This is, by far, the most annoying thing about playing this game. More annoying that getting stabbed.

Not that I like getting stabbed, mind you :-)

It happens in war too.. Imagine how irritating it was to Haig when he first heard of the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the Eastern front...

Learn to work with it!

'Which means that three quarters of a million Germans are leaving the Eastern Front and coming here, with the express purpose of using my nipples for target practice!'

"The Russians were on our side, George."

is there a link that i really should have got

ignore that im having a thick day

In one of my games. I'm the only remaining original player.

IAWTP. I think it's one of the main reasons Turkey does so well on this site while Germany and Austria do so poorly. Italy just sucks anyway, and its showing at 7.7% winning isn't too out of line with postal records. But twenty percent for Turkey? That's sad.

Isn't that Blackadder?
*refuses to google*
I will watch the again series instead, a much more worthwhile use of time than revision!
Maybe stupid of me but what does IAWTP mean?

@ Darth... So have you won that game?!

I think part of this pattern is the result of two things:

In diplomacy, you really are screwed if your neighbors have tuned against you (and their neighbors have their own agendas, etc.)

And at low point levels, you get your points reset to 100 so there's not much motivation to sit in a bad situation.

When I first joined the site I opted to take over 3 CD countries just because I wanted the experience and I didn't want to wait for new games. I played each to the end, and they were somewhat educational/interesting in their own way.. But in each game I had basically no chance to recover because the diplomatic field was already set and the alliances were already in motion (against my country, which is probably why the previous player quit).

I gained some satisfaction out of repeatedly bouncing the predictable moves of a dominant A-H in one game (had had 15 SCs, I had only my army in St.Petersburg).

In another game I tried to play Italian pirates and throw the game in an unexpected direction.. But I was quickly defeated in 2/3 I joined, and barely survived the 3rd with 0 SCs to finish.

And each defeat came at the hand of a short-sighted neighbor, whose subsequent defeat I accurately predicted in each case, and who I could've aided as a weak but positionally significant ally.

..So I don't really blame the people for not wanting to stick around. It's annoying because they stall the game, but literal no-win scenarios are kind of boring. This could be solved in some ways if there were a way to insta-quit games instead of just abandoing them to the slow, tedious trip into CD.

Ugg.. that post is filled with typos and missing words.
Apologies.