After some four-person Diplomacy in high school and two failed attempts at email Diplomacy, I joined webDiplomacy having never completed a game in my life, though by then I did have a solid understanding of the rules, and I proceeded to win the first ten games I joined on webDiplomacy. It was after I completed seven games, when viewing my profile you’d see “Game stats: Won: 7 (100%)”, that the metagaming began, and with a vengeance. In those days there was no such thing as anonymous games. My 11th game ended in 1903 as Austria at the hands of a pregame IRT alliance against me (comments such as “I didn’t want to see history repeat itself” were the norm), and my 12th a 1904 defeat as Germany. I sometimes wonder if I could have surpassed that ten game win streak, and by how much, if we did have anonymous games back then. Regardless, I had little patience for the metagaming since I joined this site to have fun, so I acted quickly, took over a few CD positions and joined a few gunboats in an attempt to beef up my non-solo stats, hoping to reduce the metagaming to an acceptable level. I suppose it worked, by the time my first year was over I had acquired over 10,000 , surpassing Rait for first place in that category, and I had also been ranked #1 in GR for three straight months, passing up MarekP in January 2009.
My second year was similar to my first, except for the 10 game win streak. By the time it was over I had over 20,000 , and in December of 2009 I started a streak of over five full calendar years of being ranked #1 on the Ghost-Rating List (a ranking I’d still hold to this day if not for the most inane misorder you could imagine, especially relative to the pot size and GR implications, though I must thank this humiliation for setting me free, as with most addicts you often must hit rock bottom before you can make real change, even if that real change ultimately took a few more months to take hold).
Other highlights include (but are not limited to, lol):
-Topping the final table at Boston F2F as Austria after weathering a pregame IRT against me.
- An all-time four-digit GR of 1050.4 that is 134% of the second best all-time GR (TheMasterGamer – 781.7).
- An average of 232 earned per game played (e.g. SplitDiplomat has earned 87 per game played).
- A stretch of 29 wins/draws in 30 games, a win/draw percentage of 96.7%.
I do like to ramble, but suppose I should stop there. I’m confident many will find all of this quite annoying, especially since I would if I didn’t know me. I don’t say all of this to brag, or sell myself, it’s more of an unexpected “list” of facts that I find difficult to fathom. I’ve never considered myself all that good of a Diplomacy player, just more of a good game player in general, but in the end, I suppose the facts speak for themselves.