Well, the time for someone to fall CD is a certain number of required phases (ie phases where they need to make a decision). Personally, I do think this number is currently a little to large, however that is down to the powers at be...

I'm in 3rd and the majority of the games I'm playing in right now are for quite low stakes.

no. abandoning the game would encourage cheaters who abandon right away when they're losing. the button should put you into CD in ALL of your games.

Abandonment is a reality in Diplomacy, both home games and online. It is poor gamesmanship to abandon when you're losing, but it's not cheating. I think you should be allowed to CD from just one game, but word will get out that you're a quitter and no one will play with you. Also, other players would be able to take over the country just in the mess you left and not have to deal with the additonal losses incurred while you didn't submit moves (as now).

What is "cheating" about abandoning right away when you're losing? It guarantees that you get 0 points, instead of possibly getting a few by surviving until the end. It saves time for everyone.

The only true way to avoid metagaming is total anonymity. Which is still an option.

The points system does encourage metagaming to a degree because it creates preformed opinions on the skill and aptitude of players. Whether or not this makes things more difficult or more easy for a person with many or not many points remains to be seen.

I always thought that the points system was specifically meant to be a more accurate representation of phpDip, to replace the old scoring system which was deemed a bad standard. As well, the buy-in system creates a natural barrier for poor or unreliable players, and for more experienced players who want a more challenging game, a higher stake is an easy way to achieve a certain standard. Of course, very skilled players may have a low amount of points currently, but it is expected to balance out with time.

As well, the buy-in of points creates a natural cap on the amount of games a player can play at a time, and creates a balance between players who wish to play only a couple of games at a time, and those who wish to play several or a dozen. The more games you take on at a time, the lower the stakes are expected to be, but your mathematical expectations for your outcome, should be the same as if you took less, but higher staked games. That way, the number of games played is not the indicator for skill, but rather the ratio, and quality of the games played.

I think this system is good at the moment, and has no major issues yet. The points system does help reduce abandoning games, and more so amongst serious players. But it also naturally separates those who abandon games, and those who typically do not.

"The points system does encourage metagaming to a degree because it creates preformed opinions on the skill and aptitude of players" - it's not just that, it also creates a motivation that is outside the game itself. Each game should be a unique and self-contained event unless it is part of a tournament.

"As well, the buy-in system creates a natural barrier for poor or unreliable players, and for more experienced players who want a more challenging game, a higher stake is an easy way to achieve a certain standard" - I was grateful to aoe3rules for setting up that list. I think word of mouth is the best way to identify good and/or reliable players with whom you would have a challenging game. Then you set up a password game and invite them.

"As well, the buy-in of points creates a natural cap on the amount of games a player can play at a time" - You're right, this is a very good feature of the system, though the number of games one could play at once was capped anyway.

"The points system does help reduce abandoning games, and more so amongst serious players" - this, to me, is a self-contradictory sentence. "Serious" players do not abandon games in the first place. And the points system will have no impact on abandonments by those who don't care about their points.

Personally i am in favour of the new points system and i think that it adds alot more spice to the game.....but then i play poker online as well so the 'buying in' and essentially gambling of points is second nature.

However, although it may sound like that i will only play in games that can make a decent return because of this, that is not so. I am in four games and only one of those is for serious players that can really afford large gambles, the rest are low point games that i am enjoying and finding the quality of play to be of a reasonable standard and good training for the high point game.

The purposes of the points system:

- Let good players play with other good players
Players can't get points without playing well in games. The more points someone has the more likely they are to be a solid player. There's some luck involved, especially with the way starting scores were worked out, but generally more points = better player.
I'm sorry if you wanted to play with the top quality players and now they have a way to only play with each other, but if they want they can still play with players with fewer points. It's not fair that experienced players should be obliged to play with less experienced ones though.
Passwords aren't that good of a substitute either, because you have to keep an unwieldy list of trustworthy players, and that doesn't work when there are hundreds of players that are trustworthy. The points system filters out bad players and untrustworthy players automatically

- Make civil disorders less likely as you play in higher stakes games
Note that this is *not* because it punishes players by taking away their points. I agree that players that go into CD may not care about points anyway.
It doesn't work because taking away points is a deterrent, it works because players that go into civil disorder more often will lose all the points they have in a game more often. So a player who has a lot of points and plays in high stakes games won't be able to play in high stakes games for long.
So it's a process that weeds out the civil disorder players over time, and at the end if someone has lots of points you can be pretty confident that they're not the kind of player that goes into civil disorder.

- Provides a ranking table so players can fight for a limited number of top positions
I've heard from people who like that they now get something out of winning that adds up, and there were lots of valid complaints with the previous method of calculating which players were good

- Limit the number of games people are in
A complaint a while back was that people were in too many games, up to 40 in some cases, and then when that player left 40 games were damaged as a result.
Then a limit of 5 games per player was put on, but some players wanted to join more and were reliable players who don't have a problem joining many games at once.
The points system means that if a player has a choice between a few high quality games or lots of low quality games, and if they play lots of games at once and bet all their points and then leave they lose all their points. So if you were in lots of games and you leave you won't be able to join lots of games afterwards, and you'll be back to square 1.
Also people used to join lots of games because if they lost it was no big deal, and if they won it would help their score. But now if you lose a game your score is negatively affected, so you have to play to win.


A problem you talk about is that players will only be concerned about getting points and not winning. Winning or at least trying to win is the best way to get points, but for most people the points isn't much of an incentive to win, the points just work to filter out people who do win and are trustworthy whether they actively play for points or not.
If I removed all mention of points, removed the numbers next to players names, and just hid the higher stakes games so only those who can play in them see them, so that you couldn't tell there is a points system at all, the points system would still work in more or less the same way without anyone knowing it exists.

"I'm sorry if you wanted to play with the top quality players and now they have a way to only play with each other, but if they want they can still play with players with fewer points. It's not fair that experienced players should be obliged to play with less experienced ones though."
TheMahatma is just as good as any of the Masterminds. and then there's figlesquidge. i think he was a Diplomat before but now he only has 300 points.

I've invested them all in big games. So actually, I am playing with the best. The only thing is that they have more left over at the moment.
I think the points system is very good, and have only two slight issues with it.
1) 10% of the pot for winning
2) If people are so worked up about rankings currently, reset all to 250 and work from there!

Kestas, thanks for the thorough explanation. Those were my red flags, but now I will reserve judgment. I really do like the idea of hiding the points, or at least displaying them only on the Hall of Fame and player profile pages. I also hope the other suggestions (abandon button and faster CD) can be implemented.

Kestas, if you decide to hide points, i htink it should be done completely. Then, they would be in the background and the only way of getting even a hint for them would be the rank of the player (Diplomat etc). Then, the value of the game could be calculated from the average points of each player in some way, and work off this.
My main comment is that points should show the total number of points someone has, not just the number that are not invested. My ranking dropped around 75 places because of the game's I've joined!

Indeed, I would only ask that you display the total number of points, at least alongside the current.

Anyways, hiding points is an intriguing idea, but one can always recognize hall of famers. I'll say again, that perhaps the only way to overcome metagaming, is total anonymity upon the joining of a game.

I only mentioned hiding the points to make the point that the system doesn't have anything to do with how much people want to get points or how much people are afraid to lose points, it's just an algorithm that would work as well even if you didn't know about it

The reason I think points should be visible is because without knowing about them there needs to be a fixed bet (relative to the points of the player starting the game) that would have to be set automatically, and has to be large enough automatically to keep unwanted players out but small enough to allow a large enough mix of players in, and small enough to not mean that you're invisibly betting too many points.

I think the only place where it would be useful to hide points is for new players, where the amount they bet isn't important because their points are replenished anyway, and it would make things a bit simpler for them.
They could be shown points and realize that there is a points system behind the scenes only when they've got, say, 150 points or so. But that's not so important for now