Thanks for those offering to join and help out! I'll give the rest of the day for F2Fers to join, and if I don't fill the game, I'll send one (or more) of you the info to join.

Wouldn't it make more sense to get experienced people on this site to play to "impress" the F2Fers, making us more legitimate from their perspectives?

@Zultar: that might scare them away...

My take on it, and this is mostly from hearsay and what I see on this site, is that online diploming is not as legit as F2F. So, are we not trying to legitimize this format (and increasing the talent pool) by inviting them to play here?
If that's the case, then you want to show off your best and brightest, don't ya?
At least our people should know stalemate lines and what to do to prevent solo in a gunboat.

I'm merely setting up a gunboat game so the F2Fers get used to inputting orders and how this specific site works. In a couple weeks I will start some "real" games that I currently intend to have 3 F2Fers play 3 webDippers along with me. I will be looking for highest GR ranked people as possible to show these F2Fers the quality of play on this site, but first things first.

Any other thoughts on this concept, the idea of pulling in F2Fers to webDip?

I would then run two concurrent games if the F2Fers are willing.
One with the highest GR ranked and one with top 100-150 GR, so they can get a sense of the variety of quality.

I was going to try to get F2Fers to play two games each, but we'll see. It's going to be a knock-off of my ABI, where everyone is super anonymous... Anyway, I want to get the "what are the red exclamation points about?" questions out of the way with a gunboat game beforehand...

@MM

Perhaps you should make these Global Press games instead of gunboat so that the new players can easily ask questions pertaining to the site?

They are relatively bright people; they'll figure it out.

Thanks for the suggestion, ab, but I was wanting the trial game to require as little attention as possible, just be about the website and getting used to the look and the different symbols, I think sending messages will be pretty easy once people are familiar with the format of things.

I'm still waiting on one F2Fer to join, then we'll get this game up and running.

For those in the game, feel free to PM me questions about how this site works (again, like "what are those red exclamation points all about?), but of course none of us are allowed to discuss moves for this gunboat game with each other...

If anyone in this game has questions about webDiplomacy, please post them here, rather than PM'ing me, so everyone can see what you are asking. Also, the only questions you are allowed ask on this thread are about the website, such as "Why are some checkmarks green and some are not?", meaning there is no asking something like, "If I use "X" to support hold at "Y" will "such and such" know I want to be allies?"

To be clear, in a gunboat you communicate with orders, so this last question I just mentioned could be a way to communicate with "such and such", you just won't know if or when such and such will accept, and if so for how long, such and such can stab you at any time just like in a normal press game.

One final note for webDiplomacy n00bs, if you want to see all orders on the map, you need to click the little box (with the arrow pointing up and to the right) under the map so that the map will be enlarged and there will be enough room to show all orders.

So, any *generic* questions about the webDiplomacy interface?! :-)

FYI - If everyone finalizes orders (clicks "ready" so their checkmark turns green), then the phase will process immediately, but if even one person just clicks "save" (so the red exclamation points go away and you get a check mark that is *not* green) without clicking "ready", the game will take the full phase length (24 hours for our game) to process... Some people will finalize during the week, but won't over the weekend, but in gunboat, there's much more finalizing quickly than in a regular press game...

You can also check out the FAQ's: http://webdiplomacy.net/faq.php

@Zultar - I'm pretty sure that if you put the top players on here up against even very good FTF players, the FTF players would get crushed more often than not. There are some different skills that you cultivate in each variant, and in both cases you only get better with practice. I'm well aware that I suck at online play. (Course I suck at both, so I'm a bad example!) I just don't practice it enough any more.

I've been arguing for years that neither is any better than the other, you just have to play differently. If you jump into another format and don't modify your play style, you're going to get punished more often than not.

One of the guys I play FTF with has a hilarious story about getting crushed in the finals of an online tournament a few years back, and basically getting criticized for playing like it was a FTF game. Which is exactly what he was doing, and is exactly why he lost.

So I assume "Draw" means "I vote to end the game". Is "Pause" "I need longer to enter my orders" ? And what about "Cancel" ?
Is there a key to the symbols used on the map anywhere ? I found the link to the actual orders entered, so I'm able to figure out what Ven and Mun did. Is a yellow arrow "support to move" and a green one "support to hold" ?
I hate the way all the pieces are the same colour...

http://webdiplomacy.net/intro.php shows all the symbols.

Draw ends the game and awards all surviving players an equal share of the pot.
Pause stops time from advancing until a vote to unpause passes.
Cancel ends the game and refunds all bets. The game doesn't appear in any statistics.

Draw/pause/cancel votes must be unanimous.

Thanks for the message Dys! My general sense (though very likely false, or at least off a ways) is that many F2Fers view F2F as the real game, as it was intended, and online diplomacy is some sort of red-headed step-child. I agree with you, personally, online versus F2F are two entirely different animals, extremely different, which is fascinating in and of itself since it's the same board and same rules. Anyway, after going to WACcon last weekend, my sense of most of those players was that online is merely viewed as "different" and not so much as "lesser", so that was very encouraging, at least to me, and is part of the reason I'm trying to pull a few of those people into the webDip community, they would certainly be a huge asset to all of us here.

@cbrand - Pause is used more for if you're going on vacation for a week, or there's a death in the family, and you need the game to stop for a certain amount of days. If you need more time to enter your orders, you're typically just out of luck and need to figure out how to find the time (or you'll NMR), unless you tell everyone it's final exam week and ask if you can get a pause for a few days, but pauses have to be unanimous.

The pieces are the same color, but the province that the piece is in is the color of who it belongs to. Don't hate! ;-)

As we get somewhat close to a deadline and one player has not entered moves, I should ask what happens if we don't submit our moves before the time. Does the machine rip the keyboard from our hands and we get no moves? Or is it more complicated (and less satisfying) than that?

If you don't submit your moves on time, then you simply don't move. If you don't log in at all twice in a row (a season and a retreat for example), it will result in a civil disorder (CD) where anyone can take over the position. This Italy player seems to want to cancel because he doesn't want to play as Italy. Poor him, the coward.

Going CD on purpose is more terrifying than anything the machine can do.

You are certainly harsh in your evaluations there Zultar!

It could be that he/she/me is new to Webdiplomacy and thought "cancel" might do something different, like cancel moves, or a draw vote or something like that. Which begs the question, is there any way one can "undo" clicking one of those vote buttons (pause, draw, cancel)?

Click to cancel whatever you voted for (pause/draw/cancel) and it would be undone.

Since it's a teaching game, I suppose they probably made a mistake with the interface or something.

@Cspieker, it's more fun to assume the worst and find out that you are wrong than to assume the best of people and almost always be disappointed. :)

Any thoughts on how to proceed? This is meant to be a teaching game, but the intent is also for people to submit orders... Maybe I should not have made it anonymous so we could have found out more easily (like with a PM) if Italy was having difficulties, and then more easily ask a question... Italy, feel free to let us know what's going on, you can do it on this thread, or maybe even PM someone like zultar and he can relay the message to keep you anonymous?

PS - To PM someone, click on their username and type a message in the large box, you can view PMs on your "home" page/tab.

If I can help someone, let me know. I'll do what I can.

Not to get too off-topic, but how is face-to-face and online that different? I have only played online, so explain it like you would explain to a child (I am actually trying to do the opposite of this post, get people who have only played online or never played to get together for a live game)