WHAT IS DIPLOMACY? - Part 3: Tournaments

There are many different tournaments if you want to play Diplomacy more competitively, both Face-to-Face and Remotely.  Here, I'm going to look at how playing in a tournament affects a game of Dip.

Face-to-Face Tournaments

Let's start at the top - the World Diplomacy Championship.  This is hosted at World DipCon with the 2019 tournament being held in Marseilles, France.  There were 38 competitors for this prestigious competition, and it was won by Gwen Maggi.  WDC has been held on 29 occasions.  In 2020 it will be held in Dover, Vermont, USA.

Because Gwen is French, I'm going to go to Europe next and the European Diplomacy Championship.  This is hosted at EuroDipCon and was, this year, shared with World DipCon, so it isn't surprising that Gwen holds both titles right now.  Possibly because of this a separate event, the European Open Championship and was won by Andrew Katcher.

National championships are held in UK (Midcon), France and the Netherlands (the Netherlands national championship in 2019 was combined with the European Open Championship).

In North America, there are more tournaments and conventions.  The North American Champion is crownded at DipCon and this year it was Steve Cooley.  DipCon regularly hosts the WDC.

Other notable conventions in North America are Carnage, Tempest in a Teacup, Boston Massacre, DixieCon, Weasel Moot, The Boroughs/TotalCon and Cascadia Open.

Outside or Europe and North America, there is China Dip Con and tournaments in Australia.

For information about Diplomacy organisations, search for the North American Diplomacy Association, the European Diplomacy Association and the Diplomacy Association of Australia and New Zealand, although I'm not sure just how active NADA and EDA are given that the links on the World Diplomacy Database go nowhere.

Leagues

Whereas a tournament tends to be hosted by a convention, and is therefore over in a weekend, a Diplomacy league will play out over an extended period of time, and is probably a local affair, featuring members of a local community.  'Local' is subjective, of course.  Maybe 'regional' would be a better term.

The World Diplomacy Database has five leagues being completed in 2019, which doesn't sound many.  Yet, looking back there are no League results logged before 2019!  This is a little strange as, when you check Leagues, you can see that Windy City Weasels have run a league every year since 2010.

Anyway, in 2019 there were five Leagues: Armada in Denver; Da Nang Diplomacy Centre in Da Nang, Vietnam; the MN Diplomacy Club in Minneapolis; the Windy City Weasels in Chicago, and Genie de la Lampe Sierre in Sierra, Switzerland.

Then there are the 'Circuits' and 'Grand Prix'.  These are not necessarily Leagues, although they seem to be scored similarly to Leagues and therefore I suggest the difference in geographical rather than anything else.  Leagues do tend to be more local, based mainly on Dip clubs, whereas Circuits, well, circulate.

The last circuit results list on WDD is the Tour de France, running in 2016/17.  I know for a fact that there was a European Grand Prix in 2018.  A Tour of Britain is being organised this year.

Online

Everything I've mentioned above are FTF events.  Websites tend to have fairly regular tournaments, usually unofficial ones.  The most prestigious of these is the newly created Online Diplomacy Championship.

The ODC is hosted alternately by webDiplomacy and PlayDiplomacy, being held every 2 years.  The current event is the third such; it started in 2019 and the finals are underway as I type.

As far as tournaments are concerned, webDip seem to be a little more organised than Playdip.  webDip have a site for it, as well as a sub-forum.  Playdip runs everything through its sub-forum.  I get the feeling that, on the former, site mods are much more involved than on the latter.

webDip's tournament site means you can track what tournaments are run regularly.  On Playdip it's more a case of hoping something comes up in the tournaments section.

There are other online tournaments.  One is run on the Dip site Nexus.  I've not spent much time on Nexus but it seems to slap itself on the back a bit too much.  It calls itself: "The premier platform for all things Diplomacy, online and in person."  Anyway, it runs the Nexus Tournament which is run biannually.  Season 4 is in sign-ups currently.  It uses Discord to run the tournament.

Discord, of course, is an app.  The problem with Discord is that, unless you're invited, it's difficult to get very far with things.  You can't just run along and find a chat, unless you're lucky.  Still, if you're invited to a chat or event, then it's perfectly serviceable.

There is also a niche tournament called the Diplomacy World Cup.  This is a PBEM tournament with a peculiar format in that you play individually, but you're also part of a national team.  It is now in it's third event... which has been running since 2013!

A Dip Variant

All the above are variants of Diplomacy.  As I mentioned in Part 2, the fact that these are limited by game length, scoring, Remote, etc makes them a variant of Dip.  But that can be a little harsh on an FTF game that is scored sympathetically to the objectives of Diplomacy and doesn't have a Game End date.  Still, the fact that these games are scored makes them variants.

There's nothing wrong with this, although it does mean that the way a player approaches a game will be affected.  Playing in a one off house game is totally different to playing in a competitive game that is part of a series... and some players will always play to maximise their outcome in a scored game, whether it's part of a competition or simply to improve their community ranking.

Scoring

Scoring, then, is an issue in itself.  What it boils down to is how a game is scored.

There are five main types of scoring: DSS is based on the result of the game, whether players won, drew or lost; CCS is based on the outcome of the game based on what SCs they held at the end and either using this number to calculate points or to rank players; hybrid systems seek to combine both the above; Elo systems seek to award players points related on their expected result in the game relative to the rating of the other players.

Draw Sized Scoring (DSS)

In these systems, the game is scored based on the result.  In these systems, a game will often be worth a certain number of points.  If a player wins, she gets all the points available in the game; if the game ends in a draw, the players share the points equally between each other.

For instance a game may be worth 420 points.  This is a good number as it is divisible by any number from 1-7.  A solo is worth 420 points, a 2-way draw 210 points each (420/2), a 3-way draw 140 points each (420/3), etc.

Occasionally, this may be modified to make a solo victory better than two 2-way draws.  In the example above, a solo may be worth, say, 450 points, meaning a player has to achieve at least three draws to out-score a player with a single solo.

DSS is a good system because the objective of a game of Diplomacy is to win the game; failing that, to draw the game so as to prevent another player soloing.

There are practical problems with this system, however.  First, many Dip games end in draws, especially when a Game End year is used.  This means that there will be a lot of players tied on points.  How are these ties broken?  One answer is the number of solos a player achieves, or 2-way draws, or 3-way draws, etc.  Another may be to use diminishing game numbers so that, if there are 4 games in a tournament and players are tied on total points, to use only their best three results, then best two results.  Still, this doesn't guarantee ties being broken.

A second problem is that, under DSS, 2-way draws are rated better than 3-way draws because based on the questionable fact that to smaller draw sizes means that each player in the draw has beaten more defeated opponents.  This can lead to draw-whittling, the practice of playing to deliberately eliminate smaller powers before accepting a draw.

A third problem is that it encourages draw-only play, which means that an steady alliance is a good thing.  Now, of course, a steady alliance in a game of Dip is a good thing... but the game is designed to make such an alliance only useful until it can be ditched in favour of trying to win outright.  DSS systems are guilty of producing boring games, in other words.

Centre Count Scoring (CSS) (including Rank Based Scoring [RBS])

These two systems are lumped together because they represent the same fundamental system - how many SCs does a power control at the end of the game?

Under CSS systems some kind of calculation is used to change raw SC count at the end of the game into a number of points.  Typically, the score is standardised.  It may be, for instance, that if a player finishes on 15 SCs, this is calculated as a percentage of 34, awarding the player 44.12 points.  A game would be worth 100 points in total.  In these systems, a solo is awarded all game points and, often, extra points (perhaps 110 points for a solo).

These calculations can become complicated.  Squares, for instance, is a complex system based on the following: if the game ends in a draw, the number of SCs held is squared for each player, so that:

P1 finished on 12 SCs, 12x12 = 144

P2 finished on 10 SCs, 10x10 = 100

P3 finished on 6 SCs, 6x6 = 36

P4 finished on 5 SCs, 5x5 = 25

P5 finished on 1 SC, 1x1 = 1

These scores are totalled to produce a game score of 306.  Each players score is then standardised by calculating what percentage of 306 she scored.

Player 1 scores 47.06

Player 2 scores 32.68

Player 3 scores 11.76

Player 4 scores 8.17

Player 5 scores  0.33

All other players score 0.

Now look at this: assuming P1 took an extra SC from P2 and P4 managed to grab P5's SC:

P1: 13 SCs; raw score is 169; pts awarded = 52.48

P2: 9 SCs; raw score is 81; pts awarded = 25.16

P3: 6 SCs; raw score is 36; pts awarded = 11.18

P4: 6 SCs; raw score is 36; pts awarded = 11.18

The game score is now 322.

Now, that one extra SC gap between P1 and P2 has extended the points gap between the two players from 14.38 points to 27.32 - almost double the gap.

CCS is good because it tends to produce a more cut and thrust game... but is that game Diplomacy?  When a game becomes about SC-count, it can degenerate into a smash and grab raid for SCs.  This might be more exciting (or perhaps nerve-racking is a better term) but it isn't what Dip is about.  Calhamer designed the game so that the number of SCs held at the end of a drawn game was irrelevant - nobody had achieved a better result than any one else who survived.  CCS completely throws that concept out of the window.

Practically, there is a smaller chance of players ending the tournament on tied scores.

The idea that Diplomacy is about winning or drawing only is further lessened by using SC count to rank players.  In these systems, the number of SCs held at the end of a game may be used to place players and award points based on their ranking.

Using the examples above, for instance, P1 "topped" the board finishing first as the SC leader.  P2 finished second.  The Win Tier system is one such system, and a clever one at that as it uses solos to separate players from non-soloists.  To separate ties on positional points, it add extra points to the points won based on position in a drawn game.  It gives players who are eliminated a ranking, too, so being eliminated from a game more than once doesn't completely prevent you from doing well in the tournament.

However, Calhamer was very clear that such a system wasn't the ideal for his game.  Again, it doesn't matter what the number of SCs you hold at the end of the game.

Bonus Point systems

I'm not going to spend long on this one as it is ridiculous.

Some scoring systems give bonus points based on how long a player survived for, the position at the end of the game, the difference between your SCs and the next player, etc.  These systems take all that is bad about scoring and lump them together.

At the end of the game, what does it matter if you survived until 1905 if you were eventually eliminated?  Nothing.  What does it matter if you finished within x number of SCs of the player who topped the board?  Nothing - because topping the board is meaningless in the context of Diplomacy as it was designed to be played.

Hybrid systems

Some systems seek to combine some or all of the above.  These just tend to be messy affairs, and don't achieve anything.  Look at DundraCon 2005, for instance.  I have nothing more to say.

Elo-like scoring

Elo scoring was developed primarily for Chess.  It involves players scoring a number of points based on the outcome of the game, and modified by the expected outcome.  The idea is that if two players of approximately equal rating play each other, then the scores awarded are modified only slightly.  However, if players are separated by a large number of ratings points, so that Player A is expected to beat Player B - based on comparative ratings - then:

• If Player A wins she receives a small number of points, and Player B loses a small number of points.
• If Player B wins, she receives a large number of points, and Player A loses a large number of points. 

The idea is that it encourages players to play against those or a comparative rating.  Where that doesn't happen, a higher rated player gains little from beating a lower rated player, and risks much; whereas a lower rated player gains much from beating a higher rated player, and risks little.

In Diplomacy this is complicated to implement because games are not 2-player affairs.  However, it has been implemented at Playdiplomacy and webDiplomacy (although it isn't webDip's official scoring system).

This is useful for a large series of games, or an on-going series, such as ratings in all scored games played.  It is not very useful for short series of games such as tournaments or leagues.

It means that playing for a specific result isn't always going to be the best result for you.  If you're a higher rated player and you draw with a lower rated player, the latter will score more points than you - in fact, the higher rated player may well lose ratings point for a draw in this situation!  The only guaranteed way to earn points, if you have a high rating, is to win your game or play against players of a similar level.

When it comes down to it, if you enter a tournament you have to play towards the scoring system used.  Fair enough.  It doesn't matter if you agree with it or not.

I've already said that these types of games are, ultimately, variants of Dip anyway, so does it matter if they're moved further away from it by the scoring systems?  Possibly not.

But that doesn't mean that a poor scoring system is acceptable.  I have designed a system that is based on solos and draws, but which isn't the classic DSS system.  It has taken a bit to work out a good way to break ties, but at least the worst aspects of draw-whittling should be minimised or even eliminated.

But I'm going to leave you waiting for that.

WHAT IS DIPLOMACY? series:

1. A Brief Intro to Diplomacy
2. Formats
3. Tournaments
4. Philosophies of Play
5. Variants