BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

These kinds of limitations aren’t easy to make airtight. I’m not even sure I’m on board with the general idea of it, (Cbeam’s all-actions sell is only the extreme end of the full range of in-game agreements, most of which would be fine,) and so I think banning mantle passing IS the only thing needed.

Yeah I don’t want to aim for airight - that would be too many words - and as you said on discord, Fair Play is the place for honour system rules.

CBeam’s all-actions sell would only be on the extreme end of the possibility space if this was the first time it had been done, rather than the second time in a single dynasty and at least the second time it’d happened decisively in the past ten or so dynasties.

Two things:

1) I think banning behaviours is a bit like playing whack-a-mole. People will keep coming up with ways to break the game in ways we don’t want it to be broken if we reward them for doing so and we can’t put everything in fair play.

2) I’m not convinced that this is illegitimate, provided it’s strictly occasional. I guess it depends on what “full control” means. Is it full control if I can back out if I change my mind later? If I retain an unlikely-to-be-invoked veto over particularly objectionable actions? Etc.

I think the answer to both objections lies in the nature of Fair Play, retara. Yes, you can twist and turn to circumvent pretty much all of the Fair Play restrictions, but they’re there to act as cultural guidelines - areas where a clever interpretation won’t win you friends and probably won’t win you dynasties, either. Yes, there will be new exotic abuses, but the reason for moving against this one isn’t that it’s just a strategy and that’s what we do to strategies: it’s that it’s a particularly busted one, that - really - everybody should be doing all of the time, playing optimally.

Again, I don’t think that anything being described here is currently illegal, immoral or illegitimate - but I think it’s an era in the game’s meta that we should be moving past, and writing that down in the rules - at a cost of a meagre 12 words - can’t hurt.

I think it would be a lot easier to shoot down what makes this deal so easy and largely dynasty-agnostic: the emperor mantle.

Oh- I see that was considered. Hm. I think this would be hard to enforce - how much submission to your ally is “full control”?

Is… a newb who is fairly overwhelmed by the guidance and superior strategy of a veteran and that just chooses to totally submit to their sempai and do everything they say running a afoul of this?

@Cuddlebeam - As it’s a Fair Play prohibition I’d expect people to err on the side of interpreting the prohibition maximally. Your example would be a violation, I’d say, and I’m happy with that - it doesn’t sound like an ideal new-player-onboarding scenario, and potentially violates the rules around mentorships.

It’s still an issue without the mantle: the deal can be made on the grounds that the controlling player is working towards a plan or scam where they can choose who to pool resources to at the end (like the Antimatter Cables last dynasty, which would have allowed the team to select a winner pre-DoV).

It does seem an extremely difficult line to draw, though. Regular team plays are often tightly choreographed for a short time, even among expert players, and as Redtara says, how much of a fig leaf of random non-plan-critical behaviour is acceptable before we say that it isn’t considered full-control sockpuppetry?

We had a very similar thing back in the day with Darth Cliche always being up for a scam they didn’t understand, if you told them when to unidle and which buttons to press. We were able to beat that with gameplay, by remembering to limit the power of an unidling stooge, but I’m not sure what the solution is here.

I definitely worry what “exerting full control” means

The whole “I have a scam, I need you do go to X, Y then Z” I think should be perfectly legal. You’re just telling the other person what to do and they are agreeing to help.

Full sock puppetry for a dynasty definitely is something I think we should try and avoid, but I worry this will either go too far (banning just getting someone to do a few moves for you) or do nothing (if you argue telling someone to do a move they don’t actually have to do isn’t full control)

i think there’s definitely a difference between “here’s the plan, does that sound good? okay, let’s enact it at 3pm tomorrow!” and “okay as a part of this deal ill just do whatever u tell me to”. i think that difference lies in collaboration vs instruction, & to me, this particular phrasing seems to limit the latter but not the former. so im gonna say

Tight coordination of plans often requires instructions. Want to make sure that is still allowed

I’m fully behind the idea of a rule in this direction, but I’m not sure what line is actually being drawn here. Lemon’s “here’s the plan” versus “I’ll just do whatever you tell me to” sound like they meet in the middle, if the accomplice is a less confident player - either because they’re a BlogNomic novice, or because they just haven’t been following the dynasty.

@Kevan If you can come up with more definitional wording that would make it into the ruleset then I’ll be impressed

(Not that this wording is getting into the ruleset either on current form, of course.)

[Josh] It is a tough one.

My instinct is that it might be enough to phrase it as “if your game-action behaviour is basically indistinguishable from the controlling player logging into your account and playing through it, over a period of more than a day” - which leaves space for sudden synchronised-watch heists (which I assume we’re happy to encourage) and Darth Cliche style short-term puppetry (which is bad, but can be designed around dynastically).

I feel like any good-faith cabal would already be operating outside of that - they’d be generally supporting each other’s proposals and backing each other up with game actions, but also throwing in some decoy votes and faked disagreement, and not following a minutely choreographed plan for days at a time.

But maybe there’s more to be said about the role of the team’s leader, and whether the other team members are following a script or (as Cuddlebeam seemed not to be, with talk of having to check with TyGuy before doing something) free to exercise their own initiative.

The day period is a good call, though I also wonder if limitations on scope are also needed

Like just going “hey pokes wanna unidle and help me win? I just need you to go do these two things” I think is probably fine

But going “hey pokes, darknight, cuddlebeam and josh I need you to all unidle and do this one thing”... that probably is stretching what is reasonable behavior a bit

I think both of those are covered by the Darth Cliche angle: if we’ve built a ruleset where players unidling in the endgame can significantly change the outcome through dynastic gameplay, then more fool us.

The second example there probably includes the seeds of its own destruction anyway, by increasing the chance that one of the contacted players will decline, thank you for the pointer, and unidle to help someone else.

on the current wording, since this is at the end of the queue now.

Okay, well, I’m for sale for full puppet mode in exchange for a reciprocal favour, if anyone’s interested!

What do you think of the “indistinguishable from being the same person, for more than a day” angle?

I think it’s also not going to pass, as this thread is full of motivated voting; I think that it has as many loopholes and interpretable edge-cases as the wording presented here, and would similarly, necessarily, rely on definition through usage and custom and practice for its weight; and I think that this thread reveals a desire for concrete wording that will ultimately get Lucy-and-the-footballed in a way that makes me anxious even thinking about.

I guess I also think that too few people think that this is a problem, and that the failure of this proposal will probably leave us in the same position as we had with the Emperor earning voteshare, in that is will have to be spectacularly misused before it gets fixed. That being the case - I think it only makes sense for me to make sure that I’m on the supply end of the misuse.

It’s a Fair Play rule, I don’t think anyone is going to realistically argue that two players coordinating is the same as “exerting full control”.