I take offense to that. I'm 17 and I'm on my way up.

Same here.

Centurian was merely making a general observation based on the empirical evidence.

None of the skilled young' uns should take offense.

54

I for one am actually a little surprised not about how many young uns there are but how many php users are 50+

It just seems like internet games (even Diplomacy) would be predominantly the forum of the young and tech-saturated.

17. started when i was 12 (right before turning 13). learned from my speech teacher.

Generally, maturity will increase your ability to communicate well and negotiate, and so will mean that players over 18 should do better. That is why I am always flattered when people mistake me for an undergrad or the like.

19

26

from: Giramondo: "wow I find it hard to believe someone here is 7, I'm 21 here."

I might have forgotten to mention that my birthday is 2-29

Or I could have just been outright lying to see if anyone would notice ... I'm really 36

physically im 15 mentally i am 2

a newbie at 60...geezz

Sorry younger players, relax. I said generally. I wrote that after seeing that Ivo, Marek, Darwyn, Treefarn, Sean, Madmarx Edi birsan... etc are all full adults. Thats a pretty serious group there. I'm 18 and I don't think I'm bad or anything.

I suppose that makes me an exception :) 19

Well, 19 is already moving in the right direction...

24

I can't imagine what it would be like when I'm 34.

52 here

34

...it's kind of like 24, except you're ten years older.

14, or at least that's what i claim.

(wa ha ha!)

Well finishing with Ed Poon, the average age here is 27.0 years. We've got impressive variation though. And classically you'd expect people who've played longer to be better at Diplomacy, so that should give an edge to the older players.

29. I'm supposed to be a responsible adult by now...wonder if it will ever happen :)

I graphed a plot of Points vs. Age and it's difficult to draw conclusions... It seems that generally we have a lot of successful people in their mid-30's, but they are pretty anomalous... otherwise we have a few anomalies in the teenagers. Over 40 isn't well represented points wise, while under 30 is a broad hump that's filled with scattered points but indicates a trend of players getting stronger as they near 20, but then get weaker later on in their 20's...

Of course, this is using the points system which we all know isn't the most accurate representation of skill. Perhaps more could be done if TheGhostmaker tried it out with his Elo calculated database. If anyone wants the excel file that I roughly used then e-mail me.

27

It's interesting that a lot of my suspicions about various people's age's has been confirmed (basically some people sound like they are in high school or just out of it and... lo and behold it would appear that they are!).

That being said there have been some surprises too. Some people I'd assumed were my age or older have turned out to be younger than I expected!

Chris, I lost my copy of the Elo databases, but sent it to you. You should have a copy of it.

I should've made this "What age are you, and how old were you when you first started playing diplomacy?" I started last month.

That's correct actually. I do still have my copy. When I get more time I'll see if there's any correlation when I use Elo, but I expect the results to be fairly similar.

Oh I forgot to add when I first started playing. That would have been when I was 22, and a Senior in college. One of my housemates brought it back from home after some break and we all enjoyed it greatly.

I turned 45 today.