Yah I don't know the penalty. Or is it only metagaming if the person actually comes through on the promise, hmmm?

Depends on the sincerity of the offer I would say. There is the whole "lie to get what you need" approach.

I would like to see Mod input on this question. An offer in a game for future action in another game is no guarantee of future action. I think it only becomes actual meta-gaming when said future game occurs and unreasonable action occurs, supposedly as a closing of the past deal.

he just answered all his questions himself lmfao

@ILN - I answered the question with my opinion, and my opinion is rather meaningless if a Mod happens to disagree.

Referring to OP you ass clown lmao.

The email address should be provided along with the advice "Email the mods"

There's no interpretation necessary. Read Rule #2:

"You can't make alliances for reasons outside a game, such as because you are friends, relatives or in return for a favour in another game."

I think it's off the table regardless of the intent of the offerer. What if he thinks he is lying, but in the next game actually finds good cause to ally with the other guy? How are the mods to know the difference?

Oh, shit, the Original Poster, "Starside", isn't talking about anything specific. He's just "receiving" the rules as vibes from the cosmos. After he's uttered all the existing rules, he'll be the psychic channel through which the "new rules" are delivered.

YJ makes an excellent point. How could the mods determine it was ro wasn't metagaming. Well thought out YJ.

How do the mods magically determine when anyone is meta-gaming? Investigations and mind-probes.

They check your supposedly "private" messages.

Do they? Can they even do that? A real meta-gamer can get around that so easily.

kestas' mind probes are still in beta and won't be released until the next site update. Unfortunately, investigations are all we can rely on, most of which are initiated by user tips.

If you see something, say something :)

It's not difficult to see if someone is metagaming. There are patterns that show up for people who are intentionally doing it vs. people who just by chance ended up in a spot to ally for two games in a row.

2wl is right. The rule reads, "You can't make alliances for reasons outside a game, such as because you are friends, relatives or in return for a favour in another game."

Whether or not you follow through, once you've *made* the alliance, you've violated the rule. It's immaterial that you may have formed the alliance with the intention of breaking it before following through.

I have another question, for which I would like to receive official clarification. Since I (mostly) play open matches these tend to accumulate a rather diverse range of skill levels. I find myself allying with the same people over and over, without prior arrangement and without promises of illicit compensation or threats of illicit punishment.

Since most of the people that play are noobs, there is little benefit to allying with them and little penalty in attacking them. By contrast, there is little benefit to backstabbing the senior players, and great benefit to allying with them.

Textual analysis sometimes enables me to identify people within ten messages. My particularly distinct writing voice is often identifiable to the people who have played with me before within about three messages.

Can the staff provide some guidance? I wouldn't want newer players to think that I am out to screw them for the simple reason that we are not yet acquainted. Rater, I'm out to screw them simply because they often make unreliable allies.

In my own defense, I would cheerfully take a newer player under my wing if any of them showed any interest, although most of them content enough to puzzle things out on their own.

@ Al

stagnight?

Per other conversation, people such as Abge have bought up that in the original game (real world) you can do anything you can get away with, up to and including moving pieces on the board. In other words, cheating is allowed in the original intent.

To that end, if I tell you, "Hey pal...I'll help you next time we play..." so that I can use you now...seems to me I just moved your piece. If you are dumb enough to believe I will follow through and meta-game, shame on you. I don't cheat in WebDip - not on purpose, anyway...so if you believe I will, then that is your problem, and the mods problem to prove I did later....because I won't.

Speaking of which, when you gonna start Call Me a Dirty So-n-So IV, krells? I've soloed, drawn, and been eliminated. Time to start back at the solo.

Still licking my puss-filled wounds from last time. Why? You wanna be my friend next time...heh heh...? (Feels a silence coming...)

I agree that the rule is a bit of a slippery slope. Metagaming is part of diplomacy; there's practically no way it can be prevented.

"You can't make alliances for reasons outside a game..."
I've done this on numerous occasions, and I can think of a number of valid reasons to do so.

1) I know the person is active and reliable. I know they won't NMR, and we'll have sufficient time to discuss strategy. I also know he'll most likely be available late in the phase in case we need to adjust moves after initial discussions.

2) I know the person is normally a faithful ally. I'll have to focus less on protecting myself from him, which will enable me to make bigger gains and put myself in position to top the board. As an additional benefit, he may leave himself open for a big stab that can lead to my solo (of course, not being aggressive doesn't guarantee that he'll be an easy target).

3) I'm in a tournament, and my options are between allying with a person who has no chance to win, or a person who is above to close to me in the standings. All else being equal, of course I would rather work to eliminate the person who is a threat to me in the standings.

I don't think I'll find many of you who think that I would be wrong in any of these situations, but they do still violate the written rule. Where and how to we draw the line?

Many times, I know these things about people because they are friends. Strangers are a big unknown, so you're taking a bigger gamble when working with them. Now, I don't know anybody on this site in real life, but is there really a difference? Does it make it any better or worse for me to meet up with a buddy in real life and ask to work together in an upcoming Diplomacy game, or if I send someone a PM on the site asking to do so?

I get the spirit of the rule, of course, and I agree with it. My point is that it's hard to determine where exactly that line should be, let alone prove if a person crossed it. How can we prove if a person is working with someone because they are friends, or whether they are working together and just so happen to be friends?

Skittles ... Your #1 & #2 (at least) should only apply in non-anon games, right? And I think #3 has been hashed out elsewhere numerous times.

@krells. Not my fault you suck at this game. hehehe Just kidding of course. I don't think I attacked you this last go round as we had Poland between us. I think you just got your ass handed to you as a hat by your other neighbors.

Well meeting up and PMs could be bad if it is a public press or gunboat game, so be careful there as well. That violates the rules of "don't work around press limitations" or whatever the wording is.

@Al, if I understand what you are describing correctly, it is not metagaming, at least not the inappropriate type. Using a relationship from a previous game isn't fair because you have that relationship with another player while the other participants in the game don't have that. The difference with the information available in a regular non-anon game is that everyone has access to the same information. New players can look at your record, realize you aren't going to honor an alliance with them and use that against you if they want. You can look at their record and do the same type of analysis. It's metagaming, but it's allowed since the information is available to everyone and there are no guaranteed alliances from it. Like you said, if you play with a good new player you'll consider allying with them. Now deciding you will always ally with someone isn't allowed, since going into the game everyone doesn't have a chance to gain an alliance with you. Does that help?

@Krellin, YJ, and Draug, making that kind of offer is metagaming whether or not you're lying because regardless of your intent, the person who you made it too is now basing their decision on factors outside of the game. This type of metagaming is allowable in some tournaments on this site, but other then that it's unfair to the other players in the game. The big problem with this is that it typically starts out as "hey I'll help you out in this game if you help me here" and then turns into "well we owned in those two games so lets start this game and wipe the floor with everyone else". Obviously everything is on a case by case basis, and we aren't going to judge the first type with much more then a warning unless the player clearly knows better or has been warned about site rules before. The second type, joining games with preconceived alliances though is more severe, and the more games it's done in the more severe the punishment.

@dD_ShockTrooper, only admins can check private messages, and it's almost never needed. The other assortment of mod tools make discerning innocent ignorance of metagaming, and outright cheating pretty easy. Like 2ndWhiteLine mentioned, most of the time the other players in the game are pretty quick to realize when something is wrong. Metagaming cases are usually as simple as getting an email like this "Turkey told me he won't ally with me because Russia is his halo partner", etc.

What's interesting is that the metagaming between two players who meet online like everyone is describing is rare because the random country positioning often makes alliances impossible, and people quickly realize it's in their best interests not to force an unusual alliance.

The final point being, we have a lot of tools and experience figuring out people's intentions. There's no harm at all in reporting a game that looks suspicious. The worst that will happen is the mods spend some extra time looking into something, and we all know most members don't mind wasting mods time ;). Best case is that you save a lot of other games, including yours, from being wrecked by unfair play.

Bob - Of course, that's non-anonymous only (unless you are able to decipher that an anonymous player is a specific person.

@jmo
"Using a relationship from a previous game isn't fair because you have that relationship with another player while the other participants in the game don't have that"

That's nice, in theory, but how does one go about forgetting what happened in previous games. If I have a real good experience with a person in a game, I can't help but think of that the next time I see them, and the same goes for a bad experience. Sure, I guess that puts me at an advantage over someone else in the game who may not have had the experiences with that player (but also might have other information that I don't have. More importantly, how can we have a rule govern an involuntary action (such as thinking)? That would be like the government making it illegal to blink.

@Draug
"Well meeting up and PMs could be bad if it is a public press or gunboat game, so be careful there as well. That violates the rules of "don't work around press limitations" or whatever the wording is."

Of course, those are clear violations of the rules. My examples pretty much used non-Anon games as a base, since otherwise it's hard to know who a person it.

"What's interesting is that the metagaming between two players who meet online like everyone is describing is rare because the random country positioning often makes alliances impossible, and people quickly realize it's in their best interests not to force an unusual alliance."

True, but here's a hypothetical conversation in Spring 01:
"Hey there, Jmo, I'm pleased to see that you are France to my England. If you recall, the last time we were Western neighbors we were able to quickly eviscerate Germany and move on to the other side of the board before the East was able to get their act together. Would you like to do the same this game?"

Clearly, I'm using my knowledge and past experiences with a player outside of my current game to influence my decisions in my current one. This is metagaming.

I'm not referring to a situation where we agree before the game begins that we're going to work together, no matter where we are on the board. That's a clear violation of the rules. I'm talking about the stickier situations like I describe, where my actions would be technically against the letter of the law.