Benjamin Schultz wrote: >Since I started playing, I don't remember the Guillotine having been >used. When was it last used?
Never used within the range of the current mailing list archives (back to 2002-11-03). On 2002-11-26 you proposed its repeal, on the basis that it hadn't been used in recent memory. It was eventually repealed on 2005-05-15. Its lack of use may be related to the shortening of the voting period from ten days to seven days. Its certainly less useful with the shorter period. I came up with it in a period when we were thinking about inter-nomic war (it was enacted just after the Risho-Agora War) and the ten-day decision cycle was too long when so many other potential-enemy nomics had voting periods of seven days or so. I'm not sure that the Guillotine was ever actually used. In the mail logs available to me I see two attempts. Andre attempted a Guillotine in 1997-09 for proposal 3550. The motivation for this was that the Virus had just knocked out rule 693, which at the time set the length of the voting period. The Guillotine was the only clear way to get a voting period to end, and proposal 3550 would disinfect and upmutate several rules to make basic parts of the game immune to the Virus. (Incidentally, it was to upmutate them to Power=1.5, possibly the earliest proposal to use non-integer Power.) The Guillotine didn't attract enough signatures. When R693 disinfected itself (after two weeks) voting periods were retroactively defined, and P3550 failed 4-5. Oerjan attempted a Guillotine in 1997-11 during the Zombie crisis. (There was a bug in Kelly's abominable Probate rules which allowed the executor-in-probate of a deregistered player's estate to reregister the player and control em as a puppet.) Oerjan submitted proposal 3581 which would fix the Probate bug, but those who controlled several zombie players were naturally opposed to the fix and controlled lots of zombie votes. One of the planned tactics was for the pro-fix players to vote quickly and then execute a Guillotine to prevent the zombie masters voting it down. The Guillotine rule was designed so that this tactic shouldn't work, and actually almost no pro-fixers signed the application anyway. The proposal passed 13-8, after a normal voting period, by the use of other tricks. The Guillotine might perhaps have been used for its intended purpose during the Acka-Agora War. I don't have the mail for that period. -zefram
