> - Is it fairly clear what the feature is about?
>
> Yes. Sheesh. You make it sound like you've knowingly
> overcomplicated this.
To clarify, I mean the actual feature as implemented, not this post or the idea the actual implementation at http://cynicalpanda.com/dip/

I'm really looking for feedback on that implementation rather than the idea itself. As others have said you have preference lists, so feedback based on the feature requiring that you choose your country in each game isn't as useful

ah. well, that implementation was clear, but your question was not :)

im a ltittle confused about where the "power choice" would come in.
to clarify

It would be an option on a newly created game (same as the 12/24/etc hour turn clock/wta ppsc) the game would be for example a
20 dp bet wta 24 hr power choice game.

then in your profile you would have your "power choice" country set. ie england

then when ever you joined a power choice game you would get england unless somebody else had england as their power choice then the code would flip a software coin and see who gets it?


How may this affect meta-accounters? Will it make pre-decided alliances easier by letting allies come into the game as neigbours?

i dont think this will be a big problem. meta accounters can work well as neighbors or as two countries on either side of another.

- Should new players be prompted for their power preferences when they join, or should it be an "advanced" feature, which you need to go to the Settings menu to set?

advanced maybe. just to help ease new people into dip without too much complicated stuff. and to stop every new player starting a thread about how they choose france as their power select country but in their first game they are austria.

- Should players who have no preferences be allowed to join "Power choice" games, and just get last-choice, or should people who haven't set their preferences not see/not be allowed to join the "power choice" games?

not allowed. i dont think people will knowingly choose a power choice game without a preferred country set...thats basically asking for austria. but to stop people accidentally joining a power choice game not allowing them...or at least asking them to set a preferred country first would be best.

To clarify, then:
In the test installation, Power Choice Preferences are indeed set in the player's profile (at registration, but editable through 'Settings') and the test game does indeed specify:
# End of phase: 12 hours
# Power Choice Game
# Points-per-supply-center
# Pot: 20

Join it and see. We still need one more player to get the game underway.

sean, you would actually list the countries in your order of preference. from napthali's pseudocode the algorithm works something like this: randomly walk through the list of players in the game, for each player, walk through his or her preference list and give him or her the most preferred country that is still available (this includes making germany and/or italy unavailable in games with less than 7 players at start time).

Eugh, I coded a scheduling application for assigning employees to work on which jobs in this similar fashion (by comparing list of preference). That's not the way I implemented it, you don't get the maximum of 'happyness' (Everyone a high on their list as possible).

For example, if a country is available, it will always be filled by someone who has it listed as their first choice.

Here's an example:

For every unfilled country, the code looks at how many unassigned players have it as their first choice.
If it's 1, then it's an easy pick
If it's 0, then it's skipped for now
If it's a tie then it's skipped for now

After this, it looks at what countries are not assigned (where there's a tie).
[Here you can go 2 ways, make the most people happiest they can be, or break the tie by giving it to the player who's gotten it the least amount by percentage or count].
So, where a country is unassigned and there is a tie for 1st, it either breaks the tie with the criteria and assigns the country.
OR
It checks to see if one of the countries has a unique second choice over an unassigned country without a tie (obviously not counting those that got their first choice). If it does it assigns it, and re-runs to continue breaking the tie or finally assigning the initial disputed country if 1 player remains. If there's a non-resolvable tie it moves to the next country.

When it's done all and there's still ties it deals with them as if it were a 1st level tie. If you get down to 7th place and it's non resolvable it can be random (or whatever other reason).

That will maximize the number of people having the highest preference possible. (I.E. 3 1sts, 2 2nds, 1 3rd, and 1 5th kinda thing).

I think that choice is always a good Idea.
while it may cause some problems with points and rankings I don't see that as a problem. We are all here to have fun and if people enjoy playing as a certain country and they have the option to get that country more often then they will play in more games. And it's not like its going to be set up so that you get the same country every time. Because most people will want the same countries anyhow and only one person gets it. As long as that is still random then the game remains random.


On a completely different note. I've given it some thought and I'm going to set my preferences to

I GREAT

Or maybe I will do

A TIGER

Personally, I think that TRIAGE by preference of country is a good choice, when it's a choice for games.

FRIGATE would be Ok too. I just didn't want France in my list. To easy to win with France. :)

Hmm... can't think of any others...

Personally I think it's a very nice choice to give people (and the way it's implemented on the test page is pretty clear to me).

I don't particularly care about "rankings" and don't think the current point system is a good way to "rank" people anyway, it's just a good rough estimate of how "advanced" a player might be, and a good way to assure that games are played at a certain level but aren't a very good way to rank people in any specific way. So personally I think worries about how this might effect "rankings" is pointless. If you don't want to play in preference games, you don't have to, and if someone else gets lots of points in preference games, you don't, then you won't ever play against them unless they decide to join a game without preferences. You can then trounce them and take their points because you are more used to the "pure" game. Or not, at which point it would indicate to me that they are as good or better than you and so griping about them getting their points in country-preference games is pointless anyway, because clearly they can play at your level.

I don't think this'll be much of a problem for multi-accounters, at least no more of a problem than it is already.

I dont' think there's any problem with allowing people without preferences to join preferance-games, as long as it's clear what they're getting into, but I also don't think its a problem to require it, and might just make it simpler, and avoid any problems for new players.

There are a lot of legitimate concerns about unbalancing the scoring system - people favoring the countries more likely to win, etc. How about adding a bid so that people who want to choose their country have to contribute more points to the pot. Either biasing by the current win percentages for each country of giving a high bidder wins their choice system would work.

Question: Why is the preference a global preference within a users profile rather than game specific?

Don't have time to read the entire thread, so apologies if anyone else has suggested this.
I have played 6 games so far and been Russia in 5 of them!
I am in favour of random, but with a weighting to help make sure you get the opportunity to play every country.

So, system can total up the number of times you have played each country and divide by number of games you have entered. This gives a value from 0 (never played that country) to 1 (played it every time). (So my values would be Russia 0.83, Austria 0.17 all others 0). The total is 1.
Now we apply this to the chances of you being that country. (normally 1/7).
Now every country has to be allocated, so the system looks at each country, compares each players scores for that country.
Starting with the countries with the highest average wins (I believe Russia or Turkey?, the countries are allocated to the player with the lowest score for that country. In the event of ties (most likely with new players with 0 score), it is allocated to the player with the greatest % of defeated games (not counting currently being played, so lost 2/5 with 2 games in play=lost2/3 = 67% loss, followed by survival). If everything else is equal (e.g. several brand new players with no completed games) resolve ties by random allocation.

Now, how would this work in practice? Well, at the beginning it would heavily bias against playing the same country twice until you have played them all. Brand new players get clear priority over more experienced players for the countries that the statistics prove are easier to win with.
Once you have 7 games under your belt, things begin to settle down to a pattern that favours giving you the country you have played the least. Ties (quite common in new players) favour giving the worse players the easier countries, so there is a slight handicap element to the system.

It does require: Match win statistics to be kept (or at least calculated once and then hard coded in). (If England has been biased against in statistics so far because of implementation of convoys, statistic should be taken from when this was fixed).

If you're worried about not being allocated , say Russia or Turkey very often, don't - eventually those countries will become your least played and you'll get them. (unless you got your good win rating by taking points from newbies in which case I guess you'll get quite good at playing Italy, and you deserve it too)!

@NevilleChamberlain,

That's an interesting suggestion, but I imagine it would be nightmare to code (I can't say that for sure, but my very very limited programming experience leads me to think it would be very complex). Even if the code could be put together fairly easily, that would require some pretty serious work on the server side to keep track of everything every time someone was going to play a game.

All of that being said, I don't think that particular system would really change anything with regard to the current proposed power-choice system. The power choice system is for games in which you want to have a greater chance of playing, a particular power, perhaps because you've come up with a new strategy you want to try, or for any other reason. what you're proposing its a fix for the randomization algorithm for standard games, they are in some ways related in that they can both be a solution to the problem of playing the same power over and over, but they are in my mind ultimately separate issues.

@DrOct -- the power choice is per user instead of per game by kestas's request. See here: http://forum.phpdiplomacy.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=29

It's not tricky to code. But you're right and perhaps the post is off topic.

@smjl: I see. I can get behind it as a per user preference due to the difficulty of coding it to show up for each game, and because of the amount of space on the game creation page, but I disagree with the contention that the only reason someone would want that feature is to try to ally with a specific player. I, for example, have a couple of strategies for different powers I want to try out, and so would love to be able to choose (or at least increase my chance of getting them) those powers for different upcoming games.

As is stands, there is nothing in the current system that actually stops you from doing that anyway, as you can join one game, then alter your preference list, and join another.

Regardless, I like the system as it stands, and am all for setting up the preferance-system the way it is now, rather than on a per-game basis if it's easier to implement without bugs and/or for UI reasons (ie having too many things going on in the game creation/game join page).

@NevilleChamberlain - I'm certainly happy to take your word for it that it wouldn't be that hard to code, as I said my programming knowledge is extremely limited, it just... sounds complex when you explain it so I assumed it would be even more so when coding it. I hope no offense was taken!

It's terrible, I don't like the implementation at all. It should be game specific. Just let each user pick their slot/power when the join a game. (Possibly allowing users to change their selection before the game starts). If a game starts with fewer than 7 players have a function that reassigns any Italian player to an empty country.

>I'm really looking for feedback on that implementation rather
>than the idea itself. As others have said you have preference
>lists, so feedback based on the feature requiring that you
>choose your country in each game isn't as useful.

I don't see any bugs with this feature if that's what you're asking. But I could say the same about a well-programmed feature that assigns positions based on player rank or alphabetically. Doesn't break any rules, but not a good idea.

Thanks for the feedback so far. Churchill I know a more complex algorithm would get fairer results, and would welcome an improvement to the very simple one which is currently present (as long as it isn't far less efficient). That being said the simple one will do the trick for now.

dangermouse (and others): Why would you want to choose a power on a game by game basis? Doesn't that invite people to agree which powers they want to be with other players, to make pre-determined alliances easier?
I don't see how your favorite country can change from game to game, can someone explain the reasoning behind this?

Also if it was to be done game by game, how would it be implemented in a UI? If it was a TRIAGE text-based thing I think that'd definitely move it into the realm of advanced users who would have to know what they were doing before entering anything. If there was just a single drop-down for selecting your preference then there'd be a high punishment for choosing the same power as someone else, so it'd be more rewarding to work out your power with other players before-hand. It seems to invite meta-gaming

My current thoughts are that this should be an "advanced" feature, with the games only visible to players once the preferences have been set via the user panel. (That is, if it's going to be done based on user account preferences instead of per-game selection)

@Kestasjk, As I said, if it's a UI issue, I'm all for implementing it the way it is now, but as it stands it won't stop people from pre-agreeing to alliances and trying to get them, they'll just alter their global prefs before they join the game.

As to why you would want to change it on a game by game basis? As far as I'm concerned the point is not so I can play "my favorite" power, the point for me is to increase the likelihood that I'll get a given power, so I can try out a new strategy I've thought of, or simply because it seems like it'd be interesting to play X power, and I haven't gotten to yet, and don't want to just keep joining games until I get that power.

For example, in the past several games I've played, (all pass worded games with friends I know in real life), I've watched a number of people play Turkey, and I feel like I could do a better job of it, so I'd love to increase my chances of playing Turkey ahead of time. At the same time I have some interesting ideas for strategies for other powers that I'd like to try out, (England for example), so I'd love to be able to have a couple of games going and have the opportunity to increase my chances of playing as one power in one game and the other in another game, not because either is my "favorite," but because I want to try something out with them, regardless of who else plays the other powers in those games.

To put it another way, I'm not trying to engineer it so I and another specific player get specific powers, so we can work together, I'm just trying to make it more likely that I will get a specific power, so I can try it out.

Since people seem to be so concerned about point inflation using this system, how difficult would it be to make power-choice games 0 point games, and therefore outside of the point system? IE if you wanted to play with your preferances, it would fall into the "friendly" game category? (friendly is of course in quotes because Diplomacy is rarely a friendly game!). Would that complicate things too much? Essentially making two classes of games?

I still don't really understand why people get so bent out of shape about the point system, but if people are going to, might this be a good way to get around that?

> To put it another way, I'm not trying to engineer it so I and another
> specific player get specific powers, so we can work together, I'm
> just trying to make it more likely that I will get a specific power, so I
> can try it out.
In this case would it be better to just have a country balancing system instead, which would more actively ensure that players get the country they've played as least of all. Over time it already balances out evenly, but there can be frustrating strings of getting the same country or not getting a particular one.

This might work better, because it could be applied to all games and wouldn't require any sort of option setting.

The implementation would essentially just be the preference list implementation which is already coded, but the preference list would be the list of countries in order of least played first.
It would be a slight deviation from the rules which say it should be random, but it wouldn't be much less random anyway, and perhaps the pros outweigh the cons? I'm interested to hear feedback on this

That might be a good solution to the issue of getting the same power over and over for regular games, but I'm still interested in the idea of having the option to have a preference. My issue is not simply that I might have to play the same power over and over, it's that I want to try out a <i>specific</i> power, and would like to increase the likelihood that I'll get that one for a given game. Even if you set it up so that I'd be more likely to play powers I haven't played recently, that would only slightly increase my chances of getting the power I want to play.

For example, I've only played 3 games on the site, and in those games only 2 powers. While it would slightly increase my chances of playing, say, Turkey in my next game (which I want to try out), I'd still be a lot more likely to get another power. I don't just want to try Turkey because I haven't played it, I want to play Turkey because I want to try a specific strategy for Turkey (so for example I'm less interested in playing Austria, or Russia, even though I haven't played them either).

didnt read
quick opinion

preferences would be very nice
but it shouldbt be 1st come 1st serve all the time, randomness shoudl still be a factor

and/or 100% random games should still be a choice

all around though I like it