On Thu, 2016-10-20 at 23:46 -0700, Aris Merchant wrote: > And why would anyone vote for this? What's the loophole you're using? I > assume we have to wait and see, but unless you have a loophole... Stoping > this from working may require CFJs, but the damage can be minimized even if > it passes... Wait a sec. Have you thought this through? Because it looks > like you may be able to jam up CFJs, and I'm not sure you intend your > destruction to go that far. Then again, you could always not do it... > (Sorry if that was badly phrased, it's late. I haven't thought through this > that thoroughly, but I'm assuming it would be better not to let this sit > without saying something.)
This is almost certainly intended to be forced through via some method that doesn't involve other players (or at least, Agora at large) voting for it. People try it every now and then. The vast majority of attempts to do this fail, although it has succeeded on occasion. Because Alexis is aiming for a power-3 dictatorship rather than just a win, it shows a fairly high level of confidence and/or risk-taking in the scam, as other players will try harder to stop it. A good first move in this situation might be to flip the spending power of all offices Alexis holds (Referee, in this case) to 0, thus making the proposal impossible to pend without outside help or taking on another office; this sort of pre-emptive counterscam would probably be unsporting if Alexis were merely aiming for a win, but taking extra steps to complicate the situation is probably worth it against a dictatorship. FWIW, counterscamming and counter-counter-scamming are one of my favourite parts of the game; you don't get the opportunity all that often. (And generally, I value a good exchange of scams more than I value winning.) Note that one fairly common move in a scam war that's not necessarily that obvious is to bribe some of the counterscammers (perhaps secretly) with some of the rewards of the scam (i.e. "if that works, we split the profits"). Alexis' proposal is easily sufficiently powerful to share the rewards with someone else, so this is a possibility that anyone on the counterscam side will need to be aware of (either by watching out for potential collusion, or via actively trying to change sides). -- ais523
