Vendettas

by **LotharBot** » Sun Sep 13, 2015 12:57 pm

yeah, there's typically a gentlemen's agreement that you won't pick something too wild in relation to your opponent's tastes, unless you both agree to making the vendetta extra wild. I won't drop Octave Pro on Jediluke. "You pick - I pick" is subject to some degree of veto power.

by **AOD_Hi** » Mon Sep 14, 2015 6:48 am

Bring back the Vendetta!
I think ideally all three should be played at once. But we all have unavoidable interruptions, so i think to keep things reasonable in this age of Descent perhaps over a week or two is fine.

by **Jediluke** » Mon Sep 14, 2015 7:39 pm

i do all my vendettas back to back

by **bahamut** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 11:25 pm

by **roncli** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 8:34 am

I'm actually in disagreement with Lothar here. If I'm going to play a Vendetta with someone, I'm going to play to win. Therefore, I'd want to play what I'm strongest in against that opponent. Whether that happens to be Skybox x5 or Octave Pro or The Minerva Shake, tough cookies for them, it's a Vendetta. Your opponent will pick their strongest as well, and on the third match THEN you can come to an agreement on level.

by **Jediluke** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 2:08 pm

roncli: that's fine...though you may find yourself with fewer pilots willing to agree to a vendetta under those terms.

by **LotharBot** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 2:24 pm

I'll quite willingly cancel a vendetta (and put someone on my "do not play unless challenged, and then make them wait the full 2 weeks" list) if their approach to level selection is beyond my comfort level and they're not willing to tone it down. Pick a Lobber level, and I'm done.

I play every Descent match to win, whether it's against Mark392 or my little sister. But "play to win" only goes so far. One of the expectations that goes all the way back to IDL is that if you were seen as an "angle pilot" -- that is, you were angling your matches toward some little subgame, trying to force people into unreasonable game circumstances -- people were free to refuse matches from you, and you weren't even allowed in the UT. That's part of why we made the core level list in the first place. Those are the only levels you can actually require someone to play in. You can't force someone to play D3 instareap on a laggy German server, even in a Vendetta.

There will be pilots who are willing to a Vendetta where "you pick" is from all 3 Descents, any levels, any weapons, any cheese. (Well, probably not -- most people would actually refuse a match in that one Lobber level with the shield-boost loop behind the puzzle that lets you rack up ~50,000 shields per minute.) But I figure "you pick" is generally restricted to levels that both players know and neither player has strong objections to, even if they don't particularly like it. And that's what I'll accept in a Vendetta challenge from another pilot. That's what I expect would go into the rules if we ever wrote up a codified set of rules -- something along the lines of "agree on the bounds of what's an allowable pick before starting".

by **Jediluke** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 2:41 pm

I agree with LotharBot on this one...

P.S. I'm ready for our Vendetta in MegaNysa x4, MegaPillbox4 & MegAthena x4

by **Drakona** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 2:43 pm

Yeah, I think choosing off a totally unrestricted list is asking for trouble. I have three sets of levels I do vendettas from. "Pick off the core list", "Pick anything we've both played a ladder match in before", and "Don't make me pick FRP."

by **roncli** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 5:34 pm

I challenge Lothar to Umbriel. ^_^ (j/k)

I can see that side of it, making Vendettas be in standard levels, makes the games kind of fair in a sense. Even from that list there are some levels I wouldn't choose against certain pilots and some that I would because I perceive a distinct advantage or disadvantage in said levels against the pilot.

Of course, I'm of the type who wouldn't accept Vendettas against pilots I really don't want to play to begin with (sorry golds, no vendettas from me for a while!), and the ones I do want to play I already know will either pick decent levels, or if they do pick off the wall levels, the pilot is fun enough that I don't care what level I play against them.