Call for Judgment: Hey wait a minute
Timed out after 48 hours with 3 FOR, 1 AGAINST and 1 abstention. EVC clause did not trigger. Enacted by Kevan.
Adminned at 04 May 2012 02:53:50 UTC
In The Reactor, replace “the Institution they nominated is Disconnected during the next Cycle” with “the Institution they nominated is Disconnected for the duration of the next Cycle”. Do not Unpowered The Reactor as a result of this change.
Set the Watchtower to be Powered and not Disconnected. Do not Unpower the Watchtower as a result of this change.
If a majority of the EVCs on this post contain the text “I guess that’s fair” and Clucky has at least four credits, reduce Clucky’s credits by four and increase his power by two.
The text of the Reactor states:
When a player influences the Reactor, they gain 5 credits. In addition, when specifying Directions to the Net, a Player may nominate an Institution to be Disconnected. When a Player influences the Reactor, the Institution they nominated is Disconnected during the next Cycle.
Kevan influenced the Reactor in Cycle 12, picking the watchtower (no one disconnected anything via in in cycle 11). Thus, “during” Cycle 13 the watchtower should’ve been disconnected.
Now how does disconnected an institution work? Note that it is different than unpowering an institution:
Whenever an Institution is created or modified, it becomes Unpowered. When a new Cycle begins, any Institution which is not Disconnected become Powered, and all other Institutions become Unpowered.
The Watchtower should’ve been Disconnected “during the next cycle”, i.e. during Cycle 13. It could’ve only been Unpowered at the start of cycle 13, but at the start of cycle 13 it was not Disconnected. As such, it should’ve remained powered during Cycle 13, only to be unpowered for cycle 14.
One could argue that “during the next cycle” to mean “for the duration of the next cycle” rather than “at some point during the next cycle” (which fixes the whole ‘the watchtower is still technically disconnected’ bug), but it was never marked with a * until 10 minutes before the cycle ended so I assumed the first interpretation was the correct one. I even pointed out that interpretation to the Net in my directions list, and he didn’t do anything about it leading me to assume my interpretation was the right one. Given the number of people who still sent a credit to the Watchtower, I can’t have been the only one to have thought that. Clearly SPC isn’t required to point out that my assumption was wrong, but its still was ambiguous, and the ruleset being stale certainly didn’t help.
So while I agree that “for the duration of the next Cycle” is both what was intended and what makes the most sense, I don’t think it is what the ruleset actually said.
Now obviously, half the power of the Watchtower has already been spoiled because SPC posted the list. I’d still like the power though at the cost I paid for it. Seems fair to me to give me the weakened power and just not give everyone else their one credit for going after the watchtower (which hurts me too because of the 96189 Pygmalion). But maybe some people don’t think its fair that I profit of this because they thought the Watchtower was unpowered. Thus I made giving me a bonus conditional.