"Everyone who bought into a drawn game and didn't leave should receive an even split of the pot."

Do you mean that, in a draw, even the defeated players would get a share of the pot?

That is exactly right. It can't be denied that eliminated players are often responsible for what leads up to an unwinnable board.

While that is one reason, my primary concern is that the role of the draw in Diplomacy is not a means of resolving stalemate positions much of the time, despite having been intended for those positions. It is instead commonly used in lieu of an "Allied Victory" option, even for six-player alliances, which has been frowned upon for many good reasons since the days of Richard Sharp.

Are you implying that a game that ends with six players is the same as a game that ends in a two way draw?

In terms of whether anyone deserves to walk away with anything more than what they bet, yes. I am implying exactly that. Diplomacy was designed to have only one winner, not an alliance of winners. As it stands, not even Winner-Takes-All games can distinguish between winners and survivors when it comes to draw rewards.

Overall, in any theoretical game that can only crown a single champion, survival should not be prioritized over victory. If the site admins wish to prioritize cronyism over actual competition, then I yield, defeated, in this discussion.

Personally, I've got some time for this.

I've long argued that far too many games end in a draw.

OBJECT OF THE GAME

As soon as one Great Power controls 18 supply center, it is considered to have gained control of Europe. The player representing that Great Power is the winner.

However, players can end the game by agreement before a winner is determined. In this case, all players who still have pieces on the board share equally in a draw.

Then theoretically, in a tournament scene, how do you crown a tournament champion if every board ends in a draw? According to you, everyone would split it evenly, even the guy who is eliminated every round and compare that to the guy that ends every round in a 17-17 split.

I tend to sympathize with op. The only results that should matter in a game are 2-way draws and outright wins. Wins are pretty obvious, in a competitive game you should aim to win, so wins should be rewarded. I consider 2-way draws equivalent because they're often just as challenging - stalemate lines being what they are, a lot of 2-way draw attempts get stalled out due to geography, and on top of that, near the end there's always the temptation (or perhaps even the plan) to stab and solo.

Virtually any other result is a failure of one of those two goals. (And even some 2-way draws, those that emerge as a result of a stalemate where two powers are big enough to cut the others out, also count.) Failure shouldn't be rewarded.

There's a couple of problems with trying to change the points system to accommodate this, though.
1) Points serve as a (loose) measure of player skill; and while a 3-way draw and a 7-way draw are both losses as understood above, a 3-way draw undoubtedly takes more skill than a 7-way draw. Rewarding either equally well (or poorly) hurts this use of points. (I don't consider this an especially strong objection though; we have PPSC if people feel the need to farm points, and points aren't even a good measurement of skill anyway. In fact I'd personally rather see points taken out.)
2) The current meta on draws as desirable outcomes in sufficiently small numbers (3 people, sometimes 4) is rooted in decades of tradition within the rather insular and at times echo chambery Diplomacy culture; regardless of the merit of the arguments above for considering a change, there's going to be strong resistance to the idea anyway.

Actually, an EOG thread that I meant to make (but never did) for Socrates Dissatisfied's summer GR invitational game would have had this discussion, so maybe here's the best place to have it instead...

Based on my arguments earlier in this post, I think as a community we should change our outlook on draws. 3-way and larger draws are almost always a result of a failure to solo, and yet many people seem complacent with the idea of a 3-way draw, considering it a good result. Why is failure considered a good result?

Diplomacy was designed to have a single winner. There is an option to handle stalemates (or end a game due to lack of time). I think that Winner-takes-all games model this accurately for betting, payouts, and evenly split draws.

I think that PPSC games are a bastardization of this fundamental objective of the game of Diplomacy.

In those games, there is no absolute winner, even when one person controls 18 SCs. Players who survive until the end get some payout, where by the basic rules of Diplomacy, they should get nothing. For this reason, I think that PPSC games should have payouts for draws also based on the supply centers controlled at the end, and *not* equally shared based on survival.

If only you had made that EOG PE :)

Diplomacy was not designed to have a single winner. Diplomacy wasn't designed to have a winner at all.

Why not limit the size of the possible draw to 4 or under, this could inspire further stabs to get to more solos or at the very least 3 ways. If you don't get to 4 or under everyone gets their points back, even the people eliminated.

The main reason for the quantity of draws these days is that a balance of powers approach is very popular these days, so when one power has 10 centers, everyone is already talking about how to stop him if he expands any further.

The reason for this is that players are often capable of observing when their opponents are liable to solo faster than they are, and thus they need to stop that player. This results in a coalition, and the build-up of a defensive line by the winning player, which makes him a threat permanently. Meanwhile, the coalition is unlikely to believe anything the winning player says.

@Tru Ninja: "Then theoretically, in a tournament scene, how do you crown a tournament champion if every board ends in a draw?"

I have never played in a Diplomacy tournament before, so I don't know how they typically score them. However, I do regularly play tournaments for the best multi-player CCG ever invented--Jyhad, aka Vampire: The Eternal Struggle--and the have a decent way of handling tournament scoring for a game which involves 4 or 5 players at the same time.

The most important thing is to highly value winning the game which is the primary objective of Diplomacy. The secondary objective is being part of a shared draw with other players. This implies that a two-tiered scoring system might be appropriate. As such, have Game Wins and Tournament Points be your two scores.

1) If there is a winner, that person earns 1 Game Win.

2) All survivors share 420 Tournament Points between them. 420 is the least common multiple of 2,3,4,5,6,7 so it divides all possibilities.

1 winner = Game Win and 420 tournament points
2 way tie = 420 / 2 = 210 per player
3 way tie = 420 / 3 = 140 per player
4 way tie = 420 / 4 = 105 per player
5 way tie = 420 / 5 = 84 per player
6 way tie = 420 / 6 = 70 per player
7 way tie = 420 / 7 = 60 per player

And of course, when determining standings, Game Wins are first and Tournament Points are second.

"...not even Winner-Takes-All games can distinguish between winners and survivors when it comes to draw rewards."

Don't mean to derail but how can there be a draw in a WTA game? I thought the whole point of WTA was that there are no draws? Does WTA just distinguish a game as not PPSC? Be kind, I'm new.

"If the site admins wish to prioritize cronyism..."

Site rules are exactly as they are given in the official rules of Diplomacy. One winner is the goal, but if that is not possible, players may share equally in a draw. We throw a wrinkle in that rule by offering both WTA and PPSC. If you have an issue with any condition of ending a game, it should be PPSC, not ending in draws.

If you don't want to end a game in a draw, play better.

OBGYN, winner take all implies that the winner takes all the points if there is a solo. Otherwise, a draw is an equal split of the pot amongst players in the draw.

Ohhhh. I need to play better.

After all these years I still don't get why people get so hung up on points. I sincerely play for fun.

Points appear to be the currency that buys you the privilege of playing against high quality players on this site. High quality in terms of both skill and reliability. Just my observation after being here for all of these... not years, not months, weeks?

"If you don't want to end a game in a draw, play better."

When there are incentives to draw built into PPSC, they happen more frequently. Players who are in weaker positions in PPSC games indirectly benefit more than those in WTA games because there is less incentive for the stronger players too win outright--PPSC winners don't get as many points for winning as WTA winners.

Moral of the story, don't play PPSC games. Even new players. Go WTA and fight hard. If you lose, you still get points back later with the 100 point minimum.

2ndWhiteLine, "if that is not possible" is the phrase in question. The reward of splitting the pot for the players that have managed to land themselves in control artificially imposes rewards for drawn games. The very meta-imposition by the points system is very often enough to render a win impossible, a problem that would be solved if a drawn game held no additional reward for survivors.

And I'm rather certain WTA doesn't evenly split the pot between all players, but only those who survive, much like PPSC does.

That said, I'm a newfound fan of the system that Jeff Kuta described for use in Jyhad. There are many other ways of tackling this issue, but for my purposes and concerns, that system is flawless.

Doesn't PPSC say that if you hold X number of SCs and the pot is Y, at the end of the game, regardless of how you get there (solo/draw) you get Y/X points. Whereas in WTA, now I think I understand if you survive and it is a three-way draw, you get Y/3 .

@OB: a draw is y/3 in ppsc as well.

Am I the only guy here who actually likes PPSC games?

Let me get this straight.... If I play a PPSC game where the pot is 999 and one power gets 17 SCs, the other gets 16 SCs and I hold 1, and a draw is called I get 333. If someone solos, I get 999*(1/34). Really?

Correct.

The only difference being if that were WTA, then if one of them solos you get nothing.