I've gotten in the habit of waiting for live games to cancel/draw due to CD's one or two times and THEN join them hoping by that point in the night only reliable people are left. It's a real problem.

Holiday fun!

ck, if your games were password protected, what would you have done differently if the RR were implemented? I think you could have accomplished the same impact if you took a few minutes and did it manually yourself before you joined or accepted someone to join your game.

If I were a mod, I'd implement something automated if I saw it being done consistently, actively and manually in the forums first. That's how a real need is determined.

Like GR, for example.

@ag, it has been. Bo made an entire thread this past weekend to facilitate private live games. It's been brought up numerous times (although being a particularly vocal advocate of RR maybe I just see them more due to confirmation bias), and like GR I and probably others don't wish to hound a subject that's been brought up and admitted to be working on by the mods. I think this thread is appropriate since it has been a while and it would be nice to know any updates, but just because we don't spam and bump RR threads like the GR people do to GR doesn't mean it's not wanted or needed. You can see the efforts and the frustrations in the forum I think quite readily.

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It's not hard to make private games yourself with reliable people. If you care so much, then filter your passworded games.

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It's not hard to make private games yourself with high GR people. If you care so much, then filter your passworded games.

They aren't even mutually exclusive and the development team has said they're working on both. Why the angst?

I'm an honorary defender against waste of time projects. Limited volunteer time should be free to indulge in things people cannot do themselves easily.

If people *really* cared, they would get reliable players themselves. It's a simple enough thing to do. Obviously they aren't doing it since they still are complaining.

You have no idea how many idiot people are in the world suggesting, requesting and demanding these spoon-fed projects in the workplace and community. It's sickening, when they refuse to take the simple initiative themselves first.

...and don't even get me started on defending the downtrodden who will fall victim to these bigoted ratings.

So I don't have the time to go into it now, but the data shows and has shown for quite some time that we need RR. Which is why it's being developed. There is a transition in coding work from Kestas to A_Tin_Can, which is why there's been a lull after the first set of small changes. These should be coming soon, though Move Previews will be first (already coded, just waiting on updated github).

This is great news. I've been a staunch advocate for this feature and am looking forward to keeping the unreliable out of this site.

ag - Any solution to reliability ratings will be about matching players of similar reliability, not about excluding players.

This site hosts games for people to play in their spare time. It's not reasonable for players to expect that checking the game becomes the number one priority for everyone. But, we can hope to match people who take their commitment to the game very seriously with others who also take it very seriously.

Just like there are seriously committed players, there will also be players who don't particularly care about the odd NMR. I'd like to allow them to play together, too, without getting yelled at for missing phases. It's my hope that Reliability Ratings will enable those players to still play together.

I wonder if "commitment ratings" might be a better name for what I want to do.

I don't think that any reliability rating system will remove NMRs and CDs from the system - but we hope to be able to reduce the impact of them on players that don't want CDs in their games. Introducing reliability ratings, and borrowing features from vdip (like requiring a certain number of completed games before players can join more than some low number of games) should go some way towards achieving that.

Please note that the RR system as we will be implementing it has been tested out for years successfully by vDip, and we'll be adding some changes to ensure that we don't have situations that encourage people to leave, or to make a 2nd account because of a rating system.

Perhaps only counting stats from the implementation date? Or only counting games in the past ~16 months.

Wait, move previews? Awesome! That would have saved me so much trouble in a few games . . .

preview orders has been in operation at vDip for about 2 years now. The more exciting development is the interactive map for entering orders... I'll exit the conversation now.

I don't want an interactive map -- I'd rather have a text box where I can type them!

well, when you are playing a game with 36 players in it and 265 SCs with 568 territories... an interactive map is pretty damn usefull!

From our point of view at vDip however, what we would REALLY like for is user- (and turn) dependent map.php generation so that the display shows a unique map based upon the user access for the the map.png. (ie. at the moment = 1 map for 7 players on the Classic map <=> as opposed to 1 map generation per player).

This would make it much easier for Fog of War to be implemented on virtually every variant and map we have over at vDip...

just putting it out there.

Unfortunately, variant related changes are not really a priority for us right now. Maybe once we've got some momentum going on the other key features first.

not really a variant related change. We already have FoW capabilities with some coding. But with a change to how the map is displayed in the main code would make this an easy option to code as an option for all games...

As in... it should be a small change to make in the parent code. I'm sure that there is community support for FoW carrying capability in the code here at webDip, and the many forks of the code offered around the web as well. To be able to simply select a game as being FoW during game startup would be awesome!!! As it is FoW is a variant because it takes explicit coding for each map for it to be available for players.

Maybe I'm out of touch, but having FoW as an option like Gunboat at game creation seems to me as something that aught to be a higher priority than Ghost Rating (btw/ @ vDip we have a running elo-based system of ranking) or Reliability Rating -> which is really handy and useful, but something you could spend ages arguing about the various parameters/distinctions made in exactly *how* to implement this code.

@kaner ... if you are so happy with vDip, why all the noise here? personally, I have no interest in variants and I *do* hope GR gets implemented soon. Move previews are also nice, and I can see the need for RR in some form, but FoW support is waaaayyy down the list.

@Kaner, one of the reasons we aren't going with the elo system is that Oli directly recommended that we not. You'd have to talk to him to figure out why.

As for the vDip wish list, I did pass it on and we have those items on our todo list, however changing maps based on user permissions isn't an easy change. So while we do hope to get there it is going to fall behind some of things we're desperately lacking here at the moment.

"Move Previews will be first"

+1! This might not be the one that stands out the most, but IMO it is one of the best features on vDip :) Glad to see it coming here.