Looks good tooo me ..Id rather try sometn=hing new like the score sytems that seem more equitable than the old PPSC. As to free cd's well lets give it a crack as the current one seems flawed lets try something new . Exceelent work in all and thanks for the opportunity.

Use the RR and invites if your worried about CD's

I'd go so far as to suggest that takeovers be GIVEN points (perhaps: original points minus current points = cost to takeover), but that they only be open to people with reliability rating over a certain level regardless of the original game RR requirement.

Another option is to allow players to go into negative points - which are after all only non-scaled rating system so 0 or 1000 or 1000000 is just a number to avoid them only taking over weak positions because that's all they can afford.

Smokey Gem is absolutely right - if you are indeed worried about CDs and/or RR, a private game is ALWAYS the best option.

No. Takeovers giving them points is an outright incentive for multis or people unsure what they're doing to take over 1 SC positions, and then be able to join more new games to ruin.

Right now, being free, we think that this is the best way to balance encouraging experienced takeovers with not causing the other effects.

As for negative points - they aren't designed to go negative, and I don't think redesigning the points system is a good use of ATC's time.

Plus, what happens if people default on those point debts, and just keep spiralling further into debt? Would the central modding system have to bail them out? 2ndWhiteMerkel would not be pleased.

Fantastic news.

Thank you powers-that-be for all your hard work! I for one am looking forward to these changes!

with CD's free, there should definitely be some mechanism to prevent a noob from joining a ton of CD positions and messing things up. maybe higher point count or higher RR enables more simultaneous CD takeovers.

I am confused why Kremmen woule have an issue with a player taking over a terrible position he doesnt care about.
Does the computer who places no orders every phaee care more about the game?

This looks like a great change! I'm definitely in favor of keeping PPSC/SWS off the list. To me, sum of squares seems to do everything that PPSC did, without encouraging players to throw solos. Unranked games sound great too. Is it difficult to create unranked games without any points? For example by making the bet size zero?

I would suggest some minor changes to the language. Specifically, I would change

"This setting determines how points are split up if/when the game draws.

In Draw-Size Scoring, the pot is split equally between the remaining players when the game draws (this setting used to be called WTA).

In Sum-of-Squares scoring, the pot is divided depending on how many centers you control when the game draws.

In both Draw-Size Scoring and Sum-of-Squares, any solo winner receieves the whole pot.

Unranked games have no effect on your points at the end of the game; your bet is refunded whether you won, drew or lost.

Default: Draw-Size Scoring"

to

"This setting determines how points are divided when the game ends.

In both Draw-Size Scoring and Sum-of-Squares, any solo winner receives (note:there was a typo here) the whole pot.

In Draw-Size Scoring, the pot is divided equally between the remaining players when the game draws (this setting used to be called WTA).

In Sum-of-Squares scoring, your share of the pot depends on how many centers you control when the game draws. (Note: you could spell this out, i.e. your share of the pot is proportional to the square of the number of centers you control when the game draws).

Unranked games have no effect on your points at the end of the game; your bet is refunded whether you won, drew or lost.

Default: Draw-Size Scoring"

Great work guys. Seriously.

Nice changes! Most important is the elimination of PPSC. IMO, this will also encourage CD takeovers because someone with 1 SC can be an integral part of a draw and earn big webDip points as a result.

I'm a little cooler to SoS scoring, but I think it is a reasonable way to go for those who want to try it out. I think it will lead to increased skullduggery as players head into draws and may lead to more outright victories. This could be a good thing. Abandon trust all ye who enter SoS games! ;)

I play diplomacy regularly, but to a newcomer to the forums, I had literally no clue what any of the abbreviations meant, except for SC = supply center. So it would be helpful to forum noobs I guess if you wrote out at the beginning what all of those letters jumbled together stood for. Thanks.

Ding dong PPSC is dead!

@billywu

CD = Civil Disorder (Resigned)
GR = Ghost Ratings
FTF = Face-To-Face (meeting up and playing the board game of Diplomacy)
WDC = World Diplomacy Championship
WTA = Winner Takes All (scoring system)
PPSC = Points Per Supply Centre (Defunct scoring system)

Great work TinCan, thanks for all you do. This is a welcome improvement.

@Kremmen - it seems as though your gripe is with the ability to take over CD'd positions, rather than making it easier. It is the position of many on the site that a country with an owner is preferable to one left in CD

This is awesome news. Thank you much for the continued coding work ATC!

I will point out that I see free CD's ending out badly. And let me explain a case where I could see happening. Please keep in mind that new players RR starts high so saying RR is a preventive measure is inaccurate.

"Some of the sites top players arrange a 1,000 point buy in game and for whatever reason 1 of the players CD's. A random brand new player walks in and takes over a good position, and then refuses to cancel the game, instead insisting on a draw. The player absolutely does not deserve any right to the pot and can hold a game hostage."

The other problem is that until GR is changed to stop CD's from counting you will have aspiring GR players foaming at the mouth to jump into CD positions that they are not qualified for. This could and probably will easily lead to metagaming where if a terrible GR ranked player takes over a position with multiple high ranked players you will have 2 forms of metagaming. The high class players will want the low class one eliminated before any form of draw. And the low class player will want the highest ranked GR person eliminated to benefit the most.

Now in the previous system this was still a risk, but not nearly as much because the point requirement stopped very low ranked players from jumping into games way above their skill level.

A way to work around this is a small change that still requires a player to pay the points to join the CD position. Then immediately refund them points taken (small code change to do this). The other similar option, hide a takeover country from the takeover drop-down list if the player doesn't have enough points to cover what the takeover cost would be (again small code change).

While I understand, more then most, that code changes are a pain, preventing games from being ruined by brand new players taking over 50 games at once and then mass CD'ing again seems more then worth the effort.


The only other recommendation I would make is to never make the default unrated games. As the mod team has mentioned the goal of the site is to be the best place to play classic diplomacy. If you make the game default something that encourages wild and weird strategies then it isn't helping make the site the best place to play classic diplomacy. I pulled stats a couple years ago from the database and the wild majority of games created were whatever the default was, so you can make the safe assumption that most players would not change away from unranked games to a more classic based option like WTA or the new one ATC laid out. This can be confirmed by pulling the % of PPSC games before and after the default was changed to WTA a few years back.

Wait a second, does GR reward players for eliminating the highest-ranked person? That sounds like it should be changed, and it also sounds like a problem with GR rather than with CDs.

I agree with JMO. I also think it's the reason, default RR should not be 100% and an earning period for obtaining an RR status should be instituted

The higher ranked people in a game give a larger percentage of GR.to the pot. Yes.

You don't gain more GR for specifically eliminating someone with a higher GR. You do gain more GR for doing well in a game with them, regardless of their result. It doesn't matter if you're in a 3WD with the higher GR player, or a 3WD where the higher GR player is defeated - you gain the same amount of GR in that regard.

So you're incentivised to play with higher players, but that's all.

No, eliminating the higher ranked players isn't an incentive in GR. Let's talk about that in another thread if people are interested in a further explanation.

@ss: Default RR is 1%. New players can only join a RR gated game after they've submitted a turn in another game. Yes, this can be improved.

Okay, cool, just making sure.

@ATC. After that first turn, they are at 100%. New player should be required to play a certain amount of game to get to the 100%. That's the only way to know if they want to play games seriously

It seems to me that the high ranked games are not the games in which CDs are an issue. At least not regularly.

Also, have existing PPSC games been converted to SWS games? Mine all display this way now.

SWS is just the renaming of PPSC, to make it more clear how it actually worked.

SoS is the new system that has been added.

Your games will not have been converted.

Not to get too sidetracked on the well deserved love fest here...

There could be a provision saying that players who have completed fewer than an arbitrary number of games, say 5....

1) Cannot join any RR game at all; and
2) Cannot takeover any CD except their own.

Yes. But that's just a name change - the scoring system is the same. The name was changed because in most other parts of the Diplomacy community "points per supply centre" means that draws are divided based on how many centres you have.

Awesome, thank you!