I hate such behaviour and have been railing against it in particular in live games where its even more common. It's poor sportsmanship, poor behaviour, and all around not fun nor legitimate.

There are three (very soft) methods around this I've seen:
-Password protected games with people who seem or known to be trustworthy. Hard and tedious to set up, and near impossible for live games.
-Allow public messaging to communicate draws/cancels. However, this is not true gunboat and there's nothing to stop it from becoming an ACTUAL public press game, which isn't the worst thing I suppose.
-Play games with bets of 101 or more to set a high bar of entry, the idea is two fold: 1) only players who are relatively experienced and consistent should have enough to join 2) with such a large pot the temptation to NMR willingly is drastically lowered. Of course, not all of us have that many points (yet) to throw around...

None of these are particularly good solutions.

I came here to play Diplomacy, but the amount of times the game I end up playing is NOT Diplomacy, but a bastardization, is unfortunate.

i'd love to see who the two players are when the game's over.

Other websites that shall not be named have "1st turn NMR protection" for this sort of thing, but I'm not acutely aware of its actual workings or any philosophical or technical reasons it hasn't been adopted here.

I raised a similar point in the forum last month as I keep seeing the same thing happen. It gets old very fast

So here's the problem with auto cancel. Lets say I hate playing France with a passion. I join a game, I get France. If there is auto cancel then all I have to do is NMR the first turn so the game is cancelled, there's no record since the game gets cancelled. So I can do this over and over with impunity.

jmo,

Surely they can be treated as "resigned" and the game drawn instead? It doesn't have to be literally cancel as the current cancel button works.

It doesn't have to be drawn as we know draws today either for those who care about their percentages. The point is that any system which can detect who NMR'd, for any particular outcome designed (whether cancelled or drawn or such) can also know exactly who to punish at the same time.

@jmo

Other site that shall remain nameless also allow you to pick your country, might this help with not getting your hated country and rage quitting?

Other site remaining nameless has had an insane number of metagaming cases with people picking spots next to players they like/dislike with pre game intentions already set.

When Reliability ratings are done they will allow people to set games to only be join-able by people who rarely, if ever, CD.

I like getting a random country - makes it more interesting. Is there a real penalty for abandoning a game?

Its a non-anon game so you don't have to wait to see the players. Its also 50 which isn't that low and enough I had assumed to deter such behaviour. I feel no guilt disclosing the game to the forum - gameID=149919 since it is about to be stalemated and drawn now inevitably.

jmo - I understand the problem with people intentionally NMRing to avoid having to play a non-favourable country. However there are ways around that.
a) Auto-cancel does not return the points to the NMRd player.
b) If cancellation is because of CD - not just are the points not returned, but a penalty is imposed - though I understand both these are limited by the fact that webDip returns a minimum of 100 to everyone.
c) If two, and in this case THREE players CD (not just NMR) then at least auto cancel kicks in?

@ssorenn

I'm not a fan of that at all.

It further splinters the player base between random and pick players, it caves to childish behavior, and I feel like it would only reduce the problem trivially.

I am practically giddy at the idea of RR being a game-setting option. can't come soon enough.

I agree with Jmo. I think RR will solve a lot of this, and I think auto cancel gives too much of an easy/tempting out to players who start poorly.

If we change anything about the way cancel works, I'd like to see resigns from cancelled games kept in a players record. Currently there are players with inflated draw percentages in their profile due to draws that were only draws because players wanted to make sure resigns show up in the right places.

Was just a thought. I agree that there's a terrible problem, I would like it resolved as much as anyone.

What about if a 01 CD happens, all other players stay, look for new player, for specific amount of time, and countries get reshuffled. Game goes on.

RR as a condition to new games is unacceptable. It will foster elitism and not an environment to develop new players. Each player will go to the mods and get their situation excused from their record, and then it will be a game of which excuse is better than the other. Which is real. This is happening now, no? I know things like this are being expunged from players records already.

And then the poor sap who has a real life problem and can't log in, makes a CD streak with 6 games he's joining, and tanks his RR. Comes back after life is stable, and finds out he can't join any games because the bar is set too high.

And so he creates a low RR game.

I can't wait to join in that one.

I think the benefits of RR as a game setting far outweigh the potential downsides. The details with new player RR would have to be worked out, but the general idea is that new players would have to establish a high RR, since it is new players who are the large majority of CDs in games.

As far as excuses are concerned, the mod team is not in the business of excusing CDs due to real life issues. We will occasionally step in and pause games for people with emergencies, but only if notified before the fact, not after. What happens in real life to cause you to CD or miss a turn is not our concern and we do not "expunge" items from a player's statistical record.

Just your own, huh?

If by fostering elitism you mean fostering highly reliable players, then that's a good thing. Mods can deal with the poor saps on a case-by-case basis. That's less policing for them overall since most of the time it's multi/extreme meta and not poor saps.

You could also do something like put a hard cap on the acceptable bet amount for any given player, say 5 + 5 * number of completed games. Completed games can serve as a proxy for reliability that always goes up. Poor saps can rehabilitate this more easily than a percentage rating.

I think the concept that your reliability is tracked, important, and that a fundamental part of playing web-based diplomacy, here or anywhere else, is that your reliability is impacting 6 other people and of the utmost importance for the game and hobby as a whole. I can't see how RR as a game-join condition doesn't foster new players. How does scoffing at RR as a factor or actually-mattering-statistic foster new players?

Not to mention it can already be done manually as mentioned above, but there's simply too large a manual labor barrier; it would be a quality of life change not a fundamental change to what's possible.

And, this also eliminates the ability for cheaters to start up in a game betting 100 (or even 20 ) as a shortcut to getting lots of points (and then NMRing when things go poorly) which screws up people who have built up their reliability over time.

2WL -- I know that Defeats, etc are adjusted upon request if the game is found out to have multi's etc in them. This always bothered me because I've had results of a Defeat/Survival with players that have later been banned for meta/multi, but this has not been expunged from my record. Only the whiny ones get this treatment.

Based on this, I can only assume the RR would have a similar administration.

@ssorenn -- You're 87% RR man, and one of the more reliable people on the site. Look around and most people are between 95-100%. You'd get cut from many of the games starting at 90%+.

Sorry, but you need to be online more. Somehow (do you ever leave)?

That number has not changed since they put them on our profiles. In the beginning of 2014. I don't play live anymore, and that's where my only CDs came from in my first weeks on site.

Many good points raised above.
The notion that RR is elitism would be no different from saying high ranked GR games fosters elitism which is no different from saying that any ranking or merit based system in the world fosters elitism. Its a ridiculous argument.
Especially in a game in which people invest months per game and NMRs can ruin everything.

Statistics, including defeats, are not adjusted because of multis because our policy is to cancel games with blatant cheating *only* if the game is still ongoing.

I would be against a system where players end up appealing to change their record. I would be for a system where a player's RR recovered over time.

As you point out ag, any solution to RR would have to be robust to single events, too. Missing six turns all in the same day probably should have a similar impact as missing one. "how many turns have you missed" and "are you likely to NMR in this game" are different questions, although the first one isn't a terrible proxy.

vDip has a feature that (if I recall correctly) prevents users from joining more than a certain number of games at once until they've played a few games. Something like that might help reduce new player NMR, or it might not.

Regardless, it's clear that there also exist players who are not new and regularly NMR. That's fine- I can't begrudge anyone for not making webdip a priority. But I'd rather those people play with others who also aren't making it a priority. RR would encourage that.

GR suffers from the same "but who would play with the newbies" argument. I think there's probably a good way to encourage established players to play with new players, but RR and GR are not the answer. Perhaps a section on the stats page- "played with X new accounts this year" or something? I don't know.

This is exactly why I set up "Will you be my friend?" games. I try to populate the with 50/50 old/knew players.