@goldie: Regarding code changes to tighten up anonymity, that's just a good idea in general for the site.

@VillageIdiot Yeah, but I just don't like that it is anonymous by rule but not in practice.

[Bragging disguised as joke] Besides, after I have blazed you all with my stunning skills I will be the target in the future and would already be if you knew your FTF history :) [/Bragging disguied as joke]

@VillageIdiot - yeah, I know. I'm pushing for it behind the scenes, but as the fundraising drive shows, there's a lot of dev work on plate for the site, and this isn't as easy a change as it appears.

@vixol - I will certainly not be making scoring system changes mid-tournament. Temporary accounts are something mods have dabbled with allowing before, but it's a *huge* hassle for them. I'm not gonna be the one petitioning them to allow 30 temp accounts on the site. I have played this tournament before. The meta does decrease in the Finals. It only ever became relevant in my game because the number of people left in the draw determined who won the tournament.

I do appreciate all the commentary though. These are ideas for implementation in future tournaments

Steinhardt is really making more out of it than what it was. I think it was pretty much just goldie or Vash, etc., going "Ok I'm pretty sure X is Y" and then planning accordingly.

for the record, I didnt mean to suggest changing scoring system during a tournament, but between

Chaqa, as much as it's convenient for you and your team to cloud things, let's make sure the situation is known. Two things have happened:

1) In a tournament announced explicitly as anonymous in order to prevent metagaming, the tournament director's team led the way in attacking one of its opponents because of their team membership rather than the position on the board. This is not something that we merely suspect, because there is public press in a FP game in which one of the other players directly admits it.

2) When our team accepted that this was now considered legitimate in the tournament and decided we would do the same at our next opportunity, we were told that it was now against the rules and would lead to sanctions if we attacked the TD's team in the final.

Of course as an experienced player I understand that given the opportunity, players will gang up on a perceived stronger player/team. The tournament rules explicitly stated that this was to be avoided if possible via anonymity, though, and we attempted to respect that, like most teams did. So it was certainly...unpleasant to see that it was the tournament director leading the way in breaking this implicit agreement. But we can accept that it was only an implicit agreement and difficult to enforce.

What's absolutely ridiculous, then, is being told that rules now change if we decide to retaliate. Yes, there's a long tradition of attacking perceived strength in Diplomacy, but it's always also fair game for strong players to retaliate selectively in order to discourage this. The idea that it's okay for the TD's team to break the implicit agreement because it benefits them but it's not okay for somebody else to do it in a way that hurts the TD's team is patently ridiculous and turns this tournament into a farce.

You asked for a solution? I think there are two reasonable solutions, either of which could work:

1) Enforce the anonymity that was promised. Disqualify, at a minimum, the teams that explicitly used team information as part of convincing others to ally with them. One player even admitted in public press that their choices were knowingly poor for their own power. I do not know whether this includes the TD's team, because it has yet to be revealed which player was publicly misbehaving in Group A's FP1.

2) Accept that this can't really be an anonymous tournament and allow our team to retaliate in the final, as turnabout is fair play. Allow us to play under the same rules that the TD's team has been allowed to play under and that other teams in our groups have been allowed to play under, because that's a minimum requirement for fairness. This might mean that we make choices that are knowingly bad for our own powers in some of these games, but it's already been established that this is okay in the 2016 World Cup, so we deserve the right to make that decision for ourselves.

Either of those would be an acceptable solution. Any "solution" in which the TD is allowed to benefit from breaking anonymity and then conveniently change the rules so his team can't be harmed by it is unacceptable and should be seen as unacceptable by the entire community.

@CSteinhardt,

The unfairness that you mention here rests on an assumption that I don't think is true. You are saying that there is something unbalanced about further ensuring anonymity in the final. I don't think that is necessarily true, and because we are discussing these rules now and not mid-round, I don't think it is clear who benefits from improved anonymity.

For example, you suggest that being able to freely detect who is playing what power would allow your team to retaliate against Goldie's team. True, but it could also allow the same sort of ganging up against the top-rated team (Team California) that occurred in Round 1.

Because it seems to me unclear which teams will be most disadvantaged by more or less anonymity, I don't think you have framed the enhanced anonymity correctly or in a fair way.

Your team has complained that the rules on anonymity did not work well enough, and that other teams meta-gamed to your disadvantage. I think you are totally correct and justified in that criticism. A consistent and fair resolution to that is to improve the protections on anonymity in the final.

Your proposed solution -- to punish and disqualify players who took advantage of the more lax rules in Round 1 does not seem fair to me. There was no rule about punishing and disqualifying this sort of meta-gaming in Round 1, and that is a very harsh response for behavior that was at least ambiguous with respect to the rules.

We did a pretty intensive investigation into the perceived metagaming and found there to be no rule breaking. Attacking a team specifically because you don't like them would be rule breaking by the current rules, so this isn't even a matter of proposed rule changing. I'm sorry you don't believe that we investigated objectively or competently, but we did, and that's the end of it.

qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq

This is my favourite thread.

I realized that breaking anonymity was possible when one player in my game started telling me who is who etc as part of rationalizing the proposed actions. I must admit that I used the information since he seemed to feed it to all players at the table. I could argue that throwing the game to me was better for one person's team although it was bad for that individual player's score.

Once the information got out it was impossible to not act on it. I don't like the idea that this makes my team disqualified according to csteinhardt above. But I do think it would be more fun if it wasn't allowed and made impossible by truly anonymous games.

@Balki, I am not saying there is anything unbalanced about there being further anonymity in the final. I'm saying that if we deduce who some of the players are despite whatever is done, we need to be allowed to use that information. If you can ensure that it's impossible for us to get that information, obviously we won't have anything to use.

@ghug, we would not be attacking a team because we don't like them. We would be attacking a team because they attacked us. This is allowed in Diplomacy, yes?

@vixol - that scenario is only really applicable to the first round. Such an action would not have benefitted the other players team if it were the Finals. That's what I meant by "there will be less of an impact in the Finals" yesterday

CStein, as a player in that game I can confirm you have your facts wrong. Perhaps you should wait until the people involved are allowed to talk about it before you make public accusations.

I publicly accuse you of being a buzz kill

@goldfinger But it can still be true that it's better to allow team X to solo than team Y to draw because my team is either so much ahead of X or behind X that it doesn't matter if X solo

@vixol, saying that you don't like a particular ruling because it hurts your team is admirably honest of you. For what it's worth, had the tournament staff done their jobs properly, they would have stepped in when the player started sending that information around, so that you wouldn't have been in the position of being implicitly told that it was okay to use.

Having said that, either it's legal or it's not. If it's legal, then your team did nothing wrong and we will be doing nothing wrong by trying to gang up on a team that, in Group A, showed the ability to beat us. If it's illegal, then I'm afraid your team was lured into breaking the rules and would need to be punished accordingly unless you checked with tournament staff and were told that it was okay.

Yeah, but then again, no one acknowledged "yes, I'm team x". But once it got explained to naive me how to check time stamps...

@captainmeme, Anybody on this site can click on messages and then look at the history and you will see public press going back to the start of the game. When I claim that in Autumn, 1903 France posted "England is on Team California." in public press, that is a verifiable fact. There is zero doubt that France made a public post breaking anonymity.

How individual players and teams reacted to that post is, as you say, perhaps something that can be better discussed after the game. In that regard, I certainly wish to respect site rules and avoid discussing the specifics of an ongoing game. For that matter, I make no claim about whether France was correct in his assertion; we'll find out when the game ends whether England is indeed one of ours or whether England was incorrectly targeted. If France turns out to be on our team, then we should be disqualified.

That was not your claim. Your claim was that "the tournament director's team led the way in attacking one of its opponents because of their team membership rather than the position on the board".

@captainmeme, That claim wasn't actually specific to FP1, but rather comes from other discussions I had with the TD privately. I take it that you agree, then, that France should be disqualified in FP1, whichever team he/she turns out to belong to?

@vixol - in practice, it is near impossible to beat a team that has solo'd in the Finals. I cannot think of a single scenario where a team would be better off tossing it than allowing a draw to happen. Solo = tournament over, effectively, 90% of the time.

Separately, the tournament director does not have the power to check press. Nor should it be expected of him to, even if he did have that power.

It is actually a silly suggestion that he/she should. Since it's easy enough to figure out who is who using time stamps

And if it wasn't possible to figure it out, then by all means such claims should be allowed as diplomatic tool.

The only real problem is that we say it's an anonymous tournament when it is not.

Goldfinger, "if I throw to the leading team my team ends second place"?

But yeah, less effect, I give you that. Enough spamming from me. It's midnight in Finland.

@vixol - this tournament has always been semi-anon. Looking through the past tournament pages should have informed you that players knew who would be in their game. Otherwise the tournament is as anonymous as site architecture allows it to be. There is nothing else I can do without unreasonably burdening the moderators (in which case it would not have been approved) or infringing upon one's ability to write and conduct their own press strategy.