New blog and plan moving forward

• Brampton Booster
• Jan 03, 2015
• Comment

We are back in business! This is the new location of my old Brampton Booster. As you may or may not tell, there are a lot of exciting details for everyone. The ones that would concern you the most are:

• Faster loading times. Wordpress and other bloatware trimmed out to speed up blog.
• No Ads. This goes hand in hand with faster loading times, but now you have no obstructions in reading solid articles
• IntenseDebate comment system. Has a ranking system and smart threading to make sure good discussions stay on top.
• Interactive elements. Check out the Hypergeometric Calculator on the side, or the program below.
• Open source. The blog is hosted on Github, so just head over to my repo to suggest changes or use ideas for your own blog.

My philosophy is having informative and expansive content in a straight and legible content being most important for readers. Informative is obvious, as that’s what blogs should be made for, and expansive because I want to impart learning as well. While to-the-point content is critical I find it equally important that readers find what they need to find quickly (the legibility part). This is why my blog has a small navbar and quick access elements so you should be only 2 clicks away from every single article I publish¹.

1. Interactive elements

In most blogs you just read text, view images and maybe watch a video or two. I want some form of involvement from the reader (if they feel up for it of course). The goal of this blog is to learn the theory and practice it. Once you understand it, you can apply it in all sorts of ways and converse with a larger group of people. Principally you should never trust me! Do your own math and prove it yourself!

So one of the ways I aim to implement proactive learning is providing tools for you. For example, let’s take the Hypergeometric Calculator on the right. I say that the chance to get at least one trigger from a twin drive check is approximately 55%. Can you verify this is in fact correct? Well you know a standard deck contains 50 cards, with 16 of them triggers. So you can put z=50 and and w=16. Twin drive involves removing 2 cards from the deck so y=2. Lastly we want at lease 1 trigger so we set u=1 and hit <pre>Evaluate</pre> and get “Chance >= 1: 54.2%”. Pretty solid. Now try it at turn 3 where you are expected to have 36-38 cards and 11-13 triggers.

Hell, you might not even use it for card games. Say 80% in your class of 30 had a cold and you want to pick out 3 students. If you put in the numbers correctly, then almost half the time all 3 students would have a cold! ² So you can play around with this and see different percentages. You can then look at the source code and understand how the answer is evaluated. Or you can search online for a different site and compare values. So have fun and learn the math at the same time.

2. Testing Database

Being open and transparent is necessary for trust. There are many people who put time and effort into meticulously testing many different decks and don’t want to have their results taken at face value. I am currently developing a program that will track every game played and its various notes, so you can expect to find quality information before you decide to invest money into a specific build.

While it will start out restricted to invitation only (in terms of adding to the database), I hope to release a public key so anyone willing can contribute to the testing. However, everyone is able to view the results of the the cardfights. Given some database experience you can send specific queries by Python integration to get detailed information on whatever it is you are looking for.

Since most of the population do not deal with databases every once in a blue moon I’ll post neat graphs that display expected and unexpected trends in the decks tested. All of this is backed by a secure server and frequent backups and more importantly, people who volunteer their time into improving the vanguard community.

3. Reader Input

And of course if anyone has any suggestions they want to make do not hesitate and do send the love (or hate) my way. It makes you feel good, it’ll make me feel good ³. I know the vanguard community is stagnating a bit maybe because you are being constantly let down by Bushiroad but the game and its design is great and you should thank whomever for crafting such a unique set of mechanics ⁴ that was not a stage for promoting all the anime they sponsor (not hating on Weiss Schwarz of course)

And as it shall, the comment box is right below.

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