In many strategy games like Chess, Go, etc., one of the most common and relied on methods of practice/training is to look at old games. One looks at all sorts of games-- games by the greatest players to see how the best play, old games one's played in order to review one's mistakes, and games played by rivals to try and get inside their heads. In Go you often study games by players who are just a few ranks stronger than you (because games by pros are still so much above you that you can't even begin to understand them).
I noticed that for the most part, we don't do this here at Stark Mountain.
The closest are the Warstories that posted and actually get attention paid to them. For the most part, only those with keen writing skills really get much welcome reception here, and then only when it comes to games that were exciting and close.
The best battlers though are not always the best writers, nor are they all the type who enjoy entertaining through the warstory format. In general intelligence is part of the game and our mods also show it with how well they express their opinions in debate, but I'm certain that not all the best battlers are like that. There are players who are really good, but due to either personality traits or lack of expressive skills would never write warstories.
Furthermore exciting and close games are not the only ones that contain potentially valuable study material. Difficult situations; turns that mistakes made or broke the game; phenomenally amazing predictions that make you wonder-- how the hell did he do that? These can be found in logs that don't end with scores like 2-0 and were not phenomenal throughout.
Moreover as they currently exist, warstories are mostly for entertainment rather than study. The feedback also reflects this, and we spend less time braking down turns than we do talking about format for the most part.
You get what I'm getting at here-- why don't we have threads to go over old logs? Why don't we have discussion and analysis of old games? As much as we tried to pour over these during the Wobb crisis to figure out what was happening to the metagame, we as a community don't go over them in order to do what "Smogon University" is largely here to do: Further our use of strategy. Am I wrong in saying that seems odd? Does looking over old logs have no value?
I do realize it would be a formatting mess, as all of us in general groan when some newb posts a half-ass "warstory" where he posts a log of a crappy battle and gives us 1 like answers (or not even that). Of course we would not want these threads flooding the boards either.
I could think of many potential things we could do.
1. Break it into Summary and focus on specific turns rather than whole logs
2. Create a sub-forum for log analysis
In the end I admit it still comes down to expressive skills-- it is a forum after all. No one wants to look at that giant log with one sentance from a noob: Help me!
But if we were to be answering questions about specific points in battle, if the OP were to summarize the battle in and explain the point of difficulty in a thought-out manner that shows his earnest interest in discussing it, I personally would not mind.
Also the idea of creating a sub-forum like RMT is appealing, but only insofar as that people would actually use it. I mean, I almost never go to RMT at all-- not sure about others. Whether or not valuable discussion would develop or not, I have no idea, but if it did wouldn't that be great?
Finally, in terms of getting logs from others. On most servers of pure strategy games like Chess and Go, you can download the log of any player on the server. People want to be able to see the game. On Shoddy too, the best players who have wide-spread reputations often get a lot of observers-- but only those who happen to be there at the time can see the game, and only if they're lucky enough to get in near the start. For the purpose of study, wouldn't it be valuable to be able to freely download the logs of any of the other players whenever one felt like it? That would have a lot of study value.
Admittedly Pokemon is not like Go and Chess because of the team building, and the element of surprise is certainly valuable. In other words there is the element that we don't want to reveal our teams. On the other hand though, this could always be made a choice of the player to let others see his logs or not. Furthermore we could provide options like "Only reveal logs of 1 month age or older," "Only reveal logs of 2 weeks or older," etc. In other words, the idea of making logs freely available for study is not an idea that seems far-fetched to me. This way even introverts not interested in discussion can at least read over the logs of players they respect.
Well, I talked a lot about issues regarding the discussion of old logs, but overall this was just an idea that came to me and I wanted to hear the general reaction of the community.
I noticed that for the most part, we don't do this here at Stark Mountain.
The closest are the Warstories that posted and actually get attention paid to them. For the most part, only those with keen writing skills really get much welcome reception here, and then only when it comes to games that were exciting and close.
The best battlers though are not always the best writers, nor are they all the type who enjoy entertaining through the warstory format. In general intelligence is part of the game and our mods also show it with how well they express their opinions in debate, but I'm certain that not all the best battlers are like that. There are players who are really good, but due to either personality traits or lack of expressive skills would never write warstories.
Furthermore exciting and close games are not the only ones that contain potentially valuable study material. Difficult situations; turns that mistakes made or broke the game; phenomenally amazing predictions that make you wonder-- how the hell did he do that? These can be found in logs that don't end with scores like 2-0 and were not phenomenal throughout.
Moreover as they currently exist, warstories are mostly for entertainment rather than study. The feedback also reflects this, and we spend less time braking down turns than we do talking about format for the most part.
You get what I'm getting at here-- why don't we have threads to go over old logs? Why don't we have discussion and analysis of old games? As much as we tried to pour over these during the Wobb crisis to figure out what was happening to the metagame, we as a community don't go over them in order to do what "Smogon University" is largely here to do: Further our use of strategy. Am I wrong in saying that seems odd? Does looking over old logs have no value?
I do realize it would be a formatting mess, as all of us in general groan when some newb posts a half-ass "warstory" where he posts a log of a crappy battle and gives us 1 like answers (or not even that). Of course we would not want these threads flooding the boards either.
I could think of many potential things we could do.
1. Break it into Summary and focus on specific turns rather than whole logs
2. Create a sub-forum for log analysis
In the end I admit it still comes down to expressive skills-- it is a forum after all. No one wants to look at that giant log with one sentance from a noob: Help me!
But if we were to be answering questions about specific points in battle, if the OP were to summarize the battle in and explain the point of difficulty in a thought-out manner that shows his earnest interest in discussing it, I personally would not mind.
Also the idea of creating a sub-forum like RMT is appealing, but only insofar as that people would actually use it. I mean, I almost never go to RMT at all-- not sure about others. Whether or not valuable discussion would develop or not, I have no idea, but if it did wouldn't that be great?
Finally, in terms of getting logs from others. On most servers of pure strategy games like Chess and Go, you can download the log of any player on the server. People want to be able to see the game. On Shoddy too, the best players who have wide-spread reputations often get a lot of observers-- but only those who happen to be there at the time can see the game, and only if they're lucky enough to get in near the start. For the purpose of study, wouldn't it be valuable to be able to freely download the logs of any of the other players whenever one felt like it? That would have a lot of study value.
Admittedly Pokemon is not like Go and Chess because of the team building, and the element of surprise is certainly valuable. In other words there is the element that we don't want to reveal our teams. On the other hand though, this could always be made a choice of the player to let others see his logs or not. Furthermore we could provide options like "Only reveal logs of 1 month age or older," "Only reveal logs of 2 weeks or older," etc. In other words, the idea of making logs freely available for study is not an idea that seems far-fetched to me. This way even introverts not interested in discussion can at least read over the logs of players they respect.
Well, I talked a lot about issues regarding the discussion of old logs, but overall this was just an idea that came to me and I wanted to hear the general reaction of the community.
