Diplomacy Headquarters
From ORG Wiki
The Diplomacy Headquarters was a hub for playing the board game Diplomacy with others over the internet. Although separate from other game-based boards for most of WarBoards' history, as of April 2008 it has ceased to exist as a separate forum and has been merged with Online Roleplaying.
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[edit] Diplomacy
Diplomacy is a board game based loosely off the balance of power in pre-World War I Europe. The game supports seven players, each representing one of seven "Great Powers" of this time period. The goal of the game is to conquer Europe by taking over at least half the strategic points on the board, called Supply Centers. Each player is given a number of military units equal to his currently owned supply. Orders for these units are written down during a negotiation phase, then submitted to a Game Master who resolves conflicts, updates the game board, and reports the updates to the players. Unlike some other war games, Diplomacy relies very little on luck, instead forcing players to negotiate, cooperate, and double-deal one another to gain advantage.
There are, like any game, many variations which include different maps, rules, etc. An example of this is Magmaniac's Experimental Diplo series (Game One, Game Two, Game Three) which use custom made maps he created.
[edit] History on WarBoards
The Diplomacy Headquarters grew out of a community of Diplomacy players who came to WarBoards.org after the splitting off of the ORG Network from the BlizzForums community. The Diplomacy hobby initially began as a sub-forum of the Online Roleplaying board, just as it had been at the previous site. Although a small community thrived during this time, the overall activity of the forum was low in comparison to the other boards. Unable to muster a user base of comparable size to more general purpose forums, the Diplomacy community was assumed to remain a sub-forum of Online Roleplaying forever.
One day the forum was moved up to its own top-level board. In the last months of 2006 and early 2007, the Diplomacy community at WarBoards.org remained relatively inactive. Whiteknight, the longtime moderator of the forum, frequently disappeared from the boards as a whole for weeks or months at a time and was eventually replaced by GrassDragon. However, GrassDragon, though once a moderately active Diplomacy player, rarely made his presence known in the forum. After all, there wasn't very much need for a moderator with such low level of activity. Several attempts at new games, both standard and experiments with new variants, were attempted, but most either completed quickly or faltered in the face of unreliable players or masters.
May 2007 brought new wind to the Diplomacy Headquarters upon the reappearance of an old regular, OboeGuru, who was promptly promoted to the moderator position, replacing GrassDragon. Prior to his promotion, OboeGuru had already started one game and was preparing for another. Following in line with his enthusiasm, other community members began to host new games and the Diplomacy community began to slowly creak back to life.
Shortly after the upgrade to vBulletin 3.7 in April 2008, threads in the Diplomacy Headquarters were merged into the main Online Roleplaying forum and the separate forum was discontinued. This restructuring most likely resulted from dwindling activity in the Diplomacy forum over the last several months.
[edit] Ranking Systems
At BlizzForums, two separate scoring systems were maintained for the players involved in the hobby. The first was a basic, no frills, system based upon pure numerical ordering of participants based on the order of their elimination. First place, given for a solo victory, received 7 points, and each successive place received one fewer point than the preceding. Powers left alive at the end of a game were given rankings based upon the number of supply centers owned. A separate system, called "Eagle Points", took many more variables into account, such as the year of elimination, how many powers were left in the game, overall supply centers owned throughout the game, and so on to create a more competitive, yet much more complex, rating system.
[edit] Original System
Upon transition to WarBoards, the idea of maintaining a player ranking system remained prominent in the community. The first solution, which so far has been the only one implemented, used a complex formula that takes input from various attributes of the game results to output a score for each participant. At it's most basic level, the scoring system is zero sum, meaning that no new points are created (except upon a new member joining) and no points are lost; points are simply transferred between players.
All new players start with 100 points in reserve. At the beginning of a game, all participants chip in 10% of their current points as ante to create a "pot" of winnings. Should a player achieve solo victory, he or she receives the entire pot. In event of a draw, players participating in the draw each take 5% from the pot and those not in the draw take 1%, after which the remaining funds are divided up based on the following formula:
Raw Score = [S * (N_s + 1)] + [(1/5) * M * (N_m + 1)] + Y
Where S is the number of supply centers at the end of the game, N_s is the number of players with a smaller supply count than the current player, M is the maximum number of supply owned during the game, N_m is the number of players with a smaller maximum supply count, and Y is the number of years the player survived. This system was not originally made to support substitution of players mid-game, but the formula was adopted to this challenge by weighting the variables in the formula by the time played by each participant.
This system, despite it's inherent complexity, provided a few advantages in that it rewarded more points for playing and winning against similarly or higher ranked opponents, who would hopefully be on similar or higher skill levels, in addition to not simply creating new points for each victory and basing the high score simply on the number of games played. Unfortunately, the complexity of the system required extensive input and maintenance from the Game Masters and forum Moderator, so it often remained outdated.
The rankings have not been updated since late 2005, but the standings at this time were OboeGuru at #1 with 192 points, followed by Modred at #2 with 191 points, followed by Cygnus at #3 with 126 points.
[edit] Proposed Changes
Due to the complexity of the scoring system in use, a few players invested some time in late 2005 and early 2006 toward finding a simple yet effective scoring system.
[edit] YARS
The first system investigated was Yet Another Rating System, which has some similarity to the above ranking system in principle, if not in practice. All new players start with 1 point. Each game takes on a value, V, which is the sum of all the participants' current points. Points are distributed at end game as follow:
Points = ( V / P ) * ( P + 1 - W ) / ( W )
Where V is the game value, P is the number of players, and W is the number of winning players (1 for solo, 2 for two-way draw, etc).
While this system is simple, players may earn fractions of a point, or negative points even, from mediocre but consistent play or absolutely horrid but infrequent play. As such, the system awards those who either play well infrequently or play an incredible number of games.
[edit] EIDRaS
Another consideration was ELO Inspired Diplomacy Rating System, which is loosely based on ELO chess ratings. While this system provided a clear example of skill based rankings, it also came with considerable complexity that would be incredibly difficult for a lone score keeper to maintain without some sort of assistance or computer program. In addition, the system required seeding with some twenty or so games to give accurate rankings, and the WarBoards Diplomacy community has not completed this many games during the entirety of its existence. Details of the EIDRaS can be found in the Spring 1998 Retreat Issue of the Diplomatic Pouch.
