Isotropic
Isotropic is the common name for the online implementation of Dominion created by Doug Zongker (dougz). Located at dominion.isotropic.org, Isotropic was the dominant arena for online play of Dominion prior to 2012's release of Goko. As of late October 2012, the site featured approximately 8,000 registered users, had hosted about 9.5 million games of dominion, and was averaging almost 20,000 games of dominion per day.
Both Donald and RGG had full knowledge of Isotropic's existence. There was a handshake agreement in place that Isotropic was allowed to be freely operated provided that dougz did not profit from it, it did not use the official card art, and that Isotropic would be shut down should an official (paid) version of the game appear. There appeared to be a friendly relationship between dougz and Donald/RGG, as Donald used a private Isotropic server for playtesting and dougz was informally approached about taking the job of creating the official online version.
Contents |
Interface
Isotropic presented a minimalist approach to the game, favoring simplicity and plain text to some of the bold colors and animations found on the Goko implementation. The user was allowed to choose between a text and simple image interface, with the images being the placeholder images Donald and the other playtesters used. (Images and sources discussed on the forums here and here) To get a good feel for the feel of playing on Isotropic, consider watching a video of the gameplay. This is a good example of the image format and this is a good example of the text format.
Isotropic featured three lobbies for meeting and competing against other players. The first (Great Hall) was a public lobby, where one could either propose games with another player or check some options (preferred skill levels, veto mode, point counters) and then be automatically matched with another player. A second lobby, the Secret Chamber, was smaller and was specifically designed as a place for friends to meet and arrange games. The third lobby was created specifically for the Dominion World Master's Online Qualifier, and it was similar to the Secret Chamber lobby but with the additional option of being able to predesign turn order for players. Turn order is a variable which will often get controlled in tournament play. An image of the Great Hall lobby can be seen here.
In general, Isotropic attempted to incorporate the official ruling (Page 6 of the game rules) when determining turn order. If you have just won a game you will typically go last, and if you have just lost a game you will go first. Exceptions to this are dependent on the players entering and leaving the lobby. Input from dougz about the implementation can be found here, and recent forum discussion on the subject can be found here.
Levels and Skill Rating
A key feature of Isotropic was its skill level estimates. Player skill was quantified using an adaptation of Microsoft's TrueSkill skill ranking, itself a variation of the Elo rating system. Among the attributes of the system: - Beyond the win/loss status, end of game score has no bearing on rankings. A one point nail biter is worth just as much as a 100 point blowout. - Multiplayer matches get broken down into individual head to head games for the rankings, so getting second place in a multiplayer game is still important. A 3 player game is broken into P1 vs P2, P2 vs P3, and P1 vs P3. More discussion on this can be found here. - A player's displayed (in Isotropic lobby and on leaderboard) skill level was the result of subtracting a player's variance from their skill estimate. This provides a lower bound for a player's skill estimate. There is some debate (especially among elite players) on whether this is the best way to manage skill levels, and the Isotropic FAQ addresses some of these questions.
Leaderboard
In conjunction with the skill ratings, a leaderboard was created which ranked all players based on their skill level. The leaderboard allowed players to compete against themselves by improving their skill ranking as well as competing with others to climb the leaderboard. The leaderboard site was updated each day, but archives of the daily updates dating back to March 2011 can be found here.
Unfortunately, a number of people have decided they want to game the system to leap up the leaderboard. User Paralyzed was one of the first to do this, exploiting the KC/Goons/Masquerade pin every game on unsuspecting players to maintain an absurd win rate. Others (such as Karumah and Ozymandias II) seem to mix legitimate play with high win rates against dummy accounts. These kinds of shenanigans were usually visible to regular players because of the unlikely numbers of levels increased in a single day.
Unofficially, Marin has attained the highest legitimate ranking, hitting a level of 53.956 in mid September 2012. While a very impressive feat, it is very difficult to compare relative skill levels on Isotropic over time. This is due to the apparent existence of a 'level creep' on the Isotropic leaderboard over time. TrueSkill tries to fit all of the available players skill levels into a normal bell curve. So, the majority of players will sit near some level X, with a tendency to see less and less of a skill level as you move further from that center point.
As time goes on, the number of players on Isotropic has increased, pushing the boundaries on the edges of the bell curve. This can be evidenced practically by both the increase in peak skill level over time as well as by the increase of players falling into the high skill level buckets of 35-40, 40-45, and 45+. Of course, this does not account for all skill level increases, as experience and strategy resources (such as this website) will also serve to increase player skill.
Criticism
One of the biggest complaints about Isotropic came chiefly from mobile/tablet players. A few cards implemented a 'drag' feature to reorganize the order of certain cards, a feature which was unusable on certain touch screen devices. dougz was fully aware of the issue and he stated that he was not going to make changes to accomodate a smaller portion of the user base because of doubts about the future of Isotropic. This topic was discussed regularly on the forums. (1,2,3,4,5)
