Oh, and tournaments, or things like School of War, are definitely a very positive aspect of webDip! I do miss them.

+1 to MajorMitchell's suggestion of cross promoting vDip and webDip together to each other. This has been brought up a million times before. Is Oli's inactivity what's stopping it?

I think it's the backlog of a million things to do and not enough people to do them on both sites that's stopping it.

Excellent post from stefanodangello
Excellent comments on maps, order & messaging systems
PPSC.... a "slightly controversial" issue...the removal of that here, ( I advocated it be kept as an option, but not the default... play SoS scoring games now ). It was the main reason I looked at the VDiplomacy site after being a member here for a few years..and joined up at VDiplomacy.

Of two suggestions I made..cross promotion & the "recruiting questionnaires contest" I liked the second.. Players here can look at the tools used by other "proselytising" organisations eg Scientology and others ..create something and cast it out into internet world ...it needs a link to a page that describes, promotes WebDiplomacy, and signs up new members... perhaps with an option to join a separate group for people with no experience in playing Diplomacy...and we provide mentored programmes for them.

So there's two parts...recruiting applicants & their initial membership time..where what we do influences retention rate

A " Proselytisers competition" ...our bright young sparks register their ideas, if it's acceptable not offensive.. it's given a coded link...hits on the link page, sign ups..register for the individual competitors in the Proselytisers competition.

Mentors...what can we do here ? Would players who have ratings as Diplomats be a resource we can use better to help new members with little experience at the Diplomacy caper ?

We have Almighty Mods,
what about creating the "College of Mighty Mentors" ?
We could have some fun and do some good work.
I don't have the skill set to be an Almighty Mod..I'd be interested to apply to be a Fellow of the College of Mighty Mentors.

@Oct: Was just kinda kidding and being overly melodramatic for effect. I know full well PlayDip is having some struggles in their past year or so and really is being noticed with the public games and forum, although certainly reaches beyond there. The platform is good but the adjustment to their membership never really recovered after they wiped their rating board clean and tried to start from scratch with a brand new one. Lost too many good players and never quite managed to attract new ones, despite arguable a pretty solid platform. Without the membership the sites not going to do well.

As for whether it's better here, as somebody only a few years old on this one i'd say yeah it is. I had a few struggles with some drop outs, but not nearly as bad as it was own playdip because people here had the option to do the silly points-per-centre as an alternative low-stress game while there you only had unranked as your alternative which nobody really wanted to play leaving your entry into point playing/learning the game as your standard ranked public games. Throw a bunch of newcomers with nothing to lose into your standard games and you're bound to have many realize a couple phases into the game it's not working and better to scrap and start new.

So yeah, better here for that. Was for me anyways as i was able to get credible enough fast enough to start getting invited to games fairly early on, which i guess they don't really do quite as much over there either you really have to start inviting yourself to some of the more credible games or groups that host games (i.e. The Classicists).

Anyways, i think all the three major sites i've played on (PlayDip, WebDip, and vDip) all have some pros that the others should look at when trying to decide how to improve their own sites. Use each others innovativeness to improve yourselves and hopefully a high tide will raise all ships. Nothing i'd like better then to see all the sites bursting with activity again.

One perhaps very important point to mention.

Three games played on PlayDip, which counting replacements means nearly 30 players. None of them were aware that webDiplomacy existed.

I proposed about 6 months back at vDip the idea of a small scale community crowd funding project to pool together a little cash to run some Facebook ads aimed at people who like Diplomacy (obviously the F2F crew) but also those who like strategy games.

Oli was a little risk adverse on this one as he's always worried that promoting things too much would get whoever now owns the copyright for Diplomacy to come down on the site like a ton of bricks.

What does the webDip crowd think of this idea?

I recommended it earlier in the thread. When I promote my company online, it costs me $2 each time. That's a pretty small chunk of change. The first step is getting a comprehensive Facebook page for webDiplomacy, though, something I might do in the not so distant future.

It'll be interesting to see how the Facebook DIplomacy guys react to that... assuming they're still around. Maybe it's time we brought them back into the fold

We already have multiple groups. I was talking about an informational page with a link back to the site.

I was thinking about these guys...

https://apps.facebook.com/phpdiplomacy/?fb_source=bookmark&ref=bookmarks&count=0&fb_bmpos=_0

Better to work with them than risk being seen as poachers of their site

LoL, I had totally forgotten that phpDip still existed on Facebook, not that it matters to me, I quit Facebook earlier this year for my birthday after years of not using it, but still really funky that they are still actually playing games! :)

On another note I absolutely love HalberMensch's redesign of the interface, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE look at implementing some of this stuff!!!
http://forum.webdiplomacy.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1696&sid=a355bd3c989ed2b69cf44d61d33843d3

@Bo - Google Keyword planner has 1,000 - 10,000 keyword searches a month for the two word term diplomacy game. Low competition on ads and recommended ad cost of 43 cents. Might be worth looking at if we crowd fund?

@HalberMensch - love the responsive design and interface. That'd keep the "I can't play that game on a phone" people happy I'd hope!

Didn't realize we were bleeding players. I still try to get 2 or 3 games going at a time.

How is quitting something you haven't used in years a birthday gift?

Opening games for new players might help. These can be unranked so established players don't just steal the newbie's points.
I've set up a game, others can follow suit.
http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=183303

So, around 2022 I might be one top ten players!!!!

:) i came to this game initially through the facebook version of it ... don't unterestimate that to be a starter of interest.

thanks for the positive feedback here – back then it was not all so clear people would actually want something changed in this aspect no matter the need for it (and of course, every change made must consider not to scare off veteran players but to make their day to day game experience easier).
i've contacted the mod team to get communication going about what could be done with the interface, optimizing what's reasonable without scaring off veteran players.

that aside, from a marketing point of view, i'd define webdiplomacy players to be very interested complex games that take lots of time, skill and effort – the opposite of a casual player. and there's a "serious/nerd cardboard game community" around nowadays who is large enough to have products targetted at them (i'm not part of that due to lack of time). these people we may want to adress and get them interested. that may be sending abassadors to their forums or events – maybe there are players here who go to those anyway and could talk about webdiplomacy sideway, or see if google or facebook ads have a segment for those.

I too, come from Facebook Diplomacy. Octavious took over a CD'd 14 center France, wiped me out, and then encouraged me to come play with the big boys at webDip.

Guys guys. I have the solution for everything here. Will post shortly

Some more thoughts on Backstabbr:

- Gunboat games seem to feature a LOT of NMRs. I've been in two Goonbats on Backstabbr so far, and in one there were 5 NMRs in 1901, and in the other, 3 NMRs.

- On the other hand, the standard of play in press games (which appear to constitute the majority of activity on the site) seems reasonably high.

- One other interesting point is that Backstabbr's interface permits invalid moves such as F Ankara - Smyrna. (The move fails - but it allows the order to be entered).

Backstabbr's interface for entering moves is excellent. But the number of NMRs, for gunboat and press, is through the roof.

Backstabbr doesn't have a point system or Reliability Rating. A newbie can enter any game that isn't "private". This may be a big factor in NMRs on Backstabbr.

Private games there are a bit like our passworded games except the game literally doesn't appear on the list of current games on the site. Only invited players can even see that the game exists.

More commentary on Backstabbr: There is no "pause" function. This is potentially a problem.

The way Backstabbr handles draws is..... interesting. At any time in the game, you can set your own "win condition", which is actually setting your choice of "X" in an X-way-draw.

If the game ends in a draw between the number of powers you chose, this is recorded as a win for you. If the game ends in a draw between a different number of powers, this is recorded as a defeat and, in fact, an elimination.

My first game on Backstabbr has ended in a draw in 1906. At this point I was the largest power with 10 SCs, but since I had my "victory condition" set to "solo win", my final result was "eliminated".

Weird.

Weird.

#rekt

This is the only auto-adjucated site I use because it is simple and offers variants. I'm bored by Standard.
I will help promote the site if I get some direction on how best to do that.

Why do we need more players? I'm happy with you guys. More new players probably means more NMRs and abandoned games.

Sorry for being contrary. Still, let's play more games and spend less time talking about how to get more people to play games with.