Or you could have the worst player (lowest rank) on each team be known, and immune to elimination. That way, every time you eliminate a player from the other team, their team's strength will get a bit worse. If one team retains a 5d while the other is down to a 12k, the game itself will be affected directly and strongly. But that way, the game will always decide who wins the metagame.

Secondly: players already know part of the composition of the other team. For example, everyone who has posted here will be playing, so if Kirby's not on my team, I know he's on the other side. What if this team captain (The lowest-ranked player) selects one move suggested by the stronger players, then each turn, the other team gets to guess who suggested the move. If they guess right, that player is out of the game. If the lowest-ranked player is scared to lose a teammate, they can just pick a move themself.

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Someday I want to be strong enough to earn KGS[-].

If you have N players, take an expected game length - say 300 moves - and divide it by say (N-1) to get a number X. Every X moves, eliminate a player.

So if you have 6 players in total, take 300 and divide it by 5 to get 60. Eliminate a player every 60 moves. So at move 60, 120, 180, and 240 players get eliminated. In whatever case, allow the remaining two people to play the game to the end to decide the result.

It's one possibility, anyway.

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be immersed

I don't see why, because there is no incentive for your own team members to want to "win the game" on the board. If you don't consider the game result, nobody has any incentive to win anything, so you can't really make much of a strategy that says "it's bad for me if he plays move X", because move X has no effect on the result. With the current rules, the only thing that matters is that more of your own team keeps from being voted off. But the choice of who gets voted off is arbitrary when there is no incentive toward winning the game on the board.

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be immersed

but the fact that you don't know who your team members are means the best way to win is to try to win on the board.

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I'm thinking...

The idea is not to know who is on your own team too. You only know your colour, and so have to guess who has your colour and who has the other.

As for balancing the game it's not guaranteed that the strongest players have to be on different teams. I've given it some thought about how to balance the game so it won't be easy to find out who is on what colour besides paying attention to moves.

Kirby, interesting analysis. Can you find a way to avoid that? Maybe just taking the final score of the game would work?

I still think the best way to work it out would be to play a game. I'd start a thread, ask for sign ups, and then distribute the players among the colors.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

Actually, with an even number of people, it seems the opposite to me.

Let's say that there are two teams of 4 and 4. I'm on team black. So there are three other people on black, and four on white. If I make a really good move for black, then if my team cares about winning on the board (which they don't have to), three people will not want me to leave. But the four white opponents would want me to leave since I made a good move on the board. If I make a bad move for black, there are only three black people and four white people, so it seems that I'd have better chances (since there are more people on the white team to vote for me).

I don't see the problem with playing for the actual game result. This way, people will want to play good moves so that their team can win. At the same time, they don't want to play *too* good of moves so that they don't get voted off by the other team (which at least at the start, has more voting power to vote you off).

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be immersed

Yes, exactly. The final score of the game will work in my opinion, because it provides incentive for "good moves" because you want to win, but not "too good moves", because you don't want to get voted off (and have less ability to play "good moves" in the future).

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be immersed

It'd also be cool to have hide tags to give the audience an idea of our psychological analysis.

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be immersed

I think the temptation to look under the hide tags would be too great.
Since there is a gamemaster anyway, the analysis could be sent by PM to him, and then he'd post it at the end.

I'm going now, but if people are interested, I'll start a thread for a game tomorrow.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

I'm in.

Another idea might be to make move suggestions and votes pseudonymously. Players would post under some sort of secondary account with an assigned name. That way nobody knows the identity or true strength of the other players. The would be voting off Mr. Green or Mr. Blue instead of Fwiffo or Jordus.

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KGS 4 kyu - Game Archive - Keyboard Otaku

This sounds really fun, can I play?
This is a cool suggestion.

Yeah, maybe it's too tempting. However the rules pan out, though, it sounds like fun. 楽しみにしています！

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be immersed

So if I'm reading this correctly...kind of like The Weakest Link? - I'd be down for it.

You left one voter out of your analysis. Are you planning on voting against yourself?

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

No, I wouldn't vote myself off. That's the point. In this example, there are 7 other people besides myself that could all vote against me. Four of those people are not on my team. Hence, it's to my benefit to please the majority --> those that are not on my team.

But this is all based on the assumption that people are going to vote based on how well you are playing in the game - which has no merit if the game result doesn't mean anything. That's why I think we should have the points on the board be the deciding factor. People getting eliminated will make it easier for one team or another to have more points on the board.

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be immersed

Once you folks get the rules ironed out, I'm in.

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Help make L19 more organized. Make an index: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5207

But if your ultimate goal is to get your team to win on the board, what use are you if you're making bad moves on purpose? You have to make good moves to help your team, just not so good that the other team votes you out. (I assume voting will be anonymous.)

How's this for a plan. When the last member of a team would be voted out, instead they stay in the game. Everyone's color is announced, and the game is played out to the end with no more kick-offs.

EDIT: On second thought, you wouldn't have to reveal anyone's color or cease kickoffs at that point. The host would just announce, "Mr. Blue was voted to leave, but he is the last member of his team, so he stays." Then no one can vote for Mr. Blue anymore. Eventually you will get down to one player from each team, at which point the colors are finally announced and they finish up the endgame (or, more probably, one of them resigns).

EDIT 2: Nevermind to the first edit. As soon as the host says Mr. Blue is the last of his team, of course everyone knows everyone's team, so you might as well announce it for the audience's sake. And since that would be known, it would be silly to continue kicking people off since it would just be the bigger team voting off their own weak players.

This is exactly what I am trying to suggest! I think that there is some sort of a miscommunication here.

The original rules do not say that the ultimate goal is to get your team to win on the board, and I think that they should. If they do not, it does no use to play bad moves or good moves on purpose, because the objective is arbitrary.

I think that the rules would work exactly as you described, and it's what I had in mind as well - except that I didn't consider announcing the color, and I think that this is a good idea.

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be immersed

Haha, oops, I guess I didn't read your posts carefully enough. I completely agree that the winning team must be decided by which color wins the go game.

This is a nice idea. I agree with Kirby/MountainGo/others that winning should mean winning the go game. One still needs to be careful that the game isn't degenerate in some way, though.

Here's a complete proposal (please modify if you like, but it seems best to lay out a complete idea):

Proposal:
a) Players rotate choosing moves (voting for moves just complicates things and would take way too long)

b) Every N (say for 9x9 with 8 players, i.e. 4 per side, use N=1; for 19x19 and 8 players, use N=3 maybe) cycles through each player moving, everyone votes someone off

c) Players voted off are no longer in the rotation for choosing moves, but still vote off players (the team with greater numbers getting an advantage on the board and in terms of voting people off seems too lopsided to me, especially if they know they have greater numbers)

d) Ties in the voting are broken by coin flip (or other random method) by the moderator

e) The last player on any team may not be voted out, and voting keeps going until there are only two players remaining (i.e. MountainGo's suggestion). If such a player gets votes, they're discarded and the next highest vote getter is voted out.

e) Discussion by players is allowed, but only in the thread, no side collusion, and no specific suggestions for upcoming moves (makes it more fun/social and suitable to a discussion board to allow discussion, but it is possible it'd be better for the game instead to disallow all discussion)


Regarding the choosing of N:
If there are 8 players, then there are 8N + 7N + ... + 3N moves in the game before we're down to two players (one on each team). That's 33N moves. I'd guess you'd want to make 33N roughly the start of the endgame (the two remaining players will then play the endgame if it's close). Hence my suggestion of N = 1 for 9x9. I think N = 3 for 19x19 is perhaps close enough to the endgame while not being so long that people will lose interest before interesting voting happens.

(In general, with k players, it's N*(k^2+k-6)/2 moves.)