BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

“Any Worker may take any action which Sharebot is legally allowed to perform on Sharebot’s behalf.” -> “Any Worker may take any action which Sharebot is legally allowed to perform, on Sharebot’s behalf.”

As written, anything Sharebot is allowed to perform is on its own behalf, so a Worker might parse the sentence such that they can do it for themselves.

doesn’t the comma stop that intrepreation?

not matching with any idle person seems like it’d be a little hard to check

On the Admin side there’s a list of all Players ever (in the codestuff where we idle/unidle people).

admins can access the list of idle players pretty easily. I don’t think its a huge concern. But better to be like “no don’t do this” than deal with the problem of what happens if you do it and then the non-bot worker tries to come back.

What problem would a same-name player cause, though? Your rule says to distinguish them by table colour in the wiki page, and we have “a word only refers to the name of a Worker if it is explicitly stated that it refers to a Worker’s name” in the appendices.

If we managed to get through a whole card-game dynasty with the player named Card sitting at the table, I think we’ll be okay with a new player joining us under the name of “Sleepybot”.

But wouldn’t “Sleepybot cannot perform any actions” prevent the player Sleepybot from performing any actions?

you can work around it by not typing the name in the behavior

i guess I just don’t see the harm in being like “don’t make npcs with the same name as players”

It’s fine because “a word only refers to the name of a Worker if it is explicitly stated that it refers to a Worker’s name”.

The harm in “cannot share a name with a Worker or Idle Worker” is that you’re asking players to remember to check that every time, and taking the gamestate out of synch (where the robot has never existed) if we forget. Which is all very unlikely, but if it’s already covered by “only refers to the name of a Worker if”, there’s no need to do it.

This is moderately scary to me, but it doesn’t seem to scare anyone else, so

i like robots

I think this creates a situation where being the first to act at the start of the Cycle (or, for the first action, being the enacting Admin) essentially lets you control the bot for the round. I’m not a fan of mechanics that necessitate camping the site to make sure you’re the first to do something.

[Vovix] Propose an amendment! I assume Clucky just went with the two simplest possible Bot rules to get things started, and in the absence of trading rules it doesn’t matter what these Bots actually do, yet.

I expect this proposal to either do nothing or break the game (more likely do nothing, but in either case it’s preferable to vote it down). That said, I’m not that strongly against, especially if someone can come up with a tweak to this that makes its gameplay more interesting.

I agree with Kevan that the camping problem isn’t a problem just yet, but it will heavily restrict what mechanics we can create in the future without causing Sharebot to become excessively camp-heavy.

cov per vovix

@Vovix

see what Kevan said

i don’t think there is anything that terrible that can happen the first cycle if someone steals all of Sharebots moves.

Well, the consensus on Josh’s timing scam has been “it’s a legal play, we shouldn’t have passed a proposal that allows for first-move advantage”, which is why I’d rather pre-empt any problems by voting down mechanics that allow for such scams in the first place.

yeah but like, what is the first-move advantage to making sharebot do a bunch of stuf?

Nothing yet, but unless we rigorously check every new action for “can this be abused via Sharebot”, I’m worried it’ll only be caught once someone does make use of Sharebot shenanigans, and when they do, I don’t want it to be another instance of “I got to do it because I’m an admin”.

NPC bots are actually a good canary for that kind of thing: most actions that could be abused by Sharebot could also be abused by someone asking a friend (or idle player) to join the game and help them out.