@YCHTT "There is a third option. Do away with points. It could be done now, especially here at VDip. "
It has already been done.
threadID=51665.
Those who like games without points can create or join games with the third Pot-type option: Unrated.
Noone can play for points in these games - because there are no sorts of points - just like it is in the tabletop-edition of Diplomacy.
I'm aware that the issue with this solution is that most of the Members here do like points (whether they admit it or not). In fact this option is barely considered and there aren't many Unrated stand-alone games around.
This is very likely because most of players here do love being rated. And this is again for different reasons... pleasure in checking one's progresses the HoFs... in hoarding D & V points... in having a great Won+Drawn percentage, just to make a few examples. Everyone got his own rating-goals. In short: rating-systems add a considerable amount of fun for many players, although basically everybody know they don't - and they will never - reflect the real skill of a player.
Hence so many players do love points. Maybe *almost all* players love points, just with different degrees or awareness.
If most of our fellow Members didn't love points and ratings, then Unrated would be the most popular Pot-type by now. Oh yes it would.
Every player is free to play whatever game the way he deems right, but:
Unrated games: you should expect most of players not playing for points.
Rated games: you should expect most of players playing for the rating. That is to say playing for Personal Stats, for V-Points or for D-Points, according to each one's favourite rating system(s).
The last thing you should expect in an online game is all players playing the same gamestyle. Everyone has their own vision of the game, depending on several things, from the obvious different levels of experience, skills and free time available, through the "online-experience", up the the different reasons that brought each one of us to join a site like this.
You add to that the different preferences and different visions on the 3 rating systems everyone got, and you can forget you know what gamestyle your opponents might have. Being able to discover it is one of the skills online-diplomacy requires, although it's not one of the most important skills, being it often helpful but rarely decisive.
This skill requires efforts; complain you did badly because someone else didn't play according to your vision requires much less.
Some say this is not how it *should be*, but there's an inescapable reason why this is how it *is*.
It's because you can't rate a game - anyhow you do it - and still expect players to play it like it was unrated.
In other words, you can't at one time add a new rule - I.E. a rating system - and expect that players will simply ignore that rule.
A rating system *should be* a tool for observation of an event - the game - in order to put it in relation with other games. But also, it inevitably becomes part of the observed event. It is a thing you add to the event.
Since a rating system *is* part of an event, it alters that event. I guess you know, YCHTT, that's why you wrote what I quoted, right?
So D-points, V-points, Personal-Stats and any tool you might use to create rating systems will always alter some players' behaviour in comparison to a game that's not related to anything and therefore has no alterations.
Mm? Otherwise why would some some of us be so worried about which names are given to the Personal Stats' result-types? Look: You change one name only -> you change the PS rating system -> you change the object(s) of the games -> you change players' gamestyle. That's what happens if you change one name. It's like you change the way a Pot-type work in the other 2 systems.
And I'd add: -> you have created a new variant.
The ones we got here have now become typical *alterations*. We could even call them "classic" alterations, since they've been online by now for almost a decade - which is an eon both on the world wide web and in modern RL - and thousands players learnt how to handle them here, on WD.com, on FBdip, on WD.it, on WD.es and on who knows how many other sites that use the WTA/PPSC pot-types.
They're so classic and so old, that some crazy veteran-online-players are wondering whether they still have to be the only available two and ask for new challenging Pot-types.
That's all YCHTT, thanks for reading my point of view on the matter of points in online-diplomacy.
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tl;dr:
If you want to play a game on this online-edition but you don't want the typical gamestyle-alterations from the rating systems (eg: people who play for points), then choosing Unrated games might be a good idea.
Thank Oli, among the other 1000 we have this option too.
dev for vdip and/or webdip
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