Play by website – The Next Generation.
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was a rather obscure Scottish novelist, poet, and politician, and was most notable for being Governor-General of Canada from 1935 to 1940. Rising from his lifetime of mediocrity, he once said, “We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.”
This seems a rather apt quote with which to consider the rapidly changing ways in which the game of Diplomacy is played in modern times. Many readers will be familiar with the progression of Diplomacy from face-to-face play, through remote play first by letter, and then by email. What is a more recent phenomenon is the play-by-website development. Some websites have been around for some time. Diplomacy.ca was established as a bulletin board in the mid 1980s, and as a fully developed website since 1999. However it is with web-based interactivity that Diplomacy has taken off. Dipbounced and phpDiplomacy were the first to be established, and with the latter being open-sourced, a number of other websites later ensued.
As an active face-to-face player, and a committed member of the php-Diplomacy.net website, there are a number of interesting comparisons to make regarding play-by-website (PBW) versus face-to-face (FTF) and other forms of playing the game.
PBW – The advantages:
For many newcomers to the hobby, or indeed those returning to it, the web is one of the first places to start some research. Many will have lost touch with university friends or the networks they used to play with, or simply have no-one to play with.
The advantages of PBW are instantaneous. phpDip is a community of over _________ players from all around the world, with around 200 games currently progressing and a regular turnover of games waiting for new players. Signing up is easy – choose a username (more on this later), and you have 100 points, or credits, to fritter away in games which you can join instantly. Each game has a ‘pot’ varying from 5 points per player (totalling 35 points for the pot), anywhere up to thousands for the more experienced players. There are two types of game – points per supply centre (PPSC), where the winner gets the lion’s share of the pot and the remainder get a proportion according to their surviving centres, and winner takes all (WTA). Win, or draw, in this form of the game and you get a share of the pot. Lose, and you lose your stake! The points system was introduced by the founder of the website, Kestas ________, for a number of reasons – to limit the number of games played by new players, to set up a hall of fame for the top 100 players, and to give a little extra edge to competitive play.
The actual input system for orders is remarkably simple – even the most computer averse person could work it out! A series of drop down menus allow you to select where you want each army or fleet to move. There are also discussion tabs for each country, and a global tab, where you can write to each country individually or to all of them at once. Furthermore, a map displays the current positions of units, as well as the last set of moves ordered, which can also be displayed in text form. All moves are historically stored too, so you can look back through the course of the game to achieve some context to a certain set of bizarre moves from one player. In essence, everything you need to play the game is stored online in one simple place.
phpDip also has a forum where the online community can post create topics to discuss. This is one of the best parts of the online community. At the touch of the button, you can contact players from all over the world, ask questions about tactics, strategy and the rules, advertise a new game recently set up, and also post in more irreverent topics, such as ‘Diplomacy People – Who are the most awesome ever?’ – a rating game to discover who is the historical figure most likely to have come out on top in a game of Diplomacy. This now has well over 600 posts! There have also been some extremely interesting historical debates, regarding Alexander the Great, the context of the Iraq war, and other matters.
Recent additions to the site have seen the development of a league system, now in its first season, and a Cup, now in its second season. There are six leagues, each with seven players who play each other in a round robin of five games. All the leagues are seeded, so each league is comparable in ability to each other. After the end of the first season, the best players will form a premier league, and so on down the chain. The leagues have been incredibly competitive, but not so much as the knockout cup, where it really is every man for himself!
PBW – The disadvantages.
Inevitably there are always problems when playing Diplomacy. In occasional FTF games amongst friends we have found that one player, once stabbed, storms out in a huff not to return. With the anonymity of online player, where users are entitled to choose any username they want, drop-outs – civil disorders - are common enough. Fortunately, there is a system where players can sign up for these countries, and a significant number of these are replaced within a short period of time, and do not impact hugely on gameplay. There are also those CDs which are less attractive – the one or two centre Austria about to be overwhelmed by the Juggernaut, but these tend to be demolished quickly enough, so that the next phase of the game moves on relatively quickly.
Another more serious problem of PBW is multi-accounting. This is literally where someone has signed up for more than one account, and then uses the second (or in some rare cases, third, fourth and fifth) accounts all in the same game to help the initial account achieve victory. There are a number of moderators, in addition to the site admin, whose job it is to remove these accounts and the points earned from them. In addition, the many regular members of the site are extremely hot on spotting any multi-accounting. Bar the odd new user trying his luck, this seems to be a deteriorating phenomenon.
Meta-gaming – creating alliances across games is also strongly frowned upon, but is acceptable in the league system, simply due to the tall-poppy syndrome. If one player gets an early lead in the first couple of league rounds, it is in all the other players interests to gang up on him in the later games, and his job to stop them!
Finally, the ability of users to hide behind an anonymous handle (name) on the site can cause some problems. It is the opinion of some members that if actual names were used, it would reduce the occasional outbursts of poor language and behaviour. I hasten to add that this could happen in any form of the game, and generally speaking, it is quite rare.
Conclusion
Many Dip players regularly complain how hard it is to get seven players together for several hours to play the game. Often, unless you are in a club, or go to tournaments, it is nearly impossible, and you are reduced to playing variants for less than the full compliment of players.
With PBW, you can play as many games as you want at any time of the day with as many different people as you like. Most players on phpDip have about 4-6 games on the go at once. Some students have more, others less, depending on how much free time they have. It really is an enjoyable community, with challenging players too. The top players on the site have an incredible win ratio of 52% - yes that is wins, not draws – out of over 100 games played. If you really want to pit your wits against some of the best, and some of the most friendly, players in the world, then www.phpdiplomacy.net is the place to go.
Who's up for a public press game!
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