Also, now that Team Brazil is officially in the finals, my two cents on the whole issue around Team California being targeted and the goal of pursuing more anonimity, without yet considering the impacts of BlackJack's words.

Essentially, while it was admittedly easy to guess other player's identities in the Groups stages, due to the sheer gap of skill between players, the same does not hold true in the finals. Of the 28 players moving on to the finals, 14 are in the top 50 (by GR), and 22 in the top 204.

Not only that, but, apart from the last, or last 2, game(s), any plan of action based on targeting one specific player regardless of its in-game soundness is very likely do be detrimental to those who employ it, as there will be no lack of skilled players to take advantage of any strategically ill-conceived plans.

That considered, it seems to me that, if Team California decides to viciously attack Team Mid-Atlantic, it will likely be more harmed itself by this choice than it will be able to harm Team Mid-Atlantic. Thus, in light of the self-destructive nature of the idea, I don't see why it should not be allowed. Especially as forbiding Team California from doing so might allow them to claim, correctly or not, this was an unfair decision, whilst allowing it to take place is unlikely to actually weaken the TD's team.

I'm thrilled to move on from this game it was by far the least fun I've ever had playing a game of diplomacy. France was clearly and plainly incompetent. This was clear in 1901. It was unbelievable how desperate he was to convoy to Portugal. FWIW, blackjack, that's not a good move. It's a huge telegraph of an attack on England *and* it makes you vulnerable to a stab from Germany (and it let Italy know you were going to be a juicy target, which actually did play out in that game). Not a good combination. You are much better off just stabbing in Spring 1902. I promise you it did not give you an edge and it did not catch anyone off guard.

So then I played for a few years with Germany and Russia not messaging me at all and France dumb as rocks and obsessed with accomplishing his pre-game plan of convoying onto my island even though he's literally getting killed by Italy, and then Germany starts dying but refuses to give up London to disentangle even though it's abundantly clear that I would want to go west if I was given the chance, and then Italy is trying to solo but refuses to consider any options that don't give him a build that turn, and then the game is finally drawn.

So anyway, my takeaways are this:
- it was horrible that the password to the game was "beatcalifornia", especially when right after that both of our full press players got blitzed relentlessly from 1901.
- it's hard to disentangle bad play from targeting, but when literally no one in the west is messaging me for years on end and I'm getting messages like "I know what I'm doing isn't best for me, but I'm doing it anyway", that's some kind of failure in the tournament. It's hard to pinpoint the conspiracy when you aren't a part of it, but at the very least, I think Vash as Russia not messaging me for years on end even though I could clearly help him makes it pretty clear that his team had an explicit goal to knock our team out (and this was confirmed to us via PM).
- I don't really have a problem with being targeted. My personal take is "fair enough". I did my own leaning on the meta when I took my pause when my position was weakest for no other reason than to give the meta a week to change. Rather than whether or not this behavior should be allowed, my hope is that the takeaway story from this game is that it's not worth betting your whole game on being able to knock me out, because I'm not going down easy. :-)

"I think Vash as Russia not messaging me for years on end even though I could clearly help him makes it pretty clear that his team had an explicit goal to knock our team out"

You clearly haven't played with Vash before.

^^^^

Vash thinks diplomacy is just gunboat, he hasn't figured out the different settings yet.

I've played with Vash before; I already had a full picture of how terrible he is:

gameID=148522

Hmm....I had the same experiences with vash

I agree with DO

I don't know what you guys are talking about. I press the enter button at the end of every message. How are they not sending?

I have to confess I enjoyed playing with Vash, he and uclabb are the only ones making some sense on that game..

And poor Turkey too, I really liked his press even when we crushed him.

@Uclabb: I have won games where I started by picking up Spa and Por with aremies. My fleet hung around in Mid, and I build only one or zero units, (wavied one or two builds). It works if all players are good. All you enemies know that of they commit against you, you can throw up two builds in their disfavour next year. Played well they start fighting each other meanwhile. Then you decide who to join and build fleets or armies depending on what you decide. Not very standard vanilla, but fun and works against good players.

Uclabb, I remember that game! England stabbed me and practically threw the game to Austria. That game sucked.

A couple of comments:

I couldn't agree more about Vash's awfulness, but the game uclabb linked seemed to be far more his own fault than Russia's.

Group C had similar passwords to group A, targeting my team, and other than A_Tin_Can being a massive douchecanoe and addressing our player by name in 1901 (he also attacked him, but that bit, while similarly boatlike, didn't seem metagamey) and some pesky people trying to stop us from soloing, I didn't get the impression that we were targeted at all. We also did some intensive investigation into the accusations when they were made and didn't see evidence of anything.

I have to agree that the Lisbon leap thing is kind of lame and obvious. It also felt like a lot of people were doing it in these games. Someone who cares more than me should check how it worked out.

As a player, I encourage teams Mid-Atlantic and California to target each other ruthlessly and without regard for their own well-being in the finals.

What looks like the biggest surprise of the tournament out of the group stage? What team was the biggest overachiever?

To kinda clarify what ghug meant by "intensive", we handed over the entirety of our personal team hangouts messages to the moderator team. As TD and as a former mod, I take metagaming accusations very seriously, and saw to it that my team was put under a closer scrutiny than a regular team would have been. As a player, I would appreciate it if the accusations were dropped, as they have been found insubstantial and detract from the results.

I don't think I consented to handing over my personal communications.

By seeding, Team Sweden was the only team that made the final outside of the top seven. By player skill and actual expectation though, I think the biggest overachiever was team Greater Lakes.

@ghug, do you mean Team Great Lakes or Team Greater Lakes?

He means Greatest Lakes

I definitely think overall Sweden takes the overachiever status compared with GR ranking and then making the final in the way they did. It was quite an accomplishment, although I think they may fairly under-seeded by the GR.

I might be biased, but I think Canada did OK.

Are we allowed to forfeit if we become completely overwhelmed and afraid by the trash talk on here? Are there formal forfeit papers to submit, or can we just skulk away quietly?

Interesting how Team Great Lakes outperformed Team "Greater" Lakes

I mean greater lakes did finish last. Clearly this is because they tempted fate with their name.

Agh leave us alone you bullies

True Vash.

Are any teams up for a losers bracket btw?

MKE is on hiatus and I'm never playing public press again.

I think we are also missing our PP player.

If most teams feel the same way about PP we could just omit it. Or we could even pull in the subs and left out people to fill the gaps. Thoughts?

To be fair, I think your problem was less public press, and more an Italy that was in Munich in 1901.