Announcements should only be posted by moderators

[kestasjk]

I'm an oddball on my generation, but as a high schooler I will note that I greatly prefer an on-site forum to discord or reddit. I don't think it needs much if any changing, but I do urge you not to remove any of it in favor of some "nuetral" social media platform.

Yep I like having our own forum too, it's not going anywhere, but I don't think it's going to grow the community here or that it's where things are going. People over the last decade have migrated to Reddit / Discord, that's where online gaming communities tend to end up these days and with those kind of trends you've got to roll with it / embrace it or get left behind. (Luckily it kind of takes care of itself, but we could embrace it more and try to integrate the site in a bit.)

But yeah not to worry; like with the old map even as newer functions come online the forum will stay.

[kestasjk]

This all raises super interesting questions about what WebDip should be and who it is for.

I love the old-fashioned early 2000s feel of the forum. I find it extremely refreshing in 2023. It definitely isn't the sort of thing that grows a community all on its own. But it's something unique that keeps me on the site during periods where I'm less active in actual games.

Yep agreed; as above the forum isn't going anywhere and I also enjoy the mid 2000s nostalgic feel.

WebDip could probably grow its player base by taking the backstabbr approach, but it seems like there's other risks to going down this path. Once we're all on Discord, why wouldn't we just play a Discord-enabled version of the game? Being too successful there might mean cannibalizing web-based games.

Well we've had a Discord for people to chat/organize for a long time and it hasn't cannabilized web-based games, it helps people organize games and exist across multiple platforms.
Interested to hear about Discord as a platform for people to play Diplomacy on directly; I thought it was just about hosting community chats / organizing games?


To me it's about focusing on what your platform does best: Discord can't be as good at hosting Diplomacy games with the UI/bots/variants/etc. webDiplomacy can't be as good as hosting a community/chat hosting area with channels, mods, notifications, mobile clients, integrations/commands/bots.

Also isolated communities for webDip,vDip,Backstabbr,PlayDip,etc are bad for everyone: Ideally there'd be a larger unified online Diplomacy community and people would use the platform that's best at whatever they want to do.

Also, I wonder how much market share WebDip could ever realistically take from Backstabbr and other established competitors, some of which are already years ahead in critical areas such as mobile development.

I want a bigger WebDip community because I think this is a fun website doing something unique and interesting. If WebDip were just a clone of other successful Diplomacy implementations, then at a certain point I would no longer be a WebDip booster - I'd have no reason to preference the site over other implementations. If I were very interested in faster games I'd just switch to the many existing Discord implementations. If I were interested in a better mobile experience, I'd just go to Backstabbr.

So the central question is: who is WebDip for? My gut feeling is that this site serves a different segment of players than other Diplomacy implementations. If I had to guess, the community skews towards players who are older, are nostalgic for how the internet was, and who prefer a smallish player base (the alternative being randomly matching with the hordes on backstabbr, never playing the same person twice, etc.). If WebDip exists to fill this niche, then it may forever be handicapped in its ability to grow. But if WebDip evolves and no longer fills this niche, is it even WebDip anymore?

Yep that's a fair take, but hooking in more into other social platforms doesn't mean the existing interface/community goes away: If new users come onboard to this site but were using a different interface/are part of a larger external community I think it would add to the site.
Bear in mind the vast majority of players on this site don't ever come to the forum; they're not part of the webDip community, but the online Diplomacy community, and that's where the growth is.
Doesn't mean no more webDip community, just that the platform has a broader appeal / more users.

Also we do have some things going for us:
- stability (less than backstabbr but more than others),
- variant support,
- bot development,
- instant no-account start/drop gunboat bot games on play.webdiplomacy.net,
- moderately active development,
- sandboxes,
- a mobile-friendly point and click board UI,
- no freemium / ads,
- open source / easily forkable.

Plus an API that allows anyone to develop a new UI that can run on the existing system, either on a fork or against webdiplomacy.net directly: Once a few gaps like user creation, game searching, and game joining are added to the API someone could e.g. write an app for iPhone say, and this new app wouldn't start off empty with another new community, but be able to build on webDip players, games, AI, mods, variants, etc.
This (if it plays out) means more players for this platform, fewer isolated communities, interfaces made and maintained by experts on that platform. More competition between user interfaces, less competition between different communities/platforms.

So I don't see webDip as giving a familiar retirement home to us old fogies (and the analytics don't bear that out). I think it's where some of the most interesting dev is happening.


tl;dr: It's not that we want to try and be more like other sites or disable anything here: But the online Diplomacy community (esp new players) will get more and more centred around modern social platforms that are best at hosting communities, and less fragmented across lots of platforms with legacy community features.
A more unified larger community is good for the hobby, means one community across many platforms, and players can go to whichever platform / interface is best for what they're interested in at the time.

[learnedSloth]

I like the asynchronous nature of bulletin boards, and that phpBB doesn't try to addict users.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

Thanks so much for all of the clarifications kestasjk!

I was wrong about the existence of Discord-based games -- turns out the one thing I was looking had a Game Master who was manually adjudicating orders 0.0

I'm curious whether this webDip Discord is the official one: https://discord.gg/Q6PtSZc

[kestasjk]

Thanks so much for all of the clarifications kestasjk!

I was wrong about the existence of Discord-based games -- turns out the one thing I was looking had a Game Master who was manually adjudicating orders 0.0

I'm curious whether this webDip Discord is the official one: https://discord.gg/Q6PtSZc

Yep no worries, I am optimistic for the future of the online hobby and webDip but progress is never as quick as you hope.

I'd say the Discord CaptainMeme runs is the most official, as he's a mod here, but we've not started an actual official Discord. I would possibly encourage people to use a general online Diplomacy Discord rather than a webDip specific one, as I feel it'll be more active / interesting, and allow more comingling of people between sites and build a larger community across all sites rather than lots of small communities between sites. (But no strong preference that's up to others)

edit: This is the Discord I usually go to, I didn't realise there was another: https://discord.gg/Pb86j9wj Not ideal that there's two just for webDip, and that one hasn't been active since 2019.

[wulfheart]

(the alternative being randomly matching with the hordes on backstabbr, never playing the same person twice, etc.)

Is backstabbr that popular?