According to Edi's interview, wouldn't non-anonymous games be clearly superior to anonymous ones.
The best diplomacy players are good at 3 things: tactics, strategy and diplomacy.
tactics is easy, diplomacy skills you have or have not and strategy takse a long time to master.
My thoughts on anon/non-anon based on that:
Assuming that tatics is so easy, it slmost doesn't count to distinguish good from very good players. We all make mistales sometimes but in general we know where which piece is most useful.
Strategy on the other hand is intricately linked to diplomacy and the whole big thing is adjusting your strategic goals to fit with your diplomacy style(s) according to your opposition.
Thus shouldn't non-anonymous games ultimately lead to better games as you know your opposition better instead of everyone being a black box in 1901/02. Shouldn't the truly best player not be the one who can use all the information about others and weave it best into his own strategy/diplomacy. And not the one who is best or luckiest (assuming we all are about as good as the next guy, once having reached a certain level) tactically, irrespective of personalities of the players that play the other powers? And to continue that thought... isn't that what makes FtF the best way to play anyways?

Curious what Babak will reply to this, him being a strong advocate of the anonymous games. Guess we can also have a discussion about it in Boston soon :) Yay!

Wow, The Wizard, very nice of you to make a thread just so otto could ask that question.

Otto, that is very interesting.

Some tactics and tactical combination patterns are tricky and clever, and it takes intuition to apply them correctly and at the right time, so i don't think you can just write off tactics like you do in the above, i will agree it is the easiest to improve on though. i am a proponent of anon only because of the big poppy syndrome where lower rated players head hunt the higher players

Hey, in my defense, prefacing such a thread with some nice context is helpful. I'm currently listening to a different podcast, sorry I can't be as wise and sarcastic as you Kingdroid...

hmmm, I would argue that the"intuition when to apply tactical combination patterns" is more the diplomacy part than the tactics part.
Sort of like: Tactics is the basic toolset you need. Strategy is when and how to put those to a bigger/further away goal. Diplomacy is which tool to use when against whom.
By the way, the first two paragraphs are part of what edi said in the interview, so grats, ottovanbis, you agree not with me but with the Legend himself :)

well that's interesting, thanks lol. i can understand your perspective on tactics though. i'm now a chess player (when i started diplomacy two years ago and before my year long hiatus i was very much focused on the diplomacy part) and have a different sense of what tactics mean to my overall plan, so i am somewhat blending artforms :)

I agree with this. Non-anonymous games tend to be more fun for me. I have enjoyed my first round of league play and some of my favourite games on here have been non-anon games with players I am familiar with.

sorry...just noticed a mistake. to clarify: the second paragraph is part of what Eid said. He did not say anything about anon/non-anon.

I see your point, Wizard. On the one hand it could be argued that the best players would be those who could look through all his opponents backlogs (old games, old messages) and create a winning strategy from said information. ((This is what I assume you meant by "use all the information about others and weave it best into his own strategy/diplomacy"))

On the other hand, it could also be argued that it takes an even stronger player to be able to develop a winning strategy without all that other information. Such a player would have to discern all he could from his own experiences with each opponent in game, and would therefore have to develop essentially the same strategy as the first player (the one playing non-anon) with less information.

Ultimately what it comes down to, I think, is personal preference. I prefer anonymous games. I like the challenge of figuring my opponents out in-game, without having access to their records. Others may disagree.

Ul@ triumvir:
That is actually not what I meant, but rather use the feeling you have developed form playing a specific player already and rememberinghis style and gameplay. But I see that the logs are a valid source of information, I do get your point as well. Yet, I would argue that after all, diplomacy plays a big (the most important) part in diplomacy. And anon takes a big part of that away. Ultimately, I agree: personal preference.
This whole thought just came to me after listening to the "gandalf of diplomacy". For the last year, I actually was in the anon camp as well.

I'm strongly in favor of non-anonymous games.

- When there's more information available, the level of play improves.
- When everyone knows who you are, and knows your history, you can't be a general asshole. The point of diplomacy is to have fun, and let other players have fun (also from Edi's podcast, but very true). It forces players to keep being polite, even when things go awry.
- In anon, one can still guess other player's identity. That becomes easier when you've played before. This might lead to outside factors influencing the game.

Personally, I prefer non-anon. I am a very personable character and enjoy learning new people and not having to associate personality with "anonymous" and then cut and paste the character and personality of mr anonymous onto their true name after the game is over. In addition, I am of the type to search through a profile, look at strengths and weaknesses, play style, common game factors, whether or not he is 'subject to change', etc. There's nearly an unlimited supply of information that can be gleaned from a player's profile before the game begins.

Where I think anonymous games gain their biggest benefit is in the League and other tournament games where players are more inclined to oust the leader. I've noticed that better players are not necessarily inclined to remove the perceived best player in a game (tall poppy) and this usually happens in strongly unbalanced games where a novice is playing with a bunch of vets or a vet is playing with a bunch of novices.

@Wizard: If you go into a game using "the feelings you have developed from playing a specific player already," is that not metagaming?

@Bas - You said "In anon, one can still guess other player's identity. That becomes easier when you've played before. This might lead to outside factors influencing the game."

By that line of reasoning, wouldn't knowing who the players are from the start (ie. non-anon) lead to the exact same thing? And, in non-anon, wouldn't it happen more often?

@TruNInja: agree with the anon in leagues. But you would figure out who people are quite often despite it being anon.
@Triumvir: if you use the feelings to adjust your diplomacy to most effectively play against them, I wouldn't call it metagaming but good diplomacy. If you can judge how to take someones press and possibly get an idea about his intentions, that is good. Metagaming would be to go into the game and know right away that you would not ally with x and y because of a,b and c. but that is not only metagaming but also bad diplomacy and severely limits your options.

@Triumvir: No.

What I am talking about is the following: An anonymous game is set up, with a line-up consisting of five novice players, yourself, and some truly epic diplomat (like Edi Birsan). It's certainly worth finding out which country Edi's playing, because you can adjust your strategy to it. Now, if you happen to be familiar with Mr. Birsan, that would be easier, than if you have never ever met him before.

This way, the anon. system introduces a positive bias toward players with a longer history on this site.

Don't have too much time to comment so I will keep my opinion shorter than id like.

Edi's interview and a vast array of his experience and suggestions revolve around FTF and tournament play. Our webformat, including its anon option, points, and GR,not to mention >15min seasons already add so many factors and new elements that his advice cannot be implemented on a 1to1 basis.

Personally, I think anon forces u to be an even better diplomat since your only source of information is what you gain inyour diplomacy, where as non-anon creates a 'laziness' in collecting information and encourages players to rely on pre-concieved notions basedon game-external info (player's comments on the forum, #of pts, last-log in, etc) that have nothing todo with their 'experience' or game history. In essence, its an added disadvantage to GOOD diplomats, as it allows non-diplomacy issues to undercut their diplomacy.

Personally I like anon much better because I think it gives the better diplomats an advantage, and I perecieve this as giving me an edge. I see it as a more accurate and 'pure' form of the game... and if it was somehow possible to do in ftf in the 50s, I think Calhammer would have implementedit.

My recent leauge experience has further convinced me of my previous oppinion.

Have more to say,but sorry short on time.

The issue of Anon vs Normal always comes up. I have played a bunch of anon games and they are only truly anon when the player pool is so large that you cannot figure out who might be behind the snide remark. I must admit that for me a major part of the anon game is to build a profile of the player and even guess at his real world ID.

An anon game puts different pressure on the players. I once for the hell of it played an anon game on some email site (not this one but back in the compuserve days) where for the hell of it I would tell some of the players that I was a new substitute player just to see how fast the rumor spread and echoed back to me and from whom as a means to trace the communication network.

The question is not really which one is the better scale for marking achievement, but the question is which one is more fun for you and then go with it. They are two different types of games and achievement in one is not scaleable with achievement in the other other than the ability to get your damn orders in and avoid a NMR.

@Bas - So what you're really talking about is a semi-anonymous game, where you know who all the players are but just don't know which nation they're playing. Is that correct?

When I'm talking about an anon game, I mean truly anon; a game in which none of the players have any idea who their opponents are. So I guess, in a way, or discussion shouldn't be A or B. It should be A, B, or C (Anon, non-anon, and semi-anon).

@Triumvir: YEs. That's how most "anonymous" games get created here (as far asI know). It would be fun to play a true anonymous game once, but I've never done it.