another thing that came up before is wha if you had all your points invested in one game and you went cd. Would the mods give you 5 points or would you start a new account?

I doubt they'll be able to not return the points - it's pretty straightforward process that will become complex if they start putting in exceptions.

But if you have to wait for the game to end anyway, well, I think that's a good consequence.

What about keeping track of how many times you go CD and using that to make it more expensive to join games? The first game you try to join will cost you 100% more than for other players and for each game you see through the cost will go down by 25%. After 4 games your debt to society is paid.

Under the 'implementable' version of Ghost-rating which I have developed, and would hope to get added to the site, I have the following ideas with CD:
With regard to takeover:
1. When taking over CD, you have a choice of how much risk you want to take before you take over. You can make it be no change, or any percentage of the change, or full change.
2. Also, ratings are adjusted in accordance with the strengths of the positions at the time of the takeover for that player, to make the expected result more reasonable.

For falling into CD:
Your result = (SCs owned/34)-1
This means that the player looses a very great number of points. If I fell into CD under this system in my League A game, I would loose slightly more than 111 Ghost-rating and fall 185 places. Defeat would loose just under 16 points and loose 10 places.

Beyond this, an effective tracking system and the smear on your record should deter people who want to play on the site.

Unfortunately, people who go into CD probably have never even looked at the ghost ratings. I think it has to be a in-game consequence.

I do like the Ghost rating formula, though, because CDs should really hurt.

That would be if Ghost-rating replaced points.

I'd say the easiest thing (and I'm no programmer, so it might not actually be easy) would be to put a moratorium on joining new games after going CD. If you go CD in a game with X-hour turns, you can't join any new games at all until, say, 5X later. That would keep people from dropping out in order to try their luck in other games, and it wouldn't put overly harsh penalties on people forced to drop out by force majeur (I'd hate to think that the system would impose unduly harsh burdens on someone, say, called out of town to visit a sick relative or some such situation; this would avoid punishing them and would even give them some free time to recover from whatever situation took them away in the first place).

Tha's a good formula, and also makes the penalty less harsh if you joined a 12-hour game without realizing it.

No new joins for 5x. That way if you CD multiple games, the one with the longest turn length (which made people wait the longest for you) defines your punishment.

"That would be if Ghost-rating replaced points."

Is this an actual idea someone has?

It's what theGhostMaster wants. He doesn't like the points. From discussions I've seen, it's not totally out of the realm of possibility.

CDs should appear on player records. NMR rate should also appear. I'd strongly prefer to see separate ranking and reliability scores rather than just point count.

Takeovers should be tracked separately.

@Ghost: Do you have a repository where you're making these changes? I'd be happy to read over your shoulder at the very least.

We run into the problem that I don't know how to code in php. I am considering learning over the summer, and/or figlesquidge has said he might program it when he has finished the new map he's doing.

I'm unfamiliar with pD's codebase and I'm in the middle of a project right now, but I should be able to take a look at it in a week or two. Have you read the body of literature on tournament scoring systems?

I have read a fair bit on rating systems more generally, and am fairly familiar with Elo Rating (for chess). I've also read about another rating system for diplomacy, which is in a number of ways morally equivalent to mine.

Tournament scoring systems are a touch off the point of rating, because here your trying to find out a players skill over time, and so need an adjusting system. Your rating moves up when you do well, down when you do badly, and is expected to slowly change as you improve/worsen.

In a tournament, players aren't going to fundamentally change in skill, so you want to treat sequential games as the same. Unlike in a rating system, you want the last game played and the first game played in a round to be of equal weight, to find the best overall performance.

See TheGhostMaker's blog for an article on his ratings sytem at http://phpdiplomacy.tournaments.googlepages.com/theghost-ratingslist (Or read it in Diplomacy World #105)

Code is at sourceforge.

I'm new and I know I should be able to get it from context but it is baffling me. What does CD stand for? I know what it is referring to but I cannot make out the acronym.

CD - Civil Disorder. You fall into civil disorder by failing to submit moves, which leads us to:
NMR - No Move(s?) Received. Failing to submit orders. All of your units are ordered to hold.

2xNMR=CD

You may see a player called "Civil Disorder Italy" or "Civil Disorder Germany". These are games that started with only 5 or 6 players - Italy is set to CD first, and Germany if necessary.

"Civil Disorder Kestas" is something completely different. :-)

Where can players' ghost ratings be found?

http://phpdiplomacy.tournaments.googlepages.com/theghost-ratingslist

a frowny face at the top of the screen

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