Proposal: [Core] [Appendix] Upholstery and Rejection
Reached quorum, 5-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.
Adminned at 20 Jan 2025 03:29:40 UTC
In the core rule “Calls for Judgement”, change
It specifies neither changes to the Gamestate or Ruleset nor corrections to any gamestate-tracking entities.
to
It does not specify changes to the gamestate nor ruleset, does not specify that any attempt to perform an action should be upheld or rejected, and does not specify corrections to any gamestate-tracking entities.
In the “Other” section of the appendix rule “Keywords”, add a definition of “Reject” between the definitions of “Quorum” and “Resolve”:
To reject an attempt to take an action is to retroactively declare the attempt to have been unsuccessful, and to declare that all attempted game actions taken after that attempt were attempted as though that attempt had been unsuccessful. An attempt to take an action can be rejected even if it were originally legal. The opposite of rejecting an attempt to take an action is upholding it.
and change the definition of “Uphold” to:
To uphold an attempt to take an action is to retroactively declare the attempt to have been successful, and to declare that all attempted game actions taken after that attempt were attempted as though that attempt had been successful. An attempt to take an action can be upheld even if it were originally illegal (in which case the retroactive change is made by pretending, for the purpose of calculating the results of that change, that the action was legal). The opposite of upholding an attempt to take an action is rejecting it.
“Starting to build up a corpus of case law” has highlighted a couple of issues in the CFJ system. One of them is that, because it attempts to revert an action that is generally considered to have been illegal, it doesn’t actually make any gamestate changes; the only reason it couldn’t be failed right now is that we have left the tracker in an incorrect state, so that the CFJ can be processed correctly (in other words, the CFJ has had the unwanted side effect of discouraging players from fixing the tracker). The incorrect tracker has the side effect of halting gameplay (we apply actions by updating the tracker, but the tracker is wrong so it can’t be updated correctly).
But the other issue is that, quite apart from the issue with the tracker, the CFJ itself also has the issue of halting gameplay; that’s because instead of reverting the attempt to perform an action by simulating a revert at the time the action was performed, it instead changes the current gamestate to match the gamestate immediately before the rejected action was attempted. That’s much easier to word in the current rules, but means that it’s impossible for my team to score while the CFJ is pending, as it would revert any scoring attempt once it were enacted.
As such, what’s needed to stop the same issue happening again is to add definitions into the core rules that would make it easy to word the CFJ in a way that allows gameplay to continue while the CFJ is pending. A while ago, we added “uphold” into the ruleset to deal with situations of “this illegal action happened ages ago, but we were playing assuming that it worked and don’t want to recalculate the gamestate”. The new definition “reject” is the opposite, dealing with situations of “someone attempted an action I think is illegal, and want to change the gamestate to what it would be if it were illegal, without preventing gameplay while the CFJ is pending”. In particular, it is possible to correct the tracker while a “reject an action” CFJ is pending – and even repeat the action via legal means – because after the action is rejected, that just looks like a routine “correct tracker to match gamestate” / “revert the effects of an illegal action” tracker update. The CFJ rule is modified slightly so that “reject an action” CFJs can’t be failed simply because someone reverted the action in the tracker (and likewise so that “uphold an action” CFJs can’t be failed simply because the action was originally legal, which under the current rules might be a problem if someone tried to uphold an action that some people felt was legal and other people felt was illegal).
With this definition, a CFJ to correct the presumably-illegal typo fix could be worded as “Reject the change of ‘rebult’ into ‘rebuilt’ recently peformed using the typo correction provision of Spelling and Formatting”, and the definition would automatically take care of ensuring that the CFJ would resolve correctly despite tracker corrections and dynastic gameplay that happened while it was pending.
I don’t think this’ll fix the problem of the game having to freeze, but it’s a useful concept to have in the rules.
JonathanDark: he/him
The tricky part is, what do you when continuing dynastic actions rely on the incorrect gamestate? What if it’s interwoven with other dynastic actions that don’t?
Unwinding a situation like this becomes untenable, to the point where the game must necessarily be frozen in order to revert completely back to the point where the mistake was made, or choose to proceed forward with the mistake baked in.
I’m not saying all situations are like this, but I am saying that it’s probably impossible to prevent all game-freezing from happening.