ais’ behaviur is unacceptable and borders on a violation of fair play and the game’s community guidelines.

This is not how the game should be played and they should be ashamed of themselves.

They are tarnishing an otherwise successful dynasty through this behaviour.

@Josh: Imagine what would happen (given the lack of Hiatus), if I didn’t perform those changes – anyone would be able to make arbitrary changes to the ruleset, which would potentially be a huge disaster. I thus at least needed to close of that possibility.

Because declaring victory is illegal if you are not Retired, then attempts to create DoVs by non-Retired players do not create a Hiatus. I consider this to be a huge problem, but you voted down my proposal that attempted to fix the situation.

There are two reasons why Raven is not retired. I seem to be outvoted on the DICE0 reason, but there is a second: all SingularByte’s actions were performed simultaneously with a dice roller update, meaning that from the second action onwards, a Heist Action (the first action in the series) had been performed in the previous 0 hours. As such, the second action failed, and the others were illegal due to the 24-hour lockout.

I am OK with you performing what you believe is the “revert tracker to match gamestate” action now that I have closed off the potential loophole, if you do believe that neither the “attestable as a name” problem nor the 0-hour problem matters. (I believe that such a revert would be illegal, but that it won’t be harmful to leave the tracker in that state while we debate it. I didn’t revert SingularByte’s illegal tracker updates, even though I could, but rather left them in the ruleset.) However, because actions require updating the tracker, I need to place the tracker into a state from which the action can be performed in order to actually perform it.

Having cooled off a little bit, I’ll say that I don’t believe ais is being mendacious, but this was the wrong way to go about it. BN is, at its heart, a game that thrives on consensus. It’s not enough to be right, you also have to be persuasive. Unilterally editing the ruleset is a no; getting into an edit war over the ruleset is a big no; demanding that you be correct and that other people contort to your interpretation is a huge no.

I think ais is wrong on the merits. But if they were right they would have lost the argument through their conduct, which can move votes all on its own. It is not enough to be right. You also have to be persuasive.

There are no problems that require the autocratic single-handed commandering of the ruleset to fix. There are no problems that cannot be fixed by a CfJ and a discussion. The moment that it was clear that these changes were being regarded as vandalism ais should have stopped and posted a CfJ. That is the extent of the matter; nothing else matters.

Because declaring victory is illegal if you are not Retired, then attempts to create DoVs by non-Retired players do not create a Hiatus.

I can’t and don’t agree with this.

Declaring victory is a purely gamestate action that may or may not be legal under certain circumstances; this is the action that was prohibited by dynastic rules.

Posting a Declaration of Victory encapsulates two things: declaring that one has achieved victory, and posting an entry in the “Declaration of Victory” category.

It is therefore legal to post an entry in the Declaration of Victory category, placing the game in hiatus, regardless of how the gamestate change thereby declared is judged by the players who vote on it.

This is the fundamental principle behind self-upholding dynastic victories. It’s also the reason that the prohibition on posting DoVs purely to delay the game needs to exist.

ais,

You can pin the dynastic gamestate on a specific date and time in a CfJ, regardless of any actions taken after that time and regardless of what is in the tracker. The tracker reflects gamestate, it doesn’t dictate gamestate. There are no actions that could be taken that would retroactively get around that CfJ, and had it been enacted, it would have reverted the gamestate to exactly where you believed it should be.

Your continued edits after it was clear that there was “disagreement” breaks the fundamental rule on that sort of thing. You could have just as easily (and more correctly) detailed your arguments in the CfJ comments.

I don’t like the idea of punishing people, but you let your passion for your beliefs cloud your ability to see the right way to handle this. Continued violation of the basic rules of disagreement after seeing the warning signs to stop is just bad behavior.

@JonathanDark: I care more about BlogNomic continuing as a functioning nomic than I care about players’ reactions to my actions to try to ensure that it continues to be a functioning nomic. Right now, my top priorities were/are a) closing off the loophole that allowed players to arbitrarily edit the ruleset and b) ensuring that everyone agrees on the resulting gamestate.

A CFJ would not have been sufficient, because the power to directly edit the ruleset would have been powerful enough to override CFJs, if someone chose to use it for that (e.g. they could prevent CFJs being made, or prevent them being enacted, or allow themself to arbitrarily fail them). It has historically been quite common, at other nomics, for players who gained the power to arbitrarily edit rules to try to prevent that power being removed from them via the game’s normal mechanisms.

@Brendan: I don’t understand your argument at all: are you claiming that posting a post in the Declaration of Victory category is all that is needed to create a Hiatus? There doesn’t seem to be any rule to that effect. Or are you claiming that posting a DoV is a separate action from declaring victory? That doesn’t seem to fit the wording of the rule, and also would mean that “cannot declare victory” requirements wouldn’t do anything at all.

I did suggest proposing that “cannot declare victory” be interpreted as “cannot achieve victory”, but that was rejected – so apparently the consensus is to treat an inability to declare as blocking the DoV. That in turn means that the DoV does not create a Hiatus unless it is legal.