has anyone ever tried to put together an archive of old PDF’s?
It would be very cool to have a place where players could upload their old PDF’s and make them available for others to see. Once a thousand or so were put up, it would start to make a reasonable data pool for compiling/checking statistics.
We could all use it to definitively answer the subtle questions about the game I often see posted to the forum.
Technically and financially it’s not a huge hurdle. A single 15 Gig disk could hold ~13,000 unzipped PDF’s. It just needs to be set-up online with a simple file structure, web interface, and rules for how to post/download.
I do have a load of pdfs “on tap”. Our teams generally start a yahoo group for every new game [sometimes two depending on length of game] and we upload there each turn. When the games end the groups [and their storage] are kept alive by an occasional email. There must be hundreds of pdfs kept alive this way…i haven`t checked…
Personally I don’t like the idea. We are getting to the point where each game will ber annalyse and srutinize in order to find what are the best move for each nation to the point of publishing book like what they are doing chess.
Going a bit further I would see the day when the DS computer is going to play the FP computer, where is the fun? I quit playing chess when a young lad told me on my fifth move I was losing that this variant was played in 1956 and resulted in checkmate 16 turns later.
I know I am alarmist but I do like the game like it is with all the variants and with the unknown factors and the emotions that are part of it
If you remove the mystery that surround the game and the world that it create it’s like introducing Big Brother into Middle Earth. Maybe Big Brother is realy another name for Sauron
MEPBM is a pretty subtle game. It doesn’t appear so at first, but as you get to play it a bit you realize there are a lot of questions about game mechanics not covered in the rule book.
One of the things a PDF archive could do would be to help players aswer questions about game mechanics definitively before making stupid mistakes for lack of information. It’s unnecessary for this type of information to be hidden from players.
About 10 years ago people used to complain that sharing starting nation information and artifact powers tarnished the game. In reality, all keeping it hidden did was give veteran players an even bigger advantage over newbies. Nowadays, it’s posted on the forum and nobody thinks anything of it.
MEPBM will never become as mechanical as chess (though I have often thought I could write a 100 line program that would play better than 1/4 of the players out there…). The main reason is you have 25 human beings interacting, trying new strategies, making decisions based on role-play, screwing up orders, etc. No two games are ever identical.
generally a good idea and I would gladly donate all my pdfs to the pool. The problem is that 15 gig webspace still cost money and time to administrate - I don’t know if we will find a volunteer for that…
Thanks Bernd. I think there are a lot of people out there just like you who would gladly donate their PDF’s. I think it would be no problem to put together several thousand PDF’s.
It would be especially cool to collect XML’s as well so we could access the data automatically instead of only by hand.
Grudge games could be the best source of PDF’s because they’re most valuable when you can collect a complete set from all positions. Having entire games worth of results would be very valuable.
I’ll look around and see if I can find an online server who can host. In the mean time I could always start collecting PDF’s by email and compiling them.
it occurs to me that we don’t need a central server to do this. We could just use peer-to-peer software to exchange game files. If a lot of people put their files up in their “shared folders” we could all have access to many many PDF’s without incurring the cost of centrally hosting them.
I’ll stick some of mine up shortly in my publicly available folder and we can experiment with trading them this way.
Is anyone willing to help me test exchanging files via peer-to-peer software such as Kazaa?
