DROD is hardly the only game that caters to both a casual, play-it-how-you-like player base and a competitive, score-counting player base. In almost any game or sport you care to name, there are features made available to the former that aren't available to the latter. Casual Scrabble players allow flipping through a dictionary to check your word before playing it; in tournament games where your score counts, that's not allowed. Casual poker often involves the dealer naming variations or declaring some cards wild; I don't think there are professional tournaments with wild cards, certainly not at the serious, shows-on-ESPN level. Casual chess often glosses over certain rules of tournament chess that count in your FIDE rating, such as the rule that once you touch a piece you have to move it (to say nothing of the clock). Casual golf literally has an "
undo"
, though it's called a "
mulligan"
; professional golf wouldn't ever consider the idea of letting a golfer undo their last move because it wasn't good enough. (Comparing a pick-up basketball/football game to the way these sports are played by NBA/FIFA rules is left as an exercise to the reader.)
Why do games, when played by casual players, have all of these variations? Quite simply, because for casual players they're more fun that way. At the official level, it's important that the rules are consistent and occasionally even a little harsh, because those restrictions provide a necessary challenge. But casual players don't care that their game isn't comparable to a game being played in another city three hours away, and are interested in easing up on the challenge. It's more challenging if you don't know in advance if your Scrabble word is valid, or if you can't take back a bad golf shot, or the like, and serious players want those challenges while casual players may find them irritating. No one is "
right"
or "
wrong"
in these games; casual and serious players simply play for different reasons, and neither would want to play under the other's rules.
I think, and I could be wrong, that that's at least some of what we're facing in this discussion. DROD has casual players, who want to make it through holds just to see if they can do it, because they like the personal challenge, or what have you. It also has people who play to have their scores compared against each other's, the way chess and Scrabble and bridge players do (even when they're not in tournaments, and there's no money involved, just their ranking). For the casual player, relaxing the rules with something like unlimited undo makes sense, while for many people (though not all!) who are interested in the high score table, unlimited undo removes one of the challenges that makes the game interesting.
For one thing, then, people arguing over UU should remember this distinction; going back and forth saying "
but that takes all the challenge out!"
and "
thank god it takes all the challenge out!"
is like me arguing with Tiger Woods about whether it's fair for someone to try again after a bad drive. For me, of course it's fair; why would I want to play a ball that's landed in a sand trap a hundred feet from the tee? But for Tiger woods, of course it's not fair; playing it where it lies is part of the game.
The other point I want to make is that, looking at it this way, I think I agree with Jacob's suggestion:
Jacob wrote:
There's an option to toggle UU in settings.
If it's selected, scores cannot be submitted for rooms completed using UU.
(i.e. there's some sort of flag generated if a demo is made with UU ON, and this flag prevents the demo being submitted for highscoring).
That's exactly the way we mark "
casual"
basketball/chess/Scrabble/croquet/caber-tossing/whatever from tournament-level. I can play all the Scrabble I want while flipping through a dictionary, but the game won't count for my Scrabble ranking; if I want a game to count, I have to play with the more stringent challenge.
Jatopian's objection, i.e.
Jatopian wrote:
All this does is put optimizers to the trouble of replaying their demo move for move once they've found a solution they're satisfied with.
doesn't feel like an objection to me. Tiger Woods may practice all he likes--in some sense, standing on a driving range is like taking mulligan after mulligan and just redoing your first shot over and over again; someone practicing for tournament Scrabble might keep a dictionary on-hand because they find it helpful when practicing. All the same, when tournament time comes around, they have to do it again without that relaxing of the rules, and the same would apply here. If you're the kind of optimizer who wants to practice a room with UU until you get it right, and then try to repeat that performance without, then hey, go for it (the same way you could do so now, using the editor). But you still have to
do it.
Your mileage may, and likely does, vary.
