spartans, here is some advice to help you do better in your games: talk more to the other players. This game is called Diplomacy for a reason. If you look at your profile you will see your total message count. Divide that number by your total number of games and you will find your average number of messages per game. Then take a look at the average for our top players and you will see it is MUCH higher. For an extreme example take a look at DJ Bent's.

I guess this is a good way of bringing all of the site's zoophiles out into the open. Now to just sit here and wait...

@spartans, spyman

Don't read too much into that number because it doesn't update until a game is through. So you can only divide it by the num,ber of completed games to get the average and it won't go up until you complete another game.

Also remember that the division would include public press only and gunboats, altering the real number of posts per game for full press games.

i think it would be rather accurate for me because i think i've only played a few games that were not full press, i didnt take those into account because i didnt feel like searching for them to confirm the number of them but i think i averaged like 65ish posts per game

aw shucks, thanks spyman. who knew i sent an average of 409 messages a game? what's wrong with me?

I find there is a very high correlation between number of posts and skill level. djbent is a wonderful example of this at over 400msg/game. At fewer than 70 msg/game, mal may have found a way of improving his game.

on the other hand, i think abgemacht and i are about evenly matched, yet we've completed the same number of games while he has 1/3 as many msgs as me... clearly more efficient...

does this also take into account gunboat games?

Yeah, that's a good point. There's probably some cut-off point. It would be interesting to see the messages in the top 100. I'm sure we're all over 100, but not sure beyond that.

@Trust

Yeah, there's gunboat error.

I am 202 messages per game. But then I do not play gunboat. Can't say I am the best evidence that messages correlates with success, but I suspect with a broader sample there would be a correlation.
How much you talk depends on the player too. I have had some allies with whom I have exchanged a lot of ideas about moves - fellow brain stormers. While other players prefer to state a brief outline of the plan and go with that.

i think we can all i agree that i need to STFU once in a while.

No, I enjoyed you talking so much when I played with you, DJ. I can't really compare to you, since I hover around 100 messages per game, but I still consider myself talkative

Please clarify:

1. Does posting cheating accusations cause noobs to suck donkey dicks?
If so, then how does this eventuate? Are you going to enforce noobs to undertake this punishment and where are you going to source the donkeys?

or,
2. Are you claiming that noobs who post cheating accusations have an disposition to want to suck donkey dicks, thereby stereotyping them as sodomites?

@Bezborodov - you need to look up which term you refer to. Sodomy is anal intercourse. Sucking donkey dicks is bestiality.

I wonder, is djbent webdiplomacy's most talkative player? I suspect yes.

@Draugnar: Sodomy also pertains to bestiality.

@spyman, we should write a web crawler to find out. Not hard to do in Perl.

But it will hammer the site.

I wish I knew how to do that. Are you a programmer Berborodov?
I have always wondered how TGM collates his data for GR.
How does a web crawler work?

@spyman:

A simple web crawler (not like Google) usually does the following steps (in my experience):

1) Determines a list of URLs to hit (it could get this from any number of sources such as a sitemap, or in this case I would just keep incrementing the User ID until I get 404 Not Found).
2) Fetches the URLs
3) Parses the HTML and searches for what it needs.
4) Stores the data in a database so you can do analysis on it

It will take a couple hours to write with Perl libraries, but to run it would bring down the diplomacy website unless you add a 3 second delay or something between pages.

based on a thoroughly scientific sampling, i think i am. but you can see what good it does me.

I talk a lot. But I'm not saying anything.

i only have about 65ish messages a game but i'm usually one of the most talkative players in my games....shows how much most of the players talk on this site.

Ghost has access to the site database. He certainly isn't crawling through the site.