Hey guys, I've somewhat recently gotten into the f2f scene and I've been talking to a lot of really great world players - many of whom have a pretty negative impression of webdiplomacy. A *lot* of this has to do with the fact that we're pretty much r/the_donald but I think this issue will be fixed once we move over to the new forum (or so I hope)... but I'm also thinking about how we can improve the actual quality of the diplomacy part of our site as well (not looking at coding/new features here because that isn’t really realistic).

I've been thinking about this because I feel like webdip is genuinely the best place to play diplomacy online and I would like to see the community grow rather than our good players quitting/going elsewhere.

Issue 1: NMR's
The complaint I've heard the most is that in public games everyone NMR's all the time and games are shit because of it.

Potential solution: Let WFO (wait for orders) be an option for people to pick - I understand that some people may abuse this feature and this an issue for mods but I really think it’ll help people play better quality games. If the mod team is concerned this would create more work for them, I encourage them to hire someone who’s job is literally to deal with WFO/NMR things (specialization is good right?). The other diplomacy websites let us have wait for orders as a thing and I want it for all my games on webdip as well. Players should understand the implications attached to a WFO game - I’d rather have someone abuse it, kick them out of my game, and then continue NMR free. I’m sure a lot of people feel the same way

(Also, how easy/hard is it to take vdip’s “don’t process games on ‘x’ day” feature? I feel like that would be amazing for webdip)

Issue 2: Quality of players
I’ve found that a lot of the good players are leaving or playing less games (maybe due to wanting to keep their GR up), and a lot of new or shit players stay shit for a very long time. I’ve also noticed that the amount of people who want to sign up for School of War don’t get a chance to do that. Webdip has some of the best players ever but we also have like way too many people that are bad and don’t know how to get better.

Potential solution: I think it would be a really cool idea to assign new eager players who want it with a “tutor” or “mentor” or something like that, and more experienced players can sign up to talk to new players about diplomacy, answer any questions, give advice and so on. I think this longer term 1 on 1 program can be really effective in teaching newer members how to get better at diplomacy, and promoting engagement.

Issue 3: Quality of public games
Let’s be real..non-passworded games are shit tier and no one likes playing in them because of a ridiculous amount of nmr’s or capt brad being in every single one. I used to play in them a LOT and because of these two factors I don’t anymore.

Solution: I don’t really know. I think we can work on the other two to begin with, and maybe that’ll help the quality of public games. A nice feature would be letting people avoid others in game (for example, I would block ‘valis’ and be unable to join games with him in) but I recognize that might be too hard to code.

Tldr: I want to have a discussion on how we can actually go about retaining good players and attracting them to webdip as well, as well as training new ones more. I have no interest in playing anywhere else for the time being so I need them to come here.

Just wanted to say I love you DO

Byron, you are part of the problem with this community >:(

aw. really? I thought we were besties?

"A *lot* of this has to do with the fact that we're pretty much r/the_donald"

oh you sweet summer child

"or capt brad being in every single one"

HAHAHAHAH

"(for example, I would block ‘valis’ and be unable to join games with him in)"

I was sold before this but I'm really sold now.

~

Great post DO. I like all of these ideas. Especially interested in the mentoring program, SOW is one of my favorite features of webdip and finding a way to expand the concept can only be a good thing IMO.

Okay; so to your OP;

I absolutely agree, the site has become a reddit page for the Clinton V Trump debate. If someone went into a Coma in August 2016 and awoke today they'd assume they weren't out for too long.

I also agree that with the new forum we can build on the site and really develop a more interactive community. I think people are afraid to express themselves for fear of a thread spiraling into a political debate.

I for one am excited for this new forum as I can't wait to see the communities that sprout up around the various variants, tournaments, forum games, and classic diplomacy talk.

On to the NMR issue; again I agree. I think some more options to prevent NMRs would be fantastic, but more importantly I think a mandatory "tutorial" before a player can enter a game would do wonders to educate new players on the importance of NOT NMRing. When i first started about 4 years ago I had no clue the negative impact NMRing was having on not only my fellow players (I assumed they'd be happy to have me drop out) and also on my potential to join better games. Simply explaining that could do loads for the issue.

Issue 2: I love the idea of pairing high level players with new players. It is something I worked to try to emulate recently with the tournament series that never really took off. So something that worked to push the top players into games with the less experienced would honestly be great.

Issue 3: This is a hard one but I think by improving the community, the NMR culture, and potentially the seriousness of the community when playing we can really make gains here. One idea that may be worth considering is allowing people to friend other players and then making games that are semi-public so that anyone who is a friend or a friend of a friend may join? Generally it's a similar idea to what you proposed but its the idea of using a carrot rather than a stick.

agree with the OP mostly -- Webdip could be more like a gaming club.

although i'll admit i kinda like it when Valis manipulates me.

Issue 1 - The way the old "nJudge" play-by-email games were set up (back when dinosaurs ruled the earth), the default setting was NoNMR, which meant that a turn would not process until all seven powers had entered orders (or however many powers were alive). If a power went into civil disorder, the game would automatically pause - the turn would not run until a new player took over the abandoned power, at which point the deadline would be extended for a phase length giving the new player an opportunity to negotiate. I personally really liked this approach as even public games would not be plagued by NMR.

The nJudge also had "grace periods" whereby you would have a couple days to get your order in after the deadline before being forced into CD. Overall, I feel these approaches led to a higher quality public game, albeit a slower one.

Issue 1A - That would be amazing if deadline could be set to not run on weekends. Also, another feature of the nJudge in the same vain that led to less civil disorder is that the nJudge default setting allowed any player to unilaterally pause the game. Of course, nJudge games all had active game masters that could override the pauses if abused. This might be too much work for webdip.

Re the forum - I don't personally think most people care about the forum one way or the other. I get that the forum is a nice thing that provides a community building resource, and I do applaud the efforts being made to improve it. But I also think that for the average FTF player who comes to web dip for a game of diplomacy, s/he is not even going to look at the forum at all at first. Rather, the first thing you do is find a game to join. If it's easy to do that, and the game turns out to be of decent quality, you're likely to come back. Eventually most people will find their way to the forum but if they don't enjoy it then they are a lot more likely to just not participate in the forum than to stop playing games. My sense is that the forum is largely dominated by a fairly small group relative to the overall webdip player community. And I suspect that is true of nearly all active gaming websites that have a forum sidecar.

"Potential solution: I think it would be a really cool idea to assign new eager players who want it with a “tutor” or “mentor” or something like that, and more experienced players can sign up to talk to new players about diplomacy, answer any questions, give advice and so on. I think this longer term 1 on 1 program can be really effective in teaching newer members how to get better at diplomacy, and promoting engagement. "

This is a great idea. Your politics suck (it's a joke), but this is a tremendous idea.

The School of War is a tremendous idea but also a bit of extra work on the mods to organize and set up. If there was a more one on one or one mentor to two pupils it would allow newer players to get help and advice on multiple games and multiple countries and situations in direct communication with their mentor.

I like the public feedback in the forum but am curious how much the feedback there is influencing the game play.

I am super happy to organize the mentorship thing if the mods don't want to do it. But it might be better if they do it "officially"

Issue 4: Allow members to post their pornographic exploits

why don't you put a temporary bad on people who NMR a certain amount of times, this would surely reduce the number of these occuring

Also maybe make an app which gives notifications on when a turn is ready.

Brainbomb reminds me of Hawkeye from M.A.S.H. haha, always the kidder. Good thread btw.

Also please keep out personal political discussions and attacks out of this thread, thanks.

"Solution: I don’t really know. I think we can work on the other two to begin with, and maybe that’ll help the quality of public games. A nice feature would be letting people avoid others in game (for example, I would block ‘valis’ and be unable to join games with him in) but I recognize that might be too hard to code. "

vDip has this, and I believe it'd be fairly easy to port over. I also strongly agree it would be beneficial.

Sorry for complementing you. My bad. Lesson learned.

ok

You do complement her desire to improve the site rather well.

llol

In the few chances I’ve had to get together with people that know of us, have been active on the site, but don’t consider themselves webDippers, I’ve heard exactly the same thing about our forum. It is rather intolerable, and it’s hard to avoid. A lot of the viewpoints that certain unnamed individuals express on the forum are rather despicable as well, and while I and the mod team as a whole have a strong belief in free speech even in private places such as this website, there is no doubt that the vitriol on the forum scares people away. It always has. The new forum will prevent politics threads as a whole from being as visible as they are now and force people to actually pursue politics if they want to discuss politics, and it will also allow the moderator team to do something about posts that break the rules as opposed to simply penalizing people after the fact. We don’t have a hard ETA for the new forum yet.

NMRs are a huge issue on this site but you didn’t actually address the issue. We have a whole load of games that are ruined within the first couple of years by NMRs because people don’t commit to the game that they’re playing. Asking someone to commit to a game that takes days, weeks, or even months (…or years, 2012 World Cup) to complete is a big task, especially when people sign up on this site each and every day and sign off within 30 minutes with no intention ever to come back, ruining 7 games in their wake. Likewise, live games go bad all the time because people can’t be bothered to stick around for a 20 minute waiting period let alone actually play the entire game out. There is no way for us to magically fix that. Unlike face to face, where you commit an entire evening or a full day beforehand, we can’t make people stick around.

Given that I just turned on WFO in one of your games and know that you aren’t worried about the casual player that I’m referring to above, I just want to point out two things. Firstly, good players NMR at a dramatically lower rate than everyone else. That’s no secret. The fact that two good people quit your game without any explanation is kind of sad, but it’s an outlier. Secondly, WFO is not a very good idea for this site. It’s so easy to game that system. Instead of simplifying the problem at hand, it complicates it dramatically by forcing the moderators to intervene when it gets abused. Think about it - there are 482 active games right now. How can the moderator team handle that kind of a load, and why would we want to?

An actual solution to this problem relating to WFO that you should consider is a developmental solution: reduce the time it takes for a power to go into CD from two phases to one, and when a power goes into CD, reset the phase length to give the position time to be taken over. This wouldn’t be extremely hard to develop and implement, but the list of things to code is about a year long for a paid staff of professionals let alone a group of a few unpaid volunteers that already give us more of their time than we could ever feel comfortable asking for, so don’t expect this any time soon unless they believe it’s worth prioritizing. Same goes for your proposed block feature.

As for your second point, I don’t know how to address this problem other than to say good idea. The moderator team would 100% stand behind a mentoring program of sorts, but it would require real commitment from good players. Feel free to take a stab at it. It could be a huge success.

"NMRs are a huge issue on this site but you didn’t actually address the issue. We have a whole load of games that are ruined within the first couple of years by NMRs because people don’t commit to the game that they’re playing. Asking someone to commit to a game that takes days, weeks, or even months (…or years, 2012 World Cup) to complete is a big task, especially when people sign up on this site each and every day and sign off within 30 minutes with no intention ever to come back, ruining 7 games in their wake. Likewise, live games go bad all the time because people can’t be bothered to stick around for a 20 minute waiting period let alone actually play the entire game out. There is no way for us to magically fix that. Unlike face to face, where you commit an entire evening or a full day beforehand, we can’t make people stick around."

Uhm actually yes you can fix that. By letting people use WFO. Have you considered that people leave this site because the games are shit tier with people NMRing all the time, and then people don't care themselves and NMR??? Like - from what I've seen ALL THE OTHER SITES have the ability to prevent NMR's. This is just something so fundamental and basic to this game and the problem with webdip is the utterly **ridiculous** amount of games that are completely unbalanced because of NMR's/CD's. You should seriously give people the option of opting out of this horrible type of game by picking WFO. You already have the feature. The magic way to fix your issue is to let people use it. You're welcome.

"An actual solution to this problem relating to WFO that you should consider is a developmental solution: reduce the time it takes for a power to go into CD from two phases to one, and when a power goes into CD, reset the phase length to give the position time to be taken over. This wouldn’t be extremely hard to develop and implement, but the list of things to code is about a year long for a paid staff of professionals let alone a group of a few unpaid volunteers that already give us more of their time than we could ever feel comfortable asking for, so don’t expect this any time soon unless they believe it’s worth prioritizing. Same goes for your proposed block feature."

a) this should absolutely be prioritized as the first thing on the list of things to do if you're not going to turn on WFO and b) if you don't have the capacity to do this turn on WFO. Also this doesn't solve for the horrible NMR problem this website has whereas my solution does. You don't understand how much good players actually fucking hate NMR's and would rather a game not proceed than to have someone NMR.

Maybe you also failed to read the part where I acknowledge my block feature might be hard to implement. But if you read the thread, jmo said it was an easy thing to bring over.

"As for your second point, I don’t know how to address this problem other than to say good idea. The moderator team would 100% stand behind a mentoring program of sorts, but it would require real commitment from good players. Feel free to take a stab at it. It could be a huge success."

Honestly, I'll take a stab at it if you guys refuse to. But this is something the mod team should arrange.

I think if a mentoring program were integrated with the site directly (which would be great), mod team involvement would be important, but if it's just something organized on the forum, I think passive but explicit mod team support for someone(s) who's actually dedicated to making it happen is sufficient and significantly more likely to get off the ground. I'd be happy to help out too.

As for WFO, I have to agree with bo. Without a significant amount of effort put in by moderators, WFO is just replacing one way of ruining games with another. If there were a more complete WFO-like feature that, say, kicked people out after pausing for a phase length and then waited another phase length or two for a replacement with an option to unpause early or leave paused longer by player vote, that would definitely be preferable to a current system, but any programmatic change to the way NMRs are handled starts to get outside of the scope of what this threat was for.

I think something that could help without development time is creating some sort of organized group on the forum that puts people in games together. Just require a decent reliability rating and a desire to play reliable games, and have someone or everyone organize "public" games. Anecdotally, I feel like games people take the time to organize on the forum tend to have fewer NMRs irrespective of the ratings of the players in them. The only real problems with forum games as they are are that there aren't enough, there's often an elitism component (which is perfectly fine, but giving inexperienced or worse players opportunities is important too), and it requires looking at the forum (which hopefully will be less of a drawback soon).

The issue is NMR's. I organized a game on the forum and had 2 people not entire in orders, it is an issue with forum games too.

And, acknowledging this might be webdip's biggest issue other than multi and meta, figure out a way to fix it. I provided one where there would have to be no coding done, if there's a better way - do it like that then.

It's good that there is a desire to improve WebDiplomacy and that we discuss ways this might be done.
With regard to the Forum, I am not convinced that political threads are a problem, and that threads devoted to the Trump V Clinton, or right V left in US politics are a major problem.

I did a quick survey of the front page of the forum today. Of 30 threads, 11 relate to Diplomacy & members. School of war, welcome back Jamiet99uk, mod retirement, replacement needed for a game, rules question, webdip grand slam type threads.. So a third of the threads are related to members and dip games. There's two Mafia threads & an axis & allies thread, so three threads on other games.

There's four "random topic/parody" threads.. Mouse in a form, Turkey in a gravy boat, when players dye & get rid of gender pronouns. Plus Capt Brad's Oklahoma for native Indians thread.

There's one sports thread.. ML Baseball... A bit low, usually there's two or three sports threads imho

Political threads ..nine if "Marx quotes" is included. There a four threads that fit the USA politics category. John McCain, Trump ×2, Veterans. ..... & then ogions thought experiment thread
There's two Australian political threads, and one New Zealand political thread.

So in approximate terms, US politics 4, maybe five threads out of thirty ..other nation politics..three, and one general..Marx quotes.

So out of thirty threads... "WebDiplomacy site, game, members returning, passing away, stepping in/out of Mod duties & Zultar looking for +1s etc type threads clearly dominate the forum.. At least twice as many as the US politics threads.

It shouldn't be a surprise that US politics has the most threads of the political threads, but I think it's wrong to suggest that they overwhelmingly dominate the forum. Given the current divisive nature of US politics it shouldn't be a surprise that discussion within the US politics threads is robust even acrimonious at times. However as a frequent participant in those threads I would note that there is a huge amount of vigorous dispute with a remarkably small amount of excessive vitriol and really offensive comments are quite rare for the volume of posts and passions involved.
So in some ways, it's a GOOD sign, not a Bad sign..it's encouraging that participants in political discussion threads in the forum whilst admittedly using insults like " snowflake " or idiot, dumbnut, and descriptive terms for Trump or Hillary like liar & criminal etc, are showing a reasonable degree of restraint given the current nature of politics "on main street USA"
So i have an optimistic view of the political threads in the forum & I think it would be a terrible shame if we chose to ban political discussion in the forum.

It's an issue with forum games too, but I've had significantly better luck with them in general than normal public games.

I'm just repeating myself, but I don't see how WFO actually addresses the issue of NMRs without creating more work for the mods. If someone disappears, the game is just as ruined unless someone does something about it.

You don't even play diplomacy anymore ghug, your experience from 2012 is irrelevant.

The game is totally not just as ruined, I'd rather cancel a game with an NMR in it. Also, half the time people are just busy and forget about a game for a phase (I've done this), I don't know if forcing a CD in those situations is productive.

Maybe if you want to have a constructive discussion, you shouldn't dismiss and insult people for offering their opinions.

I'm sorry that you felt I was dismissing your opinion. But I genuinely feel you're wrong about the forum games not leading to as many NMR's thing.