I agree with Dingle. There'll always be at least one person in the game that will take advantage of the situation, and will submit moves.

It'd be better to draw the game, but if that doesn't happen, I'd submit orders just to be sure.

guys, that's the way to protest until the issue is resolved. i don't expect other players in my games to do the same. if i had, i could politely ask them to draw the game. this is aimed at site developers!

Why not only enter PWed games then, where you can draw with your colleages if someone flakes?

my colleagues don't play diplomacy :-) this is only aimed against civil disorder germany & italy. those two should be banned from the site

...also against deliberately creating games which are not fun from the start

wait ...are you talking about the players named "cicil disorder germany" and "cd italy" or are you talking about games that dont have 7 players in them but start anyway?

."also against deliberately creating games which are not fun from the start"

huh?? how can you judge that? surely you must be having a bit of a laugh here

Sean, CD Germany and CD Italy are system accounts, and if a game start time reaches zero with only five or six players, they are entered in.

Sean knows that Stratagos. However, they are also player names. There is also a CD Kestas.

alamothe... that sort of thing only works if the people in charge depend on you to do what you're boycotting... It's not as though Kestas loses more money because you won't play out your moves.

sounds like the problem is the game start-time clock... If starting at a set time is of paramount importance, then having CD Italy and CD Germany (to allow an understaffed game to start) makes complete sense. If, on the other hand, having 7 people is paramount, then the start-time clock needs to be disabled. I don't imagine that you can have it both ways. (please forgive me for probably being an idiot)

or if the game does start why not just pause untill italy and germany get filled, pretty simple i think

wow I would be really mad at someone who did that, seriously, how big of a loser do you have to be to boycott a game YOU already joined?

Just to clarify this isn't in response to trim's post, but the initial one.

A 'looser' who wants to play a full game.

*loser

@Chrispminis: it's how civil protests work! i hope others will join. if in every 5 player game two players boycott, something will be done

@jman777: if i somehow knew a game would have less than 7 players when it starts, i wouldn't join. but i don't!

Alamothe, as has been stated, you need leadership in some way dependent on you to pull that.

what do you mean? like someone else besides me who would agree?

The key questions for me are: Are there any examples of being an unwilling part of a 5 player game that you can point me to? Are there more examples of this than fun games that have been had which started with 5 players?

It's one of the decisions that made more sense when phpDip had a smaller community and was more experimental, but like with many things I think there's a vocal minority and majority that has a slight preference towards the status quo or just doesn't care

If it's a change most people want it's a dead easy one (just deleting a few lines of code), but I'm skeptical because if everyone hates games with fewer than 7 players why not pause or draw those games? It seems like the only way this problem can exist is if most people have no problem with 5/6 player games

I have no problem with games with 5/6 players. Why don't people who must play a game with 7 players just join games where they are the seventh player. CDs happen: get used to it.

I think a problem arises if people who don't mind 5 or 6 player games join the same game as people who only want to play 7 player games. The 5/6ers won't draw. This is why I think in an ideal site you'd set the minimum players required as part of setting up the game.
Simplest way out I can think of is to make it clear in the game name and forum advertising that it is a 7 player game. May be a moderator will draw it if some idiot joins then refuses to draw if players 6 and 7 don't turn up.

If it is that easy to make the code so that players can always have 7 player games then I would say let's do that as the default and then work to have a Feature the aspect of having less than 7 player games.

phpDiplomacy is an introduction site for the majority of its players. Therefore you are getting many players who are not on this forum as well as players who are judging the hobby by their initial experience here.
By exposing those players to a situation where they wind up in less than 7 games you are giving them a distorted view of the game. Plus you are establishing a 'norm' acceptance of something which is traditionally viewed as very abnormal.

Remember also that you have a unique ranking system that may also feed into people playing out the 5 player games rather than reacting against it.

I detest less than 7 player starts, but if I was in a game with such a position, I would not act to drop out. I would do everything I could to force a draw. In another site I ran into a Spring 01 NMR/CD and I have pushed that approach.

Here I think I have only joined one game from the start and that is an invitational game that was formed through this Forum. That is also an effective way to avoid the problem.

Civil Disobedience has a place, but I think here the better approach is to try to reason with the coders to give the players options at game set up. We need to understand that coders are not always gamers and their approach and emphasis may be more influenced by things which the hard core traditionalist/elite/elitist want. Appeals for flexibility and support without throwing a heavy bat at them may work better.

So how about it Mr. K. can you make that two line code change so we can have 7 player games as a default going forward and then work to make a flexible option by the game creator to have less than 7 if the game date expires.

> By exposing those players to a situation where they wind up in
> less than 7 games you are giving them a distorted view of the
> game. Plus you are establishing a 'norm' acceptance of
> something which is traditionally viewed as very abnormal.
Edi you can argue about making this change because the majority wants it, or because games with 5/6 players are no fun, but the argument that this or that is the tradition is, as always, pretty unconvincing here because we're not aiming for tradition (this is an ongoing debate which I think has come up in many different forms ;-)

I want what works best for the environment we're trying to build here, and luckily this is one of those places where either way is easy and I'm not going to be stubborn either way, it's just a matter of what the majority thinks is best (but I think it would be either/or, not an option when creating a game)

I agree to Edi here, it's quite simple (I'm not a whizzkid though) to arrange that a game will start when all places are filled. This will make games less 'fast', as that everyone needs to react within a given period of time.

Talking about tradition, I think the argument that 'most player don't seem to see the loss of playing with five or six players' is one of the traditions of this site. I'd better not give the example of playdiplomacy.com but well, haste is not allowed there. Credits to the possibilities we have here, from two hour gunboat to 72 hour therapy. The mathematical approach many players on this site have, it simply isn't in the spirit of the game.

You can't just strip traditions from games. For instance, I would never play Risk with cards going 5-10-15-20 armies and so on. Fun gets lost along the way in retrieving more points and fast!! But what about the Diplomacy?

I think Edi has a good argument: make seven the standard and less than seven an option that has to be selected.

I agree it should be an option, but I believe that in the past you've been against additional optional features Kestas?
Oh, and I rarely have issue's with less than 7 player games. The only times it arises for me is in games such as the tournament, when a specific player doesn't take their allocated space.

> why not pause or draw those games?

i will try to arrange this in a game Kestas, but if other players won't bother, then i must boycott. i have tried to join as seventh until now, but most of the time i end up not joining at all, because the seventh position is filled up the most quickly