too many people would pick the same country...and nobody wants austria.

I wouldn't want to pick my country, but I would like to have 1 right of refusal. The game would randomly pick the order of players and then starting with the first player would pick a country and ask them if they want it. If they do not then it picks another country and they get that whether they want it or not. Then it moves on to the next player. The last player gets no choice of course. And each player doesn't get to know what other countries are already gone.

It would take a little longer to get a game going, but would allow some flexibility to help partially avoid a player getting the same country over and over.

No. In the spirit of "real" diplomacy, you take the colored block out of the bag and you play what you get.

IF you're going to implement it, it should be:

- A game create option(random/preferences). That way games can be created that force a random.
- A 'give me three countries in order of preference'
- GameMaster attempts to give people their choices, and randomly assigns conflicts. So sometimes, you're just gonna have to play Austria.

The one nice thing about it is that you can set up a game where everyone agrees to play a country, just have everyone choose their assigned country as their first preference. You could set up a 7-game round robin where everyone plays every country once.

i like playing austria ;)

I would want a preference system too. I want to force the system to give me countries I haven't played yet.

Yeah, I like playing with a variety of countries, the random system is fine.

There is actually a varient version of PHP diplomacy that was set up at one point as an experiment (I know the guy who set it up) in which players could set up a global list ranking their preferences for countries from 1-7, and then whenever they played a "country preference game" it would attempt to give you your first choice country, unless there was a conflict and so on and so forth down the line. If everyone picked a different first choice country you could have everyone pre-determine their countires, but if there were conflicts then it would randomly give one person their first choice and then try to give the person their second choice, again unless there was a conflict.

It worked out decently, and had the advantage of letting you set up your preferences in one place and not worrying about it for every game you enter (though of course you could change your preferences). It was also good because you had the choice of whether or not to set up a game in which player preferences were factored in or to play the purely random "pure" diplomacy people on this site are always getting bent out of shape about.

Personally I'd love to have this option implemented on the site, as sometimes you want to play with friends and you all have different countries you want to play, (and since it would be optional no one would HAVE to play that way), but some people seem to take it as a personal insult that anyone would want to play any differently than them when it comes to diplomacy.

@DocOc I like that, although I think when you join a game a confirmation screen could allow you to change your "default" choices

@jbalcorn - That sounds great to me too, but, there was some commotion when it was first proposed about whether it should be a global set of preferences or individual to games. the global preferences were essentially a compromise.

the concerns seemed to be about simplicity, especially for new players (this I thought was a valid point), and about people abusing the system to set up pre-determined alliances (this seemed stupid to me, as you could do that anyway with the global preferences, and in variant games... who cares, if people are that concerned about it make player preference games 0 point games, or limit them to 5 points or something).

Simplicity is the reason a lot of well supported features don't make it into phpDiplomacy. Still, hopefully when the next release is out we can add a few more in.

I do think that a confirmation screen is getting to be a must-have. Too many people are accidentally joining games that they can't actually participate in accidentally. I.E.: A player from japan joining a 1-hour turn game being done evening Europe and daytime U.S...

Why is everyone always hating on Austria? I'd much rather play as Austria than Italy or Turkey.

I agree with the confirmation idea.

There is actually a varient version of PHP diplomacy that was set up at one point as an experiment (I know the guy who set it up) in which players could set up a global list ranking their preferences for countries from 1-7, and then whenever they played a "country preference game" it would attempt to give you your first choice country, unless there was a conflict and so on and so forth down the line. If everyone picked a different first choice country you could have everyone pre-determine their countires, but if there were conflicts then it would randomly give one person their first choice and then try to give the person their second choice, again unless there was a conflict.
nice idea...