This kestasjk clearly meta-gamed. Mods please ban him.

Hey no cheating accusations on the forums ;-)

Not only is it blatant metagaming, he somehow won many more points than the pot size. Banhammer!

wow.... and looked at the maps there was no change through out+ no units this is definetly beyond meta and multying

Clearly he was gaming the system. Mods, I must alert you to a security issue. This kestasjk seems to have rooted the server.

I don't know what you folks are talking about.
France played extremely well, manipulating everyone on the board to all his whims. Good for him. He even manipulated the game itself to let him win at 17 SCs rather than 18. Now THAT'S diplomacy!

Game number 2: http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=6

Check out the neutral centers that randomly crop up.

No units up to http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=3000
Units after http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=3001 =)

Its sorcery i tell you :)

If you're interested, Thrawn369 from game 3 has the link to his MySpace in his profile. Does that still exist?

"Check out the neutral centers that randomly crop up."

Seems to happen up to gameID=75, then stops occurring.

Any clues why that might be happening? My guess was initially a CD, but that clearly isn't the reason as whole nations would disappear instead of centers. My next guess was Turkey or Austria, but I don't think that fully explains it either...

Looks like winnings massively exceed the pot size until gameID=5000, too. A change in the points system making it display old values incorrectly, or something else?

Let's not distract from the main issue here - the winner of our first game was a meta.

ANARCHISTS OVERTHROW SOVEREIGN GOVERNMENT, ESTABLISH COMMUNES THROUGHOUT BERLIN AND BULGARIA

"If you're interested, Thrawn369 from game 3 has the link to his MySpace in his profile. Does that still exist? "

What's a myspace?

Myspace is an internally valid space-time continuum where one's solipsism is the grand unifying force that governs everything.

The game, in it's early development, probably didn't have an adjudicator tied into the system and things were manually controlled far more than they are now.

I'm sure initially, England, Germany and Italy went into CD ,and later Italy rejoined the game while Austria quit. The game clearly never had more than 4 players playing at any given time and the 17 sc wins came from the fact that the original coding counted center control before incrementing the center-count. Thus, if France had enough units in non-French centers to bring the total French center count to 18, he was declared the winner. If not, the game would increment the number of French centers, subtract the number of units on the map and award builds for the upcoming season. It all depends on what order the program is executing code.

My final guess is that the number of diplomacy points "won" is merely the running total of how many points the player had at the game's conclusion.

Over the years, the website's code and database format has evolved dramatically. Throughout a continual development process, significant changes would have likely frequently broken the compatibility of old game records. Likely, it became too tedious and/or difficult to continually convert old records, so now they lie in an incomplete/broken state.

Also, keep in mind that in the early years, there were many blatant problems in the adjudication engine that would likely make it impossible to convert an old game record in a manner that is fully consistent.

Currently, the engine is DATC compliant (see http://webdiplomacy.net/datc.php), except for a few known issues with auto-disbands for CDed countries and some apparent geography problems in the world variant. However, back in the day, numerous problems existed and were gradually fixed. For example:
- dual coasts were not implemented,
- a player did not win until they actually *built* 18 units,
- supporting convoyed attacks had no effect, and
- various complex scenarios from the DATC were not correctly handled.

This website has really come a long way. Kestas and numerous other volunteers have put in a lot of effort over the years in constantly maintaining and updating WebDip. The free, open-source code base has also enabled others (such as vdip, playdip, and facebook webdip) to build their own diplomacy sites as well. This site in particular has fostered a community that has organized leagues and tournaments, and even held a face-to-face tournament in Boston last summer.

It is really quite a remarkable open-source success story, and an incredible diplomacy gaming community that has built up around it.

Hear, hear! Now about this multi....

If you like those games, what about this one: gameID=225

I see nothing wrong with that game. Nicely played, WB.

zultar: I agree. To win a game with 17 SC's? Now that is indeed spectacular diplomatic skill!

d31: Don't trust the points value like that. Just look at how many points I apparently won in this game: gameID=12231!

Now in a game like gameID=3, in a time when I don't think any points system had yet had been implemented, you would expect to see weird numbers like that.

Worldbeing: I wonder if their originally was no code for ending a game with 18 SC's.

My 1500 from gameID=225 is one of the more extreme examples I'm aware of, and probably explains a lot about my current ranking.

JECE: As yebellz said, at that point the game recognised a victory only when one player had 18 units, rather than 18 SCs. I therefore simply declined to build for a few years until I'd painted Europe brown.

Worldbeing: I prefer invisible points to points several orders of magnitude off. ;-)

That makes much more sense!

We still haven't got that right, by the way. Games still end before the retreats and disbanding phase.