Those situations are great, moral victories are the foundation of many a solo in this game. There's many tiers of crumbs for what a player wants to walk away from when the game is said and done, and moral victories are some of the smallest crumbs there are. Still, there's a wise player who really understands that is a motivator for players and it takes some skill to know how to place yourself in that position to be the guy people choose to throw their weight behind when revenge or hail mary's start flying.

I've died in some games where all the odds were against me, as if noone wanted to be my ally no matter how many or how much i talked to people and it would turn into a three or four on one. In some of those games ive fought and ive fought hard, lasting years longer than most would predict. Ive had some games where i realize the outcome is final and i decide not to bitch, but even when you die you can die with honor.

except bosox.





always 'except bosox'

*clutches chest, noticing pool of blood forming underneath me*

Ugh, you really hit me in the heart there.......

http://tinyurl.com/oaez47p

i try :P

http://tinyurl.com/pwd7s7m

Is it just me or does the guy get shot in the nuts in the first gif I posted?

Where would we be without you to keep us on track, bo?

In my opinion, the sheer diversity in personalities, motivations, and carrots/sticks to be found in Diplomacy players adds so much to the game.

If everyone approached the game in the exact same way, it would become more predictable and stagnant. Threatening to throw a solo means nothing if no one would ever actually do it. Promising a 2-Way would mean nothing if they never actually happened.

Even the mixed incentives of specific PPSC scenarios add interesting motivators. I can get a "strong second" (a significant psychological motivator in almost every 3+ player game regardless of the rules) and a few more points by helping the solo, but I don't get to add a Win or even a Draw to my record. Of course, neither does my hated enemy with 2 supply centers who is begging me to complete the stalemate line...

I think VillageIdiot touched upon a great point when he suggested that the best players (like the best diplomats) can see the sheer diversity of personalities and motives around them and manipulate them to their advantage.

"Those situations are great, moral victories are the foundation of many a solo in this game."

How are you soloing if the game ends in a draw, as Tru said in the quote I cited? Obviously comebacks from certain defeat that end in victory aren't moral victories - they're actual victories.

I think he meant "other peoples moral victories are the foundation of many a solo".

I don't have time to write much on this topic right now, but I want to say that I am enjoying this discussion immensely.

I'll throw in my 2 cents that, as well as a host of people much smarter than me (ok really mostly abge), I feel WTA far superior to PPSC. When I first joined the site I naively made my games PPSC but after watching people take my centers rather than make stalemate lines I quickly learned my lesson.

I mostly play gunboat, and the conversation about draws is slightly different in that especially in low-medium quality play
1) I don't trust my ally to know how to make a stalemate line as it's almost always Anon game mode
2) Even if he did, it's very hard to coordinate it compared to a full press game

So while in a full press game online I might frown on a 6 or 5 or even 4 way draw that I'm not the small man in, in a gunboat game, you often find people pressing draw as soon as someone reaches 10 SC, because they know it'll take a long time and have a lower chance of success to stop the solo, resulting in higher-player-count draws in gunboat.

In F2F tournaments a similar phenomenon happens but for time-constraint reasons rather than for lack of communication. Even when the tournament rules says play continues without time restriction, players after their 14th hour of Diplomacy and another game the next morning are much more willing to draw it out.

Just my thoughts on why many games may draw with a higher player count than wished for.

"...in a gunboat game, you often find people pressing draw as soon as someone reaches 10 SC, because they know it'll take a long time and have a lower chance of success to stop the solo, resulting in higher-player-count draws in gunboat."

I'll add to this. In gunboat, voting is also a crude form of communication. Pause is self-explanatory. Cancel not only means, "Let's end the game because someone NMR'd early" but it can mean, "I want to gang up against the guy who won't cancel this already compromised game!"

Draw votes mean about the same. It is usually an earnest indication that you think your best result option in the game is a draw, but it also tells other players that you want to work with them to achieve that goal by taking down the stronger individual or coalition. Hopefully others will also vote Draw and confirm this intention, or at least their orders will indicate as such.

You can stab them in the back later if a solo victory comes back into play for you.

Man, nothing more frustrating than when there's a clear solo threat, everyone else has clicked draw and, you'd THINK this means the people next to the solo threat should go start thwarting them....
and then they don't and attack another drawing fellow.

There's one person on this site who I know does this but he's special and I love him so whatever. But when anyone else does that ... grr! If the other parties stab you just throw the solo to the threat! Much better to try and save everyone imo.

I hear ya on the frustration. Sometimes I wonder if the person on the other side actually doesn't realize it's a WTA game. If they see a Draw vote, they may think you are declaring weakness so they launch an attack just to scrape up a few more SCs. Of course, this usually has disastrous results since someone on the front lines against the threat needs support or the weaker coalition will collapse.

Yes, another argument against PPSC and why WTA should be the default. Let the game be played properly as default, and just tell newbies or schools that they should set it to PPSC for a kinder, gentler, less genuine Diplomacy experience.

As an exercise in futility to keep the conversation back more on win percentage a new player may expect rather than why WTA is master race...

When I joined, and still, I came with a three part philosophy:
1) I want to play as much Diplomacy as possible
2) A larger sample size will provide a more accurate assessment of my abilities
3) I'm willing to lose as much as it takes to learn more and get more experience

I didn't know about GR, didn't understand much how points worked, didn't know much about how important reputation was or how many people NMR/CD at low cost public games.

Looking back, I may hypocritically recommend to someone new to the site to keep themselves to medium-high pot games, preferably semianon/PW'd. Yes you'll have a lot of noise in your lose/win because Diplomacy inherently will have that being a seven player game, but they'll all be true data points; I have close to 100 games completed but many were illegit (whether the illegit-ness was for or against me irrelevant).

I forgot to mention, in case it's not clear to anyone reading it, that those three points of philosophy led me to making lots and lots of low pot games rather than a few medium-high pot games; it's a crucial part of the post I somehow left out, my apologies.

Oscar is right:
"So, going off the rule book we have the following ordering of outcomes:
Win > 2WD ≥ 3WD ≥ 4WD ≥ 5WD ≥ 6WD ≥ 7WD > loss."
Anything beyond that, though, is contentious and complex.
At a simple level, I evaluate my own performance in the following terms. Without published statistics, I have no idea how many games are drawn at each of those levels. All I know is that, of games played through to a solo, the average performance would be to win just once in every seven games. Anything better than that is satisfactory or better. Anything less than that: "requires improvement". So I divide wins by non-draws. Crude, I know, but relatively uncontentious (please?)
For some time now, I have been contemplating a much more sophisticated system, with measures for the performance of each individual country.
I ask the questions:
if I solo as Italy, what proportion of players (of Italy) have done better than me (none, obviously),
what proportion have done as well as I did? (probably around 10%).
So I award myself 2 for every Italy player who did worse than me & 1 point for every Italy player who did as well as me. And I come up with a percentage of points gained over total available points.
It is a system akin to Match Points scoring at Duplicate Bridge. The comparator is not the opponent at that table. You compare yourself with other players dealt the same hand.
I then ask the same question in relation to two-way draws, then three-way draws, then four-way (etc).
I then ask the same question in relation to the other six countries and compile a matrix of applicable scores ie 7 (countries) x 8 values (solo, 2WD, 3WD, 4WD, 5WD, 6WD, 7WD, loss).
Averaging the percentages in each game gives me a measure of how well I am doing. Some day soon (maybe), I shall research the statistics of historical games to achieve approximations of the values in each cell of the matrix.
That done, the next step will be to take into account the strength of the players who are my opponents in that particular game. There I have in mind a development of the ranking system used in World Rugby.
But more of that when I have done the groundwork.

Good summary, and definitely a good indicator to level of success you're reaching but i'd take a few more elements into consideration as well. If you're an above average player and you're new to the site, you're probably going to have some pretty solid early success. You're likely in low quality basic games, you're unknown and don't have any type of reputation yet, yadda-yadda. As time goes on you get bored and start seeking out the best competition games you can get into, maybe venture into some variants, maybe people start getting familiar with your gaming style - all these things start to effect your win-draw statistics (i think there's a couple other statistics but i'm not as familiar with them .. what's the one? loss i think?). This is where things like Ghost Rating are useful to weigh against. Many players can stick to low level games indefinitely and probably rack up some solid wins but won't climb up the GR as fast because of the quality of their wins. You can get a low win rate because you went through a World Diplomacy IX phase, but you can still be top of the Full Press Classic ratings because you win those every time.

So thats my take as well. The WebDip points are a fun novelty, but they're a completely different tangent and really show your skill at gambling more then it does your skill at playing.

Heh, I have so many defeats from that 17/17 World Gunboat Tournament...

This has been a very informative thread...I've been playing PPSC mostly since joining a year ago. I might have to branch out into WTA a little more. I like the idea of players working together to check a powerful country as opposed to scrambling for SCs at the end when it's obvious someone might solo.

A question about the Ghost Ratings....is it better for your GR to be beaten or to draw in a higher-quality WTA game than its to win in a lower level PPSC game? Or is it a wash? Does your player rating go up simply by taking part in games with better competition?

I think Ghost ratings is based on how you "should" fare in a game. Winning against opponents who aren't much competition isn't as good as winning against tougher opponents. Likewise losing against players with a low GR is worse than against higher GR players. I don't think it matters whether it is WTA or PPSC.

MarquisMark, you should gain points for you name alone.

GR, in WTA, is quite simple. Everyone 'bets' 1/16th of their Ghost Rating. Solo gets it all, draw is split evenly between whoever is in it. So, if your rating is high enough compared to your opponents, you can go down from a draw but most times you'll increase from a small enough draw. You always go down (by 1/16th of your rating) from a loss.

In a departure from Elo, Ghost Rating says each game is also 'worth' an amount tied the the sum of the rating of players in the game (in Elo terms, the K factor varies based on the rating of the players in the game). So, it's better to do well in a game with high rated players (even if you yourself are highly rated).

I personally disagree with this feature of GR, but I don't want this thread to devolve into arguing about GR, so I won't go into detail.

Also, as Crazy A points out, it's better to do well in a game where you're rated lower than the others in the game.

Elo rating systems work like this:

NewRating = OldRating + k * (ActualOutcome - ExpectedOutcome)

In GR, for WTA:

* ActualOutcome is 1 for a solo, and 1/n for a draw (where n is the number of players).
* ExpectedOutcome is (OldRating/ SumOfPlayersOldRatingsInThisGame),
* K is SumOfPlayersOldRatingsInThisGame / 17.5.

If you want to know more, this page goes in to detail about how GR works:

http://tournaments.webdiplomacy.net/theghost-ratingslist

Ah, that's great. Thanks for the replies!

Yonni: I don't think you're quite right about losing. GR's K factor is 1/17.5th of the sum of all players ratings in the game, so I think in a loss you go down by 1/17th of the total ratings in the game, not just yours.

Wait, nevermind. I can't maths properly. Because of the way expected outcome is calculated, a loss turns out to always cost you <your rating>/17.5. But, wins can be worth more depending on the board. Interesting.

So I;m new, and just finding my way here. But I've been playing Diplomacy for almost 40 years (anyone else here?)! the interesting thing about the greatest game ever invented by a mailman, is that the main object isn't really stabbing someone, but learning to work together. and being trustworthy. Unfortunately, that's not a version this site espouses! Too bad, but i find the site enjoyable anyway.

About 42 years.

So why the anonymous settings? Also, why are there no way to have multi-messaging for larger conspiracies? Most importantly, how do i join quality games where I can get to know (translate read) my opponents?