webdiplomacy.net

Hello there, I just joined in with the Diplomacy games and am addicted. I'm not going to say that I'm very good, but I'll say it's like singing in the shower. The only reason to stop is if you're just embarrassing yourself. I don't think that I'm there yet. I have loved this game and played nearly everyday (wasn't able to for a few days due to sickness or lack of internet due to loss of power or being stranded). I joined another Diplomacy site called vdiplomacy. It's good, but I don't feel like it's as tight a community as this one. They do, however, do something better than this site. They have oodles of map variants. Now, I'm not a developer or anything, so I probably wouldn't be able to contribute, but I'd like to see this great site do the same thing by adopting more map variants. I wouldn't even suggest doing it all at once! Perhaps have a week of 3 potential variants and after that week is over, we might could vote on which one to keep. Anyways, love the site, but just a humble request.

Hello. Glad to hear you are enjoying diplomacy! If you hadn't noticed, vdiplomacy is our sister site, and we share much of the same code base and some of the player base. Vdiplomacy was started as a way to test out different variants in a more experimental setting. Occasionally, those variants are ported here, but only after they have undergone rigorous testing, and only if they offer something new here that you can't get from a variant already on webdip. Within the last year we ported over the chaos variant because it met those requirements.
Besides that, there is still work that needs to be done when porting over variants, and developer availability is quite scarce right now. Long story short, we can and do port over new variants, but it happens slowly. I would suggest playing on vdiplomacy if you want to try out lots of variants. If you are looking to recruit players, might I suggest using our discord, which has players from both webdiplomacy and vdiplomacy.

Another angle on this - I suspect the reason that webdip has a bigger community is because we have fewer game types. When we added new modes (rulebook press, hidden draw votes, etc) there was always an increase in those game types, but a decrease in the overall number of games being played.

Of course, there are some modes (like 1v1) that potentially increase the overall number of games being played.

I haven't looked at the site for a while, but it's good to see that there are around twice the number of games in progress as there were a few years ago. Good work, mod team!