his match history, it is not hidden. And I can go on and on.

The core argument is still that this is unfair to people, who don't have it and it is blanant cheating. I think the author should be ashamed and propably banned.

[dschingis27]

so you can focus on the only thing that matter : strategy.

@Tisaac: You must accept that memorization and simple value calculation of cards is an enjoyable game aspect for many players. If strategy is the only thing that matters to you, that's ok, but it is absolutely a matter of taste.

What about showing info known on a card at Hanabi ? Cheating again ?

Yes, cheating of course. Memorization is undoubtedly one core mechanic of Hanabi. To give an even better example, take the simple game "Memory" where you have to find pairs of matching cards. It's based entirely around memorization and a tool "showing data you should know" would completely kill the game. Including memorization into a game is a tool of game designers, you can like it or not but it is a thing.