On Automation

What a lovely topic. A lot of people have romanced the idea but there are tons of considerations and there is a huge cost and benefit to this sort of major change. For starters I've talked with people who have quit URPG because the battles take too long. That to me is reason #1 why I'm bringing up this question.

Where to begin? I guess I can summarize it in the following lists:

BENEFITS
-0 error battles, with a Head-ref overide function for debugging
-Fast battling. Really then the only concern would be players taking a while to think
-Fast basics
-Fast battles = more players (and potentially them sticking longer, too)
-Technology and program skeletons exsist

COSTS
-Radical Shift/ Fundamental Change in URPG
-Will Drastically change the URPG economy
-Will lower pay/stifle the reffing profession
-You may have to automate your stats, depending on the requirements of the specific program
-The program itself will take a monumental effort to create
-No personalized reffing


Weird battle styles like FFAs will still be manually reffed.

I've made a poll to gauge public opinion. Please take it seriously!

URPG Automation

 

For results, you may look at the link below. PLEASE fill out the survey first, however!

https://www.survio.com/p/jGQdde


uhh so I have to make a paid account to actually share results ;-;

 

Overall, my personal belief is that we are certainly not ready for automated battles. There are just too many complications, and the potential benefits do not yet outweigh the costs. It's certainly not as unrealistic as people would think initially, but it ultimately is unrealistic for the time being. Let's get into this:

I realize this is coming down rather hard. This has been a conversation we've been having for years. I just simply don't think we're at a point where we're able to adopt such a huge change right now. There are too many variables and it would overall decrease the battling experience for us not to be able to account for all of them.

 

tl;dr: I am a strong proponent for a Showdown-like battle system in URPG. Most of the obstacles that Julio pointed out in his COSTS section are, in my opinion, actually good things.

It's not a matter of being ready. It's a matter of, if increasing activity is a priority, we must do this.
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Hi all,

As one of the people who would want to do a lot of work on an automated battling system, I want to share my perspective on the effort required, my vision for such a system, and some of the definite issues we would run up against.

First, I'd like to respond to a specific concern Swift brought up in his post:

I have to throw my support behind Julio on this one. I understand this concern on a deep, spiritual level because I feel it and have to work through it on an almost daily basis at my job. One of my main responsibilities is automating processes that have been previously done manually, precisely because it saves hundred of man-hours and gets rid of opportunities for human error. *brushes off shoulders*

I do that every day, and I still get scared every time, thinking, "what if the program does something wrong I would've caught if I were doing it manually?" I agree, it's hard to get everything right all the time, but the difference between a computer program and a human is that generally, once you fix a program, it's going to do things right from then on out. Humans do things wrong accidentally all the time whether they know better or not; it's why they're called accidents.

The fact that we're constantly discovering new mechanics can't be a blocker for automation, because that issue is going to affect anyone who's reffing, whether man or machine. And think of what you have to go through when we do find one of those new corner cases now. Every single human has to be re-trained, and there's still a chance they won't retain it. A computer program doesn't have that problem.

Finally, while I see a need for a rollback system of some kind, I want to point out that finding a mistake in a battle that took four hours is going to feel a whole lot more heartbreaking than a mistake made in a battle that took fifteen minutes.

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Side note, on another one of your points, Swift. You said you've "never met someone who quit" because of long battle times. In fact, I briefly spoke to Grumpy Chienguin on one of the PoGo servers about coming back to URPG, and he specifically referenced long battle times as one reason he hasn't been active in about a year. Thing is, I don't think "long battles" is one of the reasons people tend to call out in their good-bye posts in URPG General Chat. They just... stop playing.

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Okay, on to the real meat of my post (as if it wasn't long enough already):

One, I'm probably the strongest proponent of a Showdown-like battle system. I firmly believe that from this point forward, URPG will never be much larger than it is now (making reasonable concessions for the fact that this is a busy season) unless we automate the battle section.

There are a couple of reasons I feel this way:

First, battling is the lifeblood of the Pokemon series. URPG has lots more awesome stuff to offer, sure, but when people outside the URPG think Pokemon, they're thinking battles. We don't have to elevate battles to Most Important Section, but if we want to advertise ourselves as a Pokemon game that offers battles, then we need to offer Top Notch Battles.

What do we have that will allow us to compete with Pokemon Showdown? No four moveslot syndrome, a progression system that works in creative pursuits, an active community on Discord, unique battle formats like Public Open and FFAs. Those are all awesome features that should excite players, but in a world where you have to wait to find a ref, and it takes a couple hours to do one battle, and you need to actually catch six Pokemon to even compete, and it could be a heck of a lot longer before your Pokemon have enough extra moves to pull their weight... all that waiting adds up. That's on top of the fact that it can sometimes take literal months to capture Pokemon if you're doing anything other than buying them in the Pokemart (Note: I accept my fair share of the responsibility for this. It's a topic for another day).

In short, URPG needs SOME kind of instant gratification system, both for recruitment and retention. An automated battle system is our best bet.

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My Vision

If I were in charge of the project, this is what I would implement, and why:

1. The reffing profession goes away entirely.

Getting rid of one-third of the people gets rid of at least one-third of the time commitment, both in setting up and executing the battle.

There is a concern that this gets rid of one of the main money-generators for URPG players. I say, good. A number of refs--I recall Seppe specifically--were dissatisfied that once they became refs, it felt like they always had to be refs and never got to be battlers. This solves that problem, too. Let's get rid of reffing and rebalance the economy around lots more people having lots more battles.

There is another concern that getting rid of refs severely undercuts the community aspect of URPG. I disagree pretty strongly with this, because not much socializing tends to happen between battlers and refs during a battle, anyway. My vision for URPG Showdown would involve plenty of chat space for community-building, so I don't see this as a serious concern.

2. Centralized, automated stats pages.

The easiest way to ensure players always use legal moves is to have a stats system that the battle simulator pulls its data from. In addition, this system would fully prevent cheating AND remove the burden of updating stats manually.

There is a concern that this takes control away from players who want to be able to customize their stats. I suspect, if we ever did move to an automated system, this would be the number one cause for contention.

I genuinely feel that this would be the right move, however. There are some truly talented people who have developed awesome stats websites, and I would 100% want them on our design team. Yet, there are many more people whose custom stats leave a ton to be desired. I won't name specific names here, but I have seen some serious monstrosities. At best, most stats posted on custom forums make it difficult to find the right Pokemon because they're split across multiple pages with no navigation system. At worst, there are some seriously awful design choices that make BMG skins look like Rembrandt and make it almost impossible to figure out whether a Pokemon has a specific move or not.

Still, it's possible that customization options could be implemented. It's not a high priority in my vision, however.

3. Battle Timers, and No Takebacks

There have been some concerns expressed that with unlimited moves, an automated battle system wouldn't actually save that much time. This is, however, one of my main priorities in automating our battles.

Put a timer on it, and get people out of the habit of calculating every possible move. Since the battle will be much shorter, you can just jump into another one when you lose.

4. Anonymous Open Challenges

Right now, if you want to battle, you have to put your face on the challenge. This can be frustrating for people like Ash, who's so good that battlers sometimes avoid him. It's also frustrating for the people avoiding Ash, because they might jump on, see Ash is looking for a battle, and then never actually battle anyone because they don't want to get called out on skipping over Ash.

Easy solution: Take the faces off the challenge until the battle starts. Ash can accept any battle he darn well pleases, and the people who would otherwise avoid him can suck it up for fifteen minutes.

5. Yes, FFAs, too.

Honestly, once a battle system is implemented, extending it out to multiple players is trivial. Implementing special rules is a cakewalk compared to the rest of the work that would go into getting this up and running.

Effort Required

At a macro-level, building a Showdown-like site is actually pretty easy. At a micro-level, the complexity of fleshing out all the different moves is a pretty daunting task. Creating the centralized stats system adds a lot of extra work to that.

Here's a fun fact, though: I've already got the stats system built. I could start adding people to the database right now, today, at 11:40 PM EST on December 15th, 2017 and they could use it for everything except, like, ribbons and gym info (which I'm working on). I'll demo sometime in the future, if this ever goes anywhere (or when I've got absolutely everything I need implemented to permanently move my stats off the forum).

And that's a mouthful, so good night. I'll probably have more thoughts in the morning.

 

Elrond! Thanks for your support! I want to test our your stats page!

If we get rid of refs then who will start FFAs? Or will they be "anyone can start them" sort of thing?

Stats pages are a place for people have fun with their creativity. Most people here invest hella time into that and I think automating stats pages might be ok as long as we get some form of customizability! Obviously nothing that would conflict with the scripts.

Anonymous open challenges? Smogon doesn't even do that! That's something completely new!

So far I've received mostly positive responses on an automated system!!!!! I think this should be a go! (Still waiting for more replies!!!)

There are people who adamantly opposed to it (and they have told me on the survey) so if we do move to the system, that does mean that we will be leaving some people behind. However, with this change, the potential gains in players will net an increase!

 

Woah there, julio. We are not going to suddenly snap our fingers and go with this lol. This has been a conversation for literal years; it is going to take some time. We cannot just suddenly force our entire community into a completely new system over night.

I acknowledge that you make some great points, Elrond. Ultimately I do think this is a system where we want to end up. But we can’t rush into it. That will end up losing us a lot more people than we will gain. I’d be down to help with some beta testing, though, once I’m done with finals.

I don’t like the idea of anon battles. Makes it very difficult to tell if someone is cheating or taking advantage of another member.

Also consider that there are people who enjoy reffing and would rather ref than battle. Please keep the interests of these people in mind.

FFAs should not be automated. I don’t even think you would be able to automate something that could account for every single possible special rule. There’s a lot of thought and creativity that goes into FFAs and special rules and I just don’t think this can feasibly be replicated by a machine.

As an aside, automated battles and automated stats can be two different topics. Let’s not bite off more than we can chew.

 

The battle itself wouldn't be anonymous. Just the part where you open a challenge and wait for an opponent. For the record, things like "basics only" could be specified and visible before you accept a challenge, so you know what you're getting into.

Also, spectator mode would be a relatively easy thing to add once the rest of the battle ssystem is in place, to facilitate monitoring.

 

I mean if by automated battles you mean have our own equivalent of Showdown, with all its aesthetics and near-perfect functionality, then of course that would be amazing and a huge improvement.

buuuut I have no idea how these things work and I think it would be an incredibly ambitious and time-consuming project that would take a long time (years right?) to achieve something of that grandeur.

Just having some program that wouldn't have animated models and wouldn't have the same polish or finesse of Showdown, would take away a lot of the personality and charm that makes the battles system so endearing imo. I like having real-life refs and opponents, mistakes and all.

I mean if we could literally steal Showdown's coding frameworks and re-format that would be splendid

 

I get not wanting to rush into automated battles, and I have some weird vague misgivings about automating the battle section that I can't really describe. That said, I allow that faster battles might help us keep new members, especially those already used to the quickness of Showdown- and VG-style battles. Because it's probably going to be a decently complicated project, it's something that should be actively looked into, rather than pushed on the back burner.

Automated stats is an entirely different issue and should probably get its own thread, but if there's already a system built, it's another thing that should be looked at and tested.