"Fast-track" allocating countries incorrectly (fixed)

[LCaromba]

So I've been using Diplomacy to teach my introductory International Relations class for the past three years. (It's a fantastic teaching tool, by the way!)

However, this year I noticed that there seems to be a bug when adding teams via the "Fast track Schools game" feature.

In previous years, it allocated the countries correctly. However, this year, the list seems to be "flipped" backwards. So, in each game I created, what happened was as follows:

The team I added as England becomes Russia.
The team I added as France becomes Turkey.
The team I added as Italy becomes Austria.
The team I added as Germany stays Germany.
The team I added as Austria becomes Italy.
The team I added as Turkey becomes France.
The team I added as Russia becomes England.

It's not a huge problem, but it caused some confusion in my class, when students who were expecting to play as one country ended up starting the game as a different country.

In any case, I haven't seen anyone else report the same bug, so I thought I should report it here.

[super_dipsy]

Gosh! How very bizarre!

I will go and check it out and sort it, sorry about the confusion and delighted you are finding the site a useful educational tool

[super_dipsy]

Hmm. I can't seem to reproduce this.

Can I just check what you are doing?
- You create a Schools game which is FCFS country assignment
- You go to the Teachers page
- You allocate P1 to England, P2 to France etc
- When you click to submit you end up with P1 playing Russia etc.

Is that right? And this is with the base map? As I say, I can't reproduce it. When I try it, the players are all in the right order and I checked the code and cannot see how this could be in reverse order...

[LCaromba]

Hmm. I can't seem to reproduce this.

Can I just check what you are doing?
- You create a Schools game which is FCFS country assignment
- You go to the Teachers page
- You allocate P1 to England, P2 to France etc
- When you click to submit you end up with P1 playing Russia etc.

Is that right? And this is with the base map? As I say, I can't reproduce it. When I try it, the players are all in the right order and I checked the code and cannot see how this could be in reverse order...

Yes, this is exactly what happened. I was using the base map.

I can show you an illustration too, if it helps. In the past, all the teacher-created games I've created have always had the countries in the exact same order, ENG -> FRA -> ITA -> GER -> AUS -> TUR -> RUS. Which is the same order in which teams are listed on the fast-track page:



But this time, the order is flipped around:




Also, it was consistent. The exact same thing happened to me for all three games I created this year. (If it helps, the games are 146937, 146938, and 146939.)

It's possible that I'm doing something dumb here, but it's always worked for me in the past.

[Gladius2]

I had the same problem with this. I created 4 schools games: 154342, 154344, 154417 and 154473. It's obvious which accounts should go to which country. For example, in game A, one account is COM402AusA. I put Austria in that fast track slot. They ended up assigned to Italy. Some of the games I left the countries preferences at the random default. Other games I changed it to preferences and they still jumbled the assignments.

[super_dipsy]

Thanks guys, that is very helpful. I should be able to hunt down the problem and sort it.

[super_dipsy]

Ah OK. I understand now.

The support for fast tracking a game required the game to be set up as selected countries (that is, players choose a country) but the default for all game creations is randon countries (countries randomly assigned). When you created your games, you quite naturally created them as random (the default) and so when the fast track system set the game up it reordered the players

The reason I could not reproduce it is when I set the games up on the test system I was always setting them up as selected countries. Therefore I didn't see the problem.

However, it is pretty silly of the software to make that mistake. Of course the vast majority of teachers will assume the default is right for what they want to do, and since the fast track mechanism actually specifies player 1 goes to country England etc then that is what should happen regardless. So I have changed it to force the game to selected countries if the fast track is used. So hopefully noone else will fall into this. I do apologize, it was counter-intuitive in the extreme the way it was. You should be fine now!