Dropping survives has never been mentioned; not sure where that's come from.

Survives are worthless. You lost anyway, you were defeated. May as well combine the two.

@A Tin Can

Thanks. Sorry if I overreacted. Things have been pretty wonky lately, though. You'll have to admit.

=-)

I really like Tas' suggestion of points for survival (PFS) as an alternative name for SWS.

I'm sorry that the new name seemed contentious - we weren't trying to make a slur when we called it SWS. I don't really mind what it's called, as long as it's clear.

On reflection "Survivors-win scoring" is somewhat misleading, since survives are still survives, not wins. Points for Survival clears this right up.

Ah, I understand why Al got so mad. He thinks throwing a game and getting a survive is apparently better than a defeat. As he pm'd me about my apparently horrendous defeat rate. The separation of the two actually places incentives on players to throw a game in hopes of surviving, which is sad.

Funny, he messaged me telling me I was terrible too!
Of course, he was much more polite in game, check it out: gameID=172382

(I'm honestly impressed he could make so many posts in such a short time, as someone who posts a lot on the forum I have fought with it's "You need to slow down!" never nearly as effectively as this recent demonstration)

I'm sure a high survive rate is something to be very proud of Al. Let's play together sometime, I'll make sure it gets even higher for you.

A_Tin_Can: Please take a look at threadID=1331433, an even better and clearer suggestion than PFS.

Thanks JECE. I think that "proportional victory" suffers from the same problem as "survivors win". We're not counting survives as wins in the stats, so I think the name "points for survives" keeps that clear without making a potential confusion about how games will be recorded.

Seriously. Who thinks that getting 5 centers when someone gets 18 means that you had a 5/24 "victory" and they had an 18/34 "victory"?!

*5/34

Strong second FTW!

In a vast world of different personalities, there are people that value the 5 centers they had at the end over the other guy that had 1 center.

The losing person with 5 SCs left at the end failed worse than the person with 1 SC because they had more resources and still couldn't stop the solo.

We could make a system that gave anyone who still had centers at the end equal amounts of points, even the winner, and there would be people who liked it. Doesn't mean it makes a lick of sense or should be on the site.

You were not asking whether it should be on the site or whether it made sense, you were asking if there was anyone that thought a certain way. There are.

Sorry, that's a figurative idiom. It's not a literal question. There's people who think it's OK to multi/meta, but if I ask "Who here thinks that's OK?!" doesn't mean I'm actually polling, I'm expressing disbelief and despair.

@ATC. Is your desire to bring the game here closer to the F2F experience? If so, I think you need to consider other things as well. In F2F, there is no diplomatic negotiations during retreat and or build phases and those phases are MUCH shorter in duration. I think those things should apply here too, and it would make game duration that much shorter and not allow people to hold games hostage

Not hold games hostage^^

I strongly agree with ssorenn's comments just there. Actually I've seen more FTF players complaining about the fact that this site allows negotiation during build phases, than I ever heard complain about PPSC.

A win is a win
A draw is a draw and not a win.
If you win you get to call all others looser.
If you survive it can be an achivment but you still lost.
If your eliminated you can still be a winner on a moral hround, that is if game end in a pdv (premature draw vote) then they loose and you win cause your not borna chicken.

Speaking entirely for myself, I think it's pretty obvious that some things need to be more closely aligned to the game rules as they're written down (which parallels but != the FTF game). At some point, our site also screwed up auto-disbands, thankfully that's fixed now. Another example is the (extant) bug that a victory can be achieved before a retreat phase. This is clearly a break with the official rules, and would be a serious annoyance if we would ever have the ambition of organising something uber-serious, such as a parallel online WDC (fuck yeah!). So I for one am glad that we're moving closer towards 'official' Diplomacy.

There's philosophical considerations. How close are we willing to go to this official Diplomacy version? Negotiations during builds and retreats are a good example. And conversely, how many distractions from this competitional Diplomacy should we allow. People have earlier suggested the slippery slope of abandoning variants and abandoning gunboat. It's my personal view that we can certainly have distractions, *as long as* the core of the game, and the competitional part of Diplomacy is the main attraction.

Interestingly, the philosophical angle is entirely dwarfed by the practical angle. Our main bottleneck is not lack of vision but lack of programming hours. Because of this, we've been working according to some very agile principles: doing the things that we feel adds the most value *right now*. The work we do isn't logically lined up from A to B to C and onwards. No, some things are bumped up as value increases and bumped down as it decreases. And sometimes, things are bumped up just because some dev feels like it. For a site run entirely on volunteers, and entirely free (I heard that recently playdip is fully pay-to-play, so we might be pretty unique), I think we're still going pretty strong as dev priorities go.

i applaud ATC for all his work, but if i may ask a question, What would the monetary cost be to get a programmer to do all that is necessary, to get to where most things on the to-do list are done? Is there any idea?

Any programmer who came in would first have to read all the current code to understand it, which in itself would be no small feat. Then they would have to add all the changes we desire, and test them for bugs. All of this adds up to a hell a lot of hours, meaning the cost would be... significant.

And then there's the ethical question of asking ATC to work for free whilst paying someone else.

I'd be happy to pay a little if it helped pay for a programmer.

If you find out how much a programmer would cost for a set amount of work; based on this we would also pay ATC as well for his past work.

A round of funding from site users and players could support this?

I have a suggestion for the mod team. I understand how swamped you all are; but if we are talking about moving closer to a hub of classic diplomacy then shouldn't our variants be all based on the classic map? I mean there are tons of interesting and fun ones to employ. we could have the 2 player variant as described by the rulebook, 3 player, 4 players and so on. then we could have Fog of War, Crowded, Chaos, and Build anywhere.

As i said, i applaud ATC for all his work. I wont speak for him, but it sure seems as his donation of time was for his desire to make this a better place....AND HE HAS DONE THAT!!!!! My guess is that he has RL work as well. Maybe for the right price, he would undertake the task, alleviating the need for outside help. I dont know his schedule, you'd have to ask him :))

these give variants while not straying from the classic map.