Edi Birsan
08-05-2004, 11:55 PM
The issues of face to face tournament Diplomacy is extensive.
Tournament Diplomacy grew out of an excuse to get people together from the postal hobby. As a result the 'play the game not the tournament' was the ethos. In fact, the scoring system was totally subjective when there was a tournament in the begining without any known factors or points or anything like that. There was a consensus, end of story... and it worked.
As the hobby developed face to face Tournament play has become a whole another creature of its own.
The reality is that less than 50% of the players in the average tournament in North America have a tournament focus. Most cannot envision their postiion relative to others based on the tournament scores. Further, many do not even change their play style to reflect the incentives of the tournament scoring system.
Open Scores or Posted Scores are used extensively in Europe such as the recent World DipCon Championship in the UK. While this was a collection of the highest per centage of tournament focused players, there was probably more than half of the players that did not play to the tournament but instead played their individual game in isolation.
At times posted scores have the effect of a player walking into a game in Spring 01 and being told outright that there is no chance for them to discuss the game with their neighbors because he is higher in the scoring than them and they intend to kill him. I have seen this in play for example in Sweden where Manus Hand was globbered on the round to see who gets into the top board.
People who do not want things posted generally are not that they are afraid of the other tournament players, nearly every tournament player worth his supply centers can probably tell you who the top ten is in any tournament after each round just by casual observation, talk and info swap. However, what they remove from the friction of the tournament is the medium level players and below who would be excessively reactive to such a list while not able to make it themselves. Thus the posting of the results can be viewed as a sort of 'enabling' of lesser strength tournament play.
That anyway is the arguement...
I do not post results in the SF cons that I run because 1/2 the players are playing their first tournament and a good portion of them are playing their first game! As an experiment I did not even bring up the subject of the scoring system at one tournament and it was not until the begining of their third round that someone even asked how do you win the tournament. Furthermore over the half the players will only play one game out of the three rounds in the major cons in SF which is why we are moving to use the game conventions as a recruiting space while starting a stand alone Diplomacy Tournament this November 13-14.
Edi
Tournament Diplomacy grew out of an excuse to get people together from the postal hobby. As a result the 'play the game not the tournament' was the ethos. In fact, the scoring system was totally subjective when there was a tournament in the begining without any known factors or points or anything like that. There was a consensus, end of story... and it worked.
As the hobby developed face to face Tournament play has become a whole another creature of its own.
The reality is that less than 50% of the players in the average tournament in North America have a tournament focus. Most cannot envision their postiion relative to others based on the tournament scores. Further, many do not even change their play style to reflect the incentives of the tournament scoring system.
Open Scores or Posted Scores are used extensively in Europe such as the recent World DipCon Championship in the UK. While this was a collection of the highest per centage of tournament focused players, there was probably more than half of the players that did not play to the tournament but instead played their individual game in isolation.
At times posted scores have the effect of a player walking into a game in Spring 01 and being told outright that there is no chance for them to discuss the game with their neighbors because he is higher in the scoring than them and they intend to kill him. I have seen this in play for example in Sweden where Manus Hand was globbered on the round to see who gets into the top board.
People who do not want things posted generally are not that they are afraid of the other tournament players, nearly every tournament player worth his supply centers can probably tell you who the top ten is in any tournament after each round just by casual observation, talk and info swap. However, what they remove from the friction of the tournament is the medium level players and below who would be excessively reactive to such a list while not able to make it themselves. Thus the posting of the results can be viewed as a sort of 'enabling' of lesser strength tournament play.
That anyway is the arguement...
I do not post results in the SF cons that I run because 1/2 the players are playing their first tournament and a good portion of them are playing their first game! As an experiment I did not even bring up the subject of the scoring system at one tournament and it was not until the begining of their third round that someone even asked how do you win the tournament. Furthermore over the half the players will only play one game out of the three rounds in the major cons in SF which is why we are moving to use the game conventions as a recruiting space while starting a stand alone Diplomacy Tournament this November 13-14.
Edi