Major site scoring announcement!

Hi everyone! Apologies for the long post, but we have several new features and site changes to announce.

The easiest feature to announce is that now CD takeovers are free! Merry Christmas. CD takeovers still count for GR, but that’s something we hope to address in the future. This is a trial - if we see players abusing it (or new accounts taking over all the open positions and then CDing) we’ll figure something else out.

The most important feature to announce is the introduction of unranked games! Unranked games won’t count for GR, but you still need to bet on them. Don’t worry though - it’s not really a bet, and you’ll get it back at the end of the game (as long as you don’t CD). Try crazy strategies and organise ridiculous special rule games to your hearts content! All points are refunded at the end of the game.

The feature I am most excited about is the introduction of Sum-of-Squares (SoS) scoring. Sum of Squares is a centre-count draw system (where draws are scored by the number of centres each player has, rather than the number of people in a draw). This is an often requested feature, since many FTF players prefer centre count systems. We chose Sum of Squares because it’s also the system used by the World Diplomacy Championships (organised by our very own JimTheGrey) next year in Chicago. We’re partnering with WDC 2016, and hope to bring you some other very exciting announcements soon!

Sum of Squares works like WTA if there is a solo (the winner takes all the points). It’s different in a draw though -in a draw, each player gets a proportion of the pot scaled by:

(SC_coun^2) / (sum of all players (SC_count^2))

This basically means that you’re incentivised to be the biggest power on the board in a draw, and should produce some interesting dynamics once people get used to it. Currently, SoS games are not included in GR, although they may be at a later date.

Since we now have two scoring systems with a WTA mechanic, we’ve renamed WTA “Draw-Size Scoring (DSS)”, which more accurately reflects its behaviour. It is still the default for new games. In the future, we may make the default unranked games, although we’re not sure yet.

So that you can get a feel for both scoring methods, the “worth” readout on the members bar at the bottom of the game page now shows how much each position is worth if the game drew there and then (rather than if it finished a PPSC win, which is what it used to show, and never made sense for WTA games).

This brings me to PPSC. We’ve often had new users confused about the way that PPSC works in a draw, which is in large part down to the inaccurate name. We’ve renamed PPSC “Survivors-Win Scoring” or SWS.

However, an even bigger change is that we’ve temporarily disabled PPSC for new games. This is a big change, and it may not be permanent, depending on feedback. PPSC is a legacy webDiplomacy feature, and it doesn’t model any scoring system used in FTF games, nor does any non-webDiplomacy site use it. It’s definitely a variant scoring system, and not one used by any tournaments. It’s our hope that the introduction of a standard centre-count system combined with the addition of unranked games will eliminate the need for the PPSC scoring system.

This change allows us to position the site to be the best place to play Classic, standard diplomacy. If you still need your PPSC fix, we have a sister site in vDiplomacy.net - where PPSC will be still available as a variant.

This update is a fairly major overhaul of the way that scoring works - it’s been tested, but there may be some teething issues. Please let us know if there’s anything incorrect about score calculation (other than rounding errors - any fractions are always rounded up, which means that some games may pay out slightly more than the players put in).

Feedback welcome in this thread or at [email protected]