I may be saying that the member's intuition abilities on the site has decreased in general in the last year or so. It may just be my luck of the draw when it comes to neighbors in my current games but in the 8 or so games ive picked up over the past month have made it relatively easy to find early game allies.

Don't mean to bump again just finishing my thought...

Yeah the points do and don't mean anything really. Some people will be intimidated/awed and try to ally with you or consider you a threat right off the bat. Others won't pay attention to it at all.

Other than that having points is only good for getting into more expensive games, where there are usually only better players, therefore a better game experience.

Oh yeah, and one more thing. Having lots of points is great for the ego :D

I wasn't really speaking in generalities and what you said has always been the case. I was comparing then(jan 2010) and now(feb 2011) in relation to the ease of finding allies solely based on how many points one has rather than based on persuasion through diplomacy.

Semi-anon is good way to find decent players. Make the game anonymous but password protect it and recruit from the forum. Thus everyone knows who is in the game but not who is who. You will nearly always have a decent game. The forum regulars are mostly good people who respect the game. My experience of low pot games with random strangers has been mixed. A few good games but also bad games, with CDs, multi-accounters and metagamers, or people who have no idea what they are doing or who don't communicate.

I know the best ways to find a solid group to play a game with and have done so on many occasions. But am i the only one that has noticed a rise in people swaying their allegiances towards those with a more "persuasive" bank?

Can't say I have noticed it. But I don't play a huge number of games. So you are finding that players ally with you more? It might be that you actually put some effort into communicating. A lot of noobs don't seem to realize that you actually need to convince people to work with you. For example if I am England and France talks to me and Germany doesn't, guess who I am going to ally with? (hint: not Germany)

I don't have a huge number of points either. But I have never felt ganged up on because of my points. Perhaps the opposite though. Or maybe I just didn't do a very good job of diploming or maybe I was just unlucky.

Well, the norms for alliances have remained intact for the most part as far as i have noticed. What i mean is that ive hardly had to say more than "hey neighbor, wanna fight _____" and more often than not they jump on board. In almost every game i played before i came back a month ago i had to explain my intentions, what my opening moves were going to be, and then prove over the first couple phases that i meant what i had previously said.

I can't imagine why that would have changed. Noob habits that is. A noob is a noob.
"hey neighbor, wanna fight____" might be more than they are hearing from the other players.
In my first ever online game (playing Germany) - I sent messages to all of the players and did not get a single reply. To my amazement I went on to win. At the time I just thought this was how online player played the game - like a gunboat.
Facebook diplomacy - those were the days. It was so much easier then. Then I migrated here and it was much harder.

Yeah Sammy, I really think it depends on the crowd you play with. certainly in the games I'm in now, move-sharing and trust building are necessary things. You have to explain intentions fully and completely (or at least really embellish the lie) and even that is not a guarantee of security

Once again, thats not what i said. A year ago before i took my hiatus from the site i had to do the aforementioned steps to solidify an alliance. Over course of the last 9 games i have started since i have come back have been nothing but half-assed attempts at diplomacy and i ended up with a partner that seemed willy-nilly about joining my cause. It must just boil down to the people i have been so fortunate to get a game with seeing as so far no one can relate to what i am trying to say. Or perhaps it's just that i apparently can't illiterate my thoughts correctly to convey the intended meanings.

I think it may actually be a race thing, if you had been called BlackSammy things would be very much harder for you. I think people also think that sammy is a boys name and hence show you respect you may not have earned. Change your name to BlackLisa13 and then see how you do.

PS if you think I'm wrong try having a name like maniac :) people assume all kinds of things about me and only 80% of them are true.

Correct me if have misunderstood, but you are saying that some players with fewer points ally with you because you have more points? That could happen sometimes with noobs, but I can't think why it would be happening more often now than a year ago. Unless, maybe, it actually is a good strategy?

WhiteSammy, have you noticed that in the past year (jan 2010) and now(feb 2011) it's harder to get people to stick to answering the question you ask on a forum? :)

BTW, good game ending last week. Wish I knew why France was so fruity, but I appreciated it!

I have used someone large point total to try to get someone else to ally against him with me. I send "Look at X's statistics, he hardly ever looses. We better be careful, therefore will you attack him with me?"

@joey1 - you metagamer - burn him, burn him..

Does anyone other than Maniac consider that metagaming? I can't decide. Because yes, it's using data outside the game to influence the game itself, but at the same time... 'Kill him first, not me, he's got a gun' seems like a fairly reasonable argument to me without being metagaming.

I say other than Maniac because I can never ever tell if you're serious or not. :P

on average, recently, I've had really bad neighbours or worse... on top of it, I quit playing during x-mas, GF pressure... & that my rating is low is not cool, dunno, but something could be better than this strange 2-tier system of D's & puppets...

In the School of war lecture of 1901 we were told to consider it :)

it's not your neighbors, dharmaton, it's you. you're diplomacy is lousy, you don't know how to read the map, and you don't differentiate between ppsc and wta.

on the topic, i usually play anon, so i can't see player's stats, but i wouldn't judge people by their points anyway. i have 1000+ points because of two games. had they been 35pt pot games, instead of a 707 and 350, i'd still be the same player, but my point total would be in the one-hundreds. points come and go.

i think win/draw and resign % are better stats to look at when judging others.

@gigantor - I'm always serious, diploamcy is a serious game.

@Trip - I agree points are such a transiant things that they don't derserve any consideration. I'm the greatest player ever and my points don't reflect that at all.

Diploamcy is a serious game, yes. But Diplomacy? Nope. Hell no.

thx. for reminders folks !)

@gigantor - i mak lik won mistoke in an hunddred yaers hand ewe pic uponit, shaim on yew.

Something makes me thnk it's not my username, but thanks foe the name change suggestion maniac.

Indy...No not really. It's always been difficult to get your thread to be taken in the right light in this forum. In the years that i have been here there have been very few threads to remain on topic for more than 5 posts.

Word association thread does pretty well...

With the exception of the Last to Post and Word Association the observation still applies.

TMW's historical dates game has done well also. But on serious discussions, I agree Sammy, ten posts max you'll get on it

WhiteSammy: If you feel like you're being targeted for your point total, then create an anonymous game with 508 buy-in protected by a password that only you know. If you feel like joining a higher-pot game, you can always leave the fake game and use your points elsewhere.

^ Very good idea. Although, like 450 buy-in would do

I've been surprised when anonymous games end at the point totals of people sometimes. Usually something like "I can't believe he has so many points; he didn't even try to reach out to me for an alliance as he was getting killed by his neighbors."

In light of those experiences, the statistic I look at (after number of resigns), is messages sent / total games. This is more a comment for the developer forum, but I'd love to see a "Messages / game" statistic on people's profiles that factors gunboats and public press games out of the equation.

Yourad...I never said that i was being targeted. I meant that alliances require very little communication(simply stating that i have played more games/won more games than so-and-so works unusually well) to establish recently which in my opinion was a drastic change in pace from when i last played here. I held off posting about this topic for quiet some time due to the minimal amount of games that i had played at the time.

I was only wondering if anyone else has noticed anything similar over the past year. If not then its just the games i have stumbled into recently. I never intended this thread to become a discussion on how to find the most challenging of games on the site.

But yes, Sammy, I have found that too, but only for games that I just randomly join on the games tab though; games in leagues, SoW, GR Challenge, and games I receive via PM are all of a different quality. In the random games, when I start out in 1901, I "ally" with everyone, and they all actually think that I'm their allies! then they are in disbelief when I stab them the next year. Completely different qualities of play.