David E. Cohen wrote:I am looking at equations above, and they show the heart of the problem. A point system, in its essence, turns a forum into one all-encompassing, ongoing tournament. In fact, a variant of the original game of Diplomacy. If you want to play that variant, call it what it is and then everyone can move on.
That's certainly true. Any website with a rating system is essentially a long, ongoing tournament. Any numerically scored game of
Diplomacy is effectively a type of variant, but scored games are clearly a
popular variant. Players seem to like to have "skin in the game," and scored / rated games provide that.
This is almost necessary for website-based games, where anonymous players can NMR and quit at the drop of a hat, with little or no damage to their reputation. I know I was even guilty of this in the early days of another site: phpDiplomacy, now called webDiplomacy. Back when it was a buggy Facebook app, I got partway through a couple games, encountered some bugs (or just plain forgot about them), and quit. I would never have done this to a group where I was playing by email; at the very least I would have let the GM know to find a replacement.
Even beyond reliability, it's beneficial to the platform to have some built-in incentive for players to try and perform as well as they possibly can; among other benefits, this discourages win-trading behaviors (i.e. metagaming).
So on the one hand, you probably have better
Diplomacy played overall when no scores are involved. On the other hand, it's simply not realistic for a web-based platform to sustain a userbase without some form of rating/scoring system. So it really becomes a matter of
how to score the games, rather than
whether to score the games.
The devil just happens to be in the details regarding
how such games are scored, as a scoring system will create intermediary goals that come with tradeoffs. Some of those intermediary goals can conflict with endgame goals as well. People here largely seem to be okay with the site's current scoring/rating methodology; a Draw-Sized Scoring model is applied to an individual game, and Elo rating calculations convert that score to zero-sum rating adjustments based on how you stack up to your opponents.
But here's the tradeoff: it does mean that, on average, a player will net ~70% more points on a 3-way draw than a 4-way draw, even though in an
unscored context these two types of draws aren't all that different.
(
This is, in part, why I've proposed a considerably different per-game scoring system, based on an existing F2F scoring system, to be provided as a per-game alternative. It won't quite satisfy the desire to have an unscored game, but it should allow players to play a scored game that doesn't inherently encourage draw-whittling.)