@Valent
I'm not sure how useful these many rankings would be. Aside from the confusion and work they would bring, would you really try to rank a diplomacy player on how long their games lasted, and how many drew, with
higher being better???
It's far simpler to have a single ranking that measures how good you are at winning the game.
InterMPC wrote:Unfortunately the change you have suggested is not easy. I can work on it if you want but bear in mind;
Your system won't be 0 sum anymore, It won't be true to the Elo system, There will probably be a snowball effect of unintended consequences that will need adjustments.
Basically in the scenario you've described, player 1 and 2 draw against each other. What happens in chess when 2 differently ranked players draw? The player with the lower ranking goes up and the person with the higher ranking goes down. That is what is being emulated here.
The previous Elo emulation in the table doesn't calculate a score for each player against the others individually, but each player against the average of the participants, therefore sidestepping this issue.
No. The system still is 0 sum. Each loser loses 1/N (N is number of "winnners") times to each winner. That is all. The winners get the points lost to them. 0 sum.
The reason I'm looking at this differently than chess is that it is a 7-player game, and if you want to draw with someone, it is relatively easy to do so. What is hard is beating someone else. So players 1 and 2 aren't really drawing against one another, they are just beating players 3,4,5,6 and 7.
This sort of thinking, I believe, is reinforced by this passage in Allan Calhammer's (inventor of the game) discussion of objectives (
http://www.diplomacy-archive.com/resour ... ctives.htm). He focuses on the fact that members of a 3 way draw beat the 4 other players - not that they scored some half win/half loss as is considered in chess, where a draw must mean exactly that due to the fact there are only 2 playes. A draw is simply a (often far) lesser victory, due to a reduction in vanquished parties, and an increase in the number of parties sharing in that triumph.
Allan B. Calhammer wrote:Nevertheless, it is not wholly clear why the draw is not an adequate secondary objective, inasmuch as the game is probably a draw with best play from the overwhelming majority of positions actually encountered. One of the difficulties may be that the draw is reputed to be inconclusive, because it is so reckoned in chess or checkers. However, a draw in Diplomacy may be more conclusive than victories among an equivalent number of chess players. If seven players play Diplomacy, and three draw, those three have scored above the four others. If six players play in three chess games, and all the games are wins, those three have scored above only three others, rather than four. Yet in the Diplomacy game, there is still the possibility of one player winning it all.