Discontinuing the ranking arena

I’ve decided to stop working on the driver ranking arena. I already have an MVP that works well enough to kinda sorta determine which drivers are good and which are bad, but it’s not robust and it just sums up rankings rather than implementing an actual Elo algorithm. The reason I’m not going to continue working on it is that it seems like a lot of work, and I don’t think that it’ll provide any value. Like, at all.

The root of the problem is that Hadronize just isn’t a strategic-enough game. There’s certainly some strategy, of course, and probabilistic modeling, but luck plays just as much of a factor. The cleverest Hadronize driver can still routinely lose to the dumbest one just due to slightly bad luck. So it doesn’t really make sense to build tooling for strategic bots if the strategy is not a very big aspect of the game.

Thinking back, I’m not really sure why I decided to start working on the driver arena in the first place. It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time even though I now realize that it would be kind of useless.

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Anyways, I also created two new drivers.

• The first is called Kingslayer, and it just tries to steal from the player who’s currently winning. It’s not very good at actually winning, but it does make things more challenging for the other players.
• The second is called Gentleman (aka charm). It’s obsessed with trying to collect charm quarks, because its a charming gentleman. I made it as a joke because I thought it was funny, but to my complete surprise it turns out to be a pretty good strategy? Not charm quarks in particular, but trying to collect a specific flavor of quark at all costs turns out to be surprisingly effective. It consistently wins more often than EVan, the driver that I specifically built to be a good strategy and that actually does probabilistic expected value calculations.

I think that next I’ll start working on the README and documentation, because I haven’t updated the README in like 3 weeks and it’s extremely outdated.