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BGonline.org Forums
Many will find this ludicrous...
Posted By: Michael Petch In Response To: XG Mobile Marketing train wreck (Michael Petch)
Date: Sunday, 9 September 2012, at 4:48 p.m.
Being a bot developer, I think some will be shocked at what I would consider if I were to create a FREE Backgammon application in the Apple store or Google Apps etc.
I would take my experience dealing with dice at SHG, and all that I have seen in the reviews of current mobile Backgammon Applications and do this:
I would modify/create an AI to run at ONE level (KISS principle - Keep it Simple Silly) that plays somewhere in the Advanced range. I would use a mechanism similar to SHG red dice rooms, where the chance of an individual roll appearing (1,2,3,4,5,6) is roughly what you'd expect but the number of doubles that appear are artificially lowered by about half. I'd also have the bot reduce the number of joker rolls it gets. It can see if the roll it got was too lucky to keep the human interested and reroll (The human wouldn't know this was occurring). It wouldn't do this for all its joker rolls but enough of them to keep the human from being overly suspicious of rigged dice.
People find SHG red dice a lot "fairer" and they believe it is more fun. If that is what the casual Backgammon players want, then I say why not give it to them. The idea of giving the human a leg up and disadvantage the bot may keep people interested in Backgammon on the mobile platform. The bulk of the users there are NOT sophisticated Backgammon players, and play the game to be a time killer.
Some will say "Mike that's not truly Backgammon". I'd say that would be true, however for the target market they'll likely see it as Backgammon. If they *think* they are playing Backgammon, and the enjoy themselves, isn't that good for the promotion of the game?
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