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Unread 22-04-2008, 11:58
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Re: Lesson Learned: The Negative

My only real gripe with this season is the insane load that was put on the refs and that they clearly weren't completely capable of shouldering. I think the GDC needs to accept the fact that the majority of our refs are mere humans volunteering a small amount of time to officiate these events. Expecting them to learn the nuances of when a robot is "impeding" or when they are interfering with a hurdle is simply unrealistic. Professional sports refs get to deal with the same rules year in and year out over much more total game play. They still miss calls, and the most often miss judgment calls. The fact that every major league umpire has a different conception of the strike zone, and that it often changes from game to game even for the same umpire, should clue us in to the fact that subjective penalties are pretty much doomed to inconsistency. I'm not saying that all subjective penalties should go. The non-violence penalties should obviously stay, but these should be finalized at this point and set in stone so they are the same from year to year and the refs can at least depend on developing a consistent standard for them. But the GDC should minimize game-specific judgment calls as much as possible. Especially if these calls need to be made on the fly in highly dynamic situations.

Basically, if during the course of the game design process, the GDC feels the need to suggest that Woodie is going to need to warn teams to be patients with the refs because they have even more responsibilities than ever before.... Then they should just stop working on that concept and pick a simpler one with less reliance on fallible humans to penalize teams into playing the game the way the GDC wants it played.
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