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Cluster Wars (formerly Empyrean Challenge)
#89
(03-08-2014, 07:05 AM)ixnay Wrote: And now for turn 14...

Argh. I must have fat-fingered the orders where I enlarged my new colonizer ship and stocked it with light structural units (to be used in constructing my new colony.) Instead of LTSU-2 I apparently ordered LTSU-4, which I don't have. So now my colonizer is sitting in orbit 2, burning fuel, with 15m people on it, and it has to come BACK HOME.

This gets to what is my one big gripe with this game. I should have an alert or warning when I enter a bad order. The interface does help tremendously (compared to when we used to do all this on paper), by guiding us through the order writing process. But I should have had a red flag go up when I tried to add materials to a ship that I didn't have. I would think that in real life, I would have noticed that my structural units were tech-2, not tech-4, and I certainly wouldn't have sent 15m colonists on their merry way without their supplies.

On the other hand, this player-fallibility does have an air of realism about it. Snafus happen all the time in the real world. The handful of other players in this game who have posted here seem to have hit similar snags. And one Legends player (another high-complexity PBM beast) said that even as a veteran, he generally strived for limiting himself to just one bad error per turn. And as a programmer, I can tell you that error-proofing data input can be very difficult and time-consuming.

I'm not in this game, but I am going to chime in, anyway.

In Hyborian War, which is still played via the postal service, veteran players still make mistakes. Is it frustrating? Yes, but it hasn't destroyed the game. In fact, reading about errors that players make in games such as these is often a notable point of amusement. The human (player) errors, themselves, while regrettable, also become part of the overall entertainment value that a game provides. Some even rise to become lore within player communities.

That is not to say that errors are good, per se. They can be frustrating. Yet, at the same time, many games playable online have order checkers, even as they don't achieve the same degree of popularity as numerous older PBM games achieved, by comparison.

Eliminating all potential for human error can be a commendable goal, as far as processing player orders goes. Yet, human error is part and parcel of the human element in games. The more of the human element that gets eliminated, it impacts the game, somehow, I'm certain.

Recently, I began experimenting with a game that features the game, itself, offering suggested orders. Some games offer battle simulators, so that you can be certain of the outcome of pending match-ups against opponents in battle. It would be possible to have two electronic chess games that would offer suggested moves, and two players could then compete against one another utilizing those electronic chess games.

At what point, though, does the pursuit of elimination of human error negatively impact a given game? It might vary by game. But, I do think that it is something worth considering.
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RE: Cluster Wars (formerly Empyrean Challenge) - by GrimFinger - 03-08-2014, 12:20 PM

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