To revert or uphold?
Something which perennially seems to lead to arguments is what to do when there’s been a mistake (by which I mean, someone inadvertently doing something that wasn’t permitted/possible according to the rules). I think it would be worth having a discussion about the correct course of action in this respect, in the hope of pre-empting those arguments in the future.
Some opinions on the matter that each seem to be held by at least one player (some but not all of these are opinions that I personally hold, and some of them contradict each other), as starting points for discussion:
a) If a mistake was made sufficiently recently, it should be reverted, as should everything that depended on it. This reversion can normally be done by editing gamestate trackers directly.
b) If a mistake was made sufficiently long ago that players have already based actions on the mistaken gamestate, reversions should only be done via CFJ, not via reverting all the actions since.
c) If a mistake was made sufficiently long ago that players have already based actions on the mistaken gamestate, but is still recent enough to fix, the gamestate trackers should be reverted immediately (together with a note of what happened) in order to prevent the problem getting worse (potentially to the point where a revert is infeasible).
d) Reverted mistakes are considered never to have happened – in particular, there was no period of time during which the mistake was actually part of the gamestate.
e) If a mistake was not made recently, the effects of that mistake should be upheld by CFJ.
f) If a mistake was made a long time ago, it should be ignored, and we should play on as though it didn’t occur.
g) If a mistake was made a very long time ago, the effects of that mistake should be upheld by CFJ, but there is no urgency to do so – we can fix it next dynasty as easily as we can fix it this dynasty.
h) If a mistake was made which had catastrophic effects (e.g. making it impossible to enact proposals or CFJs), it is important to revert rather than uphold that mistake, no matter how long ago it happened – the fact that it was technically illegal is a helpful excuse to revert those catastrophic effects and play on from a less broken gamestate.
i) If players disagree as to whether something was done in error / illegally or not, then it is a good idea to uphold or revert it explicitly by CFJ, in order that everyone agrees on the resulting gamestate – even if a majority of players have a consensus as to what happened.
I think it would be helpful to reduce friction if we came to a consensus about guidelines for when to revert a mistake, when to uphold it, and what mechanism to use to to revert/uphold it – in particular, this would be a useful guide for “neutral” CFJ voters, to help them decide which side to back when this sort of argument gets contentious (which would reduce the amount of contention, because it would make it much more predictable which side of an argument would win).
In particular, I expect (but am not certain) that a majority of players would agree that there’s some sort of fuzzy boundary between actions which are too new to uphold by default, and actions that are too old to revert by default (possibly with a grey area in between). I think it would be nice to get some sort of informal consensus about where that boundary is.
I’m making this post to try to get a spread of opinions on what people think the correct course of action is in this sort of situation in the abstract, and ideally a consensus (probably not unanimous agreement, but some sort of widespread agreement). If we get such a consensus, we can codify it into the rules, in order to help new players understand what the social expectations are, and in order to help existing players who are in the minority to recognise that they’re in the minority, and avoid performing actions that will annoy everyone else.
Josh: Observer he/they
I’ll respond to this in more depth in a sec but 👍 for the approach.