/in-vitational Round 4 Discussion

[hitogoroshi]

This is a really interesting problem to think about.

I think the way to go about the "assignment bonus" is to have the likes and dislikes be fixed values (you can only specify hard veto, dislike, neutral, like, or really like, with the definition of really like being that really like + dislike is a positive tradeoff for you, corresponding to "point values" of -infinity, -1,0,+1,+2), but allow people to specify their OWN values for their baseline and for the compromises from their preferred game type they're willing to accept. And then we focus on trying to improve points over baseline, and don't put a player in a game if their total score isn't at least zero.

This hopefully could help make it immune to being meta-gamed by people falsely reporting preferences - if someone says that "I will only want a game with my five favorite players" and so sets their baseline to -15, they can do that, but it's also pretty likely they just won't get a game, because having a negative baseline means that it's only smarter to include the player instead of exclude them if at least some of the likes are reciprocated. If that makes sense, I'm kind of typing in a hurry but I think it could be made to work.

Would we want a "WOTC" system wherein the system is willing not to assign a player to the game if doing so necessarily means the playerbase as a whole gets less happy?