General questions about Diplomats and Ambassadors

[jaelis]

Well, if you surrender every 11th game, I think you would stay an Ambassador, so that is pretty close to 10%. But I don't think anyone would specifically surrender once every 11 games

Maybe more realistically, you could have a player who surrenders once every 10 games on average, so sometimes they would get booted from Ambassador class, but then they would usually come back after three finished games as a Diplomat. So they would spend some fraction of their time as an Ambassador. (In fact, if you do the math it such a player would be Ambassador about 60% of the time, ignoring the possibility they picked up surrendered powers.)

So yes, there's a chance you'll run into Ambassadors with 10% surrender rates, but I suspect that there aren't so many people like that: it seems like if you don't care about surrenders, you would have a higher rate, and if you do care about surrenders, it would be lower.

[VegaMan]

I will say, it might proove tricky. If diplomats can neither substitute nor pick up surrendered positions, and they represent 80% of the player pool, it will mean ambassador games will have a pool of players 5X smaller to fill those open positions as they occur. I don't know if that will be a problem. We will have to watch it I guess.

So the question would be are ambassador only games 5x (or greater) less likely to experience a surrender?

[WHSeward]

@Vegaman, that is right. That rather is the question.

@ASU & jaelis, what matters is the average surrender rate of ambassadors as a group.

The threshold is a 10% rate - if you become an ambassador but don't have more than 1 surrender every 10 games, you stay an ambassador. That is attenuated slightly by the way we treat replacement games. Only game-starts count for defining the 10 game time period and any surrenders in replacement games count against you too. On the other hand, players can have a higher "inherent" surrender rate and still be ambassadors because they can qualify in just 3 games and random chance will let some high surrender rate players get under that bar at least temporarily.

Which all just says, its complicated. Without the data, you can't know. Unencumbered by any facts, my guesstimate when I posted here was that 1-in-3 ambassador games will have a surrender. That was a total SWAG.

Dipsy has the data. Pedros reports elsewhere that Dipsy says surrender rates are bi-modal. Dipsy says it is going to be small. I trust Dipsy. So I am changing my SWAG to "it is going to be small."

[Zubb]

Hey, do we have the data now? I see very few Ambassador only games, what has happened? To few ambassadors? Diplomats stopped surrendering?

[super_dipsy]

Hi Zubb, Ambassador games have been possible for just under 8 months now, and so far we have had 180 Ambassador games (I make that over 20 a month). About half of them got started in less than 5 days, which is pretty quick, so it seems they fill up OK. Perhaps the BEST stat which pleases me greatly is that while we started at about 1200 Ambassadors, we now have 1848 Ambassadors! This is excellent news because it means more and more people are playing to at least a reasonable level of reliability.