I'm a newbie to this site but I really don't have any objections to friends playing together and even pre-determined alliances, which could be very useful for someone just learning the game. Alliances can be broken, even pre-determined ones, and I can't see anything wrong is negotiation to say, "We're going to stay together no matter what." It does happen in games.
A penalty for making false accusations, however, would not be a bad idea.

Playing with friends defeats the purpose of the game? What about social groups who get together to play week after week after week?

Playing with friends isn't the problem, per se. I'd call a number of the active players on this site my friend. However I will stab each and every one of them mercilessly if it serves my needs in a game, and I expect the same treatment from them.

Automatic alliances disregard position, disregard the other players, and disregard different, and possibly better, strategies. Playing with a friend, and even allying with them from time to time as suits your interests, is not a problem. Just play with your friends the same way you'd play with a group of only friends: you're going to ally with them sometimes, stab them sometimes, and other times largely disregard each other (although staying in diplomatic touch with another player throughout the game when your interests do not yet overlap is generally speaking a good idea, but I digress). All the people here who aren't your friends (yet?) are asking for is a fair shake at negotiating with you.

Maybe games with friends should be passworded
If the game is on the list of non passworded general joinable games then i think we should encourage people not to make pre game deals/relationships enter the game.
I think people are good natured and not stupid so just a reasonable appeal to good sportsmanship and stating that metagaming is frowned upon should do. Maybe this could be put on the "make a game" page just above the "enter password" area. I liked the little metagaming statement Kestas put in the FAQs.

Multi-accounting is the only taboo.

Alliances, however formed, are simply alliances. They are to be dealt with.

#at the game level#

It isn't playing with friends that defeats the purpose of the game - but making an alliance externally that is unbreakable within the game. Especially if its done repeatedly.

Oh you can ally before hand. It just pisses us all off.
And you have to know, pissing us off isn't something I would recommend...*Death laughing behind*

I thought a friend was someone you could stab and then shake hands with afterwards. So, playing with those who are prepared to stab you when it suits their own interests is perfectly acceptable.

I think this thread has already gone off topic? From Kestas' post, it seems to me that the question was not "should we allow pre-game alliances" (for which the vast majority say 'NO!'), but rather "what can we do about it?"

My view is that games should be played, but if someone is found to play with pre-determined alliances then this should be stopped, with an official warning. If they continue to play and ally after that then treat it as multi-accounting

I don't know. When I played with my friends, we were'nt afraid to mistrust and even backstab eachother. It made it more fun, in my view. You could do covert crap like sneak around and ask third parties for intel. Worried text messages and conference calls at night, getting a phone call around the time orders are due. It was fun, and I think friends who "ally no matter what" will eventually see the fun of playing both sides, given time.

I'm not sure a ban or anything will work, but at least an FAQ when you sign up. 'While we do encourage you to invite your friends to join you, allying with someone solely because you are friends is highly frowned upon.'

political correctness? **

I agree with mapleleaf, amazingly

fig is right that the problem is pre-determined alliances, and the question is what rules do you take to fight that? Looking at it on a case-by-case basis is very difficult, you need moderators to look through all the previous games, see how many were joined by a certain group of friends, how many of that group of joined games were they allied in, do the alliances make sense without the context that the players are friends, etc. I'm not sure it's a realistic solution

Also the mods would like to have something very solid to lean back on, some red line that people can't cross so bans can be justified

Saying that alliances can be dealt with in-game is also probably not a good solution. If you get 4 friends together that's an alliance no-one can fight

I also agree with Mapleleaf. Alliances are alliances, after all.
If I start a game, and found that a given player is a person I can trust, it is likely I will trust him in the future, in new plays.
It is not "a predefined alliance" but rather "a bias towards people with known behaviour". Of course I can choose to stab them, but that will likely diminish my trustability in later games among them, and so I need more reasons for stabbing than being "ridiculous to do anything but that".

The problem here is that everybody insists in play single games as plain Diplomacy. But the fact that there is a point system and a ranking has to be taken into account. Using that, and the history of games, you can analyize the behaviour of your co-players, by looking at their stats, previous games, etc.
I usually study my co-players when entering a game.

@Kestas: perhaps what can be (easily?) done is some way to be able to query all the games where two persons have played together, and so be able to determine how likely is that they will ally again...

As a side effect, you will have a way to simplify the detection of multiaccounters.

A more complex thing may be some kind of wiki, where anyone (with certain level in the game?) can inform his discoveries, as comments attached to the players. (Something as "Aries is known to be usually allied with BlackFire and LynxPhoenix. They are between 1 and 3 Argentinian guys, and their alliances are almost unbreakable"). That would have helped me, Otto Von Bismark, and the rest in Downfall (gameID=5886). Luckily, some of us managed to discover their alliance in time, and dealt with it, as mapleleaf suggested.

I think the mods need to do the difficult research in every case brought up - which to be fair is only one or two groups a month.

I believe that its neccessary to look into both sides in a context similar to that of a court case, hearing both sides out and forming a judgement. It isn't that hard to look through the list of players in a game and see which ones have the same players in either. Then looking through the games to identify if they do ally together all the time would take something like 15 minutes. Other evidence such as dialogue within game may be provided by players. I don't think that its out of the reach of mods but maybe I'm wrong.

I'd say thad a single red line is unattainable though, but with a moderator dealing with each situation I think that things can be worked out.

Maybe bans shouldn't be the first step either. Perhaps if a serious issue seems to arise a number of player's could be forbidden from joining future games together for a while.

Well, I'm sure most people know that I'm against metagaming. It puts the other players at an unfair advantage. It's all well to deal with it in the game, but if you don't know about a pre-formed, unbreakable alliance between two or three players (god forbid four!) it may be too late when you finally realize how close they're willing to stick together. Obviously it's impossible to ignore past experiences with players, but that doesn't make trying to minimize metagaming a worthless pursuit. I actually only really look at countries in my games, and not names, and that coupled with my terrible memory means that I usually start my games with a clean slate unless the other player specifically brings up information from the past.

I'm fine with friends playing together as long as they are willing to stab each other just as they would stab anyone else on this site. Alliances should be made and broken by individual circumstance and situation, and not by history.

It's really hard for me to distinguish between friends that always play with each other and don't break alliances and multi accounters. This is especially if they claim to be playing at one place, such as school, or an internet cafe. I suspect many multiaccounters may hide behind the controversial shroud of metagaming.

My suggestion is that if you must play with unbreakable alliances, you should start a team game so that the other players are also on teams. Alternatively, you can just host a private game, and if you're lacking in players, simply post the information on the forum and let them all know that you're going to be in an unbreakable alliance.

If you continue to play in the same games with the same friends from the same place, and at least one account is profiting very well from it, don't be surprised or offended when the situation gets called to moderator attention and you're flagged as a multi accounter.

We try to be cautious and at least contact the offenders to obtain an excuse, but it always ends up being metagaming, and it's difficult to tell if it's tight metagaming or one person multi accounting. I'll probably ask them to stop playing with each other for a while, and encourage them to challenge other players. What happens next will probably determine whether they're metagamers or multi accounters, unless they're heavily dedicated multiaccounters.

I think this can easily be dealt with by placing a paragraph about the general rules of diplomacy sportsmanship someplace like in the FAQ or something. This would give the 'rule' that we can rely on but provide the flexability (through our determination of enforcement) that the case-by-case method offers. perhaps something like:

"phpDiplomacy is an internet game and sportsmanship is important to the phpDiplomacy community. Because of the nature of the internet, most people playing will not know one another. In the pursuit of fairness and sportsmanship, the community expects that players treat each other equally, no matter whether they are known outside the game or not. If you chose to play a game with a group of friends or with pre-arranged alliances, please consider making it a password-protected game so that unknowing players are not at a disadvantage in negotiations."

obviously, it doesn't need to be this exact paragraph. I think connecting it into the Multi-accounting part of the FAQ would be a good idea. In theory, we could go as far as to develop a phpDip code of conduct to be posted on the help page. I think as long as something is posted about how you should treat each player equally in terms of negotiations, we would then have a 'rule' we could refer to that justifies action against those people who are found to be tantamount to multi-accounters. Also, i think we should say that pre-arranged alliance games are a 'variant' which should be made known to other players in advance.

I discovered a multi-accounter in one of my games recently and reported it. I've only been playing for a month or so. I'm curious - how often does this happen? How much time do moderators spend policing the games? Is it ridiculous or just a nuisance?

Since we moderators were given our awesome powers (about two weeks ago), I have probably spent 4 hours looking at complaints about multi-accounters. Kestas has given us some great tools to locate cheaters, but we still have to review game history. In many cases, it can be hard to determine if it is one person or a group of friends who just blatently stick together.

I was in another of the games of this suppossed multi, and I have taken one of his accounts in wugdiet game after they went CD. Reading at their communications (in Spanish -- I speak it), I can say that either they are 3 very young friends, 2 friends (1 playing as 2), or a totally schizoid person...
It may be the case that is only one person faking the conversations, but if that is the case, he is totally nuts.

It was also the case that one of them (if there is more than one), LinkPhoenix, has been spared, as he has rejoined Downfall. So perhaps I am right about them being more than one, and the moderators managed to prove it.

I have been subject of a multi before, and it is a nuisance. But I think that in this case the accusation has been a bit too quick. Perhaps when a game is subject of a multi, it should be paused *before* banning the accounts, and let the accussed people explain their case.

@Archonix: the distributed work among a community is much more efficient than the work of a bunch of moderators... That is why I suggest the query system and/or wiki.

The problem with a wiki is that I can just lie about other players. We'd need someone to police the wiki to clear out harrassment/vandalism anyway and end up with just as much work.

I am opposed to players entering games with pre-determined alliances.

I think you could greatly limit the impact of this problem by setting a limit on how many games you can play simultaneously with any other player.

This would not stop predetermined alliances completely, but it would drastically reduce the total impact. This is not banning players, it is not allowing them to join games when another player is signed up for that game that they happen to be in other games with (that sentence sucked.)

In addition, there are a great number of ways to provide work arounds for problems other players have expressed with this idea. These are different settings that could be adjusted to meet most people's preferneces... The total number of shared games (I would pick one or two.) Allowing no limits to shared games above a certain buy-in amount (we are generally talking about meta-gaming for people new to the site, not old salts.) Allowing shared games when a password is involved.

There are many ways to make this work in an equitable fashion, and reduce how bad meta-gaming can get. I imagine this wouldn't be too difficult to build in as an automatic feature on the site, but that I would defer to the experts.

Thanks for considering this issue Kestas!

I still think that the best solution is to provide a way to query given a player, the list of other players that shared games with him, how many, and another one that given two players, determine the list of games they shared.
So, when starting a game anyone can use it to see if there is any chance of metagaming going on.

Regarding the wiki, usually communities are their own police. If anyone put something unjustified, it may be edited by another one. Plus you may know who added the information. I would have a tendency to trust more the information coming from old and known players. Information accuracy have to be crossed checked, of course. But I think information is the only way in which good behaviours can be kept without installing a police state.