Simon Szykman Dedicated to the Game

Coincidentally, it seems to have come up a few times over the past couple of weeks, so I'll use a couple of messages that were posted as springboards into a discussion. People who are less interested in the introductory discussion might want to skip down to a discussion of my proposed Dedicated Player House Rules (DPHRs)

On March 1st, a new player asked:

What are dedication points?

+3 points for getting your orders in on time.

-1 point for each "deadline missed" reminder which the judge sends you.

-50 points for becoming abandoned.

-100 points for missing the grace period and going CD.

More information can be found in the judge information file deadlines.

So, why should a player care about his or her dedication rating? Games have a default minimum dedication rating of -10. If your dedication rating is below that, you won't be able to SIGNON to games unless they have been created specifically with a lower minimum dedication rating. A majority of the games run under the default setting, so it will be hard for players who have lacked dedication to find games.

Is dedication really a problem? I'd say yes. At the time of this writing, more than half of the games I'm in are held up due to late moves or abandonments. Of the games that aren't stalled, two of them have just recently undergone abandonments, followed by replacements, and in both of the cases the player changes have significantly altered the course of the game. In neither game is the original alliance intact. In one case, it is very likely that a power who was to share in a draw will be eliminated instead. If this frustrates me, I can't imagine the player of the soon-to-be-eliminated power is pleased about the turn of events. I would guess that if you looked at all the games on all the judges (except for games with high minimum dedication requirements), you would probably find that over 3/4 of the phases do not process on time.

I don't seem to be the only one bothered by low dedication. As a second data point, consider another recent message posted to rec.games.diplomacy:

Hello. A small group of players have been talking about trying
to put together an invitational game just for players who
have been playing EP Diplomacy for a while, and are tired
of waiting for players who miss deadlines.

So if the judge rates players' dedications, why is poor dedication still a problem? My answer is that it is too easy for undedicated players to stay above the -10 point minimum that lets them into every newly forming game except the occasional high-dedication game. Consider this: you have a dedication of +10 and SIGNON to three games. Say there are an average of three phases per year requiring orders. If you submit moves on time, you will get 9 dedication points per year per game, or 81 points in three game-years. After three years, you are doing badly in one game and quit...you submit one last set of moves (3 more points!) and just resign, taking your -100 penalty from the judge. Play out a couple of more years in the remaining two games and you now have more dedication points than you started with, even though you resigned from (quit) a game.

Here's an experiment: pick 10 games at random from the Hall of Fame and look at all the replaced players. How many of those players are still active in current games? I'd bet a good number of them are. I know that there are other reasons for going abandoned other than quitting, but isn't it funny how it's always the bad positions that end up needing replacements?

Here's another experiment: set up a script to retrieve the openings list every 4 hours (that's how often its updated) over the course of a week. Then look at every single replacement opening. What percentage of them are mercy positions that have virtually no hope of leading to a win or draw?

Don't think people quit? Here's a message posted to rec.games.diplomacy by a self-proclaimed newbie recently:

Let's say i am sick of playing a power in one game because there
is no  way that i can win or even take another SC. Instead of
resigning and holding up the game for everyone why can't i just
disband ALL my units? 

You can tell he's a newbie because he asked. I'm sure there are more experienced quitters out there who are well past the asking stage. I'm not trying to pick on this individual. I've had positions I would have liked to walk away from for the same reason. But signing on to a game is an obligation, and one should be committed to playing it out.

So if dedication is a problem, why not make the penalties stiffer, you ask? My thoughts exactly! I was pretty vocal on the subject of dedication reform and, unless I'm mistaken, the default minimum dedication rating of -10 was my idea. I think I've seen an improvement in dedication in the games I play. This may or may not be due to the -10 minimum keeping out undedicated players; it's hard to tell. Despite this improvement, constant delays from late orders are still a nuisance. Since the judge gives +3 points for being on time, a player can break even by being late 75% of the time.

So, just to see what would happen, I started a game which ran under what I called the Dedicated Player House Rules (DPHRs) - my own version of stiffer penalties. The rules appeared in the game listing, and all announcements of the game when it first started up required players to read the listing before signing on. (The game also had some non-standard rules so all players had to read the listing to find out the rules of the game.) Because these rules are not coded into the judge, I arranged with the judge keeper for me to keep track of all additional penalties which would be applied manually in a lump-sum by the judge keeper at the end of the game.

Simon Szykman
Carnegie Mellon University
(simon@diplom.org)

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