If somebody doesnt message you often or at all is 99.9 % sure to attack you or your ally

It also depends on what kind of games he plays. If he/she plays Gunboat and maybe Public Press then he/she might have fewer messages as fewer are required.

I send, on average, about 66 messages per game. But like we said, people have different ways of playstyle so it all depends on where your confidence sits.

And Tmg996, where do you get your statistics? If you're Turkey, and England has not sent you any messages all throughout the game, you consider them an ally? or foe? What about the neutral factor?

I almost always respond to any message I receive. I agree that often I will forget to keep up communication with a player when we are allied but not fighting near each other.

I will take this as a challenge to do better

I send about 70 messages per game, I do really value communication and detailed inter-ally planning though so mine is probs a bit higher than other people's.

I'm averaging 40 or so messages a game. But I play a lot of gunboat and Wilson.

I mean if you message Austria as Italy and they dont respond they will be attacking you

But what about the case when someone just doesn't send you messages after sending them? It seems to me like this would be a major issue, and a big part of this game to me is the banter between parties, even if they aren't combatants or allies.

I would guess you are playing someone that doesn't play non-gunboat games very much, or just sucks.

I'm at 71+ messages per game. There are few times that I won't respond. Pretty much if I'm eliminating someone and they are repeated pleading their case, there is only so much I can say back. But that doesn't happen often. Usually I'm always willing to talk, even if I have nothing else to say but: "Yep, I've considered doing that but can't tell you whether or not I will, you'll just have to see."

it depends who you are playign with. try joining in games with people who are on the forum. they talk more

I send about 120 messages a game.

If you find that most of the players aren't talking, you may need to play with better people. If one person isn't responding, I find it helps to keep messaging. Eventually, they get the hint and start talking.

But, in general, if someone doesn't talk to me, I don't work with them.

I don't know how to talk because i'm new, could someone help me out?

Never mind, I found out I was playing a no message game.

I'm running 117 messages per game on average. There's probably a decent correlation between average messages per game and overall skill, though that's skewed by the fact that some people write lots of really short messages in bursts and others write long winded monologues. It would be interesting to graph people if a program were written to trawl the info.

wf, I can tell you that communication ramps up considerably once you start playing higher staked games with more skilled players. Recruiting people on the forum for a game also usually yields more communicative players. I think the communication problem is really only significant in lower tier games where a lot of players might not understand the game and think they're playing Risk.

I tend to be communicative, but have no idea how many messages I average per game. I tend to do a lot of messaging early on, but have noticed that I tend to slack off in the middle game.

i think i send a good 100+ messages a game, and usually to everybody playing, no matter how fa away i am. but when i first started out and even now, some players don't necessarily respond back. and i am a fan of the short bursts of messages, mostly because they are concise, and usually one complete thought instead of many.

I checked, I'm at about 100 messages per game. Mine can get pretty long and involved.

I'm at 85.65 messages per game, with, I assume, gunboats averaged into those statistics as well as my early career where I didn't communicate nearly enough.

I agree with the general sentiment, though: You can't trust someone who doesn't talk to you, whether it means they're plotting against you or whether their play quality is so low that they won't make a decent ally anyway. God, the number of people I've attacked solely because they refused to respond to reasonable offers....


Also: Someone who doesn't respond to press is almost an assured NMR once they dip below three SCs.

I'm at 102 per game at the moment - it clearly doesn't correlate with skill as I've still got 0 wins on the site......

Are you guys working this out from your number of game messages on your profile? Because mine says 4, although I've definitely written more than that in the last 10 mins alone..

@Crazy Anglican - you have just shy of 100 messages per game. It might be higher for normal press games if you do gunboats or public press only.

I'm at 130+ and I also play gunboats, so higher than that as well.

@hopsy

Yes. It's updated at the end of every game.

@hopsturvy: message count is based on your finished game only. This is for the best otherwise your rivals might figure you have been talking more to other players than them.

I'm just over 140, and then when you take into consideration that I've had a couple of gunboats, 3 games cancelled and a couple of PP games, it goes up to nearer 150.

In short, I'm winning :)

Thanks guys, I guess that makes sense, although I like to talk to my enemies as much if not more than my allies :)

I hope you don't count in your stats messages like "Sounds good!"
Oh I hate that response so much. It either smells stabbing or a player that is ready to be your puppet. None of these is good.

I mean the issue here shouldn't be the quantity of communicative approaches but its quality.

@hellalt,

Nope, I went through all my past messages and counted the "Sounds good"s so that I didn't include them in my average.

And, if a player is willing to be your puppet, I'd say that can be very good indeed.

Sounds good, hellalt.

I'm not sure whether or not very old games have their full press stored for the game messages count.

So our avergaes could be even higher depending on when the counts started being stored.

believe it or not, i actually did a study on the side to see if theres a correlation between average messages per game sent by a player and their success rate in games (success rate being their combined win + draw percentage) and it turns out that theres a natural log trend.

This implies that the more messages a player sends in a game, the better that player plays. The success rate appears to drop off around the 100-120 msg/game mark.

"drop off" should be "level out" since there isnt a decline in success rate after a player sends an enormous amount of messages per game

I find there are two types of people who backstab, ones who won't reply at all, or ones that send you walls of text to convince you to do what they want. Personally I'd rather them just not say anything at all, it's less of a shock that way.

Hm, I wonder which country needs the least messages to win. I'd guess Turkey. And Austria probably needs the most.

I checked my numbers and I am at ... 259 messages per game, average!
Perhaps a bit excessive... I am afraid that I typewrite quite fast, this helping me to pour tons of messages till the exhaustion of both allies and enemies...

I would say Germany would also need quite a lot of messages.

I'd say a good diplomacy player will communicate with as many people as possible and maintain communications with them, even if you're their 'enemy'

Tru Ninja, that's pretty cool. Thanks. I was basing my observation on anecdotal evidence. We've done this MPG comparison before and I remember MadMarx and djbent had ridiculously high MPGs and I also consider them excellent players. I'm sure there are a ton of exceptions to the rule, but it's good to know that my intuition about the trend was correct.

my score is 118msgs/game with 7 out of 71 games still ongoing. Gunboats and public press (37 total) not included.

@hellalt - those 7 games' messages aren't included in the message count on your profile, so just subtract the gunboats from the games completed and do the division. Of course, public press games skew the score because they add to the count of messages, so you can't just remove them from the count like you do the gunboats. To get a true average, you'd have to go into each public press game and tally up the messages you sent, then reduce the game and message count.

ok I ve done that.
I post 115,75 msgs per game.