On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Alex Smith wrote: > I'm of the view that it would be > unacceptable for the CotC to deliberately rotate the bench whilst > knowing there were standing players; that's effectively cheating, > breaking the rules for an advantage. I seem to be in a minority, though; > many nomic players seem to think it's acceptable to break the rules and > either scam around or accept the punishment.
This debate has gone back and forth quite a lot. It is also fundamental. The fact that you describe two distinct camps/play styles is why the ancient Lindrum World split was so acrimonious all those years back (Lindrum "cheated" but legitimized eir cheat via bug, is e a cheat to be ostrasized or just playing the game?). This has never been "solved." Is it even solvable? No matter how many layers of within-game scam you protect against, you can always pull the meta-scam above it. We've always had both camps present, too... Maud was very noted and effective with eir "by the rules" opinions and dislike of scams in general. Personally I can see it both ways: As Assessor at the time, I would have been willing to take the equivalent of multi-month chokey to get the Town Fountain in place (as it is, I legally abused "timing" of proposal reporting but didn't commit any penalties). Ultimately I think the only solution is the society vs. game question... in iterated prisoner's dilemma (i.e. a society) you cheat less often lest you get a reputation as a cheater (we've seen that here, if someone who has hardly scammed tried a single one of ehird's many, people would probably think "how clever" rather than "that's just ehird again"). Thinking of officer's abilities as societal positions, the question is ultimately a political one to impeach or not, to trust to elect to office or not, more generally, to enter into alliances with or not. But also, recently, I kinda saw equity as a way to say "ok, I don't know about within Agora or Nomic, but within these contests, we should all meta-agree to not scam, and use equity to get that spirit across where needed." Still, even if 90% play "by the rules" it only takes a few to annoy everyone. And that's another problem with equity... even if 90% of us "like" it, it only takes 10% who don't like the system to keep up enough Court difficulties to make it practically unworkable And due to the "meta" problem there's no rules fix that can prevent this--- hence me saying "equity is dead in Agora" even if the recent proposal fails. -Goethe
