I think the 1v1 games have soaked up some players that otherwise would play a larger game.

Please do not make self-multi accusations in forum posts, the mods get hot and bothered about it.

i agree with Hauta; the one-on-one games take away a lot of players that would otherwise be in the live games. i have been playing a lot of long term games and have not been in a live one for a bit.

jmo are you getting hot and bothered?

Nope, I'm not a mod. Just offering friendly and highly useful advice for our new member.

Yeah, a lot has changed on the site since Feb. 1

i dunno jmo, you look a little red, your veins are bulging out and you have that nervous twitch again

huh?

jmo, MOD extraordinaire, getting hot and bothered!

I was off the site for a year or so and checked it out again recently.

Every game I have played since then has been 1v1, and that's around 30-40 games. 1v1s take 1-2 hours. Full live games take 4-6. Big difference in commitment.

trstno, webdip used to have PPSC and it used to have live games fill frequently. Although I never liked PPSC, even I must acknowledge that when PPSC was banned it drove a lot of people away from the site (or at least, since then there has been an apparent drop in the number of live games that start). At the time, the site controllers said that the change was intended to "make it the best place to play Diplomacy", but with less frequent live games, the opposite effect occured. And keep in mind that my opinion is from someone who didn't even like PPSC in the first place.

Webdip is now going through yet another phase of banning and thread-locking, with the site controllers again saying that it is being done "to make it the best place to play Diplomacy", but after time we might observe a similar negative impact. Eventually, webdip may degenerate into seven guys playing in bo_sox's members-only backyard.

I believe the numbers are going up and not down, and that you are wrong wp about webdip degenerating. The live games being shot I would actually blame on the implementation of 1v1 - it's all the rage now. I doubt it had anything to do with PPSC. & god forbid the mods are making the forum less toxic.. :p

There were 500 more games played on this site in January (1,500+) then the previous historical site high (just shy of 1,000). February as of yesterday was also higher then any month in the last year aside from January at over 600.

Does that include 1v1?

Yes

Friday nights I do after the kids are asleep.

Players grew up, got older, got kicked out of home, finished University, got jobs and families

I have also noticed the decline in Classic live games and miss them. What timezone are you in, trstno1?

Live games suffered greatly from the switch from computers to smartphones as the preferred way of accessing the internet. Webdiplomacy, for a lot of people at least, can be played by phone easily enough for longer phase games. Writing messages by phone in a live game, however, is a struggle with the time constraints.

A dedicated app, perhaps a bit of voice recognition for rapid messaging, and live games will rise again. Until then I can't see them being anything other than niche.

I'm quite hopeful that Playdip's shiny new interface may allow for them to take off a bit in at least one corner of the internet, but they'd have to drop that ridiculous habit of making people pay for it to make it truly popular.