Many players have repeatedly written, like Tomahaha just did, that the rules would supposedly state something like "The person who solo's wins, all others lose." That is a mistake ! Indeed, the rules state exactly :
OBJECT OF THE GAME
As soon as one Great Power controls 18 supply centers, it’s considered to have gained control of Europe. The player representing that Great Power is the winner. However, players can end the game by agreement before a winner is determined. In this case, all players who still have pieces on the game board share equally in a draw.
That can be found, for example, on page 4 of Avalon Hill's site :
http://www.wizards.com/avalonhill/rules/diplomacy_rulebook.pdf
I can read that too on the rulebook of the board game that I have at home and that I bought in the early 80's.
In other words, the rules do NOT state that, when a player wins the game, "all other players lose equally".
It may seem to be "only" a semantic question but words have a very precise meaning. By distorting words, or worse, by adding supposedly "obvious" words to a sentence, one can try to create a different reality in order to influence people. Any Diplomacy player should know that.
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I understand that voting "Draw" publicly may cause the situation that one single player may find it difficult to face the consequences of his refusal to vote "Draw" but isn't that more realistic ? Indeed, in reality, when belligerants negotiate for peace, they publicly take position about their desire to sign peace. In reality, one relatively weak nation could be forced to agree for peace when all the other ones would agree that it is time to end the hostilities.
On that subject, has anyone thought about the potential bad consequences of the possibility of voting "Draw" anonymously ? For example, one single nation, no matter how weak it is militarily, could refuse for an extremely long time to vote "Draw" while claiming that it has. This could have the consequence that players could be forced to keep playing a game that they consider to be finished for a long time and that could lead to apathy and lost of interest in the game, which could even cause NMR's and CD's.
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Writing the previous warning reminds me of the Thread called "Input of an alternate scoring system needed..." that was started two years ago, in January 2013 :
threadID=38097In that Thread, I wrote repeatedly that we should not play for any kind of points and that adding another scoring system would create even more problems because so many players love and care a lot about points and that any scoring system will :
• pervert the way many players play the game and, additionally,
• will not reward skill in the same way that the games were originally played.
These were my exact words at that time.
And now some players describe a situation where some other players might want to save their dpoints or vpoints by drawing sometimes games in a premature time.
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My recommendation is that we should abandon any kind of scoring system that claims to measure players' strength.
In my opinion, the only real value of dpoints is to prevent some players from joining simultaneously too many games thanks to the possibility of creating games with a relatively high bet, the extreme example being that a game with a bet of at least 101 dpoints prevents newly created multi accounts to join it.
As a conclusion, let's not forget the title that Luis Aldamiz chose for this Thread :
"Rating system favors draws"
Shouldn't we always try to solve a problem by attacking its cause ?