Thanks for this, Aris. Comments on your comments below.
On 10/29/2017 6:45 PM, Aris Merchant wrote:
On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 7:01 PM, ATMunn <iamingodsa...@gmail.com> wrote:
The draft of my long-awaited (not really) auctions proposal is finally
finished.
Here it is in all its glory (not really):
You're doing a thing where each sentence is on its own line. They
should preferably be in paragraphs.
It's because I've written the draft in a separate text editor which does not
have
wrapping, and I'm too lazy to wrap it manually. (however, maybe I will start
manually wrapping more like I'm doing here (I turned it off in my email client
because it was messing up my reports))
Title: Auctions
Author: ATMunn
Co-Authors: (none)
AI: 2
In this draft, numbers enclosed in square brackets (e.g. [1], [2], [3],
etc.) indicate footnotes which are written at the bottom.
These will not be in the final proposal.
Lines beginning with hash marks (#) also have no effect on the proposal, and
are only added to improve readability.
Create a power-2[1] rule titled "Auctions"
{
# Defining Auctions
An Auction is a way for entities to give away an item or items in
exchange for shinies.
There are two types of auctions, Agoran Auctions and Contractual
Auctions.
An Agoran Auction is an auction that is permitted to be initiated by
a rule.
Any rule except for this one may permit (or require) an Agoran
Auction to be initiated.
A Contractual Auction is any auction not specifically permitted by a
rule.
Any contract CAN initiate an Contractual Auction, if its body allows
it to.
CAN by announcement, and text, not body. This will require someone to
announce it, which is good, because no user defined action should
occur implicitly.
This makes sense. I think I'll go with what nichdel suggested, which is "Any
contract or player can initiate a Contractual Auction as described by the
contract."
Also, any player CAN initiate Contractual Auctions if a contract
that e is a party of permits em to do so, as long as it is not otherwise
IMPOSSIBLE or ILLEGAL to do so.
If you make the change above, this paragraph would be redundant.
See above.
All auctions MUST[2] have all of the following:
* An Auctioneer,
* An auction announcer,
* A lot or lots of items to be auctioned off,
* And a starting bid.
MUST would make it ILEGAL for it not to, which isn't what you want.
Try something like "must ..., or it its initiation is INVALID."
Makes sense.
# Defining Lots
A lot of items is an item or set of items that will be auctioned off
together.
Types of legal items to be auctioned off include assets and
partyship to a contract.[3]
This shouldn't be limited. The idea of contracts is that they can do
whatever they want (as long as it isn't protected). What if the
contract wants to auction special status or something? It should get
to auction off whatever it likes. I'd suggest defining what happens if
the item being auctioned is an asset, and leaving it for the
contract/rule to define otherwise. Believe it or not, generalizations
also end up making things simpler, as the rules don't have to deal
with each case.
I guess what I was thinking is "well, I kind of want contracts to be able to
do whatever they want, but I can't really make an edge case for every single
thing a contract might want to auction... so I'll just make them be able to
auction partyship." Thinking about it now, I think this is a much better idea.
Maybe when I split this up into multiple rules, I could just have a separate
rule for asset auctions and contract-defined auctions. Maybe even change the
two types of auctions to have one type defined by rules and contracts, and
another where players can just auction off assets whenever.
A singe lot of items can only contain one type of item.
If multiple lots of items are being auctioned off, the auction
announcer SHALL specify whether all of the lots are to be auctioned as one,
or separately.
E SHALL only do so as described by the Auctioneer.
If the lots are to be auctioned separately, then players bidding on
the auction may bid on any one of, or multiple of, the lots.
Why not just have them be separate auction? It's not strictly
necessary, but it does simplify things considerably.
This was something suggested by G. that I decided to incorporate in.
# The Auctioneer
The Auctioneer of an auction is the entity that initiates an
auction, and describes all of the specifics of an auction.
For Agoran Auctions, the Auctioneer should be specified by the rule
that permits the auction to be initiated, otherwise, it defaults to Agora.
For Contractual Auctions, the Auctioneer is either the contract that
initiated the auction or the party of a contract who was permitted to, and
did, initiate the auction.
If the Auctioneer of an auction is a player, that player MUST abide
by the contract who made em the Auctioneer.
If e's a party, e should have to abide anyway.
True.
If the contract that made one of its parties an Auctioneer of an
auction does not permit that player to specify certain parts of an auction
by eir own free will, and instead as described by the auction, e SHALL NOT
specify those parts otherwise.
What does this mean?
basically "if a contract says that these things have to be this way for this
auction, you can't just make them different when you announce the auction"
I really don't like this sentence though, it's a super messy way of doing it.
The Auctioneer also MUST, at the initiation of the auction, own all
assets that it is auctioning off, and be capable of granting any contract
partyship that it is auctioning off.
Again, this should be generalized. A better requirement would be that
e needs to be able to "give the item being auctioned to the the winner
of the auction" or something to that effect. MUST is wrong, because it
makes it ILEGAL, not IMPOSSIBLE.
Makes sense. Again, see above.
# The Auction Announcer
The announcer of an auction initiation is known as the Auction
Announcer.
The auction announcer must be a player.
Why? Shouldn't a non-play contract party be able to announce the auction.
s/player/person/
If the Auctioneer of an auction is a player, then that player is
also the announcer of the auction.
For Agoran Auctions, the auction announcer is specified by the rule
that permits the auction to be initiated.
For Contractual Auctions where the contract is the Auctioneer, the
announcer MUST[4] be specified by the contract, otherwise the auction cannot
be initiated.
MUST is wrong. Can the contract specify a non-member as announcer (it
probably shouldn't be able to, as this would imply that it can oblige
the non-member to do something)?
That's something I overlooked. I definitely should change that to only allow
for contract parties to be announcer.
# Auction Initiation
When an auction is to be initiated, the announcer of the auction
SHALL announce the initiation of the auction.
In the same message, the announcer SHALL specify the Auctioneer, the
lot or lots of items being auctioned, and the starting bid, as described by
the Auctioneer.
Or the announcement is INEFFECTIVE?
Yes, I'll add that.
If there are multiple lots of items being auctioned, the announcer
SHALL specify whether they are to be auctioned together or separately as
described above.
# Bidding
Once an auction is initiated, any player CAN bid on the auction.
CAN by announcement. Also, how?
What do you mean by how? By announcement kind of answers that question.
Players may bid multiple times.
If the auction has multiple lots and they are to be auctioned
separately, then the bidder SHALL specify the lot e is bidding on.
In doing so, the bidder SHALL specify the amount of shinies that e
bids.
This amount MUST be higher than the starting bid, and SHOULD by
higher than any previous bid.
An attempt to bid on an auction that has already ended is
INEFFECTIVE.[5]
# End of Auction
If, at any time, any of the following are true for an auction, then
the auction ends, and no more bids can be made:
No bids have been made in the past 72 hours,
It has been 14 days since the beginning of an auction,
Once the auction has ended, the auction's announcer SHALL announce
the end of the auction.
In the same message, e SHALL include the a list of all the bids on
each lot, and the winner of eat lot.[6]
Afterwards, any players who won any lots in the auction SHALL pay
the Auctioneer in shinies equal to eir highest bid.
The Auctioneer then MUST give that player the assets that e won and
grant em any contract partyship that e won.
Another place where removing the requirement of what types of things
can be auctioned would simplify it.
Yep. See above, again.
If an auction ends while it is terminable, and any attempts to
terminate it have failed, then the auction's announcer CAN and SHALL issue a
public warning[7] to the Auctioneer, instead of the normal auction end
announcement.
This seems somewhat confusing, although it seems like it probably works.
Probably...
After 24 hours have passed from the Auctioneer being issued a public
warning, if the auction is still terminable, then the announcer CAN and
SHALL terminate the auction by announcement.
Otherwise, if the auction ceases being terminable before 24 hours
pass, then the announcer announces the end of the auction as normal.
# Auction Termination
If there is an auction that has not yet been ended, but either of
the below is true, then the auction becomes terminable:
The Auctioneer of the auction no longer owns all of the
assets being auctioned, or
The Auctioneer of the auction can no longer grant contract
partyship being auctioned.
If an auction is terminable, then any player CAN, without 2
objections, terminate the auction.
Once an auction is terminated, the auction ends, no more bids can be
made, and all previous bids are cancelled.
If the above listed statements ever both become false again for a
terminable auction, then the auction ceases being terminable.
This section is confusing and over-complicated. Why not just CAN?
Haven't you already said that no bids can be placed after the end of
an auction?
I agree. It is confusing, and probably over-complicated too. What do you
mean by "Why not just CAN"? Do you mean get rid of the "without 2 objections"?
That was mainly put in there so the Auctioneer had a chance to get the items
before the auction just ended on em. It might not be necessary though.
The entire last sentence could be removed if you changed
"If there is an auction that has not yet been ended, but either of the
below is true, then the auction becomes terminable" to "An auction is
terminable if and only if it is in progress and either ... or", which
is less verbose anyway.I agree.
}
Overall, I'm not entirely happy with this draft.
I feel like there's a lot of overly specific and long sentences that just
make things more confusing.
Please give me feedback on how this could be improved.
It needs to be divided up into multiple rules. The assets rule, which
I reenacted, is a perfect example of how _not_ to do this. I've been
meaning to split it up, but it's such a tangled tightly-bound mess
that I'm not sure how feasible that is. You should base your writing
off the Agoran decision rules, which are neat and simple. I like the
idea of your proposal, but the implementation is confusing
and-overcomplicated. Look at my comment on "Auction Termination", and
then see if you can apply that idea to the entire proposal. I can
offer some more advice on how to simplify it later, but try to find
the simplest way of expressing each concept.
It definitely does need to be divided. I'll try to model this off the
Agoran decision rules like you mentioned. Thanks for putting the time
into looking at this!
-Aris
