You are not wrong. Best regards, God's Representative

SoS is WTA for a solo.

The Sum of Squares scoring system is one designed for FTF tournaments where a form a measurement of performance across multiple players and boards is necessary on Sunday afternnoons before players rush off to the airports. It's not a good tool for scoring these round robin tournaments so popular at VDip, where you have an excellent measure of performance across each position on the map over the life of the competition. There's no need to accelerate the scoring for Sunday afternoon since the events stretch out for months at their own pace. The dangers of SoS scoring is the wave of thrown solos as the greed factor kicks in exponentially to rub out nations that might otherwise participate in a strategic draw. We've seen SoS destroy the Known World Tournament with just such an example. We also saw it lead a game to be stretched out for 8 more months just to kill a single one supply center nation. Sum of Square has its's usefulness in FTF tournaments, but here it's like using a chainsaw to clip a rose bush.

@RUFFHAUS

I'm a tad confused. In the example you give, the points for that 1-center power would be almost zero under an SoS system. It's when all survivors share draws equally that there's more incentive to wipe out the little guys.

Herr Haus is correct. Of course, perhaps having tourney games be anonymous might be a less elegant but cleaner solution?

The main benefit of SoS, C-diplo and most other designed scoring systems is when playing “short games” tourneys (i.e. with a fixed end year, just like Ftf tourneys often are). WTA makes more sense in games where these limits do not apply. PPSC never makes sense. Just my two rupees.

Considering that Max Turns is an option when setting up a game, I'm surprised that SoS or something along those lines isn't at least available in that case.

SoS is still not a thing, because I did not bother to code this for our vDip-rating.

That’s as good a reason as any :-)

SoS isn't great for variants because the amount it awards players varies wildly depending on the number of SCs on the map. If the SC count is high, large players will be rewarded a huge percentage of the points, while players who make it into the draw on 4 or 5 centers will be given practically nothing for their survival.

I'd definitely disagree with people saying it's specialised for FTF - it actually solves a lot of endgame issues in online Diplomacy too, taking away the choice players often have to make between pursuing a solo or eliminating players for a smaller draw by making the draw reward a player for how close they were to achieving the solo, while still making sure the solo is worth a large amount more than any draw and losing is worth nothing (so avoiding the PPSC problems). However, it *is* specialised for the classic, 34 center variant, so it's not really an appropriate scoring system for vDip.

Another option, other than SoS, is a rank-based system. C-Diplo is one option, though the Carnage system is gaining a lot of popularity in Face-to-Face.

A modified form of Carnage could potentially work here, and it would work for variants as well.

In a solo, the winner still gets all the points.

All draws are DIAS, but you don't share in the draw equally. Instead of your points being based solely on SC counts, they're based on your rank in comparison to other players.

Rank is determined by final SC count, or for eliminated players, how long you survived (the longer the better).

In a standard 7-player match:
7000 for 1st
6000 for 2nd
5000 for 3rd
4000 for 4th
3000 for 5th
2000 for 6th
1000 for 7th

Players that tie for rank split the points for all applicable ranks. Two players tie for first, for example would get 6500 points each. The next-highest player would then be ranked third.

This point value would then be trivially converted into vDip points as (YourPoints / AllPointsAwarded). In a seven-player match, this means the board-topper would received about as many points as what they'd get in a four-player draw.

(A slight modification to this system can give 0 points to the last-ranked player and 1000 fewer to everyone else, though generally some points are allocated to last place for a non-solo scenario as a small incentive not to throw the match, assuming that player hasn't yet been eliminated. Making such a modification increases the % of final points held by those in top ranks.)

This system can easily expand to adjust to the number of players. While true Carnage also grants one point each per SC held at game's end (with all 34 granted to the winner of a solo), this is really only used as a tournament tiebreaker, and it would have less value here.

The pluses of this system:
- It encourages players to weigh the relative merits of holding a firm stalemate line versus jockeying for position. As such, it can add some unpredictability to the late game.
- It discourages draw-whittling, as it's unlikely to make an enormous impact on the final score whether a single power with 1-2 SC's remains on the map.
- There's a more significant difference between the points an individual can receive in a solo versus the best one can receive in a draw.

The minuses of the system:
- Because draws aren't shared equally, to some this feels like a betrayal of the original rules.
- While I personally see the impact on the endgame as a positive, it can change the character of the typical stalemate-line staring-match, which some may object to.
- After being eliminated, your eventual final score is dependent on factors that you no longer have any influence on. If the game ends in a draw, you may get points; if it ends in a solo, you get nothing. Modifications to this system can adjust for this situation, though they could bring back the emphasis on draw-whittling in a zero-sum environment such as this.

@Captainmeme

"However, it *is* specialised for the classic, 34 center variant, so it's not really an appropriate scoring system for vDip."

Isn't Classic the most played non-2 players map? Introducing SoS for Classic alone is arguably worth it even if some variants would be corrupted by it.

All it takes is a "Note: Sum-of-Squares scoring should be applied to Classic only" in the game creation screen and voi-a-la. It's technically possible to make 7 points game be PPSC and 500 points timed games be WTA, but the community is more than capable of avoiding these weird variant/score combinations.

The points for an eliminated player in the Carnage system seems problematic to me. What about ranking all players regardless of result, doubling the point for a solo winner, and halving them for an eliminated player?

Or is the goal of the carnage system to increase the odds of a solo and encourage sniping at people who aren't in the lead but might overtake you?

@zurn

My understanding is that the goal of the Carnage system is indeed to increase the odds of a solo (and to ensure there's a significant difference in points between a solo and the best you can receive in a win). It's also intended to reduce the odds that players are eliminated just for the sake of removing them from the draw size, rather than for strategic purposes.

As for sniping, I believe the idea is that in a typical "stop the solo!" scenario, players are encouraged to weigh the relative benefits of jockeying for position versus holding the line. If you think you can risk a little shakeup in the status quo and still block the solo, that sniping could be beneficial.

Like C-Diplo and other rank-based systems, it's also built to work well in scenarios where the game has to have a defined endpoint. Most Carnage-based tournaments, to my understanding, allow games to go on as long as they need to, but there's often at least one round that has to have a clock limit (if not a year limit) for practical reasons.

The modifications you mention (particularly for reducing points of an eliminated rank) actually could work well in a non-zero-sum environment. I'm running a variant tournament that uses a similar system to tie together five _very_ different variants (http://www.playdiplomacy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=103&t=56099). I would NOT recommend this exact system outside the specific tournament setting it was build for, however.

A rank-based system where eliminated players lose more points is theoretically possible, I imagine, but the mathematics of getting it to work in a zero-sum environment are particularly difficult. A big piece of it all comes down to whether a solo should take 100% of the points; in a controlled tournament, this isn't as important, but in an asynchronous environment, it's pretty vital.