Thank you DO for making this thread.
A tutoring system sounds great to me, but I am afraid that it wouldn't be practical to organise it at such a large scale. But I am not complaining if people would like to try it.
Something that is maybe easier to implement, and I think will help improve the quality of new players, is making more information better available for new players. I can think of three topics that newer players tend to be unaware about, just because they lack some information.
1. The impact of NMRs on the game and your RR rating. CommanderByron explained this well on page 1 of this discussion:
''I think some more options to prevent NMRs would be fantastic, but more importantly I think a mandatory "tutorial" before a player can enter a game would do wonders to educate new players on the importance of NOT NMRing. When i first started about 4 years ago I had no clue the negative impact NMRing was having on not only my fellow players (I assumed they'd be happy to have me drop out) and also on my potential to join better games. Simply explaining that could do loads for the issue.''
2. How one can look up previous orders and previous messages from other players. Someone recently made a thread explaining that the fact that new players do not automatically know that not all orders are shown on the small map, can have negative impacts on games (
threadID=1518904). New players should know that they have to look at the large map to see all orders and should be aware of the Orders and Messages tabs.
3. The Draw option and the fact that there is an unofficial rule that players have to vote for Draw if the game is in a stalemate, and hence the importance of stalemate lines. The unofficial rule of 'if stalemate, then draw' has a huge impact on how games are played (because players will try to force a stalemate to happen), but can't be found anywhere because it is an unofficial rule.
I do not think it is a good idea, though, to let players read all of this before joining a game. I have noticed that the text people first get to see when entering webdiplomacy is quite short. I can understand this, because we want to make joining webdiplomacy 'low-threshold' (I have no idea whether that last word made sense in this context; I had to resort to google translate there) and people might be thrown off (did that last expression make sense..?) if they have to read a wall of text before entering a game. However, this information should be easily available. Perhaps we can make a 'Beginners Guide' that is linked on the intro page and that can easily be found from the main page, and perhaps (if this is not difficult to program) we can send a notification to new players after they have finished 5 phases or so saying 'Have you read the Beginners Guide?' and linking to it.
When reading this thread, I saw a few people suggesting that when someone misses a phase and goes into Civil Disorder, the phase should be extended. This is partially implemented in vDiplomacy. When someone NMRs the very first turn of the game, that player is immediately send into Civil Disorder and the phase gets extended so that anyone can take over the open spot (for half the original bet). It works fantastically well because in this way, no game will get ruined from the beginning because of CD's.
Also, I have a small suggestion about Reliability Rating. I think that the RR system will better reflect a players true reliability if recent NMRs and CD's are weighed heavier than ones in the past. For example, imagine two players that played for three years on the site. One had a few NMRs and CD's in his first year of the site but hasn't missed a phase ever since. The other player has never CD's but consistently NMRs now and then. Their Reliability Ratings are identical. I would prefer to play with the first player and not with the second one, and I think many players would agree with me. One way to implement this is, for example, by making the last 1001st to the 2000th phases weigh only half as much as the last 1000 phases, by making the last 2001th to 4000th phases weigh only one quarter as much, the last 4001 to 8000th only one eight as much, etc, for determining RR, and something similar for games played/CD's. This system would be more forgiving, too (and obviously someone with my name would be in favor of such a forgiving system!). If people know that, if they start playing reliably, their RR will converge to 100 with a decently fast rate, that is an extra motivation to indeed go start playing more reliable. Maybe some people will critique my suggestion by pointing out that the RR of players will become too high if this is implemented, but to that I say that all is relative and that if this is the case, they can create games with even higher RR requirements.
Remove the no orders/saved/ready icons
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