if you have actual examples of where this rule caused problems and want to point them out great

but without those examples, given your reputation for pushing through questionable scams I’m not sure why we’d want to take a risk with a change like this

@Clucky: The primary example I had in mind is that this DoV failed 10-0 due to a core rules bug (that has since been fixed), and had had AGAINST vote earlier in the voting – it’s quite plausible to imagine that it might have failed 9-1.

I also would gain no benefit from introducing a core rules scam, because the Fair Play rules prevent you exploiting those to win.

In this case though, DEFs still get treated as For or Against if the player or emperor uses it and the circumstances around it?

Like if someone was a bit iffy on a win?

one example that is four years old is hardly to me a reason to change something

wouldn’t this potentially make it easier for people to send out dubiously legal DOVs, knowing if they are marked as illegal they can always just try again?

@Raven1207:

I had to check, but “When the Imperator has a valid Vote other than VETO on a Votable Matter, then all votes of DEFERENTIAL on that Votable Matter are instead considered to be valid and the same as the Imperator’s Vote for the purposes of other rules unless otherwise specified.” seems to apply in this case too.

I think that’s probably correct – if players are saying “I trust the Emperor to decide this” then it’s probably OK for the Emperor’s judgement to determine it.

@Clucky:

I believe that the lockout should be based on whether or not the player has won, not on whether or not the DoV was legal. If someone wins, but can’t declare victory due to the DoV system being broken, I don’t see a reason from preventing them making another attempt to declare victory once DoVs are fixed.

Note that under the current rule, attempting to make a DoV that’s illegal because you don’t think you’ve won probably doesn’t create a lockout, because the rules prevent it having any effect on the ruleset or gamestate. In any case, this proposal doesn’t significantly change that case because such a DoV is unlikely to attract FOR votes, and especially not enough to outweigh the AGAINST vote count.

My inclination is to liberalise further and get rid of the lockout entirely.

This is strictly better than the status quo so I’ll give it a tepid

I’d very much disagree that a DoV being regarded as illegal would trigger “a DoV is Failed”. If a DoV has been declared illegal mid-vote by some other rule, or was never legal in the first place, then it never passes through the “may be Failed by any Admin if” process. It’s been unsuccessful, a misfortune, a calamity, but it has not been Failed as the core ruleset defines Failing.

Which would mean this just covers the (vanishingly?) rare situation where a DoV times out without a quorum of support, but also without a quorum of disapproval. If we’re trying to make a call on whether such a DoV was speculative, asking “did any single player have strong reason to question it” seems more likely to give us that answer, than measuring just how closely balanced a sparsity of votes were.

@Kevan All valid points, but for me the core question of this proposal is: are there any circumstances in which it would feel reasonable for a player to have their DoV failed, to then have another legitimate claim at victory, but not to be able to declare for the lockout period? If no then this at least loosens the tie.

It’s a bit of an overworked example at this stage, but I think back to my DoV at the end of MadisonSilver I. The thing that gets lost in the discussion of that DoV is that I was the clear merit leader at the time, and that if I wasn’t winning when the DoV was posted then it would have been trivial to fix. I think I may have been the only person actively trying to win that dynasty… I hypothesise that part of the reason why it passed is because voters knew that I was going to win but didn’t want to wait for the 5 day lockout to elapse before it could happen. And why would they? Passing a CfJ and then another DoV would have been more correct but people follow desire paths and when you offer them a shortcut to their preferred outcome they’ll often take it. Thus a bad DoV passed badly.

The five-day lockout has not been protecting us from anything real for quite some time; I’ll propose to repeal it when I’m not in the first week of a new dynasty but for now I’m happy to see it slightly neutered.

The reasonable circumstance would be something like Cuddlebeam/Madrid’s speculative Hail Marys, eg. “Risky instawin but I’m going for it because the cash cost to do it is cheap. Let’s go.” As a player they didn’t seem to see any downside to locking the Nomic for 12+ hours with a speculative DoV, sometimes even unidling to lob one in. Limiting DoVs gives a cost to making a weakly speculative one: you may regret it if a much more legitimate route to victory becomes apparent afterwards, and you alone can’t use it. But this is a bigger question on whether to repeal the lockout.

For changing the head count: DoVs often get some level of shrug support from players who haven’t really been following the game but are being friendly or want the dynasty to end. I don’t think we should enact a change to say that these can cancel out objections 1-for-1, when we’re trying to determine whether a DoV was meaningfully contested. Especially not in a situation where the DoV has somehow timed out below quorum: this will usually mean that there was a critical chunk of thoughtfully uncommitted players (like in the recent, decisive Snakes and Ladders CfJ) and you’re just weighing up the decisive and uninformed votes.

Oops, I had already voted before. The new EVC highlight is nice!

I believe that Kevan makes several good points. Reading the examples of controversial DoVs in this chat and on the wiki leads me to believe that this portion of the current safeguard does not require changing.

@Kevan: Oddly, illegal votable matters can be failed despite being illegal, as long as they were legal once:

“Any post that is or is made illegal as a result of an infraction against any of the prohibitions set out in this rule, except for a votable matter’s illegal resolution that has been overturned, continues to be an Official Post but may no longer have any effect on the ruleset or the gamestate. If it is a Votable Matter then it is Unpopular, regardless of any other performance against criteria set out in the core rules. When it is resolved it may be marked as Illegal by the resolving admin.”

The “continues to be an Official Post” part of the rule is what makes it failable.

If the reason a person was denied victory was because the DOV system was broken, we already have a way to fix that. The CFJ process works just fine.

But it lets us err on the side of keeping the initial intent of preventing people from trying to push out questionable DOVs with no consequences.

With this, we’d instead have to do CfJs specially to go “yeah this person shouldn’t get to post a DOV again” which is far more mean spirited than “yeah this person should get to post a DOV again”

also this would meaningfully change the scenario where a DOV fails say 4-4. To me, there really shouldn’t be much of a difference if your DOV fails 3-5 or if your DOV fails 4-4. In that regard, its worthwhile reconsidering if the 5 day timeout is still the right approach to take or not. Maybe we just cut it down to 3 or something.

I’m with Kevan here

The against arguments are winning me over here. I’ll propose reducing the timeout as suggested though.