[Daanz-dip] ANZAC Cup 2006 - TDs Report

[Greg Evans]

ANZAC Cup 2006 - TDs Report

The ANZAC Cup, an email based Diplomacy Tournament, was run as an experiment for the first time in 2006.  After the initial proposal met with some resistance, the tournament was not given the final go ahead until the DAANZ Annual General Meeting held early in the year where it was endorsed as an official DAANZ Tournament and a contributer to the year long Bismark rankings in 2006.

As a result of this, the tournament was not able to get underway until early March, but the initial rush of registrations was very encouraging with 4 games filled within the first Month.  Due to the continuous nature of the tournament, the steady flow of eliminations and new registrations, a further 4 games began throughout the year in June, July and August prior to the September 1st cut-off for new games starting.

Over the course of the tournament there were 36 registrations with approximately half of them being players who have at some point in past years attended a DAANZ affiliated Face-To-Face tournament.  In 2006 there were 11 players from the ANZAC Cup who had a Bismark score for 2006 prior to December 1st.

The top 3 positions in the tournament were taken by these regular and competitive FTF players suggesting that skill and experience in the FTF form of the game can be easily transposed to the Email form of the game. 

There was 1 player who signed up for the ANZAC Cup and then went on to attend thier first DAANZ affiliated FTF Tournament.

There were 4 solos in the tournament, which admittedly is a high percentage of games.  This is due in a large part to 2 factors.  The first being the absence of year-based timedraws and the long running nature of the games with one marathon game running to a solo in 1917 that could never have occurred in a FTF Tournament.  The second being the high percentage of new and inexperienced players participating.  A number of the solos achieved could be attributed to experienced players exploiting such players and that is all part of the player development process.  As an aside - I'm sure we'd see a lot more solo's in our FTF tournaments if 50% of attendees were new players.

There were very few controversies in the tournament, despite there being a number of misorders and the occassional player abandonment.  Only 1 power was placed into "Civil Disorder" when he abandoned on one center.  All external replacements were sourced through the Redscape sites "Replacement Exchange Programme" on a very short delay and by the EOGs submitted, the replacements (while not Aus/NZ players) seemed to be of high quality.

The scoring system worked well, with not a single player challenging its validity nor the worthiness of the players who scored well or poorly under it.  Nor were there any obvious manipulations of the scoring system or the lagging/leading critereon for starting new games.  Only 2 players were able and willing to start 3 games and the best of those finished 12th.  By far the most successful players were those who played 2 games with 8 out of the top 10 players competing in 2 games.  The Quality vs Quantity emphasis was therefore validated.

Overall, the Tournament has been a success, with a fair number of participants expressing thier interest in competing in 2007 if the ANZAC Cup is run again.

I have not yet decided if I will organise the ANZAC Cup in 2007 as that will most likely depend on the time I have available next year aswell it is dependant on continued support and endorsement by the DAANZ executive and membership.

However, I do have some ideas for changes to implement should the Tournament be run again and I'd be interested to get some feedback from the community on thier thoughts.

1.  While I do believe that there should be an element of hand-moderation to assist new and inexperienced players, aswell as allow the "misorder" element of the game, I'd like to look into utilising a judge interface for those experienced players who prefer to submit orders via this means.  I undertand that the WorldMasters offers some judge-assisted tools for GMs to hand moderate which I will investigate as that will cut down the time needed to produce maps and send reports - opening the tournament to further growth.

2.  To increase the potential for mentoring and regional-based player development I'd like to implement a 'Team Round' for the opening games of Diplomacy based on states/provinces of Australia and New Zealand.  I realise this may result in small teams of 2-4 players for each region, but the team scoring could be scalable so as to encourage players to recruit for thier teams within thier own region aswell as give the smaller teams/regions a fair chance to compete.

3.  I'd like to investigate the possibility of players submitting and/or receiving game correspondance via other mediums, such as SMS.  In this tournament I occassionally would SMS late notices to players who submitted thier mobile phones in thier registrations (which was quite successful), however there is an expense involved here which may need to be passed on.  There may also be viable low-cost means of communicating between players via Skype or similar "Voice over IP" programs which are worth exploring if players are willing.

Please feel free to comment either publically or privately.  Though I do ask that you try to keep all criticism of a constructive nature.

Regards,
Greg

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