On 9/2/20 9:51 AM, Gaelan Steele via agora-discussion wrote: > > OK, so here's what's going on: I received a proposal along the lines of > "these players get 100 points. They all win." I won't reveal the names or > number of these players for obvious reasons, but, at the point when it > happened, it was exactly enough players to pass a proposal… as long as > Cuddlebeam's NttPF registration didn't count. To be honest, I'm pretty > disappointed—it's a very early and unsatisfying end, *and* it relies on > someone accidentally sending a message NttPF, which IMO is rather > unsportsmanlike. I have several options in front of me, and I'd like some > advice on where to go. > > 1) I could end the game, declaring these players as winners and giving up on > the tournament. This is the most "technically correct" option, but also the > most disappointing for me and other people that actually wanted to try > playing this. But perhaps the fact that this was the first proposal is a > pretty good indication that the idea wasn't that workable in the first place. > 2) I could do that, then start another free tournament. If I did so, I'd > probably add a rule that exactly one player could win—I think the ability to > declare multiple winners makes a bit of a mess of the incentives in a nomic > like this. This has the advantage of giving the players their (somewhat) > deserved win, but gives us another opportunity at actually playing this. The > disadvantage is that it might cheapen both the tournament victory and > (through the proliferation of free tournaments) Agoran wins as a whole. > 3) As above, but with an entirely unofficial tournament, played on DIS or on > another forum entirely. > 4) Find some way to wiggle out of the win, probably by ruling that > CuddleBeam's registration succeeded. I have fairly large latitude over the > adjudication of the rules, but even so, this might be a bit of a stretch; I > think the two options would be to rule that "public" means something other > than what it means in an Agoran context, or to use my ability to arbitrarily > reconcile errors made in adjudication (I already recorded Cuddlebeam as a > player upon eir first registration) to "ratify" the fact that Cuddlebeam > registered. In some way, this feels like the "fairest" option (again, I > strongly look down upon abuses of NttPF messages), but it is also a fairly > significant judicial intervention. > > Thoughts? > > Gaelan >
FWIW we would've just included 1 or 2 more players if we needed to. This was pitched as a cut-throat conspiratorial game, so it feels more unsportsmanlike to bend the rules to prevent a win than to take advantage of an issue in the ruleset to win immediately... I think giving the conspirators the win and restarting with a patched ruleset makes more sense. We debated several ways to do this last night, and I think the following changes would make a much more robust game: * A 24/48h delay before turns can begin, which means enough players can join to make this less likely. * Only one person can win, as an immutable rule. This would mean the cabal would have to pass 2 separate proposals sequentially to win together (a transmutation and then a change like ours), which ups the difficulty of coordination quite a lot. * Possibly delaying voting until the rule is numbered. This doesn't do much besides signal to other players that *something* is happening, which may encourage them to try to figure it out and counteract faster. -- nix Prime Minister, Webmastor
