The first rule of gunboat is don't talk about gunboat. :-)

Oh, and my only two gunboats at the moment are both anon, so I'm not certain how you'd know who to give the SC too.

;-)

Easy, withdraw all your units from contact with other countries in the Spring, and then move back in the Autumn. It works like switching the light on and off.

You're so the SOB who stabbed me in the gunboat, Draug. Pay attention to {other country}, don't you see what's about to happen?!

LOL - strat. I *am* the other country in *both* of my gunboats.

Well, phooey on you then ;)

Irony of ironies is both are World map gunboats. For some reason I gravitate towards the world map when I gunboat lately.

More oceans to roam, more boats to build, and more peoples to oppress. Simple really.

Well, that's not me then, so you go wild ;)

Yeah, once you've conquered your continent, you have to go naval. Of course, if that continent is Eurasia...

quick q: do gunboat games count towards GR?

yes but a a reduced GR adjustment IIRC. All the variants count less than a classic full press game.

Does anon make any difference?

I'm not as sure about that. I think Ghost's website highlights all of the adjustments based on variants, including PPSC vs. WTA.

Braveheart old bean: all games count right now - one reason why I want to see a function to play games of any type or quality that will not go into the GR mix.

hmmm - no reason for anonymous games not to count. but world games and gunboat are a bred apart in my opinion.

Agree with you though Flash - option to exclude games makes sense and allows for experimentation.

or you could of course treat GRs with a pinch of salt and not focus on them too much.... i'm still in the top ten for example. not sure how.

Right, I don't really focus on raising my GR... My policy has always been "Win every game you play". It remains so, even after the big boost... I've got a lot of ground to make up before I reach MM.

I despair Amon. Have you not understood the basic premise of this thread?

I am not talking about whether you or I think about our own GRs, I am taking about situations where the play within a game is affected by other players being more concerned about their GR than the single game in front of them. The sort of situation that, for example, has a half-decent player scared stiff of losing and therefore playing to draw game after game in good company to keep his precious GR up. The idea of actually setting out to win is not even in his vocabulary. Even if I didn't give the proverbial s*** about my own rating, I cannot do much about this sort of game being distorted.

This is exactly the sort of situation I have faced and I want to be free of it. By having games not count one iota for %s, points or GRs it would, I believe, encourage games to be played the way they were when we had no records to worry about. There are other benefits too.

flash, if someone is so concerned about their GR, don't you think they will also be concerned with their stats and take a "draw from the start" approach regardless? Someone that is this fixated on GR/stats sounds like someone too conservative to experiment with atypical openings even if it was a non-rated game, so not sure how not rating a game will accomplish your goal.

I still wonder how often a person will tell you they don't want to try something "fun"/experimental because of GR just to get you off their back, especially if you are really pushing that person hard to do it, even if they don't care about GR and are just a more conservative player than you.

Perhaps you should specifically recruit for games, get players that actually like to experiment, name it Craziest Opening Wins or something like that to encourage people to play how you'd like them to?

MadMarx +1

I agree completely. I've been known to play the GR card just to get someone pushy to lay off. I'm a conservative player regardless of rating/ranking/points/whatever. I play aggressive tight poker and I play conservative Diplomacy. It's just my personality. I think you are just running into other flavors of "me" out there.

*Trying to veer back on topic*

IMO, if people want some code changes on the site (ie: the zero point game), then they have a few choices:

* Code it themselves
* Bribe Kestas

Discussions about how what is better and why are useful in the sense of determining if the need for a function is really there, but in the end it comes down to the code base.

What would an appropriate bribe for Kestas would be? Why not ask him? He does not appear to have posted a great deal recently, which would be in indication that he is busy with Real Life, so it would presumably have to be tasty. If cash is too tacky, ask him to set up a wish list on Newegg or something.

From the point of view of a guy who is *not* capable of coding this stuff, it seems like it should be a pretty trivial change, but I'm sure there will be a decent number of divide-by-zero errors if it was just a zero bet game. I would assume a better fix would be that when the game is *complete* everyone gets their bet back and the game is flagged as a zero pot in the database - this (I would guess) would only require a toggle during game setup and a few tweaks to the game completion subroutine.

In the broader sense of "do rankings affect how some people play", of course they do - but IMO it's only a part of the equation usually. From my own personal point of view it doesn't matter a damn but, but I'm not exactly playing a lot of games right now. I freely admit I check someone's win/lose/draw stats, and I'm going to *expect* that someone with very few draws on his or her record is going to try to screw me for the solo at some point, but I consider that to be fair game. ;)

flash, does your silence mean you agree with my last reply or are you thinking about it OR have you given up on me since I don't seem to get your point and thus I am in denial or something like that?

@strat - Just a quick note that there would probably be no divide by zero errors because you are always deviding the total (which would be zero) by something else which would still result in zero. The tricky part would be if the math behind things was floating point and accidentally resulted in a float that came out 0.0000031 instead of just zero (floating point gives great depth to the number of decimals, but sacrifices accuracy as a result) and that off number got ceilinged to 1 such that everyone got 1 point per SC in a PPSC game when they had no bet to begin with, or that a replacement player actually had to buy in to the game due to the rounding saying that nation was worth 3 .

well, I'm not exactly a code monkey any longer ;)

lol. I'll be getting into some code changes later this month I hope.

MM, I think I might have given up on you... ; )

Read my reply to Amon above: it is irritating to have to keep making the same point. I have no doubt whatsoever that in some of my games players have been approaching them from the perspective of trying to maximise GR ratings above all else. This has been obvious from the way the games were set up and touted, from the opening press, and from the way the play developed. There is copious evidence in the press for these games. I just want to get away from the GRs as this seems to me to be creating a huge meta-gaming environment.

I also despair when I read TGM admitting that non-rated games would be a good thing but that he has far too many other things like painting his toe-nails etc before he would do anything about it.

As this is not his site, as GRs are an external element, and as I am neither a coder nor have the time, I am hoping someone somewhere will supply the magic button that will release me forever from GRs and those who place their ratings before the simple ideal of playing a great game.

If you can honestly say that you also just want to play great Dip against good players then perhaps we should arrange some closed games, agree on the rules and then just play.

I believe TMG has similar feelings. He does not only play Dip and I am sure he can live without it, but it is a great game at its best and he must be attracted to games where we really can let go of all baggage, of which GRs are become an ever-increasing part.

@flashman

"I also despair when I read TGM admitting that non-rated games would be a good thing but that he has far too many other things like painting his toe-nails etc before he would do anything about it."

There is a limited amount of time that kestas can spend programming for this site, and a million and one things that people would like him to do in that time. Other programmers are few and far between, and generally only work on particular interests (e.g. variants). I am not going to push a suggestion that is to my mind low priority over other more pressing matters.

I resent the suggestion that this is because I can't be bothered to do something for the site, when I'm already dedicating considerable time to it.

I also find distasteful your tendency to collect baggage to bring up years after the event. In particular the Premier league where I was involved was, at times, an unpleasant affair. I tried at the time to remain as level-headed and calm as I could. You personally made that very difficult, and at times I probably failed.

I set that matter aside and played for the remainder of the season in what were good games of diplomacy. It was one of many moments when I considered throwing in the towel.

If you want to know why I had for a short time stopped replying to this thread, it was because this, unfortunately, was another occasion when I seriously considered giving up the whole business. Why? Because you brought up this difficult and unpleasant affair now, without having anything to say about it. It is one thing to say, "we had this problem in the leagues, perhaps we should be dealing with this matter differently", and quite another to just say "There was a 'plot' [to use your term] against a player in the league a year ago". If this were to become a site where the inevitable disagreements that come from running a tournament cannot be put behind us, it is not a site I want to stay on. Fortunately I think that you, flashman, are unique in your peculiar wish to dredge up the past with no suggestions of how to improve on it.

Unless you have something new to say to me about that league, there really is no benefit in saying anything at all.