Thursday, October 22, 2009

Proposal: Vetoes shouldn’t be a reward for the vetoed

Passes 6-5.  +10 to Excalabur.  —Excalabur

Adminned at 24 Oct 2009 00:24:42 UTC

Delete the last paragraph of 1.5 Enactment. 

Add, to the list of bullet points by which a proposal may be failed:

* The Leader has voted to VETO it

.

This eliminates the queue-skipping of vetoes, which I strongly dislike for the following reasons:
1. It gives back the proposal slots early: this is a reward for getting vetoed
2. It makes the queue not a queue, making it harder to keep track of things.  This is especially true if something gets vetoed very quickly: that proposal may never even be seen by a reasonable number of players.
3. It’s aesthetically ugly. 
4.  There’s an argument to be made that votes are irrelevant, so they should be removed, but the same is true of self-killed props.

Comments

Bucky:

22-10-2009 05:11:06 UTC

against

Not this argument again…

Excalabur:

22-10-2009 05:32:52 UTC

I wasn’t here for the first round of it.  Why was this added to the ruleset?  I’m actually puzzled thereby.

Darknight: he/him

22-10-2009 06:22:42 UTC

It was to speed things up, ironiclly.  against

Kevan: he/him

22-10-2009 09:13:16 UTC

I think I also missed that argument. Can we get a link, or a summary?

Josh: Observer he/they

22-10-2009 10:59:54 UTC

For now,  for

Klisz:

22-10-2009 14:00:55 UTC

for

ais523:

22-10-2009 15:21:21 UTC

against

Kevan: he/him

22-10-2009 15:40:12 UTC

for pending further explanation.

I’ve only noticed one significant use of the out-of-sequence failing - the option for a benevolent emperor to veto self-kills and give the proposer their slot back. Which has always struck me as an odd and socially-pressuring middle ground between “wait for your self-kill to expire and learn not to make flawed proposals” and “all self-kills fail immediately”.

Bucky:

22-10-2009 16:32:39 UTC

This phrase has already been removed and re-added at least once while I’ve been playing.

It was added most recently during the Third Dynasty of Amnistar (http://blognomic.com/archive/express_veto_proposals/).  Among the arguments there, perhaps the most immediately relevant is that it reduces the potential for a veto-er to be a jerk.

Bucky:

22-10-2009 16:52:06 UTC

Addendum: It had been previously removed during the Second Dynasty of Angry Grasshopper (http://blognomic.com/archive/reductio_imperator/) during a major rewrite of Rule 1.8.  The main reason given was simplicity.

Interestingly, the fast veto was removed and reinstated in proposals by Kevan and Arthexis, respectively.

arthexis: he/him

22-10-2009 22:36:31 UTC

Oh yes, now I remember why I liked this idea (it was mine!)

Rodlen:

22-10-2009 22:54:17 UTC

against

Excalabur:

22-10-2009 23:54:17 UTC

If the issue is that it costs someone a proposal slot for two days, and that’s horribly, horribly ‘game-slowing’ (which I don’t understand), would you be appeased by giving everyone an extra slot? 

I really dislike the idea that you’re better off getting vetoed than any other negative outcome.

Kevan: he/him

23-10-2009 00:12:25 UTC

I appreciate that speed is a big issue in a small, slow dynasty where only a couple of people are proposing anything, and where it helps if proposals can be killed off as soon as they start tanking. But we don’t have that situation very often, do we?

And yes, I’m also confused by the advantage in being vetoed here. I take a veto to be the equivalent of a quorum of AGAINST votes - it’s useful to have a trusted figure who can suddenly drop a quorum of AGAINST votes all by themselves, in cases where there’s a risk that a damaging proposal will somehow pass.

Bucky:

23-10-2009 00:13:35 UTC

To quote Amnistar from the last debate, “the VETO has usually been used not because of poor wording or such, but either [because] of flavor (in which case I see no reason to penalize an individual) or because the Emperor is a jerk”

With the veto power not confined to the Leader this dynasty, we should keep the veto the way it is lest the inconvenience factory of rogue team rule vetoes outweigh the benefits of punishing ‘miscreants’.

arthexis: he/him

23-10-2009 00:30:27 UTC

I strangely agree with Bucky on this one.

redtara: they/them

23-10-2009 00:34:36 UTC

against Per Amnistar/Bucky

Excalabur:

23-10-2009 01:00:17 UTC

But you’re not penalizing the individual: you’re following the normal rules, just like for any other proposal..  Why have a queue at all, then? Let any proposal with a quorum be decided, right then and there! 

The issue I have with this sentence being in the rule is that it promoted the use of vetoes as a favour to particular players by the leader to get them their spots back.  This distorts the record (it’s hard to figure out what’s going on if the entire history is ‘vetoed, vetoed, vetoed’), and promotes the formation of cliques: which we seem to have a problem with at the moment, I might add.

ais523:

23-10-2009 07:52:43 UTC

When I asked about the purpose of the queue, a while ago, I was told that it was so that dependencies between proposals work correctly. This means that a queue is useful for passed proposals, but not so much for failed ones.

Kevan: he/him

23-10-2009 09:26:35 UTC

I think the queue’s useful both for passed-proposal dependencies and for regulating the speed of the game, and how long we have to talk about things. It’s not uncommon to get an “also, this breaks rule X” comment a while after a self-kill - if we’re vetoing self-kills as quickly as possible, that comment has to wait for the next, doomed version of the proposal. (During the more trigger-happy dynasties, it’s not uncommon to log in and find that proposals have been proposed and criticised and self-killed and vetoed and processed before you had a chance to add anything.)

Wooble:

23-10-2009 15:09:39 UTC

for

Oze:

23-10-2009 15:47:22 UTC

for

Bucky:

23-10-2009 17:50:15 UTC

@Excalabur: I fail to see a connection between cliques and fast vetoes.

Kevan: he/him

23-10-2009 18:31:24 UTC

There’s at least some potential for the benevolent “hey, let me veto that self-kill so you can get your slot back right away” behaviour to favour the friends of the Emperor above his enemies.

Klisz:

23-10-2009 18:42:40 UTC

CoV imperial

arthexis: he/him

23-10-2009 22:21:06 UTC

@kevan: What’s your issue with always wanting the game to move slower?

Kevan: he/him

23-10-2009 22:27:28 UTC

Hello. I don’t always want the game to move slower.

Excalabur:

24-10-2009 01:38:03 UTC

arth: the game should move at its natural pace.  As a player not in the same timezone as the majority of the players (all of them, I assume, I’m in Australia), things have to take at least a day, more or less, in order for me to play along. 

I’m not sure why you, or some of the other players playing now, are so obsessed with making the game go “faster”, especially in ways that don’t make the game faster, they just scrape a couple of proposals off the queue.