Who Publishes the Most Balanced Scenarios?

[paulkenny]

seems to me you all are proving the point that you can make a set of numbers mean anything.

 

[da priest]

seems to me you all are proving the point that you can make a set of numbers mean anything.

:devil:

 

[Chris Milne]

Lies, damn lies, and statistics? The trick is getting a set of relevant statistics, making sure you understand what they show, and using them to enhance your understanding of the data.

Personally, I believe these are of little relevance, as there is a lot of variability in the ROAR data that can't be filtered out. But they give you an impression and food for thought.

 

[Brian W]

Personally, I believe these are of little relevance, as there is a lot of variability in the ROAR data that can't be filtered out.

While I still will not play scenarios that are way out (in the 80%+ range), I tend to think that scenario balance is really secondary to the enjoyment factor people report. In fact, I sorta wish JR would redo ROAR so that the enjoyment factor and total number of reported playings were the first set of figures and balance was a number you would have to drill down to get.

As for meaningless statistics, I can tell you that at the very least, when I run calculations it is gratifying to see Schwerpunkt come out looking good or better in relation to others in the balance category. Since I spend about 90% of my ASL time playtesting for little remuneration, it is one of the things that makes it worthwhile.

 

[Chris Milne]

Enjoyment is often the first thing I look at on ROAR. I'll look at balance, but only cursorily, to see if the scenario appears one-sided; of course, a lot of these are weeded out by looking at enjoyment

 

[Pitman]

Enjoyment statistics on ROAR are meaningless, as far as I am concerned. At least a win is a win and a loss is a loss. But what do the enjoyment statistics mean? Even a boring and mundane scenario can, in a particular playing, be turned into a wild rollercoaster just becaue of some really weird die rolls. You may play a cool scenario against an asshole opponent, which decreases your enjoyment of the scenario.

I have also noticed that some people are extremely stingy on how they rate such scenarios, while other people, if they enjoy a scenario, tend to give really high numbers.

 

[Brian W]

Enjoyment statistics on ROAR are meaningless, as far as I am concerned.

Well we all know what good opinion polls are after the past two weeks, don't we

 

[jimfer]

Balanced???

Balanced Scenarios always depend on the skill of the opponents. A scenarios Roar stats are useful but then again if many experience players take on inexperienced players so you just never know if a scenario is balanced by looking at roar until say 100 playings and even then it may still be a dog.

Jimfer

 

[ON TOP ASL]

This is what often happens! 2 players sit down, finds an interesting scenario, seems a bit unbalanced the more experienced player takes the bad balanced side. Afterwards the scenario outcome is added to ROAR, this history (if it is a win for the more experienced player) tend to make scenarios better balanced then they actually are on ROAR.

Anyway ROAR is fantastic, start supporting it.

 

[Victor]

Averages can be made more meaningful by attaching to them a standard deviation. The SD will give you a sense of whether results are spread apart or tightly clustered. Now whether you can assess balance from one apple to an orange is whole new bag o worms.

My 2 cents,
Victor

Much the same can be said of averages, to be honest. Neither are absolute guides, and it's worth looking at both, I think. In an ideal world we could produce some measurement of variation, but we're not dealing with normally distributed data. I think the medians are more in line with what would be expected, and it's interesting to speculate whether the provision of notes with SP scenarios leads to their low median value.

 

[Chris Milne]

SDev only useful if data are normally distributed. This set of data certainly isn't.