Diplomacy World #103 - Fall 2008 Issue

about the date, Dave Webster quickly corrected me to
the correct weekend, but at the end of November Edi
Birsan started a discussion E-Mail that also included
Steve Cooley and Buz Eddy who eventually came to
Bangor and a number of people who did not. I don’t
know what came before this, but presume I was added
to it because I was being very public about planning to
go and helping to organize people to go. This
discussion was around those who were planning
frequent flier trips and needed to know when the games
were going to start. Dave responded to me, and only to
me, after I chimed in that I might be able to help people
convoy in for the event, that the start time would be 5PM
on Thursday, July 24 th . But this response did not come
for two full months, at the end of January. It was this two
month delay in any information, over the holidays, that I
think raised the most concerns among the hobby as a
whole regarding the event. David has said repeatedly
that he had an injury during this time and that he was an
accountant and was going to be very busy until April
15 th . The proposed mid-December get-together with
Rick Desper never happened, Edi got very upset when
his attempt to use frequent flier miles fell through, and I
believe that it was during this period, six months before
the event, that things went horribly wrong. Even that
single E-Mail to me in late January told me nothing about
(a) where the event actually was going to be held
precisely; (b) what the scoring system or ground rules for
the tournament were going to be; or (c) anything about
how we were going to publicize this. Jim O’Kelley (to my
knowledge) was the first to raise questions about what
“Plan B” was if Bangor fell through, he did this at the end
of December. I’ll come back to this, but I think this is the
point where some steps needed to have been taken,
with some deadlines for arrangements, in order to have
the event be DipCon. It needs to be clear to everyone,
David Webster had every right to run a tournament at
the end of July any way he wanted to, but if it were to be
DipCon, a North American wide event, we needed
answers to (a), (b), and (c) by some deadline. The
actions taken too late could have been the model.
The next phase of concerns arose with me starting at
that point in discussion with Doug Kent, DW’s Lead
Editor about how we were going to print information
about DipCon. We wanted to do publicity for Dave, but
Diplomacy World #103 - Page 24
he was not cooperating. We tried to be as diplomatic
and conciliatory as we could be in this. But we saw two
key places that needed to have DipCon publicity, the
Pouch FTF tournament list and our DW by our April 1 st
deadline for the Spring issue. For whatever reason,
David never, ever, acknowledged to me in any forum
that he ever accepted the existence and usefulness of
the FTF tournament list. Any time I mentioned it
(including volunteering to place the announcement
myself) that E-Mail was ignored. As I told Edi Birsan,
Dave Maletsky, and others repeatedly all through the
spring, David did this repeatedly by omission, he never
acknowledged the existence of the Pouch FTF list.
Finally, Doug and I found that he was accepting of the
idea that DipCon should be publicized in DW, and we did
get enough information from David by April 2, 2008 to at
least put a publicity note in the Spring DW. Whereas by
this point David Webster was not too happy with some of
the other people pressuring him, Doug and I managed to
coordinate our two-timing and get something
approaching an information flow started, but it was too
late for many, and as I said, it never made it in the
Pouch list. We were so desperate for organizing
information, that in retrospect I realized that I also should
have been worried about the fact that I had precisely
ZERO information about tournament rules and the
scoring system. But I just started engaging him on what
he was willing to engage on. Perhaps this is a lesson on
Diplomacy in general? My next neat trick was that David
Webster and I both are gmail users and I can see when
he is logged into gmail (as I write this sentence he is
logged in). This allowed me to see (since I am on line
way too much) that he logged on very, very frequently.
He must have figured out that I started E-mailing him just
as he would log on. Slowly but surely these strategies
extracted that the event would take place on the
University of Maine at Orono campus, that we would
have dorm rooms ready to stay in (and I knew that hotel
rooms would be quite inconvenient, so we would want to
use the dorm rooms), and that there would be four
rounds starting on Thursday night, followed by a Sunday
team round. It seemed confusing, as it seemed that the
team round would be completely separate, but hey, at
least I now thought I knew what was going to happen.
Next pre-event issue, yes, there are more, was
regarding prizes from Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast. At
this same time this spring, Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast
were preparing to release the new edition of Diplomacy
and Edi Birsan had done a great job of engaging the
publicity department in the idea that the FTF tournament
circuit was a key inroad into the hobby. I was identified
as the official contact for TempleCon (Providence in
February, which I run, the games arrived too late for that,
so I’ve saved some for February 2009), Boston
Massacre (June 2008), and the Bangor DipCon. I also
tried to discuss this with David Webster repeatedly over
this period and again learned that it was one of the
issues that guaranteed an E-Mail non-response since he
would not acknowledge that I was bringing these game