jay65536 wrote:
A few things about this:
1) My view is that those 2 rules go hand-in-hand. I think having no-DIAS but draws splitting points equally is anti-competitive. It encourages creating situations where solos are a lot less likely. And as I said earlier in the thread, equal points for draws is theoretically supposed to create situations where small powers fight on, but in practice (in my experience anyway) it's actually the exact opposite.
I know you're the one who posted about your board at Dixie where a 4-power endgame ended in a 3-way draw where someone who had no business voting himself out did. Your case is an extreme example, but I wasn't exactly surprised it happened; to me that's the logical conclusion of what happens when you play a small number of tournament games in a draw-based system without DIAS. You don't tend to get people fighting on; you tend to get people NOT fighting on.
A fair assessment. In Dixie's scoring it's more likely in part because those who vote themselves out of a draw can get points. I generally do see this as beneficial from a pure exhaustion standpoint though, at least in a face-to-face context. Those 6 PM rounds can be brutal in a format where a game has no foreseeable end. Even an online game, which doesn't necessarily have immediate attrition problems, can be mentally draining as it drags on toward an inevitable consequence (or until somebody just "breaks").
jay65536 wrote:2) There are other questions where the rules are ambiguous but players act like the rules are clear, for the sake of them being purists. For example, the rules state that draws must occur "by consensus". Why, then, does no one interpret that as mandating open voting? Why is secret voting sacrosanct? The rules as written also do not imply that Diplomacy is a fixed-sum game; but I bet if you showed a proponent of draw-based scoring this system:
Solo 40
2way 10
3way 9
4way 9
5way 7
6way 7
7way 5
Loss 0
they would not like it, even though it adheres to all of the written rules.
Definitely agreed. It's a big component of the "any scoring system is a variant" axiom. Nothing in the rules attaches a numeric value to a draw or solo, and nothing yields an objective comparison between a draw or solo.
jay65536 wrote:To me I think the biggest thing is that when we talk about what we prefer in a scoring system, there's no excuse for saying "I'm in favor of this because it's in the rules". You like what you like, and you should have your own reasons why.
Agreed, though I would say that "it's in the rules" is a flawed way of saying, "I like this scoring system because it feels the closest to an unscored game." It's definitely an
opinion rather than a
fact (which some players refuse to accept), but there is at least a foundation there. I even consider this to be the case for draw-sized scoring; it seems to me to be the system that yields the most similar gameplay to an unscored game. Over time, however, I've found that's not necessarily a
good thing.
jay65536 wrote:3) What I've been wondering for awhile is, is there a way to make a scoring system that bends the "equality in a draw" rule partially but not completely? Like, maybe there's a way to make a good scoring system where most draws split points equally, and/or most players share equally in a draw, but with some kind of mechanism that rewards exceptional performances so a tournament field can have separation at the top? Perhaps this is just a pipe dream, though, because as I said upthread I'd probably need to run my own tournament to ever have a chance to try it out.
What you're describing is, at least in part, the Dixiecon tournament scoring system. It's probably not what you want, and it has its own downsides, but its hybrid of draw size, center count, and rank seem to be geared to fulfill that exact purpose: keep draws mostly equal, and provide incentives for secondary goals beyond win/draw/lose.
Unless one moves away from a fixed-sum system (or a near-fixed-sum system, like PlayDip's), I just don't see a way to do this without bringing draw whittling back into the mix. Small tournaments can definitely operate with a non-fixed-sum system; I'm actually doing that very thing this year with the Tournament Through Time. But for a perpetual online platform, I just don't see that being scalable in the long term.