Long ago, three add-ons were announced and it was said that you could mix them as you like when you want to play internet games. What a great announcement it was. Now, times have changed and reality is cruel and cold.
Diplomacy will split the already small internet community again. As far as I can see there is a mix of about 50-50 between ppl who play regulr sins and entrenchment online with almost all of the regular players having entrenchment and many casual players sticking to regular sins. Lobby is already messed up as it displays all players in the same window and the same color so you can't tell who's on regular and who's on entrenchment what leads to the usual "i cant see your game" - "you have entrenchment?" - "oh no i have only normnal sins" - "you cant play with me then" conversations you see all of the time in the lobby. Of course, match making has the same problem with showing all started/available games and not only the ones for your current game. Funny that you have to start a completly different program if you want to play entrenchment but end up in the same lobby as regular players without being able to tell the who has what game.
Diplomacy will push this to an even higher level. You have ppl with 0, 1 or 2 expansions (playing Diplo without entrenchment won't work i assume, so the idea mixing expansions as you like obviously died already), so will there be 3 programs you can launch that all put you in the same lobby with 100 ppl of which you don't know what they are playing? Will you have to launch 3 games one after the other to check how many ppl play regular, entrenchment or entrenchment+diplo to decide where to join (if you're lucky enough to get a spot after you launched another program and wasted time just to see theres nobody online with the expansion you want to play and have to return to another game). This will kill online playing, especially since many online players are not planning to get diplomacy as it's current benefits for online playing are not as great as the ones of entrenchment.
Are there any plans or ideas how to deal with this problem? Will diplomacy feature a way to see all games and players with their expansions?
