On Fri, 2021-06-04 at 15:46 +0000, Falsifian via agora-business wrote: > I grant one Victory Point to myself (using my Legacy focus). > > I pay a set of 4 Victory Cards to gain 10 Victory Points. > > For the sole purpose of transferring the Trust (as defined under the > Obstructive Pooling contract), I transfer 8 Victory Points to ATMunn. > > I transfer 8 Victory Points to the Obstructive Pooling contract, > thereby gaining 80 Decipoints. > > As allowed by the Obstructive Pooling contract, I act on ATMunn's > behalf to transfer 8 Victory Points from ATMunn to myself. > > If my math is right, I now have 23 Victory Points, ATMunn has 0, and > the next-highest player balance is 3. > > I Take Over the Economy.
I was sure that Obstructive Pooling was a scam, but couldn't see it. It turns out that there is indeed a scam in the contract (which wasn't in the original version of the contract, but rather was added by the amendment, making it much harder to spot; I know I looked at the original version of the contract, but not at the amendment). The quoted message demonstrates how it works. I was wrong about the aim of the scam, though. It wasn't to steal Victory Points from other players and use them to win; it was a scam to make the "obstructive" part of the pooling worthless. That means that depositing points made it easier rather than harder for other players to win, because they wouldn't be being held somewhere which made winning more difficult. That said, by the look of things, Falsifian was only 2 Victory Points away from having enough to win in a world where the contract didn't exist at all, so it seems to only have had a very minor impact (other than, perhaps, dissuading people from trying harder to prevent the win, because they didn't realise that one was imminent). Was placing the scam into the contract intentional from the start? A slow-burning scam over the course of several months would be quite impressive. -- ais523
