Let me start by saying that I generally play on webdiplomacy for the fun of playing diplomacy. While I appreciate the complex system put together to calculate points and standings, I personally don't put too much stock in them. By extension it's safe to say that I'm very much against meta-gaming, or meta-alliance or meta anything for that matter. I mean what's the point? (pardon the pun).

So, getting back to the game:

Russia was a new player and a little unsure of how to put in moves. He made a lot of mistakes in his early turn but soon he was doing fine, and by the end of it he was actually the strongest on the board.

Anyway, Austria was being uncooperative so I asked Russia to help, since he made some early mistakes Austria got very strong fast. Then Russia figured out how things worked and we started working well together. At a similar point Austria decided to attack Italy as well which resulted in him being attacked from three sides.

Anyway all that was a game of diplomacy - "shit happens" as it were.

What was more interesting (or irritating) was the conversation in the global chat. Generally speaking I ignore the global chat as in a 5 min live game it's difficult to message all your neighbours and submit moves let alone look at the global chat. However, when I did look at the global chat I found that there was a lot of consternation over the fact that apparently Russia and Turkey were allied. I'm not actually sure that was what the problem or discussion was about since I didn't follow all of it, but this is basically how the conversation went:

Germany, was initially doing well and suddenly lost a lot of SCs, for some reason he declared that "it would be good to know who is who in this game" and later that there was something "fishy" going on.

England agreed with Germany and soon started asking to draw or cancel the game.

Austria (after stabbing his only ally) suddenly lost a lot of SCs and declared that he was tired so he wanted to draw the game. Now he may have been tired but still that was poor form.

Anyway I didn't want a big uproar over something so small so I ended up drawing, and the game was drawn with all 7 players still intact (more or less). I did not want to continue in a game with so much finger pointing. In fact I still don't know exactly what the accusations were. As I said I wasn't carefully following the conversation and only caught snippets.

All I'd like to say is that the game which was interesting was spoilt by unreasonable accusations.

/end rant!