On Sat, 2022-03-26 at 02:44 -0500, secretsnail9 via agora-discussion wrote: > I personally don't know why you wouldn't point a finger at a crime > while the option for it to be forgivable exists.
A point of Agoran history: at some times in Agora's history, there hasn't been a Blot equivalent, with punishments instead having their own effects (e.g. they might halve voting power for a month, or deregister a player). One of the standard punishments has been the apology, which had pretty much its modern form, except that there was no alternative (you couldn't just take the Blots to avoid apologising): you had to apologise (or else breach the rules again). For some players, having to apologise was the most feared of all Agoran penalties; players had been known to go to absurd lengths to avoid it, disproportionately to how minor the penalty seemed. I imagine that in the current version of the rules, these players would happily take the Blots rather than try to have them forgiven. All this means that a forgivable Blot fine might well end up being a larger penalty than it seems. (Currently the smallest nonzero penalty is a forgivable 1-Blot fine; and it takes a somewhat nontrivial amount of effort to either write the apology or to trade for a BBG.) Perhaps, if we're going to move to a culture of pervasive Finger-pointing, we need to add smaller nonzero penalties, or maybe even some sort of equity court (so that the punishment can fit the crime). ==== A side note: I can't think of a time at which Agora ever had a culture of punishing minor/inconsequential offences. There have been times at which players felt that it might be a good thing to increase the rate at which crimes were punished, but even after voting in Rules encouragement, lots of minor offences typically slipped by anyway. At one time, there was even an office (the Pariah) with no duties, and the purpose of "players should nitpick every action of this officer's actions, trying to enforce punishments on even the most minor breaches" – the incentive to hold it was that if you managed to expunge a sufficient number of net Blot-equivalents while holding it (i.e. you cleared Blots faster than you gained them), you won the game. It's an interesting quirk of history that there seemed to be a reluctance to Blot the office regardless; CFJ 2864 is probably the best example of the sort of thing that happened. As Agora thrives upon occasional shakeups, it might well be interesting to see what the consequences of mass finger-pointing would be (I somewhat fear they'd become "nobody dares to take any offices", but we could compensate for that by increasing officer pay so that they could afford all the BBGs). This would likely need an agreement among players that it would be an interesting experiment to try, though (and probably the introduction of sufficiently minor penalties to match the minor crimes!). -- ais523
