but the event is not at all meant to be random. the idea is that you simply see who writes who many messages to whom.

I think that's a pretty cool idea.

That does sound cool indeed. But would it count only messages sent to someone by another person, or the sum of all messages (so you can see two people are talking, but don't know who is talking more)

I mean, if you want to have it be public who talks with whom, why don't you just have an optional setting where public press gets updated with a notification every time someone sends a private message?

I'm waiting for a multi to come in here and complain about this idea.

Really. How dare you male more work for the multi to look convincing? :-)

To make it more informative we could have it show how many words/characters every player sends to everyone else. Otherwise it's just counting how many times you press 'send' in a long message.

i'd love to try this out.

This is a rather splendid idea.

To a point, anyway. That being said, I would not only rock this game, but would defeat the underlying value of the intelligence that you were hoping to collect about me (more ore less) trivially. That is to say, that each person would receive precisely 667 messages from me each and every single turn, mostly empty messages generated by software.

Could you consider playing a public press game?

al: but i still see if they're answering or not.

But maybe what is in the messages needs no response.

No offense to the OP, but am I the only person who thinks this is a dumb idea?

It adds very uncertain information due to the confounding factors described above, and seems like an invitation to make paranoid guesses based on nothing. The quantity of messages, or even the number of characters in the messages have no inherent value. You can still mask your intent by carefully sending the same number of messages with the same number of characters to each power at the same time. So all it really does is reward people who are willing to spend the time and tedious effort to undertake countermeasures designed to make sure they do not leak any information through meta-actions. To that, I say no thanks -- I've got better things to do.

Hanged Man has a good point. Personally, with this setting on I would just message everyone when i wanted to message anyone in order to hide who I'm concentrating my dialogue with, and that would get incredibly annoying.

that point is in fact good, thm. as i said, it was simply an idea that came to my mind. i still think it is worth a try - not to be implemented permanently but maybe as a variant on vdip or whatever. firstly - people could apply said tactic in standard f2f diplomacy as well: talking to everyone for the exact same amount of time. no one does that, of course, and it's a lot easier online, so that point shouldn't count, but the other thing is that you still know if someone send you tons of pointless messages that maybe he has tons of other things to say to other people. i definitely don't think it is flawless, never claimed it is.

Online play is a direct descendant of the old play by mail, which thrived for decades without anyone knowing how many letters their rivals were sending each other. It's a fundamentally different animal than face to face play. I do appreciate kasimax's sentiment but it strikes me as wanting to pound square pegs into round holes.

I was going to say something, but decided against it. Pound away.

If only you did that in 90% of your other posts...

Shots fired.