First Impression Feedback

[KittyofEvil]

Hey, first off: great app. I've been looking for a version of Diplomacy that both plays and looks nice for years and this is definitely the best I've seen. There's clearly a lot of work that's gone into it and it's paid off—so just to be totally clear, the overlong list of feedback I'm about to write isn't because I don't like Diplicity, it's the opposite: I think it's great and want to see it become as good as it can be. That you've been actively developing the app and listening to user feedback is what makes me feel like it's worth putting all this together. So yeah, apologies for what might be an overwhelming amount of feedback, but this is what I've come up with after playing a few turns.

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Game process

• I joined a deadline game and, as I was the last player to join, the game started immediately. However, because it was only a couple of hours before the set deadline time, there were only 2-3 hours before the first phase ended. This felt very unfair on players who joined earlier and were expecting 24 hours for every turn. The first deadline should be skipped on the first turn so that you get more than 24 hours, not less. (I did see another game start more recently that I think did work like this, so possibly you've already changed this in the last few days?)
• Retreat and adjustment order with no available decisions should be skipped. I've seen on other threads that you're working on this. They do not need to be in the game history at all if nothing happened in that phase - simply move straight on to the next movement phase.
• Currently, the site uses the concept of a Gamemaster, the player who initially set up the game and has additional powers, such as to Pause or Extend the game. As a new player here, the idea of giving one player more power over the game seems strange. Now that you've implemented a voting feature to Draw the game, should Pause and Extend also be opened up to votes? Instead of a 'Propose draw' button, you could have a 'Start vote' button, leading to options: Propose Draw, Propose Pause, and Propose Deadline Extension. The 'Draw proposals' section would then become a generic 'Votes' section where votes are listed with an indication of what type of vote they are/were. Unlike a Draw Proposal, Pause and Extend could require simple majorities rather than unanimity. I've not used these features yet so don't have any ideas beyond that.

Chat

• I think it'd be fun to be able to name group chats. For example, an Austria-Germany-Italy group that you could name 'Central Powers Unite <3' or have everyone except Russia in a group chat called 'Anti-Russia League'.
• My own chats should not trigger the 'new chat' circle.
• The heading at the top of the main chat screen is left-aligned, while on other tabs you have the 'Spring 1901, Movement' heading (for example) centred. This is inconsistent and also makes the icon in the top-left ('X' on iOS or '<-' on desktop) look like it will close the chat screen and return you to the game map when it actually closes the whole game. I'd suggest centering the 'Chat' heading at least.
• Chat doesn't update in real time, at least on desktop: I have to close and reopen the chat. This makes it a little awkward on the occasion when you're online at the same time as someone else.
• Message alignment is a bit messy - when multiple messages from someone else are sent, the alignment doesn't make it clear whose message is whose. Here's what I mean:

Here's a mockup of what chat could look like, inspired by how Messenger does group chats:

My Games screen

• There could be more information on the cards for each game.
  • For example, I want a graphical indication of what country I am playing in this game.
  • I also want to see in which games I have unread chat messages.
  • There should be an indication of which games still require me to put in orders. These games should always be at the top of the My Games section.

Another quick and dirty mockup of some ideas for presenting this information. Note that my player icon (the K) is separated in the players list and given its own coloured ring according to my country in that game. The top game has unconfirmed orders, hence the order icon and white border, while the bottom game has unread chat messages. This is just what first came to mind, and there may well be better ideas for this, but just as a first suggestion:

Find a Game section

• Games available to join but with no players should be periodically cleaned up to reduce the number of empty games in the Find a Game section. Maybe if a game has been up with no players for a day, it should be deleted?

Create a Game

• I think Duration should be the default option, not Fixed Time, simply because it's quicker and matches what I'm used to on other sites. However, that's just personal preference so no big deal.

UI

• There is no indication in-game of which country I am playing. Since I'm playing a few games, I sometimes have to look at the Orders or Chat screen to work out what country I am. There needs to be either some kind of coloured trim on the UI or (more colourblindness-friendly) a flag or name somewhere visible. No mockup for this one as I'm not sure if any of my ideas are particularly strong, but I think it's necessary.
• In adjustment phases, there is no indication of how many units I have versus how many Supply Centres I have. I have to count up my units on the board to find out how many I have and then build accordingly. Changing the SC count to also display units would help with this; for example, instead of just '7' to show SCs, it could during the Adjustment phase show '5/7' to show that I have 5 units and 7 SCs.
• During Adjustment phases, clicking on an area where I am building a unit should cancel the order. Currently, the only way to do this is to go into the Orders tab and press 'delete' next to the order, which doesn't feel very slick.
• On desktop, on the My Games list, I'd like to be able to open games in a new tab by ctrl-clicking (or Cmd-click for Mac) or with the right-click context menu. Essentially, the game cards should act as links, instead of their current button-like behaviour.
• The CSS 'cursor: pointer;' rule should be used for clickable items in general. This is especially noticeable on My Games where the game title, player icons, and the two buttons should all change cursor to show that they are clickable, but do not.
• I'm playing a game as Russia (The Row of the Dowdy Power) and my units in the Orders screen are all given detailed names like 'Army Rumania' and 'Fleet Sweden' except my fleet in St. Petersburg, which is just called 'St. Petersburg': it doesn't include that it is a fleet or that it is on the North Coast.
• The Vietnam War map uses a different art style to the other maps. Is this intentional, to make it look more modern? I like the cohesiveness of the other maps using the same art style (and also really like the art style of the other maps).
• How do I get a profile picture to replace my default 'K' in a circle? Are profile pictures a legacy feature not available to new players? I would like to be able to add a picture or at least change the background colour of my circle.
• Perhaps one for the future: it would be nice to be able to use mouse gestures to order my units on the desktop app; for example: click-dragging from my unit to an adjacent province sets up a move; click-dragging from my unit to one province then another sets up a support order; click-dragging across the sea automatically sets up a convoy with any fleets I have in that area. This is inspired by the gamesbyemail.com interface.
• On the Game Info screen, the text on the right should be right-aligned and given left padding. The text looks wrong on the Phase Deadlines row on small screens. Screenshot:

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iOS App

Notifications

• iOS notifications should lead you directly to the relevant game or chat. For example, tapping 'The Struggle of the Sordid Mountain has started!' should open the game The Struggle of the Sordid Mountain. Similarly, tapping '[player] sent a message in Austria, Germany' should open the chat so that I can read the message immediately.
• The way usernames are used in notifications is confusing and inconsistent. For example, I have a notification that says 'justinsarriot sent a message' but when I check the Player Info screen, that player is not called justinsarriot, they are called justalright - presumably this is some username/display name mismatch? My suggestion would be to sidestep the whole issue and only refer to players as their country, since that's the relevant information to the user and is consistent with the in-app experience: I would rather see 'Turkey sent a message' than '[username] sent a message'.
• I like the channel system of chats, allowing users to set up groups with anyone they like. However, I don't think the channel names need referencing in notifications if it's a two-player channel. Instead of receiving 'Turkey sent a message in Turkey, Austria', I would prefer a notification that says 'Turkey sent you a message in The Contest of the Boorish Noise'. For channels with 3+ players, the current system is ideal.
• Notifications shouldn't be necessary for sandbox games.
• For deadline games (all orders processed at the same time each day), I am receiving notifications telling me that I have not confirmed my orders in the last hour before the deadline. This is frustrating as I can't confirm my orders in deadline games, and especially confusing as a new player as it suggests that my orders won't go through. However, the app should still notify players in deadline games if they haven't entered orders at all. Is it possible to detect if a player has any unit with no orders assigned and send them the 'orders not submitted' notification only in that instance?
• Bug (presumably): I'm getting serious notification spam from the 'You haven't confirmed your orders' notification type. Yesterday I got 26 notifications in the space of an hour telling me that I hadn't confirmed my orders in The Row of the Dowdy Power: 2 notifications (sometimes 3) every 5 minutes. I'm guessing I should only be getting one notification at a time.
• The frequency of this notification type should be reduced: if a player ignores/doesn't see a notification at 19:00, a further notification every 5 minutes is unlikely to help. The above notification type could also say how long is left until the deadline. My suggestions would be something like 'Deadline Approaching: You have 60 minutes to confirm your orders in The Row of the Dowdy Power', followed by a notification at 30 minutes, then at 15 minutes remaining.

Chat

• When I enter a specific chat channel, I'd like to be able to swipe from the left of the screen to go back to the main chat screen, a common iOS gesture.

My Games screen

• I expect tapping anywhere on the game card to take me to the game, but I have to specifically tap the title of the game. Having the whole card link to the game feels a bit more natural to me in this card pattern. I understand that tapping the player icons takes me to Player Info, but I'm not sure how useful that is - the large majority of the time, you want to go to the game, not Player Info (at least after the game's started).
• Bug: all my games on the iOS My Games screen are stuck on showing 'Spring 1901 - Movement', no matter their actual phase.
• I've started a two-player game (The Struggle of the Sordid Mountain) which is on the Deadline setting. On desktop, the Game Info screen says 'Daily' but the iOS app says 'Resolve when ready'. I don't understand the discrepancy - is it a bug? 'Resolve when ready' feels wrong, since it's a daily game where I'm not able to confirm my orders.

UI

• I found the Leave Game button under the Game Info section. I tried pressing it but it gave me a 'Failed to leave game' error. Is there a confirmation dialog after pressing this button? I wonder whether Game Info is the right place to have this option. I understand the desire to have it difficult to accidentally press, but my instinct would be to put it in the dropdown menu accessed by the [...] icon - at the bottom, slightly separated, with an 'Are you sure?' dialog should be enough to keep it safe.
• The Community tab has an ever-present circle, which looks like a notification dot. This makes it look like there is a new message waiting for you in a chat feature, but you can't get rid of it by visiting the tab. Ideally, this 'new' indicator circle should disappear once a user has visited the tab.
• The app should make use of loading indicators. A lot of the time when switching tabs or entering games or chats, I am presented with a blank black screen. The app should always use a loading indicator to show the user that data is loading.

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Inactive Players in new games

Probably the biggest and hardest-to-solve issue is the frustration of joining a new game and immediately having one or more players go inactive. I've joined a few games and this has been an issue in all of them, which makes it difficult to get a proper, balanced game going. Obviously, this isn't the app's fault—it's common to any long-form game website like this—but I wonder if there is something that could be done to at least alleviate the problem.

• I've read that you're considering having a 'reliable player' badge or something along those lines. Presumably, this would come with the option of setting up games that are restricted to Reliable Players. The downside of this is the possibility that a new player could join the app and see that there are no games for them to join, raising the barrier to entry. One possible solution to this could be an automatic process that detects when there are no beginner-friendly games available to join and creates one, ensuring that new players are always able to jump into a new game. Obviously, this would have to be immune from that empty-game-cleanup suggestion I mentioned earlier.
• I was going to suggest a #find-a-game channel on the Discord, but I see that you already have one, just that it's not used. I might try it out next time I want to start a game, though.
• I've played on a site before that let players jump in to take the spot of players who have abandoned. I thought it's worth throwing out as a suggestion, but I don't know if it would be worth implementing, honestly: there aren't many people who want to join a game halfway through with a country that hasn't moved for multiple turns—maybe something to consider one day. It would need to be clear on the Find a Game section that you are joining an in-progress game, not a new one—maybe a separate tab where games with players in Civil Unrest are automatically displayed and available to join.
• This one's the only idea I like: add a new 'Confirmation' phase before Spring 1901. I might have this wrong, but I assume the inactive players are mostly new users who join a game, then forget about it and never come back to the site. So instead of jumping right into Spring 1901, a simple Confirmation phase would precede it: once all players have joined the game, every player who previously joined will need to press a button saying, "Yes, I'm in and ready to play this game." Once everyone confirms, the game proceeds to Spring 1901. If a player fails to confirm within the time limit, they are ejected from the game and the game goes back to the lobby to let new players join to replace them. If you are the last player to join, you would automatically be marked as Ready in the Confirmation phase as it wouldn't serve any purpose in this case. The downside of this is that it would slow down the start of games by adding an extra turn. However, given how long games last anyway, I would personally be fine with that tradeoff if it reduces the problem of immediately-inactive players.

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Okay, that's all I got—hope it helps. As you can tell, I'm kind of invested in this app now...

[JorenC]

Wow. Long post! I'll reply in-line.

Hey, first off: great app. I've been looking for a version of Diplomacy that both plays and looks nice for years and this is definitely the best I've seen. There's clearly a lot of work that's gone into it and it's paid off—so just to be totally clear, the overlong list of feedback I'm about to write isn't because I don't like Diplicity, it's the opposite: I think it's great and want to see it become as good as it can be. That you've been actively developing the app and listening to user feedback is what makes me feel like it's worth putting all this together. So yeah, apologies for what might be an overwhelming amount of feedback, but this is what I've come up with after playing a few turns.

No worries - happy you like it and always good to have feedback! Most of the below makes logical sense - I used to be a UX designer, and a lot of this is in line with my thinking. However, - two (1.5 if you count me as half) developers means we need to prioritize.

Game process

• I joined a deadline game and, as I was the last player to join, the game started immediately. However, because it was only a couple of hours before the set deadline time, there were only 2-3 hours before the first phase ended. This felt very unfair on players who joined earlier and were expecting 24 hours for every turn. The first deadline should be skipped on the first turn so that you get more than 24 hours, not less. (I did see another game start more recently that I think did work like this, so possibly you've already changed this in the last few days?)

• This was a bug. We now ADD the time, so 2-3 hours before the turn would become 24+2-3 hours. Has been fixed last week.

• Retreat and adjustment order with no available decisions should be skipped. I've seen on other threads that you're working on this. They do not need to be in the game history at all if nothing happened in that phase - simply move straight on to the next movement phase.

• This is fixed. Not sure if John already merged it, but should be in place either now or soon.

• Currently, the site uses the concept of a Gamemaster, the player who initially set up the game and has additional powers, such as to Pause or Extend the game. As a new player here, the idea of giving one player more power over the game seems strange. Now that you've implemented a voting feature to Draw the game, should Pause and Extend also be opened up to votes? Instead of a 'Propose draw' button, you could have a 'Start vote' button, leading to options: Propose Draw, Propose Pause, and Propose Deadline Extension. The 'Draw proposals' section would then become a generic 'Votes' section where votes are listed with an indication of what type of vote they are/were. Unlike a Draw Proposal, Pause and Extend could require simple majorities rather than unanimity. I've not used these features yet so don't have any ideas beyond that.

• Yes. And a 'separate' GM that can manage a game, e.g. tournament organisers. We used to have this in the old diplicity, but it was not often used and takes a lot of effort to maintain. For now, this is just the option to ensure SOMEONE can pause the game if necessary. In the long run, I expect this to be abused, but for now it's good enough.

Chat

• I think it'd be fun to be able to name group chats. For example, an Austria-Germany-Italy group that you could name 'Central Powers Unite <3' or have everyone except Russia in a group chat called 'Anti-Russia League'.

• Yes, although I think this is a nice-to-have that will take quite some time to appear. I do think own-player names should always be hidden; this was how it happened in the old client. Will get to it, I hope.

• My own chats should not trigger the 'new chat' circle.

• The whole unread system needs some love - you also don't see unread badges on the 'GAmeCard'. Definitel to when we get around to it (and I'll add this to more things - DTWWGATI; agree, when we have time.

• The heading at the top of the main chat screen is left-aligned, while on other tabs you have the 'Spring 1901, Movement' heading (for example) centred. This is inconsistent and also makes the icon in the top-left ('X' on iOS or '<-' on desktop) look like it will close the chat screen and return you to the game map when it actually closes the whole game. I'd suggest centering the 'Chat' heading at least.

• I (UI focused) have not looked at this yet, will do it. I previously also used colours for players etc.

• Chat doesn't update in real time, at least on desktop: I have to close and reopen the chat. This makes it a little awkward on the occasion when you're online at the same time as someone else.

• This might be more tricky, but likely part of the whole messages epic.

• Message alignment is a bit messy - when multiple messages from someone else are sent, the alignment doesn't make it clear whose message is whose. Here's what I mean:

• Same as above. I'll get around to fixing it when the variant-creator and Android app are live.

My Games screen

• There could be more information on the cards for each game.

• For example, I want a graphical indication of what country I am playing in this game.
• I also want to see in which games I have unread chat messages.
• There should be an indication of which games still require me to put in orders. These games should always be at the top of the My Games section.

• DTWWGATI. Games have 'pending orders' but we changed the confirmation system, so it needs ot be updated.

Another quick and dirty mockup of some ideas for presenting this information. Note that my player icon (the K) is separated in the players list and given its own coloured ring according to my country in that game. The top game has unconfirmed orders, hence the order icon and white border, while the bottom game has unread chat messages. This is just what first came to mind, and there may well be better ideas for this, but just as a first suggestion:

Find a Game section

• Games available to join but with no players should be periodically cleaned up to reduce the number of empty games in the Find a Game section. Maybe if a game has been up with no players for a day, it should be deleted?

• John already has a crawler for this, but it is not pushed live yet. Created a couple of weeks ago. For now, we don't delete populated games yet - but empty games should be removed.

Create a Game

• I think Duration should be the default option, not Fixed Time, simply because it's quicker and matches what I'm used to on other sites. However, that's just personal preference so no big deal.

• Preference. I have a job and like it to be at the same time, because my time is not so flexible.

UI

• There is no indication in-game of which country I am playing. Since I'm playing a few games, I sometimes have to look at the Orders or Chat screen to work out what country I am. There needs to be either some kind of coloured trim on the UI or (more colourblindness-friendly) a flag or name somewhere visible. No mockup for this one as I'm not sure if any of my ideas are particularly strong, but I think it's necessary.

• Nice one. I hadn't thought about this yet. DTWWGATI

• In adjustment phases, there is no indication of how many units I have versus how many Supply Centres I have. I have to count up my units on the board to find out how many I have and then build accordingly. Changing the SC count to also display units would help with this; for example, instead of just '7' to show SCs, it could during the Adjustment phase show '5/7' to show that I have 5 units and 7 SCs.

• Improvement that could work. DTWWGATI

• During Adjustment phases, clicking on an area where I am building a unit should cancel the order. Currently, the only way to do this is to go into the Orders tab and press 'delete' next to the order, which doesn't feel very slick.

Nice point, hadn't thought about it yet (i don't play this game personally),.but makes sense. DTWWGATI

• On desktop, on the My Games list, I'd like to be able to open games in a new tab by ctrl-clicking (or Cmd-click for Mac) or with the right-click context menu. Essentially, the game cards should act as links, instead of their current button-like behaviour.

• Nice touch of love. DTWWGATI

• The CSS 'cursor: pointer;' rule should be used for clickable items in general. This is especially noticeable on My Games where the game title, player icons, and the two buttons should all change cursor to show that they are clickable, but do not.

DTWWGATI

• I'm playing a game as Russia (The Row of the Dowdy Power) and my units in the Orders screen are all given detailed names like 'Army Rumania' and 'Fleet Sweden' except my fleet in St. Petersburg, which is just called 'St. Petersburg': it doesn't include that it is a fleet or that it is on the North Coast.

I think this is just a bug, small improvement. Likely the system doesn't look at named-coasts. DTWWGATI

• The Vietnam War map uses a different art style to the other maps. Is this intentional, to make it look more modern? I like the cohesiveness of the other maps using the same art style (and also really like the art style of the other maps).

• There are more variants with a different style: https://github.com/JorenC/godip/tree/master/variants/. I try to always make maps that have relevance to the era and situation. This is definitely a choice, e.g. cold war is very similar. We will not have 'ugly' maps official anymore, but it also goes a bit by who does the map. If I do it, I have freedom. Recently, CounterInk has been helping make some maps,that limits the style flexibility.

• How do I get a profile picture to replace my default 'K' in a circle? Are profile pictures a legacy feature not available to new players? I would like to be able to add a picture or at least change the background colour of my circle.

• Don't know. I think right now profile images are taken from Google/Apple. Would be nice, but very low in the prio list. DTWWGATI

• Perhaps one for the future: it would be nice to be able to use mouse gestures to order my units on the desktop app; for example: click-dragging from my unit to an adjacent province sets up a move; click-dragging from my unit to one province then another sets up a support order; click-dragging across the sea automatically sets up a convoy with any fleets I have in that area. This is inspired by the gamesbyemail.com interface.

• Nice, but I don't think this is worth the effort. I would like to have a more dynamic menu, and an 'order builder' (Army Kiel. Army Keil moves to... Army Kiel moves to Berlin), which we used to have. For that, DTWWGATI

• On the Game Info screen, the text on the right should be right-aligned and given left padding. The text looks wrong on the Phase Deadlines row on small screens. Screenshot:

• Yeah this is a small bug. We'll likely revisit this text some day - based on the updated rules. DTWWGATI

iOS App

• I don't have iOS and am focusing on Android now. I know that builds don't automatically update for iOS, so updates are less often happening - some of these are already fixed on web. Notifications are definitely a first pass on the system, will get an update. DTWWGATI

Chat

• When I enter a specific chat channel, I'd like to be able to swipe from the left of the screen to go back to the main chat screen, a common iOS gesture.

• I understand. When we have Android I expect to be able to add some system-specifics (e.g. different home screen), this might be part of that.

My Games screen

• I expect tapping anywhere on the game card to take me to the game, but I have to specifically tap the title of the game. Having the whole card link to the game feels a bit more natural to me in this card pattern. I understand that tapping the player icons takes me to Player Info, but I'm not sure how useful that is - the large majority of the time, you want to go to the game, not Player Info (at least after the game's started).

DTWWGATI

• Bug: all my games on the iOS My Games screen are stuck on showing 'Spring 1901 - Movement', no matter their actual phase.

• Fixed on web, not pushed to iOS yet. Each takes time we can't spend on something else, I expect John to make a major release - or update the pipeline so it does dynamically - but now focus is on variants/android/notifications.

• I've started a two-player game (The Struggle of the Sordid Mountain) which is on the Deadline setting. On desktop, the Game Info screen says 'Daily' but the iOS app says 'Resolve when ready'. I don't understand the discrepancy - is it a bug? 'Resolve when ready' feels wrong, since it's a daily game where I'm not able to confirm my orders.

• This is because the iOS does not gets updated for each small update dynamically. Eventually the web should become the iOS version, but we're releasing updates daily now, so there is some lag. Eventually we won't update so frequentl anymore and the parity should be less of an issues. Fixed on web, when we improved the fixed-time logic.

UI

• I found the Leave Game button under the Game Info section. I tried pressing it but it gave me a 'Failed to leave game' error. Is there a confirmation dialog after pressing this button? I wonder whether Game Info is the right place to have this option. I understand the desire to have it difficult to accidentally press, but my instinct would be to put it in the dropdown menu accessed
  by the [...] icon - at the bottom, slightly separated, with an 'Are you sure?' dialog should be enough to keep it safe.

• I already updatd this slightly once but John had some good points on my PR. Will get another pass - DTWWGATI.

• The Community tab has an ever-present circle, which looks like a notification dot. This makes it look like there is a new message waiting for you in a chat feature, but you can't get rid of it by visiting the tab. Ideally, this 'new' indicator circle should disappear once a user has visited the tab.

• Yes, but it's also a trick to get people to actually visit the discord. We used to have 100s of players, the community is rebuilding. Will get changed later, but not high thing. Also, made on first pass.

• The app should make use of loading indicators. A lot of the time when switching tabs or entering games or chats, I am presented with a blank black screen. The app should always use a loading indicator to show the user that data is loading.

• Yeah. DTWWGATI

Inactive Players in new games

Probably the biggest and hardest-to-solve issue is the frustration of joining a new game and immediately having one or more players go inactive. I've joined a few games and this has been an issue in all of them, which makes it difficult to get a proper, balanced game going. Obviously, this isn't the app's fault—it's common to any long-form game website like this—but I wonder if there is something that could be done to at least alleviate the problem.

• There are two main issues with the community - new/trial players that leave, and verbal abuse. We used to have a very toxic community, which is why Droidippy stopped (same author as the origiainl Diplicity). These are tricky and need to be managed.
• I'm thinking at least to make pre-game chat a possibility (public only) so people can hype each other up before the game starts.

• I've read that you're considering having a 'reliable player' badge or something along those lines. Presumably, this would come with the option of setting up games that are restricted to Reliable Players. The downside of this is the possibility that a new player could join the app and see that there are no games for them to join, raising the barrier to entry. One possible solution to this could be an automatic process that detects when there are no beginner-friendly games available to join and creates one, ensuring that new players are always able to jump into a new game. Obviously, this would have to be immune from that empty-game-cleanup suggestion I mentioned earlier.

• Usually the issue is new players making too many games (try - new game - what happens?) so I don't think this is an issue. This will need more thinking, server-specifics like this is a bit trickier than a simple UI change. We already have the 'fastest start' whcih sort of works the same way.

• I was going to suggest a #find-a-game channel on the Discord, but I see that you already have one, just that it's not used. I might try it out next time I want to start a game, though.

• Ideally we'd have in-app chat, but that seems to be reinventing the wheel, and a large part of the Dip community lives on discord. I think most 'pro' players use different discord servers (there are MANY) to organise games, then use private links there to have players to join. There is a discrepancy between players:
• Newbies who try the game
• Onlines who play strangers
• Pro/Friends who are very particular with whom they play with.
  We need to cater to all three.

• I've played on a site before that let players jump in to take the spot of players who have abandoned. I thought it's worth throwing out as a suggestion, but I don't know if it would be worth implementing, honestly: there aren't many people who want to join a game halfway through with a country that hasn't moved for multiple turns—maybe something to consider one day. It would need to be clear on the Find a Game section that you are joining an in-progress game, not a new one—maybe a separate tab where games with players in Civil Unrest are automatically displayed and available to join.

• Yeah, super nice, but very complex. My preference would be to make LLM-powered bots, this is also my work now so it's an interesting test case. I don't expect either of these soon, but I think that might be easier. Since we don't have a forum, 'finding' someone is hard if there is no in-game chat or forum functionality, and that is a huge investment. Bots would help 'newbies' and randoms' AND give additional value to players who liek to play (and more importantly, is hugely more fun to work on for me).

• This one's the only idea I like: add a new 'Confirmation' phase before Spring 1901. I might have this wrong, but I assume the inactive players are mostly new users who join a game, then forget about it and never come back to the site. So instead of jumping right into Spring 1901, a simple Confirmation phase would precede it: once all players have joined the game, every player who previously joined will need to press a button saying, "Yes, I'm in and ready to play this game." Once everyone confirms, the game proceeds to Spring 1901. If a player fails to confirm within the time limit, they are ejected from the game and the game goes back to the lobby to let new players join to replace them. If you are the last player to join, you would automatically be marked as Ready in the Confirmation phase as it wouldn't serve any purpose in this case. The downside of this is that it would slow down the start of games by adding an extra turn. However, given how long games last anyway, I would personally be fine with that tradeoff if it reduces the problem of immediately-inactive players.

• We had this, called 'muster'. Might someday come back. It was notorious for getting large-player games (24 people) to ever start, because ALWAYS someone forgot. Maybe.

Okay, that's all I got—hope it helps. As you can tell, I'm kind of invested in this app now...
Perfect! A lot of DTWWGATI, because most of this is known and wanted, but free time/free resources/family and friends handle it down. I already feel John is doing A LOT, and i'm not always helping adding random bugs :D.

If you know how to develop, come help!

[KittyofEvil]

Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed reply! I understand that the app is developed (for free!) by a small team of people with other life commitments, and you've a long list of existing jobs already, so I hope that my feedback came across as suggestions, not demands—I know how time consuming development is.

Nothing much to add to any of your responses, just happy to hear that you're working on things and open to feedback. Only suggestion would be that if the Muster phase has caused issues in the past, perhaps it could be an option during game creation, activated by a checkbox.

In theory, I am a developer (if only a lowly front-end web developer), so there may be some things I could contribute on the code side, though not to the extent you and John do . From a quick look, it seems like the app is built in React? In which case, I may be able to get my head around it if I find the time to sit down and spend some time on it.

[JorenC]

Awesome! If you want to join, join our discord, and we can help get you set up - if you want to contribute