While I agree with balki's last sentence, he tends to benefit from anonymous games by pretending to be a carebear :)

It's all I have, really. Just a few moments a day when I can sit down in front of my keyboard, take a deep breath, cast aside this insatiable hunger for the taste of sweet, sweet blood, and pretend to be someone else entirely. Someone just a little bit taller, just a little bit more handsome, just a little bit more friendly. Someone who genuinely cares about the desires and feelings of other human beings.

Don't take that from me.

@Balki - I must not have been clear. I am not inclined to make them non-anon. It was suggested, and that it my rejection of the suggestion. I am, however, downplaying the metagaming in the Finals compared to the other rounds, as I believe it will turn out less important. Simply because only one team can win. It was *my* team that identified the California players in Group A, due to the danger they posed to advancing *my* team's shot at advancing. Had they solo'd one or more games, my team could've been pushed out of the Finals pretty easily just by SC counts in the draws that we made in other games. The strategy was implemented to prevent solos, and they were the most likely team to do so. In the Finals, that doesn't make sense, because all teams are strong enough to solo.

Again, there is some inevitable meta. But that will be more prevalent in the last games to finish than in the first. If I see it is being used to cut cross-board deals, I will take it as a breach of the tournament rules.

Non-anon tournament games get WAY too meta.

Anon still gives the players a few rounds of unbiased play before identities start getting recognized and since gunboat games are near impossible to crack there's some relief from team overall success influencing across games until after games start finishing.

Atta boy Goldie.

Okay, got it. I was confused by the double-negative, and then it seemed like you were arguing for non-anonymity.

If we actually want anonymity to mean something, then I think the suggestions I offered make sense:

(1) Teams can assign any of their team members to play any game;
(2) No player is allowed to write any messages speculating about or suggesting who is who;
(3) No player is allowed to identify him or herself.

Otherwise, people are going to know who is who pretty fast, and they are going to make decisions and alliances based on that information.

Still, "last online" on profiles make it fairly easy to identify who is who for the dedicated. If we want anonymity (wich I do) then there should be for example temporary accounts used for the tournament. If they have totally randon names then no one (excpets cheating mods I guess) can know who is who because checking last online wont help. Another way would be to remove the "last online" from the profiles, but if that was easy I would already have been done I guess.

Ah, it's annoying you cant edit a post. Many typos above, but you are smart so you understand it anyway. Last sentence "IT" would already have been done...

How hard is it to get rid of the online indicators and last seen times-stamps once and for all? That is kinda silly to display.

There are benefits from a moderating perspective to have them around, and they were first implemented to help improve live game formation. So the argument to remove them does have drawbacks. Additionally, from what I've heard, removing it isn't as simple as one would think.

@Balki - I will consider those. I am biased in that the past WC games I've been in have featured a whole lot of #2 (courtesy of Sandgoose, mainly) and a bunch of players have frequently inadvertently identified themselves.

Surely if Balki's suggestions are accepted, we'll all be playing in a tournament we did not sign up for?

Also, #2 is a ridiculous suggestion.

I was thinking more about future tournaments. But yeah, making it impossible to not only infer from press but from site architecture who is who is hardly something else than we signed up for. Perhaps we signed up for different things though, me bein naive signed up for an anonymous tournament and the old timers signed up for a tournament where it was possible to break anonymity.

Dear Tin Can,

You can use the arrows above to look back at the original post to see what the stated rules of the tournament were when we all signed up. It says this:

"All games will be anonymous"

I think it's pretty silly to argue that there is some promise for anonymity backdoors. Those are bugs, not features.

Goldie, what was I joking about? Had I been willing to play on, that's how I would have played. And the reason is precisely your, um, interpretations.

In the first round, you go after my team and it is okay. But if I do so to your team in the second round, it is a violation of tournament rules? Because you...think mine is bad strategy but yours is good? Or just because your doing it legally but my not being allowed to is convenient?

I think if you retain a shred of decency you should remove yourself as a player immediately.

CS - the moderators determined whether our actions were within the confines of the rules. They looked at everything. You know this. I said "joking" because I was giving you an easy way to back down from your statements without losing face.

I also suppose this is a decent time to announce that zultar will probably be TD'ing the Finals. I will get confirmation on this before they start.

And to get rid of the confusion that I appear to have caused, I'll announce my decision regarding anonymity as well. Between the end of this round and the start of the next, teams may switch around whomever they like as far as assignments and substitutes go. There will be no press restrictions on anonymity. However, I will remind everyone that the extent to which the meta is used is strictly limited to your team's score on the scoreboard at the end of the day. No knocking out people for lulz.

You press players have too much fuckin drama.

The game is designed for communicative games. Negotiations are in the rules. As well as the famous passage "you may try to overhear..." ☺️

As convenient and self-serving as your interpretation might be, it won't make sense to a bunch of Diplomacy players. It is considered completely legitimate for me to make a late-game decision on throwing a solo because the in-game actions of one of the players sufficiently upset me. A very common reason would be "I think you stupidly tried to kill me for no reason, so I shall ensure that you end up with no points from this game."

Oh, of course my actions would have been dictated by the scoreboard. Your team demonstrated in this round that they are stronger than we are. Naturally, it is in our best interest to focus on making sure that we finish ahead of you!

My actions in Round 2 would have had similar motives. You went out of your way to try to kill us in Round 1 for no reason other than the people who made up our team. Moderators decided that doing so might be ill-advised and make the tournament less fun for some teams, but was not explicitly illegal. Changing the rules so that we're not allowed to retaliate later in the same tournament is as transparently ridiculous to everybody else as it is to me.

Besides, I could certainly make a scoreboard-only argument that it makes sense for us to focus in Round 2 on defeating a team that demonstrated in Round 1 that it was stronger than we are. Surely that's stronger than your argument that in Round 1, you should focus on defeating a team that you suspected *might* be stronger than you.

CS - your argument holds no water. "Might" be stronger? Please, we have Vash lol. Besides, we guessed incorrectly on identities in over half the games. I would appreciate it if this tournament thread were not derailed further.

..."

Can confirm, am burden to team.

If I had continued, I'd have been playing press, and Vashta certainly has a stronger press record than I do. So I think it would have been appropriate for me to intentionally target him as a more dangerous player.

However, as you know from our earlier discussions, I was simply playing out remainder the games because you felt I had an obligation to do so after signing up and it was hard for me to disagree with that. I took a premature draw in a very strong position in the first game to get it over with, and you told me that wasn't really right, so I won the other one. I trust that you'll now consider my obligations discharged.

And with that in mind, I suppose your hypocrisy is really an issue for those who plan on continuing in this farce. So, I'll leave it to the next team that you decide to gang up on to ask themselves why the rules only apply to others, and I'll leave it to the site moderators to consider how to structure future tournaments so that they end up bringing players to webDip rather than driving them away.

It's a team tournament, of course there's going to be meta thinking. Why wouldn't anybody target players who threaten their individual or teams success? Embrace the meta, it's part of the fun. Don't try to make it against the rules just make it more challenging to crack.

The whole team Cali thing has been blown out of proportion. The fact that you had 4 of the best players on the site on your team had an effect on the playstyles of some players, but it was always going to in a tournament like this. It was nothing to do with the passwords of the games. I'd say more, but my game is still ongoing so I can't.

If you want to quit the site because weaker players decided to attack stronger players, CStein, that's entirely your right, but it's not exactly an uncommon thing in Diplomacy. If you're quitting the site because of the passwords, you need to learn how to take a joke. Either way, nobody here is interested in you continuously bringing it up unless you're actually contributing and giving suggestions for avoiding the metagaming aspect, like Balki is.

I can confirm that also in FTF tournaments dealing with the fact that weaker player tends to ally against stronger is part of the skill required to win. Still, back to the original issue; can we make anonymity stronger?

@vixol - teams will be able to swap their player assignments between rounds. That is all I can promise. Code changes to the site are a bit much to ask for, from a little tournament :)

yeah, but what about setting up temporary accounts to play with?

I dont agree that the anonymity is less important in the finals. It is not the case that it is always better to score more than all opponents in a game. It would be interesting to see what happened to the play style if we used for example the French C-Diplo scoring system. That system makes it more important than anything else to be the largest power. Makes for tight games. The top table I've been on with this system has all been very tight boards which ends with a winner on 7 sc or so. It's really fun.