Obviously I've been on hiatus for a while. Became an adult and all that jazz and just lost the time to consistently play. But now that I'm back, it seems like no one else is.

All the good strat players are still here, but the diplomacy community appears to be decimated. Hardly any open diplomacy games at any given moment, and of the 10% that actually look somewhat playable, they take a week or more to fill up. I'm in one right now that I joined almost 2 weeks ago that still hasn't filled.

Back in the day, the diplomacy community was so numerous that you could play real-time diplomacy games, which would be impossible now, and multi-day games took just a day or two to fill up. Every other open game was a diplomacy. Now, there's nothing. What happened?

Welcome back!

Diplo is more generational than strat, but there's still a somewhat active diplo scene. There's still the main diplo Discord: https://discord.gg/TrN2VfKj There's also chill zone, which organizes RT and MD diplo games from time to time: https://discord.gg/GHuhaZEm

Hornbeck (https://www.warzone.com/Profile?p=3578141570) I think has some connections to the current MD diplo scene, so you should maybe mail him (or ask him - he's usually on Global Chat during late nights/early mornings in US-East).

the diplomacy community was so numerous that you could play real-time diplomacy games

Quickmatch killed RT diplo. Most players can find RT games without going to Open Games, so the discoverability of diplo games has gone down considerably. On top of that, QM makes it possible to play a lot of RT without getting absolutely rekt (unlike in auto-games before, where noobs would still lose the bulk of their games), so the pipeline of players who fail at strat and then switch to diplo because it's less painful has really shrunk. Even though the playerbase peaked in late 2020, RT diplo hasn't been viable for years.

Overall, diplo is generational, so it's always easy to feel like it's dying when it's really just getting replaced by a new generation that has little awareness of the past diplo generation. Basically a new generation of kids joins Warlight while the old one ages out of diplo. For strat, it doesn't feel like it's dying when this generational replacement happens, because the venues and clans remain the same... but for diplo, the diplo clans get replaced by a new generation and the new kids are poorly connected to the older diplo scene.

Diplo dying is also not isolated to WZ. It seems atWar has had basically the same history as this game in that regard, except they weren't able to grow off of COVID like we were. Might just be a sea change in this genre of gaming.

Edited 2/14/2022 04:46:09

You're an adult now. Congratulations!

Do you feel smarter?

Do you remember me?

You're an adult now. Congratulations!

Do you feel smarter?

Do you remember me?

I create diplos once every, eh, month or so? If you want to, you can PM me and subscribe to my diplomacy games. I think when mega games cost are cut, and custom scenarios are enabled for them, it will unlock way more possibilities with diplo games.