The mass exodus

[New England Fire Squad]

Thanks again NEFS, I just looked again, this morning at that noon game, it's got six players so you will definitely get your 7th. I'm going to be busy today, eagerly serving the quite reasonable whims & demands of The Most Beautiful Fire Breathing MemSahib, Her Imperiousness Indoors as well as go for a bicycle ride to the auto parts place & then engage in consultation with a mechanic etc etc.
Plus it's DSS not SoS and twenty five points, good gosh man, twenty five points, you young scallywags treat points as if there was a free inexhaustible supply. When I were a lad, a point was valued, respected, revered, and the amount of work we had to do at coal pit or down coal mine just to earn a point, why it twas backbreaking toil for days. I remember Foxy Newton once licked road clean with tongue just to be shown a point. But these gimcrack modern devices with their apps and Ubers have produced a generation who treat points like confetti at a wedding.
Twenty five points... On one game. When Omnipotent Zultar was a lad, why he lived on just twenty points for years when he were a penniless University student.

I hope your in game press is as interesting as this comment is

[MajorMitchell]

Thanks NEFS, most of those humourous lines are looted, stolen, plagiarised from better writers than myself. For example, the "when I were a lad... & licked road clean with tongue, working at coal pit" etc are pinched from the Monty Python skit where cloth capped Yorkshiremen tell increasingly outrageous tales of how hard life was "when I were a lad" which finished with.. "and you tell the young folk of today, and they just don't believe it".
I strained my left leg yesterday, no not doing that with The Most Beautiful Fire Breathing MemSahib Her Loving Imperiousness Indoors, or with Princess Estelle you sex obsessed young blighters. Twas riding the bicycle about and around yesterday.
The bicycle riding was quite exhilarating, this old codger still has a burst of speed in the old legs, but I might have overdone it coming back up the long hill. Hope your live game went well. I've found another today and I joined to make four players, but it's only got another 20 minutes left to get another three... & there's zero joinable games.

[MajorMitchell]

Hoorah, it's got six players with ten minutes left.. might be a starter..

[MajorMitchell]

Wishing now it hadn't. Bloody Australian NBN ( our national internet ) game starts, I go ok, then it hits, slower and slower internet speeds, service disconnections and fails to reconnect. Severely impacted my ability to play and most unfair to a player who allied with me. I had to give up and play to be wiped out because all but one player agreed to a Draw, and would only draw if I wasn't in the game. Way to go Fifty Fifty. You are in my opinion an obnoxious little bloody minded cork brained clown

[MajorMitchell]

Such was the experience that I've pulled out of a game I had joined and think I will give it all a break. .. Again. Just toooooo tired of the nonsense from clowns like this Fifty Fifty.

[MajorMitchell]

PS has ssssorrennn left while I was away ? Just asking & just joshing.

[MajorMitchell]

In above about that live game. All players but one would draw immediately, one, this Fifty Fifty clown insisted that he knew I was lying about my internet problems and would only draw if I was eliminated. Of course a little later he added another country that had to go to meet his revised demands

[wpfieps]

Apparently, I'm in the "old timer's" group, since I also remember a time when you could log on to this site and take your pick from multiple live games. Unsurprisingly, jmo completely misses the boat … it isn't 1v1 or old tech or generational change.

What happened was a series of events like the removal of PPSC. This site owners said, "There will be no PPSC available here no matter how many people want to play it. This is how the website is going to be now, if you don't like it then you can leave".

Although not part of individual games, the forum was part of this site's overall experience. But a political-correctness purge set in, and the site owners essentially said "You will not post anything that offends DemonOverlord's sensibilities, otherwise we will punish you. This is how the website is going to be, if you don't like it then you can leave". A single-viewpoint moderation team was assembled. jmo whines about lack of volunteer developers, but what developer would want to volunteer his time for a site that would be so one-sided as to have bosox as a moderator?

The source of the mass exodus is simple; the site owners said "... don't like it then you can leave" enough times that eventually most everybody did exactly that. They left.

Now you're left with a website that is nothing much more than a series of MajorMitchell posts. "We want this to be the best site for playing diplomacy online", the site owners used to say. Epic fail.

[jmo1121109]

* I think you mistyped

"Hi all, I'm going to ignore the direct data correlation between the drop off in live games and the increase in live 1 vs 1 games because data and global warming aren't real.

What happened was the removal of a scoring system that used to confuse the crap out of members and didn't match the standard rules made a few people mad.

And don't forget the forum that used to be used by under 5% of all members, and of those, used more then once by under 50% of them. The ability to post wildly sexist things without being silenced was exactly what fueled live games! And I'm not just calling out demonoverlord and bo because I got silenced for making a sexist post in a thread demonoverlord was in by bo (seriously, I promise I'm not still bitter 2 years later). The right to be sexist is 100% a constitutional free speech right that I should have on a private website and it's what made live games run.

I'm also going to ignore the fact that the https://github.com/kestasjk/webDiplomac ... ntributors page on github shows the spikes in development work happened after the forum started being monitored because that doesn't fit my argument. And I'll ignore the fact that all the sites are struggling with getting developers cause that doesn't fit my narrative either!

Now all you are left with is a more welcoming site that suppresses my right to be a bigot with just as many active members playing games as ever. Hosting major cross site tournaments with active development efforts. Epic Fail. "

[breaca]

........
"We want this to be the best site for playing diplomacy online", the site owners used to say. Epic fail.

So, if this isn't the best site for playing diplomacy online, which site is, and what in your opinion makes it better?

[bo_sox48]

His goal wasn't to have a spirited debate about which site is better; it was solely to complain about this one.

[Octavious]

........
"We want this to be the best site for playing diplomacy online", the site owners used to say. Epic fail.

So, if this isn't the best site for playing diplomacy online, which site is, and what in your opinion makes it better?

For live games Conspiracy wins, even with their issues regarding cheating and reliability.

For variants, vDip continue to fill that niche very well.

webDip still have the best offering in terms of the longer classic games. Our messaging system is superior to PlayDip's, and we're slightly ahead in terms of quality, especially at the lower levels. Playdip have caught up in terms of the look of the board, and since we adopted a PlayDip style forum theirs is slightly superior, so it's not the clear difference that it used to be. In terms of pure game mechanics Conspiracy leave us all in their dust, but the reliability and cheating problems hold them back.

[Senlac]

Amongst the exodus, I’m an arrival. ODC brought me here & I like it.
I’ve pretty much decided to only play on webDip for 2019 unless something else comes up that’s too tempting (I only play 8 or less games per year now anyway).
I like the forum, the moderators are an improvement on previous experiences elsewhere & the game interface is OK once you get used to it, with some nice features. I loath cheats so unless that’s under control it’s a non-starter, so a word of congratulations to those responsible from a newby.

[jmo1121109]

........
"We want this to be the best site for playing diplomacy online", the site owners used to say. Epic fail.

So, if this isn't the best site for playing diplomacy online, which site is, and what in your opinion makes it better?

For live games Conspiracy wins, even with their issues regarding cheating and reliability.
...
In terms of pure game mechanics Conspiracy leave us all in their dust, but the reliability and cheating problems hold them back.

See I keep hearing this, but I don't have an android and they don't have an IOS version of their app.

[Bladerunners]

Best way to get vets back into dip is to eliminate mafia from the site :) Also make nmrs impossible... no matter what. gets rid of teeny boppers and multis

[jmo1121109]

" Also make nmrs impossible... "

Working on it!

[RagingIke297]

I'm not sure how easy it would be to do, but if people want serious games that won't have NMRs, maybe there should be some sort of system that separates "casual" games from "serious" ones. In order to even join a "serious" game you would need to have something like a 97% or better RR, played for at least 100-300 spring\fall phases, and have played to completion 5 "casual" games from the map you want to play with the time frame you want to join (live/non-live). I can think of work arounds that people could use, but they would have to waste so much time to ruin a game. I know Vdip has some of these as options too. Just a thought

[peterwiggin]

Apparently, I'm in the "old timer's" group, since I also remember a time when you could log on to this site and take your pick from multiple live games. Unsurprisingly, jmo completely misses the boat … it isn't 1v1 or old tech or generational change.

What happened was a series of events like the removal of PPSC. This site owners said, "There will be no PPSC available here no matter how many people want to play it. This is how the website is going to be now, if you don't like it then you can leave".

Although not part of individual games, the forum was part of this site's overall experience. But a political-correctness purge set in, and the site owners essentially said "You will not post anything that offends DemonOverlord's sensibilities, otherwise we will punish you. This is how the website is going to be, if you don't like it then you can leave". A single-viewpoint moderation team was assembled. jmo whines about lack of volunteer developers, but what developer would want to volunteer his time for a site that would be so one-sided as to have bosox as a moderator?

The source of the mass exodus is simple; the site owners said "... don't like it then you can leave" enough times that eventually most everybody did exactly that. They left.

Now you're left with a website that is nothing much more than a series of MajorMitchell posts. "We want this to be the best site for playing diplomacy online", the site owners used to say. Epic fail.

First, you don't get to call yourself an old-timer unless you had to order your armies into the ocean to convoy and email the mods to draw.

Second, PPSC is an abomination and one of the original sins of webdip. I (and I'm sure many others) didn't take webdip seriously as a diplomacy site until winners take all was an option. There will be no PPSC here because PPSC is not diplomacy and so does not fit our mission of being the best site for playing diplomacy online.

Third, you're welcome to call it political correctness if you'd like (free speech!), but I prefer "being a decent person." I'm not sure who this DemonOverlord person is: I tried looking them up in the spiffy new search and got nothing. Maybe you spelled their name wrong?

Finally, bosox is a fine moderator and admin, and I'm certain he is neither the most progressive personality on the mod team nor the reason we don't have developers knocking down our doors.

[bo_sox48]

Amongst the exodus, I’m an arrival. ODC brought me here & I like it.
I’ve pretty much decided to only play on webDip for 2019 unless something else comes up that’s too tempting (I only play 8 or less games per year now anyway).
I like the forum, the moderators are an improvement on previous experiences elsewhere & the game interface is OK once you get used to it, with some nice features. I loath cheats so unless that’s under control it’s a non-starter, so a word of congratulations to those responsible from a newby.

This is what we should hear about. Welcome to webDip, Senlac.

[Durga]

"You will not post anything that offends DemonOverlord's sensibilities, otherwise we will punish you. This is how the website is going to be, if you don't like it then you can leave".

I'd live in this reality.