wait a minute
NMR's do not harm the game? Are you KIDDING me!?
Did you really just say that? You actually want a game full of NMR's and claim this is what the game is about?
...I rest my point about being ignorant selfish blowhards!

NMRs absolutely ruin the game. Just as fumbles ruin a drive in [American] football. Should teams not try and recover fumbles because they feel bad for the other team or should they take advantage of the rules as written? If they make a rule making it so you can't fumble the ball, teams would have to adapt. Just as if people set up game settings where there's no such thing as NMRs (these settings currently exist on this site), players have to adapt. You should stick to no NMR games -- or just sit on the sidelines and pontificate, which seems to be more of your M.O.

As Mapu says, yes the NMR ruins tue game, but the player using it to his advatage is *not* ruining the game. He is doing exactly what he *should* do: Do whatever it tales to win.

No surprise, the entire point is missed!

Yes NMR's suck, yes we want to do away with them but unfortunately must deal with them as they happen (except for the bozo who claims they ARE the game).

So the question is about minimizing their damage to a game. If I am England and my enemy in France NMR's it sucks for all playing the game in that I got an advantage in France not blocking my attacks and I may get a lead thanks to someone not caring about the game and not caring about others. But we can't do too much about this and we suck it up. But to allow me to see ahead of time that France is about to NMR and I need not support my attacks, I gain a HUGE advantage! The rest of the board is not able to take advantage of this now are they? (Maybe Italy)

As stated, reducing the negative impact is what we should be doing and is in fact excatly what MOST of us are striving for. How do we reduce NMR's and how do we make them affect the game less and less so? We have in place a reliability ranking for a reason! We want to point out these "flight risks" and yes we want to punish them by this horrible ranking they earned themselves. Few will want to play with these people (yet we see some here who seem to actively look for these types in an effort to win at any cost simply to pad their stats, the game means nothing, it is all about stats and in other threads has even been stated!)
Any who claim this is part of the game and should be exploited are nothing but ignorant, simple as that! Ignorant people who care only about themselves and could not care about a quality game, in fact i doubt they understand what quality play even means.

This order status indication does nothing but make NMR's further abused and do nothing for game integrity. Not one good reason was given for keeping it, now we see those who freely admit it is a valid part of the game, these people should be ashamed of themselves and should be shunned in further play!

and further ignorant comments, I am not sitting on the sidelines pontificating. Since I have joined here I have played two games and I have had little to no downtime between those games. Because I play one game at a time does not mean I am sitting on the sidelines. And my sitting on the sidelines? I have done more for this hobby than you EVER will even dream about doing. Because I have played limited number of games here means I am sitting on the sidelines? This means I know nothing while your opinion means more?

Sorry pal, my opinion DOES mean more than yours, I have years of contribution to the hobby on multiple sites not just playing a few games here and there, You see, I KNOW what I am talking about where you have proven yourself to be an ignoramus.

I love the fumble analogy.

Tom, you have some good points, but 90% of your posts are filled with nonsense and strawmans. Comments to the effect that your opinion mean more than others are not likely to win you much respect here. Respect is earned here over time. And even though you have been a decent GM in your past, your playing experience is marginal, particularly in this community. Like it or not, you're going to have to prove that your opinion carries the weight that you want it to.

NMRs aren't part of the game, they're just a sad side effect of Diplomacy being a brutal/frustrating game where people rage-quit, or being a long game in RL where people just have to go, or again in RL being a game where you can be very obviously doomed and powerless but still a have a unit or two to order. The last two shouldn't be a big deal in online games, but the first of course always will be.

It's a concession in the name of carrying on with the game, but ideally there should be no NMRs. People don't consider it normal to abandon other games either, and it's just as undesireable here.

I was replying to the person who said I do nothing but sit on the sidelines and pontificate. He was so very uninformed and yes I most certainly know FAR more than he does. Doesn't matter how many games I have played, I have contributed to the hobby more than he can ever dream of doing and his foolish statements and assumptions prove him to be ignorant.

And to your comment "my playing experience is marginal" is also flat out wrong. My play HERE is less than marginal, my play the past several years is marginal as well. My lifetime number of games is not as many as many others but is far beyond "Marginal". I can prove my credentials and have before, this is not about me or my opinion and I will not list those many criteria, it is about what is best for the hobby and my defending myself from stupid people.

What is best for the game is to reduce NMR's and to lessen the effect of those that do happen. That is a fact, that is not debatable, yet here we have self centered idiots who think otherwise.

Lift your leg and go piss on another tree, Toma. Your territory isn't yet completely marked.

Let's not get elitist here and get back to the point of the thread:

Remove the logged in symbol: YES/NO
Removal of the orders received: Site-wide or Option during game creation

Remove Logged in Symbol: YES
Removal of Orders Received: Option during game creation

Remove Logged in Symbol: YES
Removal of Orders Received: Option during game creation

Remove the logged in symbol: YES
Removal of the orders received: Site-wide

Remove the logged in symbol: YES
Removal of orders received: Optional

Nobody claimed NMRs are the game. Only that taking advantage of every opportunity presented is a means to winning the game. If your opponent falls down the steps and breaks his back, it's pretty crappy to take advantage of the situation while he is in the hospital but it is technically part of the game.

Oh and I vote Yes and Sitewide.

YES
Site-wide

Remove the logged in symbol: YES
Removal of the orders received: Site-wide

Remove Logged in Symbol: YES
Removal of Orders Received: Option during game creation

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RHZTRK2

Most of cheating reports we get on the Modforum have a list of strange facts who made suspicions arise in the reporter's mind.
Frome time to time, one of those attached facts is two countries logging in or putting in orders just a few minutes from each other, turn after turn.
IMO, the reason why this fact is rarely attached is that even the most stupid cheater is able to realize that he has to wait a while, say a few hours, to play with the other account, or he'll be looking like the same person. So, at the moment, cheating is a rather time-comsuming thing to do.
So my concern with the Removal of Orders Received is that this could make multiaccounters' life easier because they wouldn't have to worry about not looking so. Nobody could ever notice anything strange and nobody would ever report them to the Modforum for a check.

I don't know if this is a reason enough to keep the Orders Received info. Just want to point it out for discussion.
Without getting much into details, I don't mind the removal of the blue dot: it wouldn't be anyway a big loss and maybe it could even help to preserve semi-anonimity in some 6-players semi-anon game.
But as for the rest, in general I believe that the less you know about what your opponents are doing, the easier is to cheat. So I wonder if removing further things is really a good idea.
Comments welcome.

Who is being elitist? We have some who know what they are talking about and we have some who don't. We have MANY who keep pointing out made up reasons for allowing such nonsense and those who keep saying it's good to take advantage of every opportunity to win at any cost despite any and all game integrity. It's not cheating to take advantage of what is given to you but when these things harm the game, then they should be removed, these self centered people continue to ignore what is best for the game experience.

Guaroz points out an example where the orders and on-line light could be useful. But in my opinion this is again minor at best. To use this as he suggests would require a lot of detective work and people being online at the same time this is happening watching to see if this is the case and then checking for the same thing in other games as well. Cheaters can be much easier spotted in other ways, while this evidence would be nice to have, I just don't think it would be used very often. If we had no negatives (as we have pointed out) then sure, why not keep it and use this as another tool to find cheaters! But (in my opinion) this benefit is so slight vs the negatives.

And is cheating that big a problem that you want to lessen the quality of play on every game just to make it easier to spot a possible cheater? Is it that rampant? (really, I do not know, is it that big an issue here?)

Remove the logged in symbol: YES
Removal of the orders received: Site-wide

Remove the logged in symbol: YES
Removal of the orders received: Site-wide

Guaroz, there is no greater occurrence of cheating by removing the order received tab. The public doesn't need that knowledge, but the moderators could still have access to it via the site. Your ability to police cheaters at this site is already so constrained by your inability to analyze the method that they use, that this change would have no effect.

From my experiences on another website, I know some of the things moderators look for to determine who may be cheating. I will not go into detail (keep the cheaters guessing) but as Ruffhaus points out, this is nothing the moderators would use, it might help if players HAPPENED to notice this and alerted moderators, it could certainly be another nail in the cheaters coffin but (from my experiences) this would be a very very minor help at best.

That kind of thing really should be automatically checked for, if it truly is an indicator. We shouldn't be relying on haphazard player observations. I don't think it's a good reason for leaving the log-on symbol as is.

I am not a moderator here, I do not know all the particulars that can be searched for on this site (I do know some that can be searched by moderators on just about any forum). If they have access to this history of when orders are submitted, awesome! But to suggest it be done automatically? That is not likely to happen without any existing reason to do so. It's kind of like we know the government CAN check on all sorts of your personal life, but to expect them to do this in depth checking on every single person is not possible, they can only be expected to check if a reason were there to do so. Same here, if a person is suspected of cheating THEN he can be looked into with a fine tooth comb.

Checking for patterns in order timing is hardly "in depth". I wouldn't call it proof either, just maybe a red flag if there is a pattern, which could easily be picked up automatically. Banks and payment systems (eg Credit Cards) use automated fraud detection all the time, comparing it to government snooping isn't really the right analogy. Relying on haphazard suspicions of players for order timing seems far more dubious. Where player suspicions are more valuable is determining overly-cooperative play or something along those lines, since that's harder to track automatically.

*If* timing of orders is used to sniff out multi-accounting, the haphazard and inconsistent nature of players' observation regarding this makes it a poor reason to keep around the logged-on flag/submitted orders flag just for this purpose alone, that's all I'm saying.