Guest writer Fluger brings us a follow up article: So, I just put out an article about ITC creating its own formations and it was mostly negatively received as an idea. That’s fine, I’m stubborn and passionate, so I keep coming atcha with ideas.
I was listening to the Cracked podcast and they had an interesting spotlight on a new technology: UNU. UNU is a way for people to harness the wisdom of crowds to make better choices.
UNU is relatively recently famous for correctly predicting the top 4 place finishers at this year’s Kentucky Derby. That’s a bet that rarely comes true, and it was done in a fairly simple manner. Basically, they took 20 self-described Horse Race Enthusiasts and first asked them to pick the top 4 finishers on their own, then they had them use UNU. On their own, only one person picked 2 finishers correctly, but using UNU, they predicted it perfectly.
This hits on a few interesting theories about group intelligence and takes a lot of cues from The Wisdom of Crowds. A book that goes over several examples of how just trusting to the average or mean of a group can be a better indicator than getting expert advice.
UNU is currently free to use and you can make up your own survey questions and invite who you want to join it. It can have big numbers of people involved in each session to make decisions.
I’m pretty sure you see where I’m going with this…
What I propose is this: let’s put a world-wide call out to get as many 40k players as possible to log in and start assigning points values to all the things that GW has points for.
My suspicion is that we’ll probably hit ideal points values for everything if we cast a wide enough net and are as detailed as possible. Even people who are tournament veterans and successful generals will disagree about the values of various things and have potentially outrageously wrong perceptions of value. By soliciting the hive intelligence we have a better chance of smoothing out the rough edges and getting a better result than just trusting to an individual or even a small cabal.
The process would be laborious for everyone involved as each question takes roughly 30 seconds to come to a conclusion on and I’d guess that there are probably about 1000 different things to assign points values to in 40k, that’d be about 8-9 hours of work. But, it would be problematic because we’d have to adjust for time zones (UNU is real-time), so we’d probably have to break it up into 30 minute chunks and do it over a two week period. If we went for groups of 20-30 people for each chunk (and divided each chunk over a wide swath of armies and items) we’d need about 250ish people total.
Could we get 250 people over all the world to commit to taking 30 minutes out of their day to work collaboratively to get good data about points adjustments?
I think it’s possible. And I think we have the tools at our disposal in UNU and social media in general.
So what would we do with this?
Now, the thing is we aren’t changing rules here, we are just adjusting points values. Is that still too much for people to handle? Would it be so terrible to have something that I’d call Tournament 40k that just takes all the rules as is and just adjust the points for everything? I have faith in the wisdom of crowds, and UNU has me sold that we’d get MUCH better points values, perhaps a Platonic ideal!
I’d be willing to bet that the same tired arguments against this will get thrown at me again. “If it’s not from GW, we don’t want it!” “ITC has gone too far!” “Leave house rules in the basement!”
Yeah yeah yeah, but, for reals, we can all see the imbalances, why not try and fix them? Why just shrug our shoulders and accept that only a few certain builds and units dominate? Why not go for more diversity? Why not go for balance? Why not take GW’s own advice and work things out to make the game more enjoyable?