Maybe one should look at the site owners and the massive purge of users, followed by a strong-armed control of the forums to begin to understand the decline. It's really not difficult to understand why the number of players declined.

And now the inevitable screaming at me by the anally-retentive likes of Cheater-the-Mod Bo, jmo, etc.

blah blah blah...

It must hurt that the first 3 google results for "diplomacy online" are playdiplomacy, and webDiplomacy is fifth behind even Backstabbr. It's strange considering this site offers everything playdip offers for free.

*but for free

That's funny because I basically stopped playing 5 years ago and started again recently.

Krellin nobody has been banned for obnoxious forum behavior in ages. Were still here... ;)

Jmo isnt a mod either so his opinion is rather irrelevant.

to be fair, it was when he was as well

Lack of variants, outdated UI, clunky/bad mobile interface, fading of Diplomacy in general popularity.

Solution? More mafia

Agreed. Best thing youve ever said Chaqa

So someone want to make a mobile app which interfaces with the webdip server??

Sure its called google chrome on your android or mobile devidce.

Clearly you've never browsed the site on mobile, bb

lack of SEO? the fact this is free means less mony for marketing, if anyone here has been interested on marketing at all

Do you have stats for vdiplomacy, which is even better than this and seems to have mch less users?

Better is a weird term to use when describing vdip. I mean live games actually can happen here...

ugh

time to make more multis...

Activity seem down on all the sites so may just be sign of the times.

I blame Netflix and Pokemon Go.

Start of the school year may be part of the very immediate cause.

I think it's fair to say that diplomacy has never had a general popularity :p.

My gut feeling is that we've burned through most of the source of members made up of people who have played the game in the past and stumble across an internet version. The more sustainable stream of members completely new to the game has never been properly developed as we never really had to before. We are having something of an energy crisis and need to up our game to achieve what used to happen without effort.

There is also the problem that Playdip is much improved over the hideous looking site that it used to be. Their map is now at least as good as ours, there is a decent range of free stuff, and the forum is no longer a pale shadow of ours.

We also have a few problems here.

We have no ratings system. GR has been neglected and actively talked down by the site leadership, to the extent that virtually nobody cares anyone. The new system is showing no more sign of coming into life than nuclear fusion. On a site that thrives on competition this is really exceptionally poor.

The live game clock problem has been a problem so damned long that I'm convinced the mods have stopped seeing it :p. Seriously, it puts people off playing live games in droves.

The forum has become a less comfortable place to be. Back in the days when arguments about every subject under the sun were rowed about here you could expect to be insulted royally if you joined in. Crucially, though, so was everyone else. There was room for people with all sorts of views, and always someone on their side to welcome them. Now there is very much a "right" view on most topics and those who stray from it are given something of a beasting.

Also, why the hell do we still give a telling off to people who make a thread to advertise a new live game? That rule came in when there were so many live games it made the forum tricky to navigate. I would dearly love to have that problem again! We're now just embarrassing people in the forum and putting them off live games for no real benefit.

I stop posting on the forum for exactly the group think mentality you speak of Octavious - to be honest it just became unbelievably painful for a while there. Still play though - in the main because I have a long commute to work

I agree with VillageIdiot. People don't know about Diplomacy, mainly because it is just an old board game. People don't have the time to slow down and take 30 minutes to an hour and ready orders and chat. Sad but it's true. I also think that school starting has something to do with it.

But where do I find the number of active users?

I don't think a different rating system would get me to play more games. I do think a different rating system would be better for ranking players, but that's a separate issue.

My suspicion is actually that the most recently added features have lost rather than added users. They've improved the quality of games for people who stay, but we've actually made it less friendly to newcomers by somewhat segregating them from the stronger and more reliable players. A new account without a reliable track record now feels more restricted and will experience more NMRs than in the past, and the key to acquiring new players is to make sure that their first experience on the site makes them want to have a second experience on the site.

I second Octavious' point on ratings, and I do think rating systems increase games played. Ratings are key to any game site. Whether you've played 1 game or 100, you are excited to play another to try to raise your rating and see the immediate results of a successful game.

I can only speak for myself as a relatively new player, but the aspects of the game that have come close to driving me away are 1) people who join games and immediately go into civil disorder, disrupting the balance entirely and 2) cheaters. The mods are good at taking care of the latter in my experience, but for every one someone reports there are probably 5 other ones who are better at hiding it actively ruining other games.

It's also a pretty big time commitment for standard games, but that's just the nature of the game I guess.

There will always be 7 assholes here, including myself.

Actually its probably even games like this one (http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=180990) that really piss people off and make them stop playing. As soon as people starting losing they start NMRing, then ask to disband because "too many NMRs".

This is interesting. I'd caution basing anything purely off number of accounts. In 2011, I would bet that the percentage of multiaccounts was quite a bit higher than it is now. So while we likely do have fewer players, it is probably not quite as different as those numbers would indicated.

The Purge likely lost some players, but personally, probably no more than we were already losing because of obnoxious behavior, so I'd call that a wash.

We did lose a number of great players, who had a strong presents on the site, which I think has given new players less to aspire to. More importantly, though, I do truly believe that while the game experience has improved for veteran players, it has likely become worse for new players. When I first joined, I almost immediately started playing with some of the best players on the site. There were no rankings, no records of NMRing, so no one cared about playing with new players. I can imagine it quite hard for a new player to become established here now. And, let's face it, if your first game isn't fun, you probably aren't going to stick around.

Finally, we've lost most of the tournament and series games. Those who weren't around probably can't imagine, but we constantly had at least 1 if not 2 tournaments running that were well populated. We also had a variety of series games. All of this adds to the community and helps keep around.

Anyway, those are just my thoughts. Although given the dates involved, I'm probably a bit biased <3 <3 <3

There are a lot of good points here, and i hope our leadership will speak to them. Zultar has maintained that this is to be a free site, and in making that decision, i wonder if we will be left behind? ATC, can not bare the workload alone. ( i hope he has a life)

What would be the costs associated with hiring a developer to make a lot of the changes that are needed now? On a one time basis. Would the user base, offer up small donations to help in this endeavor?

The forum, whether your an oldtimer or not, has changed, but we saw what attrition came from that long ago. I might argue that others have stayed because some of the vile rhetoric has gone away. I thought there was a post a while ago, that said only 18-20% of the user base used the forum. if thats true, the forum is of little consequence to player retention

We must get integrated ratings that update in real time.

Is there the same player attrition rate at playdip?

CSteinhardt said it well. There are many times I go through the games list and wish I could play in some of the games that involve higher rated players, but because of my NMR's/CD's from years ago that lowered my RR, or the fact that there are so many password protected games, it makes it feel like it's a small club to join to get quality games.