BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I’m not quite understanding this. Can you explain why someone who did the Atomic Action incorrectly or incompletely couldn’t just post a CfJ to resolve the issue of “that prevents you from ever again performing a dynastic action or achieving victory”.

The 72-hour timer doesn’t seem to do anything but allow someone to “get away” with doing the Atomic Action incorrectly and hope nobody notices.

It’s to automatically resolve cases in which someone performs an Atomic Action incorrectly but either a) nobody notices, or b) somebody notices but decides to keep the information secret for a late-reveal scam (i.e. “what happened during the dynasty isn’t what everyone else thought actually happened”). It does so by putting a time limit on the consequences, meaning that a mistake will only affect a few actions, rather than everything that happens until the next successful DoV.

Although the situation would be recoverable with a fix CFJ, players need to realise that something has gone wrong in order to make the CFJ in the first place.

Under the current rules, a player can mess up an atomic action early in a dynasty, then attempt to perform further actions which everyone else assumes are valid, but later on in the dynasty it’s possible to notice that the original atomic action was wrong, and thus everything that player has done up to that point didn’t actually happen, which could lead the gamestate quite different from how it was.

(There’s another core rule which exists for the same purpose: “If a Proposal somehow ends up being pending for more than 7 days, it is ignored for the purpose of calculating the oldest pending Proposal, and can be failed by any Admin.” That’s to prevent the queue becoming permanently blocked if a proposal isn’t left un-enacted and nobody notices, as in the absence of the rule, it would mean that all future attempts to enact proposals would be invalid as they wouldn’t be the oldest pending proposal.)

I think most of the abuse cases are handled by a combination of Fair Play (“A Snail should not deliberately and unreasonably prolong the performance of a game action once they have started it”) and 1.1 (“This is the Ruleset for BlogNomic; all Snails shall obey it”).

In the event that those aren’t watertight, it would have to be a scam in a non-dynastic rule, which is also prohibited.

Well, if someone accidentally messes up an atomic action and someone else decides to keep that information secret for a late reveal, it’s unclear whether that’s actually a scam, and if so, whether it’s a core rule that’s being scammed. (Also, given that the scam would likely be used to prevent someone else winning, it wouldn’t be a Fair Play violation; that rule prevents the use of a core rules scam to achieve victory, or to cause someone else to win victory, but not to lock someone else out of the game.)

I’m more concerned with accidental breakage than intentional breakage, though.

[ais] It was more a comment on JD’s concern that this change would implicitly permit the deliberate non-completion of an atomic action; this proposal doesn’t seem to affect the legality of the situation you’re describing, just the practicality.

though I admit to being mildly confused.

I don’t understand why this is necessary, and it feels counterintuitive that an atomic action might legally be left uncompleted

If nobody notices that the action was performed incorrectly, then there’s no problem; and if someone notices, they can and should post a CfJ to either undo or uphold the action

“if someone notices, they can and should post a CfJ” - this is the problem - you say “can and should” but that ‘should’ isn’t anywhere in the ruleset. Players can and likely occasionally will exploit the gap for their own interests instead.

I choose to stubbornly refuse to accept that people will perform game-hindering scams for their own benefit, just in case some miraculous magical quantum effect will transform the perceived universe to match the erroneous beliefs of my consciousness

You could try to legislate to make it so! Put something into fair play about how players should strive to correct inaccuracies in the ruleset or gamestate as soon as they notice them rather thanholding on for personal gain. I won’t vote for it but you never know.