VillageIdiot, while I know I could go to vDip to play 1v1, I don't really want to go to another site for playing diplomacy. I've been on webDip since 2009, and I've found this community to be one of the best to play in. It's declined in recent years as things like RR and private games seem to have taken over everything else, but I don't really want to play on multiple sites. So having 1v1 on this site would be really nice, even if it's available elsewhere.

Hey guys, I've been following along here, and I'm happy to see that the discussion has been almost entirely civil, even when people disagree.

In my experience, the biggest problem we have is NMRs and CDs, especially (but not only) in public games. This leads to established players only wanting to play private games with other established players, which means new players get stuck with the unreliable players, and then either become unreliable by example or quit out of frustration.

Believe it or not, I've been playing some random public press games recently, and all 7 players to show up for the first turn is a frustrating struggle. Then, people will randomly drop out midway through the game. I would definitely play many more anonymous public games if this weren't such an issue. Where I learned to play (Bounced), that was the *only* way to play, and it's still my first choice. I play private games mostly because it's nice to not have quite as many dropouts.

Therefore, our number one priority when it comes to development, before live ratings, modernization, a new forum, more variants, or anything else, should be to implement a system where NMRs don't happen. That system cannot depend on people always putting in orders on time -- it needs to fail gracefully even when they don't. I would support a system where a late player gets a certain grace period to put in orders (but can't press or use preview), and if he repeatedly goes into grace or ever exceeds the grace period, then the deadline is extended, and he's put into CD so that somebody else can take the position. The key here is that the position is not ruined by two consecutive NMRs before it's open for replacement, so that these positions are easy to fill. It could perhaps even be augmented with a feature like the live-game one where recently open positions are posted in a prominent location.

That's not to say that there aren't other good and important ideas out there, but I think improving the gameplay experience needs to be the priority if we want to be the best Diplomacy site, and the number one thing that ruins gameplay is NMRs.

Of course, this is a structural, development issue that we're not equipped to handle immediately (and that I personally am not equipped to handle at all).

What I can do, right now, to address the complaint that it's hard to get games started, is to start an invitational game. Details will come in a different thread, but the goal here is to give newer players (or just lesser-known players) a chance to play a quality game, so priority will be given to new players and to players I haven't played before.

Keep up the discussion.

NMR's are every sites number one concern and while i've seen many approaches on how to handle it, nobody has quite yet found the magic bullet to solve it. Frankly i find here one of the better places for it because we have mods willing to jump in to pause games and actively find replacements and we have quite a few people willing to 'be a pal' and step into bad situations to keep the game alive.

Elsewhere you'll see "protected" games where they automatically offer grace periods for NMR's and added time when replacements are needed. It works kinda ok, but more times then not it just drags the game since low quality games just get littered with dropouts and now delays. I've seen games become exclusive based on RR, invite, or equivalent but then your general population games suffer greater. Reward systems for replacement players helps a little, but they generally get abused by people who want to work this system to inflate their standing.

It's simply a very tough issue to tackle.

I agree with the invitational games approach, i've rarely seen a "hey, who wants to play a game?" post not get filled up within a few days regardless of the level of player who floats the idea out there. There's a lot of people out there who just want a game that they know is going to get off the ground.

@JEccles - I get what you're saying, but really there you do see a lot of the same familiar faces as you see here so it's not really that much of wandering over into foreign territory. I personally love 1v1 games and am excited to see PlayDip having implemented a version of them that's comparable to vDip, but that's because i get to play against a completely different subset of players i'm familiar with over there. Considering how close vDip and webDip already are i really think it would benefit from a little differentiating or else really you're just going to see the two sites cannibalizing off each others membership until one of them proves to be the slightly inferior one and dies off. We should probably strive to be more then just two mirror sites with one being the 'civil' one while the other the 'tolerant/non-censored' one.

If there was a way to exclude me from any GR bump or drag if I take over a game, I would be much more inclined to take bad positions. The other thing is that there should be a better way of knowing there's need for people to take positions instead of going through the games menu

Nobody has ever found a magical solution to NMRs and I don't think anyone will. New players do that, experienced players do that. It's never really acceptable but it's something that we have to deal with. However, there's a very plausible solution to games being ruined by NMRs and CDs: one-phase CDs.

The acronym NMR, obviously, means that no moves were received. That does not automatically lead into a two-phase process toward a CD; that only happens when a player literally does not log into a game over that amount of time. I don't know why this is the case, but it's coded that way. Still, NMRs and the first phase into a CD have the same effect, which is that moves don't get ordered for a country.

What really messes things up, though, is the second phase. The second phase of CD, in my opinion, is when things get royally fucked to the point of no return. In the first phase that a player NMRs, the player may very well lose their advantage in a battle or, depending on the scenario, have the tides completely turned against them, and that's not really fair. In the second phase, though, players begin to turn away from their fights in order to take advantage of a player in CD and sometimes we (the mods) even get people emailing us asking people to be booted early so the game isn't completely ruined. After one phase, a position may be salvageable. After two, that is often not the case and the game is wrecked.

Sending a player into CD after one phase would at least partially solve that.

Personally, I would even be open to a phase extension where a player that doesn't enter orders is immediately booted from the game *without* the game progressing. A new player could join the game, enter orders, read press, maybe send press, and continue forward without a significant interruption. I don't think that this would work in live games, but in long phase games, it could work.

That's basically what I suggested, just without the grace period :-)

I think that would work for first turn NMR. If a player misses a phase in, say, 1905, they should get some leeway.

It's exactly what you're doing in that game, only you are doing it manually.

Yeah, Chaqa, I would prefer it where the difference between NMR (i.e. player logs in, doesn't submit orders) and CD (doesn't view game at all during phase) stays in place.

Are you supporting another satirical ploy again bo-sox ?
Well there's no lack of enthusiasm on this thread..220 odd posts very quickly

Nah, this one's an actual idea.

- webDip Mom

Immediate CD with phase extension rather than NMRs is actually a great idea. I don't know why such a valuable feature from vDip hasn't yet been implemented here.

They've got that at PlayDip as well, albeit as an option. It's good I'm fairly decent quality games where you get the flukish unreliable player slip in or life gets in the way however in lower quality games it just becomes drop-out, two-day delay, drop-out, two-day delay, complaint to mods about losing track of coming back after two-day delay and getting a nmr on their record, bickering, frustration, screw this game!!

My thought was that a phase would only be extended by 24 hours max and that it would only happen once per phase. If dropouts become that big of an issue, though, I don't think there's a thing to be done about it other than penalizing people after a certain number of NMRs/CDs in a certain timeframe, which seems unnecessary to say the least.

Some of you might recall that there is a reason we took WFO down as a default option, so I don't see us opening the door to that sort of abuse again.

What's WFO? World Fighting Organization?

Wait-for-orders.

To clarify, I'm not necessarily saying it's a bad idea. It's great under the right conditions, it just shouldn't be a global feature or else it'll cause more grief then it fixes.

Even a deterrent is not a simple solution because for newcomers it's just too easy to scrap an account and start new.

I guess anytime somebody nmr's the player instantly gets booted and bo gets shoved into the position. That's marginally better then it being in civil disorder, yeah? ;)

If your going to start porting features/variants from vDip over here can I suggest the following:

features -
Interactive map option
No process of orders on *given day* option
NMR policy option (to extend, autoCD on NMRs, etc.)

Variants:
Fog of War (as a stand-alone variant, not as an option)
http://vdiplomacy.com/variants.php?variantID=30
Greek Diplomacy (a really unique and interesting bidding phase to begin a game)
http://vdiplomacy.com/variants.php?variantID=35
Known World 901
http://vdiplomacy.com/variants.php?variantID=57
Viking Diplomacy
http://vdiplomacy.com/variants.php?variantID=63

"I guess anytime somebody nmr's the player instantly gets booted and bo gets shoved into the position."

Do you want us to get down to 7 players by 2017? Get out of here, you playdip shill!

Weird to think I probably count as an old fogey now. Huh.....

Anyhow, I figured my two cents might be helpful. I joined with some friends 5-6 years ago, but I was the only one who stuck with it. A few odd things I remember from reading the forums (but very, very rarely posting in them):

-The pitirre (sp?) awards being made fun of annually
-A bizarre joke about eating people in the Congo
-Abge was virtually synonymous with "mod" - still a little odd to not see the little checkerboard by his name

CDs and NMRs were always sort of an annoyance, but I don't remember them being such a big deal, at least to me. If somebody quit, everyone would draw or cancel and move on with our lives. Except for the jerks who'd blitzkrieg through their CD'd neighbor(s) and get a cheap win.

I picked up points mostly by playing a bunch of live gunboats so I was able to play with quite a few good players without them knowing I was a newbie (until they wiped me off the board I guess). Learned quite a bit from the likes of SplitDiplomat and The Czech and eventually managed to play almost on par with them. My high water mark probably came when I *almost* soloed in a game with MadMarx (but didn't have the guts to go all out for the win) when he put together a series of games several years ago.

Anyway, life got busy, and it remains that way for now, but if webDip is still around in a few years, it's definitely something I'd come back and play. A couple more variants would probably not be a bad idea; one of the better 1v1 maps from vDip may be a welcome change in pace.

who is this guy? is he knew?

"Get out of here, you playdip shill!"

Well that deserves a +1. ;)

Out of curiosity, does the site's leadership know what the experience of new players here is actually like?

I've played a few games on PlayDip recently, getting a taste of what diplomacy is like to someone new over there, and frankly it's awful.

You get so many drop outs that the game might as well be decided by rolling dice.

You encounter players with access to stats on each other and you by virtue of paying premium membership, which gives you a skewed playing field.

The forum can be deathly quiet

You get people talking about live games and variants which you have no access to unless you pay, which is really annoying.

In short, if I stumbled across Playdip today as my first diplomacy site I would probably leave pretty sharpish.

The question is, are we much better? Is it worth a mod or two, or even volunteer members, to be given a second account to experience what happens to a new member? Has this already happened?

I think the delema is that new players are not given the benefit of doubt by experienced players, that they will adhere to the etiquette that's required to play these games. I'm not opposed to winning,losing,or drawing but all I want is for people to see the game through.
When I first joined, it was something I needed to learn, because all I wanted was to test my skill against better players and I could not get into those games. I left quite a few live games. Not realizing the detriment that I caused to the others (shame)

If we can find a way to solve that issue(people dropping out) things may clear themselves up

I strongly thing that creating a rule (possibly optional) that if there is an NMR, the player is immediately booted and the game-time extended to find a replacement player would go a long way in making players less-afraid to join games.

Well when I start my multis it always feels really weird because unless I invited my multis to better games they'd be alone in lesser maps with constant NMrs and juvenile cheating accusations.

Octavious is right that Playdip is awful.

For comparative purposes, I shall be taking a look at Backstabbr over the next couple of weeks. I shall report regularly with my findings.