Penalty for Helpful Players?

[Crazy Anglican]

I've noticed that there are several players who will jump in to accept an untenable position in a game (I believe, I've literally seen Brian Baru take on a one center power in CD) to help the game along. Are these players penalized with loss of ghost rating and an additional defeat on their stats when they voluntarily jumped in to take a position nobody expects them to win with? Is there a way to allow these players to accept the role as unranked without disrupting the game for others?

[CaptainFritz28]

This has been an ongoing issue observed many times on the threads. I fear your suspicions are correct - they do lose GR and their scores go down, whereas the player at fault of the problem to begin with gets away with nothing more than an RR decrease.

I suggest that when one drops out of a game, they are punished as if they had been defeated, and then when a new player fills the ranks they will not lose nor gain GR for that game.

[JP48]

Curious. What is the opposition to the proposal above? Just too much trouble to implement? Lack of interest?

[Aristocrat]

I think there is general agreement that people who drop out should be tagged for a loss. And, to be clear, they do lose their dipcoins, they just don't lose anything off their GR or profile record (coins being the longtime official point system on WebDip; GR being the informal one that was partially integrated a couple years ago). Yeah, it would suck if you get hit with a loss when something truly out of your control causes you to drop out, but I think the upside outweighs the downside here.

There is less agreement on the other half of the equation: whether people who join should be able to play without penalty if they lose. You need some kind of incentive for players to not play like absolute garbage or immediately hold the board hostage with threats of throwing or whatnot. I have noticed this happening with midstream joiners at a decent clip lately, and I suspect it would get far worse if people could start trying for moonshots with no downside. Of course, it also seems unfair that if someone picks up a 1-center DOA country that they would get penalized in GR. But the answer to this half of the equation requires a lot more nuance.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

Recently, the admins fixed the counter on our player profiles for "Civil disorders taken over:".

This doesn't fix the scoring issues, but at least it provides a record for how many open positions a player has taken on.

If I'm curious about a player's skill on this site, I typically look at their GR (not their dipcoins) and then make a very rough mental adjustment for how many CDs they've taken on.

This is, of course, very imperfect, not least because it's conceivable that a player could be selectively taking on those rare CDs that are actually better than the average starting position.