All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

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Claesar
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#41 Post by Claesar » Sun Nov 01, 2020 8:18 am

I've been keeping track of my per-country stats myself as well, so I'm super keen to see that too!
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TheFlyingBoat
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#42 Post by TheFlyingBoat » Sun Nov 01, 2020 9:48 am

Claesar wrote:
Sun Nov 01, 2020 8:18 am
I've been keeping track of my per-country stats myself as well, so I'm super keen to see that too!
Same! I used to keep way better track years ago, but now just have a general idea of how I've done with each power and would love to know the actual data. I think Austria is probably my strongest country and I think I have two solos with Italy so at least I have some diversity in theory but idk.

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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#43 Post by swordsman3003 » Mon Nov 09, 2020 8:25 pm

The Diplomacy Dojo discusses scoring!

(Figured it was better to continue this thread than start a new one)
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ben9990
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#44 Post by ben9990 » Thu Dec 17, 2020 6:00 am

I am ready for the scoring system that does not differentiate between drawing and losing. Just treat any match without a victor as a cancel.

I'm pretty depressed over the GR1 game; I feel like the substantial majority of players did not at any point attempt to win the game. The players in the draw certainly did not try. Maybe you or ATC did, Swordsman, idk. But the meta feels like "just get to a 3/4WD and end it."

I see this same behavior over and over when I play rando anon games, too; I guess I thought maybe higher-rated players might be different. Fucking awful.

It makes me feel like I need to find a new game to play.
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#45 Post by ben9990 » Thu Dec 17, 2020 6:27 am

Macchiavelli wrote:
Wed Oct 21, 2020 7:12 pm
Allowing an enemy solo means you did nothing right and deserve zero points.
^ this is a broadly-accepted, also incorrect thought. Its fine to risk someone else's solo if you own odds improve as a result. If your odds of winning a match improve even 1%, its fine, more than fine even - optimal, the correct choice - to make a move that boosts someone else's odds 5% or 10%!

But players mostly don't think this way; in fact its the reverse: the vast majority players are risk-averse and will trade away their own strong solo run in the name of thwarting the weaker chances of someone else.

Risk aversion is incentivized by the GR formula and DSS scoring, which treat cautiously forcing a 4WD as a "win." So you have players with 10% win rates at the top of the full-press GR which is (or should be) a joke.

The only real rebuttal is some normative "anything goes! you can play how you want in Diplomacy!" objection, which is by its nature impossible to contest - but if we want to incentivize more dynamic games that see more risks taken, scoring and GR should reduce the rewards to herding for safety.
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#46 Post by A_Tin_Can » Thu Dec 17, 2020 6:34 am

ben9990 wrote:
Thu Dec 17, 2020 6:00 am
I'm pretty depressed over the GR1 game; I feel like the substantial majority of players did not at any point attempt to win the game. The players in the draw certainly did not try. Maybe you or ATC did, Swordsman, idk. But the meta feels like "just get to a 3/4WD and end it."
This describes my feeling about that game, too. I think everyone in it is capable of high quality play, but I don't think we really saw it on that board. I was disappointed by the level of caution, and the clear choices early on that precluded wins. That's not the kind of game that I play diplomacy for.

But hey, what do I know about high quality play. In that game, I made big mistakes, paid for them, and then was eliminated.

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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#47 Post by A_Tin_Can » Thu Dec 17, 2020 6:38 am

Risk aversion is incentivized by the GR formula and DSS scoring,
In most games, a 5 way draw will give you a GR "win".

It's weird though - the way GR works, you lose the same amount for a loss, but you stand to gain more in a "high GR" game from a win or good result. So you'd think that high GR games would have more risky play.

My personal feeling on this is that people focus on the "it's like Elo" part of GR, and don't realise that losses are uniform in GR (because they aren't in Elo). I think most players don't realise that GR should encourage risky behaviour in "high GR" games.
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#48 Post by Dejan0707 » Fri Dec 18, 2020 12:53 am

Over the years I played on 5-6 diplomacy sites, each having different rating system. Of all those I liked GR the best.

I see rating system as a tool to evaluate player skill and a way to find good and interesting games. Rating system will not tell you that player A is better than player B. It would tell you that high ranked player will with high probability give a good performance. Which is fine by me.

One could be dissapointed and feel that G1 underperformed. That might be true. But it is also true that it was interesting high volume press game filled with very good players. Yonni and me discussed during the game that it was probably the game with highest number of messages we had. At the end of the game I had 142 pages of press. When inside the game we go to "messages" game list all messages that player sent/received. 142 pages is a lot.

With so many good players in the game, everyone acted with more caution than they usually would. I know that I had. And as game progressed people become more cautious as they thought they could lose hard earned progress. I agree with ATC that without that caution it would be more of a spectacle. It was not a boring game though, MM managed to come back from lost position and in a very short time went from non-build 3SC power to 9SC power. That is an example of great diplomacy right there.
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Yonni
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#49 Post by Yonni » Fri Dec 18, 2020 1:16 am

I truly and honestly don't believe the scoring system has that strong of an impact on how experienced people play the game. Each person tends to have their own sort of objective and risk tolerance and those also change during the game in response to other peoples' press.

If we're using that GR1 game as an example, it would have surely ended in a 3WD if people were driven by the scoring system. You can fault me for being too cautious of a player and my record surely shows that to be the case but I wouldn't blame it on the scoring system at all. What that game did show me, however, is that Ghost Rating is a great 'rule of thumb' to get a competitive game with strong and engaged negotiators.

I don't think any rating system is going to do a great job of changing the way I play. What I want out of a rating system is to find people who are very challenging to play against and I think GR does a decent job of that.
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#50 Post by ben9990 » Fri Dec 18, 2020 3:35 am

I disagree with what you wrote, Yonni & Dejan. I do find it funny that you both showed up with apologetics.

I did not write what I said hoping that you two would read it (the opposite). Debating you over a dead game is not a good look for me, and you are not persuadable anyway. Happy to disengage or move to that game’s global board if you think we absolutely must hash it out.

The point is that current scoring systems and GR reward herding and risk aversion, reward wide draws and discourage attempting to solo. It is "fine" if you personally would be risk averse and herd either way, but that does not say anything about what a "good" scoring system looks like.

I use scare-quotes because I recognize these are partially normative questions.
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#51 Post by Yonni » Fri Dec 18, 2020 3:49 am

It's weird to bring up that game in particular as a product of the scoring system when it finished with people leaving easy ghost rating points on the table. A 3WD would have been fairly easy but neither kgray nor I were eliminated because people didn't give a damn about the scoring system.
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#52 Post by ben9990 » Fri Dec 18, 2020 4:02 am

I didn't say it was "a product."

I did say I do not want to debate you here, Yonni. Would prefer that you not insist.

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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#53 Post by Dejan0707 » Fri Dec 18, 2020 7:47 am

ben9990 wrote:
Fri Dec 18, 2020 3:35 am
The point is that current scoring systems and GR reward herding and risk aversion, reward wide draws and discourage attempting to solo. It is "fine" if you personally would be risk averse and herd either way, but that does not say anything about what a "good" scoring system looks like.
If you want to play solo only games why don't you just play them? Pedros on playdip organized those games and I played in many of those. The same thing could be done here.

I don't think scoring system has anything to do with people mentality. Long time ago there was heated debate on webdip where many people asked for PPSC games to be replaced with WTA games as deafult when creating new game. They were convinced mentality of people will change with changing the default setting.

It turned out it was not the case. Rating system is good tool to find you a good game. It will not change how people play their games.
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ben9990
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#54 Post by ben9990 » Fri Dec 18, 2020 8:18 am

Dejan0707 wrote:
Fri Dec 18, 2020 7:47 am
If you want to play solo only games why don't you just play them?
It is not like I haven't. They are hard to find. Webdip has better players. So I play on Webdip a plurality of the time. Webdip doesn't run "no draws" outside of the occasional "lusthog" forum game.

But that is beside the point. The idea that, "hey guys, let's all try to win this game we are going to spend months playing" shouldn't sound like some absurdity. It shouldn't require some "special" arranging beforehand. That it apparently does, is a travesty.

You and Yonni are both misreading the thrust of my proposal. It is not about you (shocker). I know by now not to expect you to change your nature (the last three months taught me that).

Rather, it is to reward people who behave differently, and to make a normative statement to new players that it is OK - more than OK, admirable even - to shoot for the moon and fail in the attempt.

It is also incorrect to say that even if your behavior is unaffected (sure, I don't know you, I will grant this) that no one's will be. Either A: some players' behavior changes, or B: no one's does, in which case scoring doesn't matter and nothing is lost by changing it. Said another way: heads I'm right, tails your argument is pointless, so stop making it.

The current system suggests that the cravenest craven castrate is "a good player" and that is, to me, a loss. You can disagree if you like.

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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#55 Post by Jamiet99uk » Fri Dec 18, 2020 12:23 pm

The current approach to scoring encourages players to draw, rather than to try to win.

Bring back PPSC.
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#56 Post by Yigg » Fri Dec 18, 2020 4:02 pm

With a heavy sigh, Yigg slowly clambers to his feet. He shakes his head as he walks towards the time clock, dragging a comically large lead pipe behind him. The factory whistle blows, and he punches his time card to signify that the work day has officially begun. He turns to face the dead horse as he swings the pipe into a ready position and says, "I'm really sorry about this, buddy. We're all sorry."

Look. At the end of the day, people just have different goals when it comes to this game. What's even more bonkers is that some people's goals change from game to game, or even turn to turn. Imagine, if you will, an abstract war game that focuses on player psychology and social manipulation to achieve war goals, and then actively wonder if all those mind games might start skewing those goals in players' heads. Worse still is that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. So the people in the back row can hear it, no amount of scoring system changes, let alone bitching about any of it, is going to fundamentally change how all people play this game. Simply accept the fact that people play their games however they see fit with whatever rationale they conjure, and play your game your own way. That's all you can really control anyways. Sure, you could make a logical argument with conclusions based on anecdotal data or clever jokes and possibly persuade someone to spend some personal time thinking about how they view their own goals. Hell, a few may even decide to agree with you. Past that, the best you can do is to suss out some like minded folk and just play with them. Complaining about it just makes it look like you're pissed off that other people don't see the world the way you do. Snapple Cap Fun Fact; no one sees the world precisely the way you do. Hell, I think I'm pretty right about everything I've just said, and I know for a fact some people won't see it that way. So I can either move on with my day (and pick the Red Snapper), or die mad about it (and pick the box, finding out what's inside).

In conclusion yes, All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks, as the forum post title suggests, and none of it really matters.

Spoiler, there's nothing in the box. Absolutely nothing.
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#57 Post by ben9990 » Fri Dec 18, 2020 4:12 pm

Lotta words for something that supposedly does not matter!

Dejan already made (succinctly) the bad argument you are making.

Either A: it does matter, scoring influences behavior. People respond to incentives, especially aggregates of people [not individuals], making decisions at margins. This would be consistent with every other area of life.

Or B: You are right. It does not matter. Then, no harm in tinkering. Nothing will be negatively impacted if you are right.
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#58 Post by RoganJosh » Fri Dec 18, 2020 4:26 pm

@Yigg
For a site like webDiplomacy, and a long term ranking like GR, I agree with you. For tournaments with a limited number of participants and time constraints, scoring systems does make a big difference. But then again, if there is a time constraint, then there is no such thing as playing for the solo.

@ben
First, for a long term ranking like GR, the scoring system must be zero-sum, or it implodes.
Second, scoring is always relative. So a scoring system that rewards a solo will automatically make a difference between a loss (someone else solo'd) and a draw (nobody solo'd). So you're asking for something that doesn't exist.
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#59 Post by ben9990 » Fri Dec 18, 2020 4:46 pm

Thats not true, Rogan. Not sure what you are trying to say. Treating draws like a cancel is zero sum.
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Re: All Diplomacy Scoring Stinks

#60 Post by RoganJosh » Fri Dec 18, 2020 4:55 pm

Unclear what part you think is 'not true'.

Treating a draw like a cancel is the same as treating any draw as a 7WD, and it means that a draw is still better than a loss.

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