This article summarises postings to the usenet group rec.games.diplomacy. It is based on the posting which remain on my usenet feed at the time of writing, roughly speaking the middle two weeks in July. I have excluded some non-Diplomacy postings. The Summer is traditional a time of peace and tranquillity on RGD. Students have returned home after their exams and most lose net access in the move. In a couple of months all will be hectic as the "old hands" return and a new year of students discover the attractions of free net access! This tranquility is reflected in a great reduction in the number of posts this time, down from 178 in March to 80 in July.
I have classified the 80 postings in this period into the following groups:
The second thread started when [email protected] --- not bold enough
to give his/her name to their opinions --- launched an attack on
Joel Furr:
"I'm not grinding an axe here... Joel's "work" here serves his own ego
more than it does us, or the game in general."
The reason for this attack was
not clearly stated, but stemmed from a game where Joel (as the GM) did not
bow to the wishes of one particular player. This led to a discussion
of who "owns" the game, and under what conditions the GM should change
game parameters.
The onus is clearly on the players to read the
game conditions prior to joining, and the GM does not owe a responsibility
to the players to change parameters once the game has started. Once
it was clear that the mysterious enigma has no support in the Diplomacy
community he wrote,
"this thread has begun to bore me," and tried to
kill the discussion.
David Kovar, himself not a Joel Furr fan, wrote
"It's people like you who make me wonder why I've invested
close to five years in this hobby and uncountable number of hours,
days off, and vacations to support the Judge, mailing lists, news to
mail gateways, and the like. I deeply dislike the attitude of people
like enigma. It's uniformed, destructive, caustic, immature, and very
undesirable."
It's worth noting here that of the eight posts announcing new
game openings, four, that is 50%, were from Mr. Joel Furr. Joel may not
be a SMOF, but his GM'ing is in demand.
Producing a hypertext version of the rulebook is an excellent idea,
an excellent idea which would make it much easier to use the rulebook
and understand it. Unfortunately, as other posters commented it
would lead to legal problems; the rulebook is
copyrighted material, and redistribution of it could lead to Avalon Hill shutting down the
judges.
However, Melle Koning, posting from Holland,
suggested that "the legal threat should be ignored and the rules made
available to make it easier to join the internet hobby!"
The only other miscellaneous threads to have two or more posts
were the announcement of ManorCon (two) and of Chris Read's ([email protected])
multi-player version of Diplomacy that runs on MacIntoshes over AppleTalk/Internet
(also 2 posts).
Adjudicate the following:
Names have not been named, but two postees got it wrong, including one
who said the following: "The reason the Turkish attack into Serbia succeeds
is because you may not support a unit that is not holding or convoying."
Incidentally, the standby positions included a 19 center Italy, in
a Youngstown gunboat game.
Finally, a posting from Andy Schwarz advocated the use
of hypermedia to make information readily accessible and easily
understandable. His post contained some good naked egotism --- this man could go far!
Said Andy, "I am toying with the idea of creating a virtural WWW companion to
Nick Fitzpatrick's Hall of Fame.... Ideally we would have URLs or GIF
images of every registered (or active) player, and could link them in.
Then when Nick catalogues a game's results, we could get a map up in the
virtural hall of fame, with links to the EoGs, the summary, and the photos
of the winner/drawers.... As the hobby becomes increasingly on the
cutting edge of technology, game-wise, this would enhance our stature and
maybe make ME famous, which is my secret aim!"
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Clueless Newbies
Of the three clueless newbie posts, two were from aol accounts....
GM'ing
There were two threads in the GM'ing discussion. One thread concentrated
on what GM's should do with endgame statements once the game has finished.
The concensus was that the tradition of distributing them over the
group should be restarted.
Miscallaneous
The main thread in the miscellaneous section (8 posts) was started
by the following comment made by John Twilley on 13th July:
"[I suggest] transcribing
the Diplomacy rules into HTML to make it easier to move from section
to section, to add margin notes (such as Judge peculiarities or newsgroup
comments) or even images of specific rulings."
Opening Strategy
There were two threads on Opening Strategy this month. Three posts
provided advice on "How to Play Turkey." Andrew Caddock suggested
an alliance with Austria against Russia, opening to BLA and Arm after
first agreeing a DMZ in BLA with Russia! Jeff Cochran suggested
neutrality with Russia, aiming to split Austria and Italy. The
other thread discussed the "Western Lepanto" in which Italy makes an
early attack on France. As long ago as
1987 I analysed Italian openings and calculated an expected Calhamer
point gain for each type of opening, the Western Lepanto was one of the
worst! This doesn't mean it can't work -- it can work because diplomacy
is always the key -- but that it's harder work than other options.
Rating Systems
The discussion on rating systems concentrated on a system designed
by Bruce Duewer called YARS (Yet Another Rating System). In this system,
the number of rating points you score depends upon the quality of the
opponents against whom you are playing; you score more points for beating
good players than for beating bad players. To test the system ,
Bruce made some (pretty outrageous) simplifications and rated only games
in which the top 15 HoF rated players had played. The top
five YARS players were: Dan Shoham, Alan Bick, Conrad
Minshall, Jamie Dreier, and Michael L. Frigge.
Rules Questions
The following rules question isn't difficult, but it was amazing
how many people didn't get it right. Can you do better?
Russia: A(Bud)-Tri, A(Ser) SA(Bud)-Tri, A(Rum) SA(Ser).
Turkey: A(Gre) SA(Tri)-Ser, A(Tri)-Ser.
Standby Positions
The seven standby postings split into four positions and a three-article
thread. Pitt Crandlemire started this thread moving by writing a long
article on the different philosophies open to mercy standby players:
Variants
The three variant postings divided into one for Machiavelli
(a request for more gamestarts) and two for Colonial. Internet has only
just started its first e-mail Colonial game, people are so used to playing
on the Judges that the idea of playing in a hand-moderated game has
novelty value! Gianni Stanizzo, a player in the Colonial game, commented that
it is "An interesting variant of the original. Nice board (except
for the several glaring mistakes), nice price (that's sarcasm)."
Contributors
Who contributed to the discussion? 51 individuals posted to
rec.games.diplomacy, of which 18 made two, or more, posts during the
period under consideration:
2 Posts: Jef Cochran, Scott W. Davis, Bruce Duewer,
Manus Hand, Melle Koning, Peter Lund, Bill McNair,
Mark Nelson, Rob Paar, Bruce Regittko, John Twilley,
Xhi
3 Posts: Rick Desper, Jim Jowski, Robert Rehbold.
4 Posts: Joel K. Furr.
5 Posts: Ken Samuel, Andy Schwarz.
The July 1995 "Diplomatically Challenged Dipster of the Month"
is shared between Ken Samuel and Andy Schwarz. Congratulations, guys?
Mark Nelson
University of Leeds, UK
([email protected])