Leagues are where i hit my limits, that's just meta taken to a way too extreme level. Play the same six people in four back-to-back-to-back-to-back games?

Just kill me now.

I've always been a play-the-player kinda strategist so i totally get off on the meta aspect of it. I like the player identify cracking and doing homework on our competition, had fun with working the numbers to help us adjust our goals as the situation changed, and even enjoyed helping architect the complicated meta strategy at the cross game level to ensure we navigated our team tempo correctly so that our meta target was as conservative as we could make it. No easy task. Events in one game were regularly rippling over into other games as players teammates get eliminated and add additional pressure on them or solos cause other players to start dragging their feet towards draws. I've little doubt some game pauses were used for purposes of dragging out a game or delaying a revealing of a games winner.

It's very complex and sophisticated if you fully embrace it, and I loved every second of it.

"I've little doubt some game pauses were used for purposes of dragging out a game"

Guilty as charged

My team didn't really know the identities of many in the Finals, so I wanted to wait and see what exactly my neighbors were playing for

Game pauses being used for metagame purposes is terrible. A pause disrupts the flow of the game and should really only happen when someone has a legitimate unforeseen emergency. That's the sort of rules abuse that makes me not want to play in this tournament again. I don't remember the details, but I'm fairly certain it happened in my game.

The point of the tournament should be to test people's ability to play Diplomacy, not their ability to manipulate an honor code or a particular online technology. If that's what you want, then be forthright and call it the World Cup of Diplomacy, Online Sleuthing, and Strategic Inconveniencing.

Understood, not everybody embraced it and for some it may have became a point of frustration or a crutch blame their failure on. The reality is the high level meta is for the most part only a difference maker as you neared the end of the tournament, for every game along the way it still came down to the best players winning.

If you walk into a team based tournament and tried to play your game in a silo then you simply missed the point and in my opinion missed out on a very interesting aspect of this tournament.

@maddotter - each person gets one no-questions-asked guaranteed pause. And no-questions-asked means exactly that. If they use it for meta purposes, they're taking a gamble that they won't need to use it for real. For me, it ended up being a welcome break in the middle of a 7 month long game, and didn't affect very much, besides preventing me from burning out.

But VI is absolutely right, and it's what I tried to explain to everyone in the Group Stage: meta isn't a difference maker until the very end of the tournament, after most games are finished or nearing finish. So if you just speed through your game each round, there's essentially no meta in your tournament experience. The only thing I will try and find a fix to is making it harder for people to identify each other in the games. But that's hard on a site where people know each other's playing styles.....and professions (like Balki dropping he was a lawyer in 1902)

I wonder if it's possible to design the tournament so that identity detection doesn't help? One possibility is to have the team-membership be the anonymous bit, rather than who is in which game.

That would fall apart once we got to the finals (before really, because a lot of people know each other). It would also make it significantly harder to organize teams.

Is it that even that needed? Our team had all the meta heat on us in the world and still seemed to do ok, same with Team California in 2012 which was also full of heat magnets. I had no indications that anybody less then the best teams had made it to the finals and the quality line was very high and every year.

What's broke that we're looking to fix?

It really depends on what you want the tournament to be. At the moment it's largely a competition among Webdip insiders, who have advantages for technical reasons as well as a culture that accepts things like a strategic week-long pause (in the game I played, this happened after just one week of play). If you want to expand the tournament, to attract *and retain* more casual players or ftf-ers, then you need to find ways to keep the tournament from feeling like an insiders club.

I'm sorry to have to say it, but these sound like you're trying to justify a bad result. There's benefits to be had by understanding and playing the meta, but it wasn't at your game level or the way in which you're attempting to infer. I may be different as i tend to homework my enemies, but for most people knowing who's sitting across from you won't make much difference it's really just about that final tournament stretch. At that point, you make up your own team so i can only recommend that being the nature of this tournament as it is that you find one person from Chicago who has some home field familiarity to round out your squad. Not everybody on our team did, one of the guys on our team has only ever played 7 press games on this site before this tournament.

WebDip gets by on it's more then enough merits, it really doesn't need to bend to such an extent to 'retain' casual players who feel the world doesn't cater enough to them. For guests and FTF'ers, we have speciality tournaments (ODC) to accommodate that crowd if this doesn't feel suited. There's more then enough interest in this and in my opinion i believe it's one of the more well thought out and interesting online tournaments out there. WebDip tends to really do a good job with the tournaments.