On Mon, 2017-09-25 at 23:24 -0700, Aris Merchant wrote:
> Speaking of mysterious secrets: ais523, can you tell us why you
> submitted the repeal all rules proposal around the time of your
> junta?
> Sorry if I already asked and forgot about it.
First of all, the actual text of the proposal was irrelevant, so I
decided to go for something amusing. (Because Agora is Agora, I first
triplechecked that it wouldn't do anything if it passed; there were a
number of intentional mistakes in it.)
The original intention when I filed the proposal was to make it
possible to manipulate quorum with it as an emergency counterscam (you
couldn't force through a proposal if quorum was high enough). A
proposal like that tends to attract a lot of votes, and it would be the
next proposal to go through if things went badly wrong during the scam
itself. Of course, this wouldn't exactly be a bulletproof counterscam –
the votes on it could be retracted by the scamster – but having bribed
the Assessor, it seemed that having control over two important parts of
the gamestate (the timing of Assessing and the nature of the first
proposal to go through with the scam public) would help put me in the
best possible position minimize any potential damage. (I wasn't
planning to make it publicly known that quorum was relevant until
absolutely necessary, and was hoping any potential scamster would miss
this.)
As it happens, the proposal was distributed much earlier than I'd
expected (the Terrible nature of the proposal, in addition to the fact
that I'd stated that it was important to the scam and the fact that the
Promotor had been stalling other obvious scam proposals at the time,
made me think it would be stalled, but it wasn't). So I adapted, and
used it as a vessel on which to do quorum manipulation; because it
would necessarily attract several votes, and I could retract them, it
let me accurately set quorum to any specific value I wanted, which was
particularly handy in making sure that the scam worked. Even better, it
let me disguise the reason why I was retracting the votes (I could make
it look like I was panicking about the proposal potentially actually
passing, rather than doing something with no apparent purpose,
increasing the chance that people realised that I was trying to set
quorum). This was likely a much better plan than my original one (which
was kind-of half-thought-out).
Incidentally, the specific quorum bug exploited was an intentional bug
that I slipped into the quorum rule at the time when I wrote it. Agora
was going through a lull, and finding it very hard to make quorum (back
then it was based on the number of players, not on the number of voting
players), so it was easy to slip in a buggy quorum rule as we badly
needed one. This obeyed my standard Agoran practice for proposals
("every proposal that isn't an obvious scam should improve the game;
it's just that it's allowed to contain a minor scam at the same time"),
incidentally, it's fairly rare that I slip a scam into a proposal over
here at Agora, because if I did it too often everybody would vote down
my proposals on principle (i.e. "what happened to me over at BlogNomic"
). I decided that passing a proposal with very few votes is the sort of
thing that I'd be much more likely to do than anyone else, and so this
disproportionately benefitted me (although at the time, I was
originally planning to let quorum reduce "naturally" as hardly anyone
was playing; this method with retracting votes wouldn't have worked in
the ruleset at the time).
--
ais523
