The mass exodus

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New England Fire Squad
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Re: The mass exodus

#121 Post by New England Fire Squad » Sat Feb 16, 2019 5:18 pm

ILN wrote:
Sat Feb 16, 2019 5:00 pm
This website is dead.
Doing my utmost to make it less so.
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Re: The mass exodus

#122 Post by Dejan0707 » Sat Feb 16, 2019 6:34 pm

Is there any way to create statistics from the site database? Like number of live game running through time, number of new players joining...

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Re: The mass exodus

#123 Post by Octavious » Sat Feb 16, 2019 7:45 pm

You've been around long enough to remember the old days, Dejan. Several full press live games a night, often a couple running at the same time. If your live game had an nmr you simply cancelled it and started a new one ten minutes later.

I don't see any reason why we shouldn't aspire to at least being as good as we used to be.

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Re: The mass exodus

#124 Post by Durga » Sat Feb 16, 2019 7:58 pm

Oct, you refuse to play diplomacy when invited to games. What exactly do you want?
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Re: The mass exodus

#125 Post by Octavious » Sat Feb 16, 2019 8:36 pm

I'm not sure how turning down a game invitation half a year ago has any relevance to anything. As it happens I was in a game over on Playdip at the time and I've never been enthusiastic about playing multiple games at once. At the moment I'm playing a game over on Conspiracy.

What I want is for webDip to become a great place to play diplomacy again. When I first joined webDip was the standout website. It had the best looking map, it was free, it had high quality full press long phase games, it had multiple full press live games every day, it had a lively forum with a great community where diplomacy players practiced forming arguments. We had a ranking system people actually cared about. We kicked arse.

Look at us now. Playdip caught us up on the graphics and gameplay front years ago. Conspiracy has left us in the dust as far as live games are concerned. The forum has been sacrificed in the name of not offending anyone. We still are able to boast some top quality games, but that's no longer unique. I sometimes feel the hobby would be better off if we stopped operating altogether and consolidated diplomacy players elsewhere.

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Re: The mass exodus

#126 Post by Durga » Sat Feb 16, 2019 8:50 pm

I'm in a conspiracy game. It's great. In spring of 1901 three of us entered our moves, and in fall of 1901 - two of us entered our moves!

All you care about here is the forum, which has nothing to do with actual diplomacy

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Re: The mass exodus

#127 Post by Octavious » Sat Feb 16, 2019 9:04 pm

Yup. There's a lot of dross on Conspiracy. Which is lucky for us as otherwise we would be utterly outclassed. But you can find good games, and even a live game with a couple of nmrs beats no live games at all.

I've accepted that the forum is gone forever. It doesn't mean I'm going to pretend to be happy about it, or subscribe to the idea that a place to let off steam and practice being persuasive has no place on a diplomacy site. I believe killing it off has been a massive mistake, but I accept that it is irreversible.

What I don't accept is the acceptance of mediocrity that has infected this place. That live games are too hard to make work anymore, that running a ranking system is too much effort.

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Re: The mass exodus

#128 Post by Dejan0707 » Sat Feb 16, 2019 9:53 pm

People call it progress. From what I remember webdip had more activity before than it has now. I remember well how live games were popular because I was anoyed by how many people advertised them on the forum while I never liked them much. Loads and loads of them. Today they are rare but I dont think anybody was to be blamed for it.

When hoby was created people invested much time and effort to play it over the postal letters. Zines were typed on those handwriting machines and distributed over the post. All that was gone when internet showed up. Letters become too slow and too much work. Everybody shifted to emails.

Not long time after that web based diplomacy was invented an nobody played email based games as it was too slow and required too much work.

Now we have smartphone era and people choose even faster way to play. They want smartphone app to do most of the work. Every step of the way messages become shorter and negotiations faster and diplomacy lost some of it charm. People become less patient and wanted more in less time.

Of course there is also good sides of the story. My impression is that todays player are much stronger tactically than it was in 2011 for example. They play more games so average tactical skill is higher than it was before. For the skill of negotiatioss and press I think 2011 average player would be ahead of the 2018 average player.

Game is evolving on its own and we can't do nothing about it.
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Re: The mass exodus

#129 Post by jmo1121109 » Sun Feb 17, 2019 2:49 am

I find this thread pretty interesting. Because it's pretty focused on the idea of the decline site being tied to the forum and to a couple colorful individuals being banned and the reduced number of live games. When you actually start looking at the data it gets more interesting.

The average life of a player on a diplomacy site isn't all that long. In the time I've been here I've observed a number of top players leave the site. We at one point reached out to them and surveyed their reasons for leaving and in general what you'll find is that many people who leave our site aren't going to another diplomacy site. They've grown tired of the game, had circumstances change in life, had kids, started a new job, or some other time consuming event shift their focus. A surprising number of people have stated they have a flat out problem with playing too much and needed to stop cold turkey. This of course only relates to the more experienced top rated players that I have gotten to ask.

For the more general player there's a different set of factors and those are more easily looked into analytically.

I have spoken to playdip members and found their active member base has had a nearly identical drop in active players to ours recently, and we are hovering around 100-200 more active users then they were just a couple weeks back. So it does not seem like it's the site specifically that is losing people, it appears to be the hobby. But that loss is not geographically consistent.

For example, in the last year our users from the following countries increased drastically.

Switzerland increased over 112% to around 550 users
Malaysia increased 37%
Finland increased 40%
Norway increased 22%
Belgium increased 50% to 1,169 users accessing the site during the year

While on the flip side
US decreased 19%
UK decrease 9%
Australia decreased 34%
New Zealand decreased 35%
Russia decreased 60%

We've had an less then a 2% change in the number of mobile users on IOS but a 20% drop off in the number of android users. A massive drop in IE users, but a large increase in edge users (makes sense right, as IE support ends and edge is pushed by Microsoft).

The problem with this data is obvious though. Did we lose users from Russia because the Russian webdip based site came back up and started getting popular there again? Because their internet filters have started blocking en-us advertised sites, because the hobby there is simply dying off? Who knows.

Are we losing mobile users on androids because android users prefer app based games more, because android is losing out to IOS as a phone choice? Because there's an increasingly competitive market of freeware phone games on the google store?

The decrease in live games I can directly tie to the introduction of 1 vs 1 games. The falloff in them directly correlates to when I added those 2 variants. An unexpected side effect. But is it bad? We have had 8,959 of one and 4,782 of the other played since their introduction with many of those being live. Which means people are more consistently able to hop on the site, enter a live 1 vs 1 game, and get their diplomacy itch scratched then they were previously.

Google Analytics provides all sorts of data on usage and we can access more with complex queries to see how many games on average new members stay, how many messages per game are sent now vs 3 years ago, you get the idea. But even that is hard to do clearly because we had a bug preventing many new users for months this year unfortunately.

My overall point here is that I find the notion that banning around 20 some trolls for various severe rule infractions over 5 years or so has lead to a "mass exodus". As you can see from above there isn't a mass exodus, there's geographically shifting interest in the hobby and I'd suspect the other diplomacy sites would be able to confirm similar patterns in their user bases. All the sites are for free based on volunteer efforts. None of us have big data analysts to do prediction models based on proposed changes for things like adding a 1 vs 1 variant to figure out of the fallout of less live classic games is better or worse then a faster time to play for 1 vs 1 games (though anyone with expertise in the areas of site analytics and big data who wants to volunteer their time can be given access to help us find areas where we can target specific steps to try and attract interest).

I do think that the massive lack of developers in the hobby will lead to the hobby's death online within 20-30 years though. Across all the sites you can find severe deficiencies in the technologies that if addressed would probably attract a lot more interest and help retain the interest of those who visit the site for the first time. As the most active developer here I can say it's painfully difficult even for me to do development work because ATC and Kestas are so slow to approve any changes and the system isn't designed well for it. Playdip isn't open source so they can't even accept help for small changes from devs, nexus is building a new site from scratch I think, so they're facing a massive undertaking there, and vDip has a lot of pseudo-devs making maps but Oli won't give sever access to anyone else so they are dependent on him having free time to approve new variants and fix bugs and if he's ever hit by the hypothetical buss then vDip is dead. I've been trying to address those problems for years now and have essentially given up. But for those wondering why the hobby is suffering online, that's my best hypothesis. The severe lack of devs with a terrible system for contributing new development work makes all the sites end up falling behind all the flashy games available to mobile users to the point we're all losing out on members as they check out the site for the first couple times.

Or maybe I'm wrong and all those people just know that we banned krellin and he who must not be named and would have stayed if they were back. But if those of you unhappy with the current state want to enact change, I personally think the best way would be to figure out a way to help me find people willing to contribute development effort to the site.
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Re: The mass exodus

#130 Post by New England Fire Squad » Sun Feb 17, 2019 5:15 am

jmo1121109 wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 2:49 am
I find this thread pretty interesting. Because it's pretty focused on the idea of the decline site being tied to the forum and to a couple colorful individuals being banned and the reduced number of live games. When you actually start looking at the data it gets more interesting.

The average life of a player on a diplomacy site isn't all that long. In the time I've been here I've observed a number of top players leave the site. We at one point reached out to them and surveyed their reasons for leaving and in general what you'll find is that many people who leave our site aren't going to another diplomacy site. They've grown tired of the game, had circumstances change in life, had kids, started a new job, or some other time consuming event shift their focus. A surprising number of people have stated they have a flat out problem with playing too much and needed to stop cold turkey. This of course only relates to the more experienced top rated players that I have gotten to ask.

For the more general player there's a different set of factors and those are more easily looked into analytically.

I have spoken to playdip members and found their active member base has had a nearly identical drop in active players to ours recently, and we are hovering around 100-200 more active users then they were just a couple weeks back. So it does not seem like it's the site specifically that is losing people, it appears to be the hobby. But that loss is not geographically consistent.

For example, in the last year our users from the following countries increased drastically.

Switzerland increased over 112% to around 550 users
Malaysia increased 37%
Finland increased 40%
Norway increased 22%
Belgium increased 50% to 1,169 users accessing the site during the year

While on the flip side
US decreased 19%
UK decrease 9%
Australia decreased 34%
New Zealand decreased 35%
Russia decreased 60%

We've had an less then a 2% change in the number of mobile users on IOS but a 20% drop off in the number of android users. A massive drop in IE users, but a large increase in edge users (makes sense right, as IE support ends and edge is pushed by Microsoft).

The problem with this data is obvious though. Did we lose users from Russia because the Russian webdip based site came back up and started getting popular there again? Because their internet filters have started blocking en-us advertised sites, because the hobby there is simply dying off? Who knows.

Are we losing mobile users on androids because android users prefer app based games more, because android is losing out to IOS as a phone choice? Because there's an increasingly competitive market of freeware phone games on the google store?

The decrease in live games I can directly tie to the introduction of 1 vs 1 games. The falloff in them directly correlates to when I added those 2 variants. An unexpected side effect. But is it bad? We have had 8,959 of one and 4,782 of the other played since their introduction with many of those being live. Which means people are more consistently able to hop on the site, enter a live 1 vs 1 game, and get their diplomacy itch scratched then they were previously.

Google Analytics provides all sorts of data on usage and we can access more with complex queries to see how many games on average new members stay, how many messages per game are sent now vs 3 years ago, you get the idea. But even that is hard to do clearly because we had a bug preventing many new users for months this year unfortunately.

My overall point here is that I find the notion that banning around 20 some trolls for various severe rule infractions over 5 years or so has lead to a "mass exodus". As you can see from above there isn't a mass exodus, there's geographically shifting interest in the hobby and I'd suspect the other diplomacy sites would be able to confirm similar patterns in their user bases. All the sites are for free based on volunteer efforts. None of us have big data analysts to do prediction models based on proposed changes for things like adding a 1 vs 1 variant to figure out of the fallout of less live classic games is better or worse then a faster time to play for 1 vs 1 games (though anyone with expertise in the areas of site analytics and big data who wants to volunteer their time can be given access to help us find areas where we can target specific steps to try and attract interest).

I do think that the massive lack of developers in the hobby will lead to the hobby's death online within 20-30 years though. Across all the sites you can find severe deficiencies in the technologies that if addressed would probably attract a lot more interest and help retain the interest of those who visit the site for the first time. As the most active developer here I can say it's painfully difficult even for me to do development work because ATC and Kestas are so slow to approve any changes and the system isn't designed well for it. Playdip isn't open source so they can't even accept help for small changes from devs, nexus is building a new site from scratch I think, so they're facing a massive undertaking there, and vDip has a lot of pseudo-devs making maps but Oli won't give sever access to anyone else so they are dependent on him having free time to approve new variants and fix bugs and if he's ever hit by the hypothetical buss then vDip is dead. I've been trying to address those problems for years now and have essentially given up. But for those wondering why the hobby is suffering online, that's my best hypothesis. The severe lack of devs with a terrible system for contributing new development work makes all the sites end up falling behind all the flashy games available to mobile users to the point we're all losing out on members as they check out the site for the first couple times.

Or maybe I'm wrong and all those people just know that we banned krellin and he who must not be named and would have stayed if they were back. But if those of you unhappy with the current state want to enact change, I personally think the best way would be to figure out a way to help me find people willing to contribute development effort to the site.
jmo, I am willing to help in any way to keep this site strong that I can, though my background in liberal arts and massive industrial machines may not be of much use. I love this place and of course the game.

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Re: The mass exodus

#131 Post by MajorMitchell » Sun Feb 17, 2019 9:29 am

Good on you JMO for that informative post. I'm not sure that I agree with the basic proposition that there is a mass exodus of the best players. I'm on "sabbatical" after my dummy spit last October, & I'm definitely not "one of the best players"

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Re: The mass exodus

#132 Post by Octavious » Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:20 am

It is worth noting that Conspiracy has gone from nothing to 460,000 registered players who have completed 106,000 games of full press classic diplomacy in recent years. That's more games of full press classic diplomacy than we've had games of anything in our entire existence.

We have long since left behind the reality of the world of online diplomacy being us, Playdip, and a few supporting acts. We are like the English player obsessed with France and totally oblivious to the growing juggernaut in the east.

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Re: The mass exodus

#133 Post by flash2015 » Sun Feb 17, 2019 4:15 pm

Octavious wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:20 am
It is worth noting that Conspiracy has gone from nothing to 460,000 registered players who have completed 106,000 games of full press classic diplomacy in recent years. That's more games of full press classic diplomacy than we've had games of anything in our entire existence.

We have long since left behind the reality of the world of online diplomacy being us, Playdip, and a few supporting acts. We are like the English player obsessed with France and totally oblivious to the growing juggernaut in the east.
I assume you are meaning the app Conspiracy?:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... p&hl=en_US

I don't know what features conspiracy has but an app could give you notifications (a pain point for me with playing - when I play I stress about missing a move), real-time communication, an interface designed explicitly for mobile (not to insult anyone, the mobile interface for webdip is useable in a "dancing bear" sort of way). If we had all this hear I would play a lot more.

I think this all comes back to jmo's point. It isn't about the forums. webdip just doesn't have the developers to compete with full time developers working for a for-profit company.

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Re: The mass exodus

#134 Post by Octavious » Sun Feb 17, 2019 4:33 pm

Conspiracy has a lot of nice features. Most importantly is has a really user friendly interface. Entering moves on conspiracy is as good or better than entering moves here and on Playdip. The messaging system on Conspiracy is far superior to Playdip's and probably a bit better than ours.

Where Conspiracy has thus far failed, as Durga pointed out earlier, is in the quality of games available to new members, and in preventing cheating. You can find quality games on Conspiracy, but it is tricky.

The also don't have much in the way of a forum at all. Even Playdip's miserable offering is far better than anything Conspiracy has. Diplomacy is about far more than a forum, I agree, but a good forum adds considerable value and it is one of the few areas where we can be well ahead of Conspiracy.
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Re: The mass exodus

#135 Post by jmo1121109 » Sun Feb 17, 2019 4:56 pm

Octavious wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:20 am
It is worth noting that Conspiracy has gone from nothing to 460,000 registered players who have completed 106,000 games of full press classic diplomacy in recent years. That's more games of full press classic diplomacy than we've had games of anything in our entire existence.

We have long since left behind the reality of the world of online diplomacy being us, Playdip, and a few supporting acts. We are like the English player obsessed with France and totally oblivious to the growing juggernaut in the east.
You are making my point for me. Conspiracy is ahead of us in terms of users and games for the simple reason they are ahead of us technologically. But they are behind us in a variety of technological methods too that prevent them from being the best...or even sometimes a good site to play on. The quality of the games is low for a couple reasons that could all be solved technologically, and their cheating detection system is awful from what I can see. I also for the life of me can't find them on the apple store. And in searching for why I found this on their FAQ:

"No, there is only an Android version. Indeed, we are only 3 friends developing everything in our spare time. Unfortunately, for now, we have neither time nor money to make another version (and especially for Apple)."

So right back to what I pointed out as the problem for the hobby. A lack of dev's. They have triple the number we do here, at vDip, and at Playdip and it shows. But they lack expertise in some of the tech areas the other sites have nailed. In making the game into an app though, they're ahead in targeting a different user-base then everyone else.
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Re: The mass exodus

#136 Post by dyager_nh » Sun Feb 17, 2019 5:33 pm

Personally, I find Conspiracy difficult to use in alot of aspects. The quality of games is poor.

I downloaded it a while back and drifted back to here.

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Re: The mass exodus

#137 Post by jmo1121109 » Sun Feb 17, 2019 7:18 pm

The other important thing to keep in mind when you are considering the number of games played on a diplomacy site is that the decision was made on this site to add developmental functionality to allow it to be open source with a fully developed locales translation system in place to make it easy for other sites to pop up in translated formats using our open source code.

So if you want an accurate count of the games played on the webdip inspired code base you need to include:
the 4,428 games completed on our Russian sister site (http://server.diplomail.ru/gamelistings.php)
the 1,298 games completed on our Italian sister site (http://webdiplomacy.it/gamelistings.php)
and the 21,106 games completed on our variant sister site (https://vdiplomacy.net/gamelistings.php)

which altogether brings the total completed games to around 112,819 total, and when you consider that's with a combined user base of less then half of conspiracy's the numbers show that the people who sign up to play on the websites end up playing more games on average then the people who sign up on conspiracy. Which reasonably indicates their retention rate is worse.

Again, the why is hard to nail down, is it quality of games, is it cheating, is it people playing on an app have a shorter attention span and go back to candy crush too quickly? No idea.

At the end of the day though, there are a ton of options for playing diplomacy online.

webdiplomacy.net
playdiplomacy
conspiracy
droidippy
Backstabr
vDiplomacy
Redscape
Stabbeurfou
Webdiplomacy.it
diplomail.ru
Facebook Diplomacy
diplomaticcorp.com

And I'm pretty sure I'm missing a couple of the older smaller ones.

I view this as a problem, since there are limited development resources and limited people in the hobby willing to contribute money in the form of donations to the various sites and apps. If all the sites consolidated into 1 or 2 based on variant and language use the result would be a site/app combo that would be technologically up to date and competitive with other gaming apps available and would probably see a significant resurgence in the hobby and would be able to consistently stay up to date since there'd be the development resources around to keep that 1 site up to speed. But good luck trying to make something like that happen. Instead the hobby's likely to continue having a dozen groups trying to rebuild the wheel slightly better then the others until the hobby dies off due to old tech entirely.
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Re: The mass exodus

#138 Post by Hellenic Riot » Sun Feb 17, 2019 7:28 pm

God damn the People's Front of Judea
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Re: The mass exodus

#139 Post by Octavious » Sun Feb 17, 2019 7:43 pm

If you want to count the number of games played on webDip inspired code, surely you should add Playdip's games to the mix? ;)

But however you tally things up, Conspiracy has made an impressive land grab. My worry is that it's the electric car of diplomacy. Lots and lots of problems with it, but they're all problems that are solvable. When they manage to do so they're going to have a formidable package.

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Re: The mass exodus

#140 Post by flash2015 » Sun Feb 17, 2019 8:31 pm

Most importantly in all this jmo continues to improve his +1 to post ratio...
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