Thoughts on anet nerfing other stats on armour in the future

[Arheundel.6451]

On 9/15/2024 at 3:13 PM, ChrisWhitey.9076 said:

This quote from the balance update makes me think this is something that might happen to other builds. Did Pandora’s box get opened? I like to see some thoughts on this.

”we may use going forward to tune other attribute combinations in WvW specifically.”

source: 

 

Yes...it's pretty much over for WvW, it will go the same way of PvP now. There is no stopping the "nerf crusades", once you start removing stats, you just encourage the vocal minority to complain even more. After celestial, they will start with minstrel...then trailblazer...then settler...then crusader...then dire...then everything that offers any sort of sustain against ganking specs. Basically for those who will remain, WvW will turn into a "join a zerg or play a willbender/thief/mesmer/engi", zerg or busted mobility/block/evade spam sort of specs; everything in the middle will disappear. I hope by that time the last expansion for this game will come out 

 

[Hesione.9412]

2 hours ago, Arheundel.6451 said:

Yes...it's pretty much over for WvW, it will go the same way of PvP now. There is no stopping the "nerf crusades", once you start removing stats, you just encourage the vocal minority to complain even more. After celestial, they will start with minstrel...then trailblazer...then settler...then crusader...then dire...then everything that offers any sort of sustain against ganking specs. Basically for those who will remain, WvW will turn into a "join a zerg or play a willbender/thief/mesmer/engi", zerg or busted mobility/block/evade spam sort of specs; everything in the middle will disappear. I hope by that time the last expansion for this game will come out 

 

The "nerf minstrel" thread has already started.

[Cameirus.8407]

usually its a bad sign when devs do this kind of thing, it generally means they are losing control of the abilities and balance and are starting to cater to the "must nuke things in seconds" brigade of muppets who think they are pvp pros.

cele now, but shortly it will be all sustain stats. so instead of sorting out boon ball meta by making boons reactive instead of constant...they will just make people die really quick and everyone will go full mindless dps.

far easier (and cheaper in dev time) to just nerf stats rather than adjust mechanics as they need to do.

Edited Wednesday at 11:21 AM by Cameirus.8407

[Anekto.8391]

I dont want to suggest this because im probably shooting myself in the foot of comfy and still working wvw.

 

But lots of people complain about boons and what to do about them and how they are so oppressive in wvw.

There would be the option to introduce something like a boon fatigue. That forces to either reduce the uptime of incoming boons while for example the same boon is already applied. Or increases uptime decay on time in battle or other factors. Or introduces a mechanic to have the boon fatigue be reset during the fight by whatever means going ooc entering specific areas. Could even be objectives in objectives that reduce boon fatigue. It would not even have to be 100% decline. Lots of variables are possibile to tune this and make it interesting.

 

Which it just might be too interesting too gimmicky and not necessary. Right now there are lots of ways to deal with balance and issues. We have gear as potential modifiers. We have consumable items. Skills, traits and elite specs. And maybe many more things i dont know about.

 

And then is always the question:

 

WHAT DOES ARENANET WANT?

What are they trying to do with the mode. Are they trying to force a meta? Are they trying to incorporate players wishes? Do they players know what they want and is it sensible?

I dont know the balances teams goal maybe they dont know it either.

 

EDIT:

One thing gamedevs and balance department should always recognize is that players outnumber devs many more times or at least they should. So the wisdom of the crowd is on the playerbases side. Whereas the direction and expertise in gamedesign SHOULD be on the devs side or at least there in equal amount.

Edited Wednesday at 11:43 AM by Anekto.8391
After thought on numbers

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

1 hour ago, Anekto.8391 said:

WHAT DOES ARENANET WANT?

What are they trying to do with the mode. Are they trying to force a meta?

Ultimately...yea, this is what Anet's directives are, at least in accordance with what they stated in their philosophies that they posted two years ago now.

I wrote a thread called Explaining Complexity, Diversity : Balance Philosophy off in the SPVP forums a while back. It's a very physics oriented thread (as this is the nature of the topic) but in the latter half, i go on to talk about how this relates to their (Anets) philosophies announcement, and the incongruency within their statements. Here is I quote from that thread:

"So lets contextualize this quote from the Balance philosophy post :

 

"We want to design builds that allow players with a high level of mastery to demonstrate their prowess and be appropriately rewarded in terms of effectiveness. At the same time, we want to ensure that there are builds for every profession that require less mastery to be effective. These builds should allow players to succeed in parties and clear content, while still having room for them to improve their mastery over the combat system and increase their effectiveness.

This is also an important consideration for balance in competitive game modes, as the builds that are effective can vary significantly between different levels of mastery. Our goal is to create a fun and diverse metagame for as many players as possible, and that involves addressing builds that are problematic at any level, even if they aren't problematic at every level. When bringing down a build that only overperforms at a particular level, we'll try to target changes to minimize the impact on other levels or attempt to otherwise compensate in a way that is less problematic at the targeted level."

 

The first issue with this statement: "We want to design builds..." no...that is not your job. I'll repeat that again, It is not your job to design builds that is the job of the players. Your job Arenanet is to create the skills so that the players can design builds. How you create those skills is like I mentioned before, dependent on their ability to interact with other skills...and what rules that they follow.

The second issue with this statement : "Our goal is to create a fun and diverse metagame for as many players as possible, and that involves addressing builds that are problematic at any level, even if they aren't problematic at every level." Again that is not your job Arenanet. You're job is not to design the metagame...that is what the players do. You're job is...let's here it...to create the skills of the game so that the players construct the meta game. If you do that job correctly, the metagame would be fun and diverse and complex, it would be interesting and nuanced, not homogenous and boring. how does one do the job correctly? By constructing the skills to follow simple rules that lead to complicated behavior.

I hope the repetition here is helping sell the message for what is being explained. I'm not targeting the syntax or grammar... I'm proving a point that to really get to the bottom of a balance philosophy that will actually work, requires understanding exactly the implications of what your actions are even if you don't know that these kinds of actions passively destroy the game. This is also the issue with Purity of Purpose as a balance philosophy. Purity of Purpose means you are designing for the game, the roles people should play, and not letting the players decide via natural selection what roles actually need to be played at any given time. I'll repeat it again...designing the roles of the game isn't your job Arenanet. It is the job of the players to establish roles of builds that they play.

 

Basically, A-net inadvertently, and at the very least implicitly stated that they want to "design the metagame..." and "design builds..." and I asserted that this isn't supposed to be their job...that it is players who create metagames and design builds...that Anets job is supposed to about supplying skills to players for them to do that...making sure those skills allow players to explore the space of possible skill interactions and possible behaviors.

My posts never exactly "go well" because oooga booga science and math, which most of my posts are like this (Applying formal logic and scientific research on game design). People talk a lot about homogenization nowadays...but people don't remember that i was the first one talking about it nearly 5 years ago (In a thread called "The importance of Build Diversity and why it's more important than Balance") and have pretty much haven't stopped talking about it since : that balance is going to kill this game through a systemic nerfing and removal of its parts.

At the time, the "All Nerf" Philosophy was announced, and something seemed very wrong to me about the philosophy. i didn't know what it was so i did research...didn't even know what kind to do or even how to think about the game, until i stumbled on complex systems (a body of science) that worked out to be a good working model for game design when i was modeling it. After doing this research (took years btw)...up to current day where its just been completely formalized, the solidified idea is that numerical balance is not logically possible to do...because all numerical balance operations that attempt to make skills equal, homogenizes them. When the operations do not attempt to make them equal in an effort to avoid homogenization, makes balance operations completely arbitrary, because we can't form proof statements about these equivalences. Keep in mind that most forms of balance are numerical...hence the reason for thread i first linked : the only effective way to attain balance and diversity is to remove oneself from the concept of numbers. That what matters are rules...the behaviors of skills...and how those behaviors get explored by players of the game.

So in summary: Anet's philosophies are (and always were) antithetical to this idea : That they wanted to make the meta, that they wanted to make builds... Slapping the words balance, diversity and complexity on it in their philosophies, yet failing to grasp that trying to box the game into a box they are trying to make for it is the complete opposite of how to attain those properties. This is why i even make these posts is to try to explain what are obviously hard and counter intuitive topics to make them more understandable, but clearly i have failed to do that cause nobody yet still understands these topics. I still talk about them from time to time, and there is still a great resistance, even after seeing it happen in real-time as anet imposes their philosophies on game balance...as the true boogey man of the balance problem.

 

Edited Wednesday at 12:39 PM by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Anekto.8391]

19 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

Basically, A-net inadvertently, and at the very least implicitly stated that they want to "design the metagame..." and "design builds..." and I asserted that this isn't supposed to be their job...that it is players who create metagames and design builds...that Anets job is supposed to about supplying skills to players for them to do that...making sure those skills allow players to explore the space of possible skill interactions and possible behaviors.

Well as far as i can tell you mean the most simple equivalence of player interaction is possibile if in a two player scenario both players have all the same stats and skills. Reducing the number of possibile actions as close to 1 as possibile. Or mabye close to 2 would make more sense as on action should always be decided to occupy the space of actions in favor of the other action. For example move forward versus move backward.

 

Would you are suggesting is if im correct is that more actions would lead to cancellation of advantages of one action to another and therefore through the law of big numbers even out balance?

 

And it would be ANETs job to provide a diverse enough pool of actions so that this cancellation can take place?

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

2 hours ago, Anekto.8391 said:

Would you are suggesting is if im correct is that more actions would lead to cancellation of advantages of one action to another and therefore through the law of big numbers even out balance?

 

And it would be ANETs job to provide a diverse enough pool of actions so that this cancellation can take place?

Yep, pretty much this. 

One doesn't even need to make a lot of different skills to accomplish this feat (and not just for the sake of being different), the skills that exist need only be "non-trivial" or deep enough, such that they interact with the other elements in arbitrarily complicated and novel ways. The formal terms for this property is being "undecidable" or "Turing universal." Our computers for instance have this property, where they can compute any and all possible computable functions, by putting 0's and 1's together in a sequence, and its exclusively this property of assembly that allows us to have games like guild wars 2, Youtube, Blender every image and video we've ever seen in the past 20 years...all of these different programs on the same machine, all constructs made of just that stuff. So this property of undecidability...universality...is in some sense very easy to attain. Computers typically gain universality at the level of logic gates and if you look at one of the images on there, you can see how the 0's and 1's (on's off switches, true's or falses etc...boolean algebra) can construct the universal gates (NAND and NOR) which can then construct any expression in boolean logic...and of course a turing universal machine.

You can imagine skills in the game as elements we assemble into builds. The name of the assembly loosely describes what it does and how it might interact with another build. If all the skills on a build do is "Skill A = 500 damage, Skill B = 100 damage, Skill C = 800 damage, Skill D = 300 damage" and so on...this is not a robust enough ruleset or design to produce undecidable behavior. They are all just addition problems, and if one were to apply buff and nerf operations to this game we just made, that property does not change in any meaningful way...it still remains a trivial game. Generally speaking, this is the state of guild wars 2 where many of its elements are trivial like this...and its why there exists even an "optimal state" of the game (a singular metagame). Many of the elements in the game are just too trivial.

Once a game and its elements becomes non-trivial, the attempt to balance it numerically become illogical and impossible because of the failure to make equivalence statements between nontrivial elements, for instance, Stability and Immobilization as mechanics, can't be logically compared or equivalenced with numbers. So once one has a game, such that they want it to have elements that are actually different to one another, it can not be logically balanced by numeric operations.

This is actually not a bad thing, and the reason is as you stated : When there are enough of these different, deep, behaviors happening, in the space of all these possible behaviors outliers will have more counters that exist in the space to subdue them. i'll use the following example:

Imagine we take as an axiom: that for every 100 builds, there will exist at least 1 counter to every build.

• If a game has 10 builds, and 1 of them is a strong outlier build, then the number of builds that exist that can counter it is less than 1. (.01). So likely that build won't have a counter.
• When the game has 100 builds, if 1 of them is a strong outlier build then the number of builds that exist that can counter it is at least 1.
• When the game has 100,000 builds, if 1 of them is a strong outlier build, then the number of builds that exist that can counter it is 1000.

So for every build, there will exist larger and larger sets of counters to that build. When outliers arise, so too do their counters, and this effect is a natural balancing mechanism. It's worth mentioning explicitly, that one does not need to "design" these counters...they simply arise as the result of different elements existing...the elements that counter each other will necessarily find each other in the space. Counters to Outliers...find purpose in countering builds that they counter. 

So yea, that's where the law of large numbers idea come in to play in this very not so-obvious, unintuitive way. It can pretty much be summarized as "when different things exist, it becomes more balanced." And all the details is just related to the definition of what it means for "a different thing" to exist. Nature just enumerates all possible things (it creates everything in some sense). Game designers by contrast don't have to enumerate any and all functions, we can just design what we want into the game, but we can never guarantee that what we create will produce interesting behavior no matter how well we design them, there will always be some emergent phenomena that could produce a homogenous state. In my view the homogenous state is a critical part to all of the different kinds of behaviors that could happen in the first place and so not only do I think that it can not be circumvented, its a crucial part to how we can even make sense of the world. 

If you are interested, there is a video you can watch...the first 25 minutes of it is relevant to this topic. The rest is focused more on physics...still interesting to watch anyway...

To summarize what he is saying in the first 25 minutes, it's basically that numbers are arbitrary constructs, that can't truly describe the complexity of the world...but the concept of counting (mathematics) is our way of taking regularities in that complexity, so that we can create a narrative about it so that it makes sense to us...when we make sense of something, we tend to instantiate them...give them names, and then build higher level concepts on it...to create more objects that we can give names to and so on in perpetuity...and that this concept is crucial to how the world itself gets built and why it makes sense to us at all to begin with.

It's basically this love hate relationship dynamic, where numbers are a blessing and a curse. we are in some sense forced to describe and build the world with numbers, but we actually can't describe the real world with just numbers.

To parralal this back to guild wars 2 : Anet and many players believe that we can "create the perfect little box" where the perfect game of guild wars exists. Computer Scientists like Woflram, pretty much show explicitly that this is an impossible thing to accomplish. The idea of "numeric balance" is not a real thing, its illusory. 

Edited Wednesday at 03:16 PM by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Anekto.8391]

30 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

To parralal this back to guild wars 2 : Anet and many players believe that we can "create the perfect little box" where the perfect game of guild wars exists. Computer Scientists like Woflram, pretty much show explicitly that this is an impossible thing to accomplish. The idea of "numeric balance" is not a real thing, its illusory. 

Ok first of all im very grateful that you took your time to make this post and describe what you mean and how it relates to what i asked.

 

I will paraphrase what i think i can respond to.

You are saying that it would be beneficial to have a turing complete game e.g. a game that can represent any logicial construct no matter how complex( like magic the gathering ,for example). And you wish for guild wars 2 to be redesigned or extended that it becomes turing complete?

 

So first issue that in my eyes arises is the one of design. First of all how many skills you would need to design one build that has a probability high enough to be different or a counter of another build will encompass more skill options combinations than one. So for one Build playstyle you will gobble up a certain amount of skills.

To achieve enough diverse builds for the law of big numbers to take effect we would like need 100 or 1000 builds to have representative distribution. That means at a given time 1000 builds must be played in the same space for all builds to cancel each other out.

In wvw the maps are closed off after i think 100 or 150 players on each side/team. Its not possibile to have all builds active at the same time.

So Anet would have to to offer skill combinations that achieve 1000 builds. I think that would be 1000 times lets say a build consists of 16 unique decisions. That would take a lot of development time to achieve so many non trivial decisions to create a build.

 

Right now the thing anet is does with balancing is as you described they push numbers around. But the game mode at least as long as we re still in realm of wvw doesnt only considers builds but also terrain movement structure and everything else enriching the players pool of decisions to make.

 

EDIT:

What issues you find in my reasoning? What am i not seeing?

Edited Wednesday at 03:42 PM by Anekto.8391

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

  

2 hours ago, Anekto.8391 said:

Ok first of all im very grateful that you took your time to make this post and describe what you mean and how it relates to what i asked.

 

I will paraphrase what i think i can respond to.

You are saying that it would be beneficial to have a turing complete game e.g. a game that can represent any logicial construct no matter how complex( like magic the gathering ,for example). And you wish for guild wars 2 to be redesigned or extended that it becomes turing complete?

I actually think that this was guild wars original design...that the idea of guild wars was to take skills, assemble them into builds and pit them against each other...so one would assume that the goal of its design is to give to player the ability to explore "build space" the space of all possible build interactions.

If the elements in the game are turing universal, then the space is just formally defined as being infinite in size (or just undecidable where the upper bound is infinite time). So... hey, say they dont design a skill to be turing universal...its no big deal...at least its not an addition problem, are trivial and we don't want.

So the lower bound for design goals is just non-trviality. i'm okay with that... So long as guild wars can't be reduced to a glorified spreadsheet in a few seconds, that's at least a good direction, and not the opposite direction. i'm not a chooser...I'll take whatever I can get. 

 

2 hours ago, Anekto.8391 said:

To achieve enough diverse builds for the law of big numbers to take effect we would like need 100 or 1000 builds to have representative distribution. That means at a given time 1000 builds must be played in the same space for all builds to cancel each other out.

In wvw the maps are closed off after i think 100 or 150 players on each side/team. Its not possibile to have all builds active at the same time.

The idea is not that you have to have 1000 builds concurrently playing against each other. The set of possible skill choices are always available to a player, and the set of possible build choices, sits in an abstract, much larger space, which are always available, but they do not necessarily exist in any physical sense...and that's kind of the point, we have to invent them :

Player A invents a build called "Build X"...the build is a very powerful outlier build but like most builds there are some weaknesses that could be exploited.

Player B, spends time inventing a build, such that they incorporate skills that dominate over the weaknesses of "Build X" and they call their creation "Build Z". Build Z did not exist before this time, a player had to go, explore the set of available skills, map out how those skills interact with each other...test it and so on...the player has to invent it. The build existed out in the set of possible builds but it isn't real until a player takes the time to explore build space.

The reason Player B went to explore build space, was because of Player A inventing their build...now imagine in the extent of many builds in buildspace...Player A, B, C, D, E....N where N is an arbitrary number of players. If one of them invents a strong build, every other player is incentivized to explore build space to overcome that build... and for every player that develops a counter there will exist another player inventing a counter to their counter...and another inventing a counter to their counter to their counter and so on for N counters. In the limit of all (infinite) builds, and players creating them, the meta game constantly shifts...there's no single "meta game" anymore, there's just the existence of players exploring build space...pitting their builds against each other and finding out what happens...There's no "optimization" because there's no logical way to really do that in a game where each element is actually unique.

It's like asking what is the most optimal fruit to eat, an apple or an orange or a banana...is there really an answer to that? Nope they just abstractly exist in a world together of ever changing behaviors and component interactions. Some animals eat the bananas...some creatures eat apples...that's true diversity and balance there's no more "oh well its the most optimal to eat the orange because blah blah blah" 

People will still develop theories of the game, as alluded to earlier, players have to develop theories to construct builds that they think will work. If this game is turing universal though then in principle it is not going to be describable by a single consistent and complete theory of the game, which further justifies why its possible for players to continuously develop theories in the creation of builds. 

Quote

So Anet would have to to offer skill combinations that achieve 1000 builds. I think that would be 1000 times lets say a build consists of 16 unique decisions. That would take a lot of development time to achieve so many non trivial decisions to create a build.

This is actually really easy to attain...probably the easiest and this is kind of the magic behind permutation, the same kind that our computers do : If you have only 2 skills slots on the bar, and there's 32 skills to chose from, you have 1024 possible combinations of skills (1024 possible builds you could have made in this hypothetical game of 2 skill slots).

Imagine now 10 skill slots...12 armor pieces , relic with 32 choices 4 or 5 modifications with 32 choices? the number is astronomical. its basically infinite if you typed it on a calculator.

Anet limits the permutation space in an effort to "put gw2 in a little perfect box" like setting up the trait system so that you can only string 3 choices together in a traitline rather than choosing from a pool of 9. In the past, Runes usto be connected with Relics, which was a also a limit on the permutation space. locked weapons did the same thing. This is why when Relics and weapons were unlocked, the permutation space for possible builds skyrocketed...It was in my view one of the best things they have ever done in the past few years, and many builds became viable as a result of that.

Obviously : trying to balance the skills differences numerically...or trivializing their unique behaviors undo the magic of permutability. As i say earlier, a game of addition problems is trivial...no matter how many addition problems you have, its still easy to solve it. It's a problem when every power relic's effect is "does +5% damage". So its not like unlocking the skills and boom the jobs done...they still have work to do, and they can't screw it up by continuing numeric balance as they do. They have to let go of the idea that they can balance the game, with numbers...its hard to comprehend and its a big red-pill to people's worldview, but that is what they need to do.

It's not a bad thing...i'm still a math guy and i use numbers to effectively parametrize stuff, even though i know that it is arbitrary. It's like art : We still enjoy art even though it has no objective meaning. Just like the value of mechanics in this game, its value is based on what we want it to be. numbers, math, and science is just like that : the same as art. subjective...we construct it. We just have assumptions (usually popularized by mainstream physics and technology) that "oh this constant over here is special!" but well...not gonna get too off topic here but just a hint : its kitten. there's no magic numbers, there's no special values. It's arbitrary and relative, just like balance, and that's where all these ideas find unification.

Quote

Right now the thing anet is does with balancing is as you described they push numbers around. But the game mode at least as long as we re still in realm of wvw doesnt only considers builds but also terrain movement structure and everything else enriching the players pool of decisions to make.

This is a big side of this topic that really deserves a comment in and of itself. But I'll briefly allude to it : The human player is an important part in our participation and perception of this game. Like i spoke about above, subjectivity and arbitrariness is a big theme over here...and the player is an integral part in defining what some number even means to us. Us humans invented the Turing Machine so when we formally talk about the player of a game, we can sufficiently state that the player is Turing universal Machine and that in principle, the player can do any computable function...then you can go, model that, and create abstract versions of this game, where humans aren't playing it, but turing machines.

What would a game be like if everyone's eyes were closed (if humans could only play the game through sonic ques) What would the game be like if the machine could only press the A key on the keyboard (always moving to the left). the question is : would the metagame be the same? It's somewhat obvious that no the metagames wouldn't be the same at all...For instance in the hypothetical version of players that can only play the game through sound alone, it's reasonable that the leading theories of optimal play in this game would be through the usage of "the quietest skills" verses "the loudest skills." 

The purpose of this is to highlight the following : that because the human player is a turing universal machine, we can not in principle ever find an objective single balance procedure to the game, if we could we would have effectively solved The Halting Problem, which we know to be impossible to do. A large part of the formal proofs rely on the fact that human players are turing universal machines, and that we could model the game as being served input to drive any kind of behavior we wanted.

So yes, a lot of novel experiences, is from the player of the game themselves and not necessarily the game and its design. There's a large exploration space outside of just skills in this game (like 3d terrain and strategy and what not). But this doesn't excuse or absolve the poor design of the game. There's still a space of exploration that you can map, that can generally speaking tell you what behavior you are going to encounter. Again: If all the skills are addition problems to be solved, then most of the function a human can do is just going to be to add them up and pick the biggest numbers. Yes, there's a small subset of players who lose games on purpose (playing a metagame where you pick the lowest number to sum to in an addition problem is a valid possible meta-game in this space where all players are Turing universal machines) but we are more or less not concerned with taking seriously every single abstract case as a balance issue. 

Conclusion:

Good questions man, and I'm glad your thinking deeply about this. The topic can feel rather daunting...and its not easy also for me to condense it all into words...there's a lot of access points to come from, so I hope that I'm doing an alright job here in explaining it. The videos definitely help so watching the actual people that work and explain this stuff, is beneficial. One has to extrapolate a little bit using formal logic since these guys are mostly in computer science and physics (see nobody is doing scientific research on guild wars 2 balance problem). These problems are not easy problems, they are deeply counter intuitive, and paradoxical and to truly appreciate it, requires looking at deeply held assumptions and challenging them.

Edited Wednesday at 05:39 PM by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Anekto.8391]

39 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

The reason Player B went to explore build space, was because of Player A inventing their build...now imagine in the extent of many builds in buildspace...Player A, B, C, D, E....N where N is an arbitrary number of players. If one of them invents a strong build, every other player is incentivized to explore build space to overcome that build... and for every player that develops a counter there will exist another player inventing a counter to their counter...and another inventing a counter to their counter to their counter and so on for N counters. In the limit of all (infinite) builds, and players creating them, the meta game constantly shifts...there's no single "meta game" anymore, there's just the existence of players exploring build space...pitting their builds against each other and finding out what happens...There's no "optimization" because there's no logical way to really do that in a game where each element is actually unique.

Thanks again for your response and the time you took to explain your view.

 

Right now i am thinking about this part where you explain the balance process in an infinite build space.

I see that you rely on the fact that builds will be unique but also that you introduce the characteristic which gives a build the ability to be a counter. So basically every build(0) in this set has an attribute ( is counter for (+1)) and an attribute( is countered by(-1)). Reducing this to an addition would mean in some circumstances countered builds get negated by counters. In whatever set of unique decisions that are necessary to describe this action. There is a set of unique characteristics for each build to win against a set of builds and a set of builds to lose against. This also assumes that builds will by definition always win and always lose to their counter part.

 

How would you design a skillset to give each build the value(0) in wins and losses against other builds? Statistically speaking or even just in a design point of view?

How would it affect the choice of build by players regarding to the score of build(X)?

They could choose against being the most winning or most losing build or anything in between?

 

This already neglects the human in the loop. Which in itself as you say provides an infinite amount of unique decisions.

 

One thing to solve the counter and is countered issue would be to have a more complex version of rock,paper,scissors. Where you have a cyclical is counter and countered situation. Otherwise as you describe that people have to explore the design space of builds to achieve ever more sophisticated methods of countering and i think then the game stops being one of playing and becomes one of designing. And at this point maybe on should search a career in gamedev or similar and create a satisfying experience for players themselves.

 

The most complex solution will always also be the most time consuming solution to implement and execute i think.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

1 hour ago, Anekto.8391 said:

Thanks again for your response and the time you took to explain your view.

 

Right now i am thinking about this part where you explain the balance process in an infinite build space.

I see that you rely on the fact that builds will be unique but also that you introduce the characteristic which gives a build the ability to be a counter. So basically every build(0) in this set has an attribute ( is counter for (+1)) and an attribute( is countered by(-1)). Reducing this to an addition would mean in some circumstances countered builds get negated by counters. In whatever set of unique decisions that are necessary to describe this action. There is a set of unique characteristics for each build to win against a set of builds and a set of builds to lose against. This also assumes that builds will by definition always win and always lose to their counter part.

In the limit of all builds, every build has an infinite number of possible counter builds.

Let just define what i mean when i say something is a "counter" to something else. a counter, is a player originated idea, that their build has some feature that beats the feature of another. if i have stability, than a boonstrip is a counter.

like i've been going on about here in this topic though: non-trivial mechanics can not be parametrized objectively by numbers, that includes counters.

Like in this example with boonstrips, even though it counters stability it also counters other boons...up to an arbitrary point where the opponent can't just spam boons. When does a counter not become a counter anymore, when does a build or set of skill become a counter to another build or set of strategies? There's an arbitrarily large space of this that grows with the number of unique skills, and any build at any arbitrary situation could be the counter to any other.

Imagine for instance we have two players using builds, each using one skill :

Player A

Skill 1--Cleanse 3 conditions. Do 5000 strike damage in a 100 radius.

And i face an opponent with this build:

Player B

Skill 1--Teleports 600 units. Inflict Burning and Bleeding in 600 radius.

Is it clear what the counters are here? To answer that, no its not very clear at all. We have a colloquial understanding, that "cleansing 3 conditions" is going to counter "burning and bleeding"... We might also colloquilly say that a 600 range teleport, counters a 100 radius strike. there may be other counters here but we need to establish some theory of this game to say more about it.

Now, Player A searches the space of possible skills to add to their build, that it turns this effect of "5000 strike damage in a 100 radius" to become an outlier that it is really strong like so:

Player A

Skill 1--Cleanse 3 conditions. Do 5000 strike damage in a 100 radius.

Skill 2-- Immobilize for 3 seconds enemies in 360 units.

For Player B, is it clear whether its teleport function still "counters" this build if immobilized has been introduced by the opponent? Let's just say that it is not...Player B is now motivated to explore the set of skills available to them, and they find a skill, skill 2 which does the following: 

Player B

Skill 1--Teleports 600 units. Inflict Burning and Bleeding in 600 radius.

Skill 2-- Strike Damage is converted to healing for 3 seconds.

So Player B, finds that he counters Player A...but now comes in Player C who is running...

Player C

Skill 1--Forms a bubble around target, trapping them.

Skill 2-- Transfers conditions currently on you to the target.

This player C, created this build with the intent to counter people playing player B's build. It transfers conditions, doesn't use strike damage, and prevents teleportation with the bubble move...so they obviously feel very confident in those fights. With Respect to player A though...it doesn't seem to have any true relation to it in a way we can call a counter or a non-counter ...again its the same story: we have to establish a theory of their relationships

This can continue on forever... for every unique mechanic that exists, that mechanic may or may not counter something out there. This is why we take the statistical law, that if for every outlier there exists a counter to it in a set of100 builds, then in the extent of 100,000 builds, there should statistically exist 1000 counters. Because builds are made of assemblies of skills...the notion of counters starts to lose meaning, to a definition that aligns a lot more with "things exist"

This is why you should also think about how nature works in this context : Birds, and Trees, and Rocks and Fish and Deer...these do not exist in a rock paper scissors relationship. They simply "exist" and in the space of possible creatures/forms, birds find their way to eat the fish, and live in trees...Rocks find there way to being mountains and trees find their ways to being forests and deer find their way to living in forests and so on...There's no RPS notion here... there its just "things that exist." and the relationships they have with each other. It's all relative to what they were trying to do...whatever there goals seem to be. For us here its no different. we have goals created by theories of the game, and we seek to explore the space to fulfill them...and as we assemble builds by exploring this build space, we gravitate towards where our inventions work and where they do not, in the same way that birds tend to be near forests and rivers, we tend to play mode X to find and kill enemies running builds A B C because our builds are made for the purposes of defeating them.

Which leads to this:

Quote

Otherwise as you describe that people have to explore the design space of builds to achieve ever more sophisticated methods of countering 

As previously described, the game is in fact this...this is what we do...we create builds... in an ever advancing race of pitting our invention against each other to beat our opponents in both martial and intellectual combat...at least what the idea of it should be considering we are given skills, to build assemblies with them. If the design idea of this game, was to simply tell us what we should play, then why give us unique choices at all? Simply ship the game with stuff we can not change then we need not worry about "balance" ever again. But as those familiar with this counter argument : This obviously goes against the fundamental design idea of Guild Wars. 

 

 

Edited Wednesday at 07:50 PM by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Anekto.8391]

7 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

As previously described, the game is in fact this...this is what we do...we create builds... in an ever advancing race of pitting our invention against each other to beat our opponents in both martial and intellectual combat...at least what the idea of it should be considering we are given skills, to build assemblies with them. If the design idea of this game, was to simply tell us what we should play, then why give us unique choices at all? Simply ship the game with stuff we can not change then we need not worry about "balance" ever again. But as those familiar with this counter argument : This obviously goes against the fundamental design idea of Guild Wars. 

Thanks again for your consideration and input !

 

Right now i have to admit it seems that guild wars does in fact not need a turing complete design space for their builds as that would lead to an endless design process in build crafting. Which would stop people from playing the game. As humans are included in guild wars 2 already there seems to be an underlying game already at play which does in fact not need or is even difficult for the devs to change. It is us humans just doing what us humans do and that is exist in the space of guild wars 2 with all the stuff it has. Be that balancing and pushing numbers around or expressing ourselves in ways that can not be numerically represented so easily.

 

 

Still if i ever find myself being more like a bot in wvw i sure hope that my build will when i want it to be more effective or adaptable than it might currently be.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

15 minutes ago, Anekto.8391 said:

Right now i have to admit it seems that guild wars does in fact not need a turing complete design space for their builds as that would lead to an endless design process in build crafting. Which would stop people from playing the game.

I don't think it would stop people from playing the game. This hasn't happened to the internet or the computer... quiet the opposite : everyone uses the computer today. The success of Guild Wars 1 was mostly because of this design as well.

Quote

As humans are included in guild wars 2 already there seems to be an underlying game already at play which does in fact not need or is even difficult for the devs to change. It is us humans just doing what us humans do and that is exist in the space of guild wars 2 with all the stuff it has. Be that balancing and pushing numbers around or expressing ourselves in ways that can not be numerically represented so easily.

Sure we can make checkers arbitrarily complicated, by imagining ourselves as turing machines and feeding the game interesting inputs like stated earlier...only pressing the A key, or players only playing the game based on sound ques or something funky. we can find novelty in playing a classic Rock paper scissors game with our hands, by just imagining we aren't doing this...coming up with new ways to visualize it (ahem we by and large in fact do this ) but the point is that the game should have this and not rely on the human players imagination to derive fun...otherwise...again...why play guild wars 2 when i can go do the same thing typing numbers on my calculator and spreadsheet?

Design of the game is important, not just the human players part in it...its a two way street.

 

Edited Wednesday at 08:10 PM by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Anekto.8391]

2 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

Sure we can make checkers arbitrarily complicated, by imagining ourselves as turing machines and feeding the game interesting inputs like stated earlier...only pressing the A key, or players only playing the game based on sound ques or something funky. we can find novelty in playing a classic Rock paper scissors game with our hands, by just imagining we aren't doing this...coming up with new ways to visualize it (ahem we by and large in fact do this ) but the point is that the game should have this and not rely on the human players imagination to derive fun...otherwise...again...why play guild wars 2 when i can go do the same thing typing numbers on my calculator and spreadsheet?

Design of the game is important, not just the human players part in it...its a two way street.

The perfect game needs the perfect idea and an perfect execution on that idea. As Perfect is the limit of the function of progress we will not achieve this any time soon !

So might aswell just use some heuristics and cut the chase short and make do with what is basically desirable to a big enough population to not occupy a niche in the existing games space but be quite enjoyed by many.

 

Or what do you think we should do? GW 1 appeal was sure that there was a lot of variety but there were also lots of cookie cutter and best in slot builds for various encounters and i think it was not turing complete. Nonetheless it was and is a great game and you can still play it to enjoyment if you dont mind somewhat outdated graphics(the engine is okay just the structures and design of the environment is very unsophisticated which is a desgin space too that games can and should explore).

[Kulvar.1239]

8 hours ago, Anekto.8391 said:

But lots of people complain about boons and what to do about them and how they are so oppressive in wvw.

There would be the option to introduce something like a boon fatigue. That forces to either reduce the uptime of incoming boons while for example the same boon is already applied. Or increases uptime decay on time in battle or other factors. Or introduces a mechanic to have the boon fatigue be reset during the fight by whatever means going ooc entering specific areas. Could even be objectives in objectives that reduce boon fatigue. It would not even have to be 100% decline. Lots of variables are possibile to tune this and make it interesting.

There's an easier solution.

Normalize runes to gives 35 / 65 / 125 concentration and expertise instead of 5% / 10% / 10% boon duration and condition duration.
That would shave 10% boon duration or condition duration by itself.

Then change the scaling of concentration in WvW from 15 concentration to 1% boon duration to 20 concentration to 1% boon duration.
Full minstrel with water runes would give 42.9% boon duration instead of 67.2% boon duration.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

24 minutes ago, Anekto.8391 said:

So might aswell just use some heuristics and cut the chase short and make do with what is basically desirable to a big enough population to not occupy a niche in the existing games space but be quite enjoyed by many.

I think this is what Arena anet already does…because of the arbitrariness of balance operations, they chose some model of the game and stuck with the “hamster wheel must keep going”  idea. In PVE that heuristic model is “The DPS golem” in SPVP that’s the performance of top players in tournaments.

24 minutes ago, Anekto.8391 said:

Or what do you think we should do? GW 1 appeal was sure that there was a lot of variety but there were also lots of cookie cutter and best in slot builds for various encounters and i think it was not turing complete. Nonetheless it was and is a great game and you can still play it to enjoyment if you dont mind somewhat outdated graphics(the engine is okay just the structures and design of the environment is very unsophisticated which is a desgin space too that games can and should explore).

To the  “what we should do” question: all it is, moving away from the paradigm of number balancing because it is futile…and moving towards the paradigm of creating and altering mechanics (skills) that have depth. That’s all there is too it, it’s not a super complicated thing. 
 

Creating skills that have depth is an operational task that requires understanding undecidability and how to curate mechanics such that they have that property. Not complicated just requires an understanding of this topic at a certain level

Edited Wednesday at 08:40 PM by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Anekto.8391]

4 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

Creating skills that have depth is an operational task that requires understanding undecidability and how to curate mechanics such that they have that property. Not complicated just requires an understanding of this topic at a certain level

I see and understand. Now how much of a rework of existing system would be necessary to make that happen?

Like the devs if they were not aware of it then gw2 is probably not designed around this principle.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

17 minutes ago, Anekto.8391 said:

I see and understand. Now how much of a rework of existing system would be necessary to make that happen?

Like the devs if they were not aware of it then gw2 is probably not designed around this principle.

That’s pretty much the issue : is the lack of understanding of this topic which I don’t actually expect anyone to understand any time soon. If you picked up on this based on the video linked earlier, these connections are closely related to fundamental physics…closely related to the limits of mathematics which civilization is built on even… This paradigm shift is something way deeper than just Arenanet which is often times why I do not even make topics on the subject except for the two topics I posted links to earlier…usually only comments in threads to try and spread the ideas so that there’s a more informed player base (thats a tall order in and of itself)

practically? I do not expect anything at all. But I’ll still talk about these ideas because I believe people should know who the boogey man is. As you also be able to tell: many threads and posts made by people are about the heuristics that’s been established…whether class A should do 40k dps on the golem instead of 35k dps…things like this…is a red herring, in the same way that “falling from a 30 story building on your feet or on the belly” is a red herring because falling 30 stories is not gonna end well in either situation. 

my other practical reasoning is for anet to simply hire game designers that do understand this stuff which, they do exist….the topic is actually not uncommon in game dev…biology…computer science. For example this guy Will Wright is someone that gets this stuff (he even mentions Wolfram in this lecture who is the guy I linked earlier)

But balance being impossible to do is not known by this guy I’m sure…wolfram obviously does but he’s deep in theoretical computer science. Again we are very far off from a paradigm shift. 

 

Edited Wednesday at 09:00 PM by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Anekto.8391]

2 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

For example this guy Will Wright is someone that gets this stuff (he even mentions Wolfram in this lecture who is the guy I linked earlier)

-Thanks again for your time!

 

It seems to me you want to share the joy of the concept of the ruliad and computational irreducibility. And similar concepts that can explain how existence can exist and why existence is possibile or the default state of our existence(universe). I have some rudimental knowledge of what wolfram tries to explain and i have some of my own musings with existence and why existence is the default state of the universe without a need of anything making it exist.

 

Taking in the probability that we actually exists makes it much more easier to explain that existence is existing because in our time we exist! Does this make sense to you?

 

But this would be somewhat off topic to the question i tried to answer which is how to balance gw2 and not have the devs throw dice or make unjustified decisions. Or if they even know what they do which you tried to tell me they basically dont in your eyes!

 

But i dont think anyone cares about any of the physics stuff enough to engage your posts. But i happily hear your gospel so go ahead and explain simple enough what you try to teach! If you can include examples and relate to them it is always helpful for anyone to understand. And relate them to something practical in the real world or online world that they are familiar with.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

4 minutes ago, Anekto.8391 said:

Taking in the probability that we actually exists makes it much more easier to explain that existence is existing because in our time we exist! Does this make sense to you?

Yep this makes perfect sense to me. Existence is an inevitablity…the default state as you put it. Wolframs Ruliad is basically the equivalent of this idea.

Coincidentally I was doing this research before stumbling on the wolfram model (in a field called Complex Systems) but Computational Complexity wasn’t enough to answer some of the deeper questions and paradoxes that came about which is where folks like wolfram really connected the dots and completed the story. Part of why I even subscribed to his work was because of this research on GW2 and how it was able to answer those questions in a way that wasn’t obviously wrong. That video about numbers was the first video I saw that really addressed why the balance problem had the character that it did…

For some context : when I first started this 5 years ago (2019) I straight up just did balance operations on my own because I wanted to see if a perfectly balanced game was possible and to follow the “all nerf” philosophy that Anet was going for at the time to its logical conclusion…but with even two skills I wasn’t able to do it in a way that I could actually prove equivalences between unique elements. What ensued was a search to find out why I couldn’t do it and so when Wolfram came along with those ideas in 2020 it just made perfect sense. Since then I was able to completely formalize the problem, using his work.

 

10 minutes ago, Anekto.8391 said:

It seems to me you want to share the joy of the concept of the ruliad and computational irreducibility. And similar concepts that can explain how existence can exist and why existence is possibile or the default state of our existence(universe). I have some rudimental knowledge of what wolfram tries to explain and i have some of my own musings with existence and why existence is the default state of the universe without a need of anything making it exist.

But this would be somewhat off topic to the question i tried to answer which is how to balance gw2 and not have the devs throw dice or make unjustified decisions. Or if they even know what they do which you tried to tell me they basically dont in your eyes!

 

But i dont think anyone cares about any of the physics stuff enough to engage your posts. But i happily hear your gospel so go ahead and explain simple enough what you try to teach! If you can include examples and relate to them it is always helpful for anyone to understand. And relate them to something practical in the real world or online world that they are familiar with.

Theres a lot we could talk about on this topic when we consider the Ruliad concept and the other areas of his work. Luckily he did write a paper on games (which you can read here).  It’s an interesting and…deep read…about many kinds of well known games through the lens of his formalism.

ultimately i his ideas pretty seriously and I think guild wars 2 balance, definitely falls under the umbrella of being computational irreducible…impossible to balance unless we make it trivial.

I appreciate you taking the time to hear this out, and you have a pretty good grasp at the topic (this greatly helps my sanity in explaining it), I’m just glad to be able to make even at least one person out there see the problem here. I hope you take the time to go deeper into it too cause it goes pretty deep and it’s worth it in the end to analyze it at this level…cause it’s also just fascinating in and of itself, as a research topic.

[Anekto.8391]

16 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

ultimately i his ideas pretty seriously and I think guild wars 2 balance, definitely falls under the umbrella of being computational irreducible…impossible to balance unless we make it trivial.

Thank you !

 

Is not the concept of computational irreducibility saying that a process has to progress to be able to receive its conclusion? Or put in different terms if i want to know how one simulated state evolves to another state that i have to take all the intermediate steps this process would naturally use.

 

In GW2 i can only relate it to some part of the game meaning that if i fight on for example ebg i will not be able to know what it will look like in the next 2 hours. Because of all the actions that can take place and the results that they offer.

 

But on the other hand if i know commander x,y,z is leading that day and i know we have ebg t3 keep and waypoints and deff. I can make a better prediction as to how it might end or look like with a specific uncertainty value to it.

Therefore it seems GW2 is not necessarily computationally irreducible as i can use past experience(heuristics) to gauge the future state of the map or whatever. And those heuristics being reducibility of the computation necessary.

 

And in the end fighting on ebg is just balancing being in its applied state. Maybe actions cancel out and the results of balancing are fairly fast obtained? I sure think that gw2 offers endless actions to take but they not all may lead to something "meaningful". And this might offer reducibility in the computation. Maybe probalistic theory is interesting to you i just have some surface level understanding of it!

[MaLong.2079]

A build without vitality equipment will still have 15,922 HP and 1k toughness. So, a glass cannon is not as fragile as it should be. This is a huge advantage for builds that have tons of evades or skills that make them very hard to hit. Those builds don't have to put anything to vitality or toughness and still have high survivability.

Anyway, the point is that the way things are set up now it is not possible to establish a direct correlation between the benefit and the tradeoff. In a perfect world increasing damage output would lower survivability, or range would lower mobility, for example. But not in this game.

I don't think they can balance the game just by changing armor stats.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

1 hour ago, Anekto.8391 said:

Is not the concept of computational irreducibility saying that a process has to progress to be able to receive its conclusion? Or put in different terms if i want to know how one simulated state evolves to another state that i have to take all the intermediate steps this process would naturally use.

Ya, this is the colloquial definition that Wolfram often gives, but the formal definition from his NKS book is : that a system is computationally irreducible, because its combinatorial space is equivalent to that of a Turing machine (Principle of Computational Equivalence) so to know what any finite system will do is the same problem as trying to solve the Halting Problem (undecidable)

The Halting Problem more or less, is a statement about Godel Incompleteness : about the failure for a logical assembly, to construct a consistent and complete theory of how it works.

to quote directory from Wikipedia:

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e. an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system.

The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.

Basically, when we have in front of us a system like guild wars 2 and we try to use mathematical logic to parametrize it, like say a set of balance operations across its elements, we can not form a complete or consistent logic for it…it will either prove its own inconsistency, or be incomplete. For example in order to have a complete model of this game also requires a model of players that play the game…in order to have a model of players that play the game requires a model of the universe those players exist in… this is an example that we can’t “complete” the theory of this game.

When we consider that Turing machines exist in the universe (or just more simply that the universe is at least equivalent to a Turing machine), it ultimately means that to have a complete and consistent paramaterization of the game we also need some complete paramatrization of the combinatorial space of a Turing machine which for all intents and purposes is infinite. 
 

it’s not like a “space is very big” kind of infinite, the halting problem shows that a function can either go into an infinite loop, or halt and we wouldn’t be able to know which one because we can’t construct an algorithm that could tell us the answer: we need a full paramatrization of the combinatorial space of the Turing machine which also includes the algoryrhm we are trying to run to tell us what the output is supposed to be. an infinite regression.

So computational irreducibility is the statement that knowing what a system will do, basically can not be known due to the failure of being able to meaningfully parametrize it

reducibility by association is the ability to meaningfully parametrize part of a system, by finding regularities in it. Just because we find regularity does not mean the system is consistent or complete. It just means we found something we could say “it does this over and over again” and we can create a narrative about that particular regularity…until that thing doesn’t repeat because computational irreducibility is going to eventually come in either at some scale or some time and prove that (reducible) theory to be inconsistent.

According to this work and him mostly, all systems are irreducible because all systems are computationally equivalent. If you follow this logic that makes sense: every finite system is imbedded in a larger system in infinitum so no system is safe 🤖

I left a link to the specific chapter up above where I think he talks specifically about it…but generally speaking the entire book centers around these definitions for its formal claims.

Edited Wednesday at 11:14 PM by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Anekto.8391]

5 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

I left a link to the specific chapter up above where I think he talks specifically about it…but generally speaking the entire book centers around these definitions for its formal claims.

Thanks again, this was a very informative post and with good examples!

 

I think i would have to do a lot of reading to catch up to the position you are holding on the computational irreducibility of GW2. But it is somewhat clearer now thank you.

On the other hand let me poke you just one last time before i go to bed now as it is way beyond my usual time. You are saying wolfram sets his formalismn on the fact that the universe is turing complete. Which means the function to create the set of it parameters e.g. what it is made up of would never finish? I am sorry but i always assumed a turing machine was one instance of something. Are there different kind of turing machines like more complex and less complex ones? Or maybe the better word is faster and slower ones?

19 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

So computational irreducibility is the statement that knowing what a system will do, basically can not be known due to the failure of being able to meaningfully paramatrizating it

So it means we have not enough data to make a prediction of it all? But we can find some regularities to make predictions about that not necessarily retain their predictable value because of the halting problem? So we have a set of predictions that only are true in some time in computational space?

 

I wonder what his ideas and stance are on superposition and i think they are called quasi particles that exist in the vacuum? Been awhile i dont know if its correct!

After all it seems lots of space in the universe and therefore also combinatorial space of the universe computation is not decided by cause and effect but by probability and chaos? Which itself could cancel out to be a cause and effect hm? Interesting!

 

Good night !

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

3 hours ago, Anekto.8391 said:

So it means we have not enough data to make a prediction of it all?

Yes, this is correct. the wording "Computational Irreducibility" is a fitting name for what it is, and separates it from other similiar concepts (like Chaos and sensitivity to initial condition in chaos theory) : You need something stronger than both determinism and super determinism to make a true prediction...specifically, you need all the information of this combinatorial space of a Turing Machine...which is infinite in size and complexity (This combinatorial space of a Turing Machine is the Ruliad object) 

The idea of Computational Equivalence is the most important part of his ideas: Conceptually, It's an argument that all systems are equivalent to each other, and more specifically equivalent to this combinatorial space of a Turing Machine. In that video i linked, he explains how systems emulate each others behavior, and that this is possible because all of the systems exist "in the same space." 

All together Computational Irreducibility and Computational Equivalence say something much more powerful and without a doubt novel : That a system could at any time, do anything, Because systems are Turing machines, and emulate the behavior of any other system...that one can program systems as if they are computers.

Quote

Which means the function to create the set of it parameters e.g. what it is made up of would never finish? I am sorry but i always assumed a turing machine was one instance of something. Are there different kind of turing machines like more complex and less complex ones? Or maybe the better word is faster and slower ones?

So as stated above just now, the idea of the Computational Equivalence Principle is that there's only one (real) class of complexity, which is this combinatorial space of a turing machine (aka the Ruliad object).

Just to quote exactly what Wolfram says

"What it means when one system is capable of universal computation, is that a system even with fixed rules, that might have small rules can emulate a system with arbitrarily complicated rules. It's saying, that's the thing (Turing universality) that allows you to say "I've got a model and its rather simple, and that model is capable of doing all this complicated stuff."

That's one of the reasons that you can generate complexity from simple rules. That even though the rules are simple at least in principle with computation universality, you can emulate all these other kinds of things. It's something we will come back to again when we talk about the Ruliad and the physics project and what's been derived from that project, that the Ruliad is really a play, on universal computation and ultimately on the principle of computational equivalence, as the possibility that there's really just one "thing" that emulates all possible (rules) that deals with all possible computations...the fact that, that is possible and that there is a single Ruliad that's all connected. That's a consequence of the idea of universal computation."

This idea of connection, is that idea that all there is is just this one system (the infinite super system), and that finite subsystems imbedded in it, can't "separate" from this bigger super system. The fact that we call these subsystems "different systems" is basically just human fallacy : when really the only true, real system that exists is the entire universe as a whole (this combinatorial space).

Anyway i recommend watching the whole New Kind of Science series that i linked earlier if you are interested in getting the whole picture. The series is basically a set of proofs for why he believe this principle of computational equivalence is true (This idea that all systems are equivelent to a turing machine). Considering how solid the proofs are (proofs by exhaustion and the proofs are visual so its undeniable) its hard to deny that it isn't true. 

Edited Thursday at 03:11 AM by JusticeRetroHunter.7684