Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Proposal: Eli Curf’s Playthings [Core] [Appendix]

Withdrawn. Josh

Adminned at 22 Oct 2021 16:48:37 UTC

Replace the core ruleset with the version found here: https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=User:Pokes/IdleSandbox&oldid=17574

Replace “A New Realtor is defined as a Realtor who has been a Realtor for fewer than seven days or a Realtor that has unidled in the past seven days after being idle for at least 3 months.” with “A New Realtor is defined as a Realtor who has not been a Realtor for more than seven days in the previous 3 months.”

I’ve always been confused by where idle Realtors count as Realtors or not, and I think adding a new noun would improve things. A ‘registrant’ is an idle or non-idle realtor, and a ‘realtor’ or ‘player’ is always specifically a non-idle realtor.

For some reason EE was swallowing the URLs with the wiki diff.

Comments

pokes:

20-10-2021 22:59:19 UTC

Well, it’s eating it there too. But there’s a diff there if you know how to use the wiki.

Trapdoorspyder: he/him

20-10-2021 23:00:15 UTC

A problem I could see here is that there are proposals in the works that use player instead of realtor. Another thing, is that typically ‘player’ is used for all current active people, then Realtor (or similar) for non-emporer players. In addition, I don’t see in this revision where it says that the Eli Curf/Emperor has to be a non-idle person, since it just says ‘player’.

pokes:

20-10-2021 23:03:48 UTC

I think currently the Eli Curf can be idle, that itself doesn’t make a metadynasty. But I haven’t been around for that occurrence I think.

And I agree, I’ve already soured on Player as being the catch-all term; I think I’ll edit in “Registrant” instead.

Zack: he/him

20-10-2021 23:04:38 UTC

I do not like the idea of splitting “Players” and “Realtors” into two separate things. In my mind a player is a Realtor, and having “non-Realtor Players” overcomplicates things.

lemon: she/her

20-10-2021 23:17:37 UTC

^ i agree w/ zack

pokes:

20-10-2021 23:25:07 UTC

I’ve changed ‘player’ to ‘registrant’ for my own edification, which lets us keep the player/realtor synonym. @Zack/lemon, does that help? We’re still both players and realtors.

redtara: they/them

20-10-2021 23:31:48 UTC

I haven’t had the chance to read through the full diff yet but generally I like the current system of idle players not counting as players, with a few explicitly defined exceptions. If we were going to change it up I think I’d prefer to see something like “idle players do not count as players except where explicitly specified”, but that seems more likely to lead to error than having one blanket list of exceptions. But maybe when I read through your proposal more fully I’ll change my view.

Zack: he/him

20-10-2021 23:32:24 UTC

No, I don’t think a Player/Registrant should ever be allowed to not be a Realtor.

Clucky: he/him

21-10-2021 04:12:27 UTC

why are we replacing the core ruleset?

I’m very hesitent of core rule changes that are just “replace the ruleset” and thus not stuff that can be easily diffed.

against

pokes:

21-10-2021 06:03:10 UTC

But… you can diff it, that’s why I did it that way. The linked wiki page’s first revision is the current core, so you can look at the wiki diff.

Kevan: he/him

21-10-2021 07:39:27 UTC

It’s even possible to show a diff against the current ruleset by swapping in the revision ID of another page.

This is a big edit that will need closer scrutiny to make sure it’s not accidentally redefining everyone as a non-player, or something.

I’d put a red line under “Realtors are active players capable of taking game actions and voting” for meaning that anything that blocks game actions makes those players disappear. There are also silly questions about whether someone’s internet connection going down would mean they were no longer a Realtor.

How does a person actually become a Registrant? “A human with access to the blog who is not already a Registrant may make a blog post making clear their wish to be a Realtor” seems to skip over that, and to suggest that someone who’s applied to join the game and been given a blog account isn’t yet a Registrant.

I think that last paragraph is enough for an against , I’ll come back to the rest of it another time.

And having seen this written out I’m not sure how I feel about it as a concept. It’s probably shifting towards a model where the game has ongoing Registrants who stop being Citizens at the end of one dynasty and decide whether to become Realtors at the start of the next, which does make more intuitive boardgame sense.

Josh: Observer he/they

21-10-2021 08:45:22 UTC

Firstly, I like the ambition and I don’t want to discourage that. I have come to this proposal wanting to vote for it, and will do so for any future revisions, but there are some wording issues, and I have ended up on the fence about the core concept.

Kevan lists some wording issues; I’d add that “A Realtor is idle if any of the following are true:” makes idleness a platonic variable, which I dislike as adding new ways in which the platonic gamestate can disassociate from the observable gamestate seems like a bad idea, especially when one of the criteria rests entirely on the untestable interior mental state of a subset of players; although I do acknowledge that this shifts the concept of ‘idleness’ into a more transitional state from being a player to being an observer.

It seems to remove the provision by which idle Admins can still act as Admins, which doesn’t come up often but is, I think, an important thing to have around just in case.

I think I’d be more comfortable with this if the Core used generic language for player and emperor, but there are some weird bits in here that I have to wrap my brain around. For example; “This is the Ruleset for BlogNomic; all Registrants shall obey it” now means that idle players have to follow the rules even though they’re idle, which has some weird externalities given that there doesn’t seem to be a way to stop being a Registrant. Could I wait until Cuddlebeam was idle, and then get a bunch of rules passed that forced him to vote in certain ways on Agora proposals, and then get him banned from BN when he failed to comply?

against but I’m not against a follow-up.

pokes:

21-10-2021 10:37:15 UTC

@Kevan: re: red line; I see how it’s true from a rigorously logical standpoint, but colloquially I think it’s fine, and the ruleset is already littered with things like that where something else takes away a capability, but we don’t go back and say they are no longer the position that gives them the capabality. E.g., Special Proposal Voting says the Eli Curf can vote VETO, but Malign Emperors saying they can’t doesn’t mean that when it’s on, Eli Curf isn’t an Emperor.

It’s implied that becoming a Realtor also makes one a Registrant, but on the flip side, this is relying on the rigorously logical standpoint. That’s worth clearing up.

pokes:

21-10-2021 10:56:06 UTC

@Josh: idle players currently have to obey the ruleset, they are realtors for the purpose of “Ruleset and Gamestate”. This is exactly the kind of thing that this makes clearer!

Re: idle admins: I defined Admins to be a subset of registrants and not of players so that they can still admin. But this does reveal what might be a problem with the current ruleset as well- is there is such a thing as an idle admin? They’re not marked in the sidebar.

Josh: Observer he/they

21-10-2021 11:11:28 UTC

@pokes… Oh yeah that’s a good, albeit wild, point.

At the moment, Admin isn’t really a class of player, it’s a property that a player can have… It is all a bit nebulous though.

Raven1207: he/they

21-10-2021 12:31:45 UTC

against

Zack: he/him

21-10-2021 16:21:06 UTC

against

TyGuy6:

21-10-2021 18:13:58 UTC

against I also appreciate the ambition, and the diff presented as a solution to the difficulty of this type of shotgun-breadth change. I just like our current, silly, ever-changing term.

I think it’s true that our ruleset is missing a line that defines Idle Admins to be “Idle players that were Admins when they were last Active”.

Trapdoorspyder: he/him

21-10-2021 19:35:08 UTC

against

Vovix: he/him

21-10-2021 20:31:18 UTC

against

pokes:

22-10-2021 16:41:50 UTC

against