drano019: It's not easy for me to find them either, to be honest. I've been arguing for PPSC for years.

You can find some of my more recent posts here: http://webdiplomacy.net/forum.php?threadID=1476181 and in threadID=1432961, which is linked there. Luckily, these posts directly address your concerns about players throwing PPSC games.

JECE - from an objective point of view, your smaller power logic works, but by the time this point of the game is reached, the smaller powers are rarely objective and more interested in screwing whoever screwed over them.

@YCHTT From a subjective pov your 'rebuttal' of JECE's logic is really annoying, as it is based on opinion.

As such, I can equally say that my opinion is (and it is) contrary to yours... then we get to whose opinion has more weight ... so, like politicians we might get to the 'dick measuring' stage, with all its semantic noise, and name-calling that obscures the issues.

This difficulty arises because ratings systems tend to be constructed to mirror the playing philosophy of the constructor. Damn... 1.30 am ... G'night

@Chumbles - I wouldn't argue and would never fall to name calling. I'm not a politician and can agree to disagree. I merely pointed out that a purely logical and objective analysis doesn't take into account the emotional factor that many players (not all, not even necessarily a majority as many doesn't mean most, only a number larger than few) bring to the table in either position. And this is less an opinion as much as a case of anecdotal evidence, but an overwhelming amount of it. In civil court, this is enough to find the person liable for damages even if it isn't enough to convict them of a crime. So the community at large is guilty of the civil crime of abusing the scoring system due to overwhelming anecdotal evidence.

As it is, I've seen it happen far too many times to be willing to play PPSC for regular games especially as, for me at least, this is a form of metagaming.

I'm actually with Ruff in being anti-points altogether and feel a rating system, which also adds a level of metagaming to "game your rating" must somehow balance all these aspects which is why I presented the two scores (PPSC style and WTA style) average within a certain offset or the lower if outside that difference.

Improving my thoughts from earlier:

I have actually thought more about this approach and think I have found a nice simple calculation if you run a two score rating system (One WTA based but with relative power rating points in a draw - i.e. draws are not equal - and one PPSC based also with relative power points in draws):

Call the top score T and the bottom score B.
Take the difference of the two scores and call it O (for offset).
Divide O by B to get the offset percentage deduction (Pd).
Multiple Pd by O to get the deduction amount (D).
Subtract D from T to get the rating (R).

This discourages strong seconds from throwing the game as it punishes them in the WTA score but encouraging them to fight for a win instead of care bear drawing as the draw is still an even split with everyone who drew in PPSC (and a boost in WTA). It also encourages small nations to try and alter the game outcome to get them more rating points in the draw on both ratings categories while balancing the risk of someone soloing. Care bear draws go away when draws aren't equal.

This has the not so nice side effect of not rewarding the key player who stopped the solo with only 2 SCs and fought hard, but that judgement is purely subjective and, if the figure skating world has taught us anything, subjective scoring is simply the wrong way to go about it.

So, as an example of how the two ratings would work to calculate a player's over all rating, I give the following:

Player A:
T = 2100
B = 2000
O = 100
Pd = 5% (100 / 2000)
D = 5 (100 * .05)
R = 2095 (2100 - 5)

Player B
T = 3000
B = 1000
O = 2000
Pd = 200% (2000 / 1000)
D = 4000 (2000 * 2)
R = -1000 (3000 - 4000)

As you can see, there is a serious punishment for gaming one or the other system this way and it can send you negative.

This could, of course, be tweaked, but the idea is to punish play styles that favor one scoring system over the other so that play styles which provide optimal results in both result in better overall ratings.

@Chumbles - To clarify, by objective point of view (is my statement to JECE) I meant when looked at logically, his statement was correct. I wasn't saying my statement was objective, but that his was true assuming the players were being objective. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Look, I'm not here to alter either your overall rating system or make drastic changes to PPSC. I was under the misapprehension that PPSC was unpopular here, or that it was only kept around because there wasn't a better alternative. It's not a system I'd personally use, but so what?

vDiplomacy is like an all-you-can-eat buffet. There's something for everybody, and frankly, not all the food is good. But that's okay.

I'm mostly just offering to adapt Carnage, a system that's growing in popularity in the face-to-face community, to your online environment. Fibonacci-Diplo is simply a mathematical conversion of Carnage to scale more consistently with different map sizes and player counts (those 5-and-up particularly), and I got the seal of approval for it from Dave Maletsky (the originator of Carnage).

It won't necessarily solve the problem of maps where some powers start with absurdly imbalanced SC counts (looking at you, Imperial), but I'd just suggest not using it there.

Carnage / Fibonacci-Diplo works in settings where there's no time/turn limit, and it also works in settings where there's a capped number of years or turns (assuming that the game is scored as a draw at the forced ending, not a solo for the board leader). It provides an incentive for players that feel doomed to keep playing rather than NMR out, as eliminated players may actually get some of their points back (rather than a guaranteed zero from dropping out).

While draws aren't shared equally, which is admittedly a change from the original rules, draws in Carnage / Fibonacci will include all survivors, so you get that piece of the rulebook back.

Just something to ponder: is this something you would try out?

Putting this out here (and I'm on a phone so sorry for any typos) but I also happen to think that this fixation on ranking is unhealthy on the community in general. Personally I feel that each game should be played, enjoyed and finished with an interesting end-of-game statement made, and then archived without any attempt at quantifying a player's individual worth based on the outcome of that game.

If a player is good then that player will have a reputation that travels with them regardless of whatever number is attached to them. I just don't see why we have an addiction to trying to *rank" each other, especially on a site that caters to a multiple of different variants.

Why not simply keep the basic stats of win/draw/loss on a player's profile, as well as reliability stats, and have games open to gamed based solely around those statistics? No need for points, no need to rank, no need for this discussion.

We tend to forget that the whole WTA/PPSC stuff (and hence ranking) was a *fix* put into place in the early days of webDip as a way to manage players from joining too many games at the same time. I'm sure we have the tools now to manage that issue, so why not move on from the whole need to have a *score* in the first place.

As if being here and playing games is some sort of perpetual tournament, which it is not. It is something much larger than that simple perspective.

@kaner makes some good points. I wouldn't mind if all points were discarded altogether.

Still, if someone wants to track their success solely by win/draw/loss stats, then they can just play Unrated ad aeternum and follow on with their lives. No need to remove points as some folks enjoy the thrill.

Kaner -

I think you'll find there's a number of us who would agree with you 100%! Discarding points altogether and just making it Win/Draw/Loss (which would abolish the heinous "survive" as well) would, like you said, make this entire conversation a moot point. I'm all for it 100%.

@ Enriador -

The problem there is that there's few enough games on vdip. Saying to people "oh just only join Unrated, or, just join WTA only if you don't like PPSC" is difficult when there aren't that many games out there. Vdip isn't a huge community. Splintering it into "unrated only", "ppsc only", and "WTA only" groups will cause even fewer games to beplayed. Right now there's 23 games waiting to start. 5 of them are a tournament, so we have 18 games. 4 of them are 1 v 1, so now we have 14 games available. Of those 14, 7 are PPSC, I think are Unrated, and 5 are WTA. So if you splinter the community, you have a much smaller pool to work with. And that's not even counting how many of those games are gunboat, which further restricts people.

I guess what I'm getting at is that self segregation isnt' really feasible in a community the size we have here at vdip, not if you actually want to be able to play games.

Nopun, the problem is adding yet another rating system will lead to people playing to game their rating, including CDing to avoid taking a rating hit. Points and ratings invariably lead to poor play to game the meta system.

+1 Kaner

@drano019,

1) I don't grasp the "small community" point. Heard it a lot from folks in webDiplomacy, never made any sense.

I personally create 99% of the games I play (you can check my profile and see how similar they are), and NEVER had trouble getting people to join it. I make a 10 days join limit, low bet entry (who cares for points anyway?), advertise in the proper forum thread... and the game starts normally.

2) Anyway, I don't think that the alternative is getting rid of points, as plenty of people enjoy rankings and stuff. And since points exist, we (who somewhat play for them) might as well find a good way to improve them, and debate the pros and cons of proposals like the above.

The thread got far too derailed, in my humble opinion.

" including CDing to avoid taking a rating hit."

Wait, you don't penalize people who CD?

I'm all in favor of removing the points completely.

But they give the game a direction. Different people have different objectives in a game. Sure the game is meant to be played as WTA with one winner and everybody else lost. But quite a lot just try to get as many SCs as possible trying strange or funny tactics and find fun in a survive. If you mix these types of players in the same game it's not much fun for everybody involved.

That's why I love the two more extreme scoring-systems we have here.
With the removal of PPSC or any scoring system the WTA-players would be very surprised if they have 70% casual PPSC-players in their games. A WTA-player does not want to play and discuss strategies with a PPSC-player. They clearly have a different view how to play. And it's obvious with the default set to WTA that 70% of our players are no WTA-players.

So while many serious players would like to see PPSC removed it's just keeps the not-so-serious people out of their games, so the WTA-players can enjoy their games more.

Personally, I think the fundamental problem you have here is that both systems are overly focused on elimination. Both are draw-sized scoring at heart (DSS). While elimination will happen under any system, it has little-to-no value unto itself in either an SOS or rank-based scoring. DSS makes elimination the primary means of increasing one's final score, and it often means that the solo becomes less possible as a result.

There are "serious" players that simply don't care for draw-sized scoring, and I imagine PPSC is a poor alternative. Likewise, I imagine that there are a number of users that simply haven't tried another system and don't know what they're missing.

So, after haing played the game for 49 years (I checked the date on my box), because I prefer PPSC I'm not a "serious" player - ROFL... I give up ...
¯\_ツ_/¯

No, but your grasp of set logic is clearly in need of mentoring. Saying there are members of group X who prefer style Y over Z doesn't preclude someone from group X preferring style Z. It's simple set logic.

I notice that some people use the terms 'scoring system' and 'rating system' interchangeably. They are not synonymous. A scoring system is used to determine the performance of players in specific games, while a rating system is used to determine the skill of players across multiple games. A scoring system can exist without a rating system, but not vice versa.

@G-Man "I disagree with Mercy on surviving. A 1-supply center draw is waaay better than a 16-supply center survive. Surviving is meaningless." I think you misunderstood me. I was saying that you cannot give objective arguments that a draw is always better than a survival if there is no scoring system backing this up. Without a scoring system, all you can use as your argument is the subjective 'This is how the game should be played'. Other people will have a different, subjective view of it and the result will be a game where players play according to different goals, and hence rules, which leads to frustration for all. Hence the need for a proper scoring system.

@Oli worded this quite well in his response. I disagree with Oli's assertion that PPSC players are less serious players, though. They often are indeed, but I think this is only due to the correlation between being not very good at a game and wanting a higher percentage of the players get a reward, and that is not a 100% correlation as there are other (albeit bad) reasons to play PPSC. I agree with Oli when he says that removing PPSC, forcing the PPSC population to play WTA games, will lead to a drop in quality of WTA games, but I think this will only be temporary as eventually players will adapt to the new scoring system.

@RUFFHAUS I see you wrote a rant on vRanking and while I agree with you there, I don't see how it implies that 'all ratings are bad', and certainly not how it would imply that all scoring systems are bad! If your idea of how the game should be played is consistent, then there should exist a scoring system that reflects that. The fact that apparently, 'back in the day', before I was born, games were played better, is, I think, better explained by the fact that back in the day, it was a bigger step to take to get into a game, so you only got serious players; nowadays, registering and playing are easy. By the way, the rating systems used on web- and playDiplomacy are FAR better than the one used here. It is really only on vDiplomacy that headhunting is encouraged. On webDiplomacy, the ends to which wins and draws are rewarded and losses are penalized are dependent on the ratings of the other players in your game, but not on any of the results that the other players in the game will get; only on your own. Also on webDiplomacy players simply fall off of the rating lists if they are inactive for a long time, but will be re-entered as soon as they play another ranked game, while their old ranking is remembered.

@JECE I think you are completely wrong but @drano019 already explained what I would want to say.

@Enriador Seriously? You have NEVER trouble getting people to join your games? I take the same steps as you and I literally ALWAYS have trouble with it. Maybe that is because I always play Anon WTA games with some form of press, and often choose maps that aren't necessarily popular but that I think are interesting and balanced. In fact, the sole reason why I started playing on WebDiplomacy too was because it is so difficult to get games (with settings I like) to get started here.

@nopunin10did We do penalize people who CD. If you CD often, you can't join too many games, and on top of that, CD'ing causes you to lose ranking. So @YouCan'tHandleTheTruth, if players are really CD'ing to prevent a hit to their rating (which I doubt), then they don't understand how the rating system works here.

@mouse, @nopunin10did and @G-Man noted that the two types of draws in my hypothetical scoring system were not easy to distinguish. I agree. A possible solution would be the creation of two draw buttons, or saying that the computer sees someone as a 'solo threat' if that person has more than an X percentage of supply centers and more than everyone else.

@Mercy, perhaps it is you who doesn't understand. If you stay in the game and lose, you take a hit. But if you CD and someone takes your abandoned spot, then the rating takes no hit unless it has changed.

@ Mercy: A draw is always better than a survive because the Diplomacy rules back that up. A survive is not valid in Diplomacy. When you score a survive you are playing a different game. Just as it would not be soccer if the game was played with two soccer balls, or a three-legged race with four legs.

@YouCan'tHandleTheTruth No, it is definitely you who doesn't understand. CD's are being tracked and players lose rating because of them. Take, for example, the last game I played where someone CD'd in: http://vdiplomacy.com/hof.php?gameID=33308
As you can see, Yogurt Pantz CD'd and lost 3 points.

@G-Man: I agree that 'PPSC Diplomacy' isn't really 'Diplomacy' because the scoring doesn't match with the rulebook, but this is more like a semantic issue. Point is that WTA Diplomacy and PPSC Diplomacy are two different games, and if you have no scoring system, players may get confused on what game they are playing exactly. Hence the need for a scoring system, which is more direct than a reference to a line in a rulebook of a board game that players may have never played in that form.

^ @YCHTT You need to copy the whole link.

"...removing PPSC, forcing the PPSC population to play WTA games, will lead to a drop in quality of WTA games, but I think this will only be temporary as eventually players will adapt to the new scoring system." How unutterably patronising...

What I mean is that if players who are used to play PPSC will start playing WTA, part of them is expected to, for some while, keep using strategies that work in PPSC, but not in WTA, hence reducing the quality of the game. By 'work' I mean that it optimizes your point gain.

@Mercy, perhaps you have a case of bad luck? Again, look at my games. I have no trouble at all making games with very peculiar settings or shady variants.

Pro tip: setting minimum RR to zero may help (besides other steps I mentioned) as there are plenty of eager newbies around ready to enjoy a game.

Fair enough ... the way it's been phrased is as though we who like PPSC were not only inferior in quality, but also needing 're-education' in the one true way of playing the game. I'm quite a reasonable player (top 4% on webDip, due to being in the ICU and nearly dying, whilst in games here in vDip, some drops meant my rating tanked here)... and I resent the attempt to enforce a view on me which I disagree with - it's morally repugnant.

I do like YCHT's (+1) proposition though! Agood compromise.

My main beef though is that changes which rerate previous games played to a different rubric must NOT be included in a new system. Much better to start from a baseline were all ratings are zeroed so future results will be comparing like with like.

@Mercy - thanks. I didn't realize that oversize had been fixed.

Oversight had been.

Poor @Nopun. He had no idea the wasp's nest he was kicking when he invoked the dreaded WTA vs. PPSC debate. I have honestly never understood the animosity it engenders here, in this haven of alternate formats. There are maps here where I can play as France, Daniel "The Terror" Johnson, oMgYoUrAsLuT, or as a Troll. With so many options, I can't fathom how this community could ever get the notion that some else is having WrongBadFun, but many people do, and that is unfortunate.

Instead of wading into the waters, myself, I have a question. Drawing upon the distinction that Mercy made between a scoring system (WTA, PPSC, Carnage) and a ranking system (vpoints, webDiplomacy Points), I was wondering who here would be opposed to adding a new scoring system while leaving the current ranking systems untouched?

[I understand the fear that having more game-creation options that are not prefered would make it harder to start game with your prefered options, I am just wondering how many people have that concern about this instance.]