Yes, I remember that being part of that document. I nearly mentioned it myself, but I wasn’t in a position to look for it at the time. I think I’ll see if I can find it again now.
It’s worth noting that it’s an old document, to the point where 2nd Edition wasn’t a thing yet. Still, here’s the relevant section:
Taking Notes
Players are allowed to take written notes during a match and may refer to those notes while that match is in progress. At the beginning of a match, each playerʼs note sheet must be empty and must remain visible throughout the match. The games are more fun without notes, and relying on your unconscious instincts might actually take into account more information than the limited notes you would take, but use them if you must.
One reason that non-enforceable bans are a problem is because they create an advantage for somebody who is willing to break the rules. With an enforceable ban if you break the rules you lose the gains you make because of the penalties that follow. Non-enforceable bans encourage breaking the rules, so they cause the opposite of what you want to happen.
I agree that the Yomi community is great (the best online gaming community I’ve come across), but I think the idea that 99% would adhere to a ban that is non-enforceable is just not how humans work.
I’m a big fan of note taking and RNGs myself. Even in f2f games I use RNGs based on whatever I have available - pen and paper, discard pile, draws, hand shuffling, etc. Although I play so little f2f that my experiences in that regard aren’t very informative.
This tool is great as it is so far. It looks great on Chrome on my iPad. Really clean and responsive. Well done @vengefulpickle, once again you have gone above and beyond.
I probably won’t use it myself, because pen and paper is less hassle for me, but I hope the tool works for you. And if you are asked to not make it publicly available (I very much hope that doesn’t happen and I very much doubt it will too) you should definetly still keep using it yourself. Testing our memories of what has happened in a game/set is not remotely as interesting as testing how we interpret the publicly available information.
This tool is bad. It kills Yomi, the IOS/Apple’s killer app. In order to be competitive, I must play on web client (more efficient than the steam version) and use the ipad (might as well have an android) as a second screen exclusively for this new tool. Have you seen Apple’s market cap? @vengefulpickle will be the biggest wealth destroyer of all time. Next, the robots will come with rng lasers. Who really wants to face down these 60/40 dice rolling machines of death?
I think of it more as a philosophical question: how can you ban something if you can’t enforce it? For something like “using a dice to determine certain combat reveals”, short of a player stating during or after a match “I used a dice” how would you ever be able to tell that it had occurred? I think in this case it’s a moot point anyway, because I don’t think the outcome of two players of equal skill would be significantly impacted by one player using an RNG and the other not.
An RNG is only going to be as useful as the range of probabilities it expresses: if in a given situation, it’s correct to dodge 30% of the time, and throw 70% of the time, if you use an RNG and assign 50/50 odds to those values, then the RNG is going to hurt more than help. At the end of the day, I don’t think my play would change against a player using an RNG and one who doesn’t - my goal would still be to assess and punish their most profitable play on any given turn.
In a casual match, no. In a tournament match, absolutely? I track recurred cards in hand as much as possible, online and offline. I ask my opponents to spread out their discard so I can see what they’ve played and what they haven’t, and I do the same for my opponents. This comes from my distaste for relying on memory when I could just look at a discard, or at a note. In other words, memory isn’t a skill I want to test when playing Yomi.
This expresses how I feel much more elegantly than I did. To me, Yomi is increasingly a game I enjoy because it is about valuation and bravery, not about card counting.
I appear to have borked the fonts again. Also, having now used it during a match with a bot, the fact that things shift vertically as your hand changes size is terrible. Expect those things to be fixed tomorrowish (turns out, slow test execution cycles at work leave lots of time for yours truly to mess around with side projects).
If ntillerman (and others) were able to use RNGs to any kind of benefit it’s because they were very good at valuation and range estimation in Yomi and also were very mathematically minded. With the infinitely varied gamestates in Yomi I’d bet that 95% of players, myself included, would perform the same or worse if we decided to actually use RNG to decide plays in tournament games.
And I mean, as long as it’s possible to play topdeck hero RNG is never truly banned
I recall the rulebook specifically stating that you can look through the opponent’s discard. I do not recall anything stating that information can be tracked by writing down or using a computer. But hey, it won’t stop me from continuing to play online against opponents who choose to do so.
Maybe I am too trusting of humans in general to respect an unenforceable ban.
RNG= random numbers generators. Like, instead of using your gut/insight/tactic u say, ok i roll a dice1-2 i play reversal, 3-4 i block, 5-6 i throw. So basically your action is unpredictable violating the spirit of the game (the yomi aka reading the mind of the opponent). Ofc this also means that u roll throw, the opponent (scared) plays his A++ and kills you. Again, is like instead of using brains and instinct, just toss a coin. Imho is dumb, useless and inappropriate. If u wanna go random, go play slots machines.
EDIT:
Hmmm, all competitive card games i played allowed to keep track of the opponents cards via pen and paper, especially if there were spells that allowed u to see the hand. IRL i cannot look at the log for martial mastery, so is fair to take note of the cards
Yeah, I suppose it almost requires one to record the hand if one is playing as Perse or Grave (if you want to do well).
My partner initially thought that Yomi was merely luck and that she could do just as well by playing randomly. We tested it (to the best of our ability which is difficult b/c of As & KD dodges). Thankfully, I was able to demonstrate that it was poor play that way. Of course, it’s a small sample size, but I think it would hold up to extensive testing vs even better players than myself.
I can’t imagine someone who is a fan of the game finding any enjoyment (or success) from using a RNG. Heck, I’m so poor at this game, my opponents probably scratch their head at some of my combat reveals, wondering if I’m doing just that!
Using RNG at a high level emphasizes valuation (to correctly evaluate the range) over yomi. Both are interesting skills, although I think the former is easier to practice.
It’s time to explain the NASH to the new generation, I think.
Using RNG to play is not “I will equally weigh all these options, roll a die, and do what it says”. It is, “based on my hand, my discard, my opponent’s hand, and my opponent’s discard, what is more likely to win in this situation? Okay, now I will assign percentages of options I should play based on this situation: 50% block, 30% attack, 20% throw. Okay, NOW I will use a random number generator to determine which of these weighted options I will do.”
You still have to play Yomi. You still have to understand valuation. You still have to take into account fluid gamestates. Everything that everyone does when playing Yomi is still done. Except now, instead of using that information and making a play you use that information, create an odds table based on proportionate payoffs and then randomly determine the play using those criteria. It is almost literally the same exact thing, because if you improperly weigh the payoffs, or if you assume no super but they have super, or if you misinterpret any given game scenario, your percentages will be off and you will get a suboptimal result. We are all doing that in our head constantly while playing Yomi (or should be, anyway). The ONLY difference is, instead of making that final decision based on “reads” or whatever you’d like to call it, you make it using a random number. The reason why these “top players” as it were were top players were not because of RNG. They were top players because of their ability to evaluate the gamestate. They just used RNG because they thought it gave them an extra edge, which it may or may not have.
Yes, this is one of the best indicators of a player graduation from beginner to early intermediate skill, which is to be able to very consistently beat beginning players who are playing randomly, or who are playing “so as not to be predictable.” (The secret is just to block until you have 13 cards, power up for Aces, and then dodge/reversal/super as much as possible.)
Ah, there is some misconception going on. When we talk about high level players using RNG, it’s not that they are using it to “play random cards” or assigning a 1/3 change to attack, throw, and block/dodge.
A more accurate summary of how to use RNG at a high level is this: you are in a situation as Zane where your opponent has no more Jokers, and you have known Maximum Anarchy in hand, and throws. You are choosing between Throw, raw Anarchy, and Dodge. Without an RNG, you make a decision based on some tactic or some model of your opponent’s behaviour. With an RNG, you still model your opponent’s imagined tendency, but rather than making a call, you say “okay, I think I should throw 40%, dodge 40%, and Anarchy 20%” and then roll a dice to make the final decision.
They’re not using a dice to make a “random” decision, they’re using the dice to play in a way that is more true to the “ideal range” that you should play in a given scenario, because making a decision yourself will tend to be more predictable.
I actually explained it to him earlier via PM, since i do not want to derail vengefulpickle’s thread.
Imho, this rng stuff is taking a lil too much space, going OT.
Just my 2 cents, mate
shrugs I think it makes sense to discuss, just so other people who might not be familiar with the concept can understand (1) why someone would be concerned about an automatic range calculator, (2) the history of the use of RNGs in competitive Yomi, (3) how they work, and (4) why they may or may not be of any concern.
The document I linked above said it was fine to take notes if you needed them.
It also said that the opponent should be able to see any notes you take, and that the notes should be cleared between games.
However, as discussed earlier, it’s pretty much impossible to enforce either of those restrictions on notes in an online environment.
That said, as vengefulpickle’s tool works currently, the only things it can track are:
The opponent’s hand size (public knowledge, easy to confirm at any time).
Cards that are known to be in the opponent’s hand, such as blocks that have returned to hand, aces that have been acquired via powering up, or everything seen via Martial Mastery and the like (public knowledge; all of this is reported in the log on the online client, but that can take time to scroll through if you want to confirm things).
Cards that are known to not be in the opponent’s hand (public knowledge; usually this is easily visible in the opponent’s discard, but there are exceptions like Menelker banishing cards or a card getting put on the bottom of a deck; even so, it’s recorded in the log).
Because everything this tool currently tracks is public knowledge, and there would be no purpose in keeping any information on it between rounds, it gets closer to the intended use of notes than keeping a Notepad window open would—your opponent knows what’s possible to have noted on it at any given time, and it gets cleared between rounds.
Therefore, use of this tool as it is currently should not only be acceptable but actually preferable to using other kinds of note-taking, from the perspective of keeping to the tournament rules document.
I think it’s probably a good idea to let opponents know that you’d like to use this tool before a match starts, just as common courtesy if nothing else, but if you do that there shouldn’t be any issues with it. As for a potential addition that tracks ranges… I don’t really have a strong stance on that either way, but I doubt I’d want it myself. I’d rather just use this to offload the stress of remembering—and constantly checking the logs to remind myself—what cards can and can’t be in the opponent’s hand.
