Unless I’m missing something, isn’t that covered in the last line of 1.2 - ” the Apprentice’s personal gamestate retains the values it had immediately prior to his going Idle. If one or more values would be undefined, it is set to the value new Apprentices receive, if such a value exists”?

I don’t think so. Look at the Partners rule from last Dynasty.

Rules should be made taking into account the possibility that some players will try to strategically idle or unidle.

The more important issue to address is Wakukee’s use of admin powers to gain unfair advantage.

How did he use admin powers to gain an unfair advantage? [Qwaz did not pay very close attention to the winning maneuver].

He unidled himself quickly.

If you recall, I raised this EXACT issue here:

http://blognomic.com/archive/closing_a_loophole/

It was widely ignored. :)

NOI: you did raise it- and rightly so- but your proposal wouldn’t have solved it.  (I’m not saying that my concept is a perfect solution either, but it’s worth discussing.)

Not the proposal itself, the comments. My point was that admins could use their admin status to delay (or, as in this case, speed up) idle requests. I think that idling should still be a valid strategic move, but also that something should be done to make it “fair”, in that admins shouldn’t get a leg up on us normals.

One question, NOI - after it was relevant to anything, you blanked all of Ienpw’s GNDT fields based on his unidling. Why did you do that?

We were having a discussion in the IRC room about how the technical reading of the Victory and Ascension rule impacted the values of people who un-idle when the game is in Hiatus… initially I thought it was appropriate to have all the fields blank, but then we couldn’t come to any sort of definitive solution. Then we all decided it didn’t matter so I didn’t bother changing any of the others or Ienpw’s back.

Those long winter IRC hours must just fly by.

Admins should /not/ use their powers to their own advantage. That’s part of why I voted against the DoV. Admins should be completely impartial. Unless someone’s being a complete jerk.

My preferred resolution to that would be to strip Wakukee of his adminship rather than making a rule change.

It’s not really a major abuse; if I had been doing something like this, I probably wouldn’t even realize that only admins could theoretically do it. I would suggest a fix that treats idle and unidle requests as immediately effective.

I like Qwaz’s idea. That would even things out between admins and non-admins.

Ideally you guys just wouldn’t construct a ruleset which allows people to get any sort of advantage from idling or unidling. Admins need to be able to unidle themselves because the game could get locked otherwise (if every admin goes idle or one or more goes rouge). That being said, if for some reason you decide to making idling abusable again, I think a non-admin willing to provide proof of concept for a victory which required idle abuse would be equivalent to actually doing it. (I don’t recall Wak ever announcing his intent to idle/deidle so he basically did the same thing).

As for the rule in question, I don’t see where it said you change partners when you unidle. So if Alice’s is Bob’s partner and Bob idles, when he returned to the game Alice should’ve still been his partner even if her partner was now Eve. Too late to do anything about that though.

I think most dynasties have some the potential for tactical idling; a “can’t be affected by gamestate changes” invisibility cloak can always be useful in a dynasty where other players’ actions can damage you. It’s mostly a bit cheap and not worth the social retribution, but if you’re into the endgame and it can keep you safe until an imminent win, it’s worth doing.

We should be making tactical idling harder, not easier. People should only be idling when they’re genuinely taking a break from the game; I think I’d support a 72-hour minimum idle period.

My 24 hour notion (rather than 72) was to make things a little easier for a player who idles as a result of timing out, rather than per a request.

Maybe if someone requests or announces that he is idling, the request shouldn’t actually become effective for some period of time (say, 12 or 24 hours) to lessen its value as an invisibility cloak.

Strip me of my adminship for using it to idle/unidle myself quickly? Time wasn’t really an issue, and I also had DC onhand. I could have, with little additional time, just have asked him to do it for me. My adminship really didn’t play any effect in the scam, as an admin working from a completely impartial standpoint would have to do the same thing in the same order.

Also:
“It’s not really a major abuse; if I had been doing something like this, I probably wouldn’t even realize that only admins could theoretically do it. I would suggest a fix that treats idle and unidle requests as immediately effective.”
. This is an excellent idea. It levels the playing field perfectly.

@Clucky: Wak and I went into the partner change thing in great detail over IRC. The issue is that the act of idling causes partnerships to change, even amongst the idle people. There’s some ambiguity about how the rule actually worked, but in two of the possibilities Wak and I ended up as partners (this is why Wak unidled before me, incidentally); and the other made idling illegal, which clearly doesn’t make sense. (-1 for the “No action may be taken which would require setting a gamestate variable to an illegal value.” rule; I’m pretty sure it wasn’t intended to affect idling…)

Several dynasties have had temporary bans on idling in time-sensitive areas. (For instance, in mine, you couldn’t idle during a Voting Event.) Also, there have been quite a few where unidling was punished during the endgame, so as to prevent a new player, or an idling/unidling player, gaining an advantage due to not being penalised by mass penalise-everyone rules.

Yeah, I didn’t actually know what you guys did—I just implied from the provided stuff said here and then later figured out everything was legit.