This adds more subjectivity under the guise of removing it, as instead of an actor self-assessing their motivation now others have to assess the motivation of the poster from without.

Attempting to eliminate subjectively is a fool’s errand.

@Josh: Well, this reduces the need to make the assessment at all, because it no longer has any impact on anything other than providing guidelines for voting.

Under the present ruleset, if someone makes a DoV without believing they’ve won, the DoV is not valid and does not create a Hiatus; and if someone makes a CFJ without there being an active disagreement or a matter that urgently needs attention, the CFJ is invalid and doesn’t change the ruleset if it passes.

After the change, it’s objective whether or not a CFJ or DoV has passed correctly, and any disputes are handled via Fair Play or via voting against the CFJ.

Feels to me this is fixing problems that don’t exist. Haven’t seen issues before with people trying to claim a DoV or CfJ isn’t valid for overly subjective reasons

The “other Nomicers generally believe them to have achieved victory” is an even looser piece of subjectivity, for being balanced upon one player’s subjective understanding of other players’ subjective understandings.

Is it intentional that it would allow me to DoV based on a gamestate that I knew to be invalid, if I thought that the current player group were “generally” too inattentive or bored to work out that it was invalid?

@Kevan: sort-of yes; if someone does that in the current ruleset then we have no way to tell, and yet the dynasty doesn’t end and we don’t get the auto-uphold, and I consider that a worse outcome than getting a DoV through on the inattention. Or in other words, I consider that mildly undesirable, but less undesirable than the ruleset’s current reaction to that.

The clause was intended for situations where a player is not sure that their own win is valid, but where the victory attempt ends the dynastic gameplay and the other players are waiting for the DoV to be posted. (In Raven’s dynasty recently, I wasn’t convinced that my own win attempt had worked, although luckily it got upheld by CFJ before the DoV was posted and I was able to post the DoV based on the uphold. If the other players consider the win attempt uncontroversial enough that a CFJ isn’t required, then it would be very weird to post a CFJ in order to be able to post the DoV, rather than just posting the DoV directly and having the discussion there.)

In general, I a) miss rules sufficiently often, b) often interpret the ruleset differently enough from other players, and c) worry often enough about historical gamestate breakage that I am rarely 100% certain that my own wins are valid – there’s always the risk that everyone missed something that caused the win to not count. (I’m the sort of person who semi-routinely worries about things like “what if the CFJ system hasn’t worked properly for years?”, but have mostly been mentally glossing over it in order to avoid creating excessive friction, as most players don’t care about that sort of thing. It’s only recently that I started to realise that my own beliefs about such things might actually have a gameplay effect that stops dynasties ending correctly.) In such situations, I am not convinced that I can legally make a DoV without something like the clause in question. (Generally I get around this by making the DoVs during a rush of emotion after pulling off a winning move, where I’m not thinking so much and thus have more of a chance of believing, for a moment, that all is well. But I generally start to have doubts shortly after the DoV is posted, no matter how uncontroversial it seems.)

Actually, this dynasty makes another good example of this sort of thing, probably better than the ones I discussed in my previous comment.

I think the rules may currently make Milling illegal (see the discussion here). I’ve been doing it anyway, because the playerbase generally seems to think that it still works, and there’s a limited time to spend the Discs – if I didn’t attempt the action it would put me at a severe disadvantage if it later turns out to be legal, and illegal actions don’t do anything so there’s no harm in trying.

Now, suppose the dynasty ends before we have clarity on whether Milling is currently legal or not, and we have a roll-off, and I win the roll-off. I would not be sure whether or not the correct probabilities had been used in the roll-off (because if Milling works the Equity values on the tracker will be wrong), and if they are wrong then the victory is not valid. As a consequence, I would have won the dice roll but, if I posted the DoV, it wouldn’t work (there would be no Hiatus and the dynasty wouldn’t end) – there would need to be an uphold CFJ first.

I think it makes much more sense to have the discussions of win validity on the DoV rather than on the uphold CFJ before it (and that it doesn’t make much sense to have to post a CFJ before basically every win), which is why I want a clause allowing people to post a DoV if the win is generally considered to have worked, even if the person winning has doubts. Additionally, the uphold CFJ couldn’t even legally be posted until the dice roll (because the matter wouldn’t require “urgent attention” until then, and the players wouldn’t have been “actively” disagreeing about the ruleset interpretation).

  I don’t really think this is a problem. People shouldn’t be making DoVs without being sure that at least one interpretation of the rules is able to give them victory and if other people disagree, that’s what the votes on the DoV are for.

[ais] The “other Nomicers generally believe” clause seems worse on that “rush of emotion” line. The last dynasty ended with Josh enacting a proposal out of sequence, then (I assume) DoVing on the basis of believing it to be legal, then being told on Discord that it wasn’t, and deciding to let the DoV play out.

Being able to realise a mistake and then DoV anyway if you think most other players won’t notice it will incentivise more “rushes of emotion” around endgame. If you know you need 100 coins to win, you’d be able to rush the maths of some complex action to make an update that felt right and got you to 100, then check your working afterwards: if you’re wrong but not too wrong, you can DoV anyway.

To me it feels wrong for there to be a difference between “I have 100 coins (I don’t really, someone added them up wrong and I reckon nobody else noticed this) so I buy a diamond ring, game continues”, which I think everyone would agree was a form of cheating, and “I have 100 coins (I don’t really) so I win the game”.

But maybe DoVs can work like that if everyone thinks of them in a more explicit context of “looks like I’ve won doesn’t it, you’d better all check everyone’s working because if there was a mistake I’m not going to tell you what it was”.

For the record, JonathanDark adminned the proposal out of sequence; I just did a semi-incomplete job of cleaning up afterwards.

Oh, I see, I’d misread the enacter on that one. Apologies.