BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I’m afraid your Award Ceremony was illegally carried out - you forgot to increase the Snail Fame for being Healthy. It’s a good shot and almost worked, but I’ll have to on that basis (when the timing is so tight like this, it’s dubious to go back and correct something like that like we would normally)

Preparations is an atomic action so this shouldn’t even be legal?

I think it’s legal, the Atomic Actions rule says “When a Snail performs an Atomic Action, they must complete all its steps; they must complete them in order; and they may not take any other dynastic action, or achieve victory, until all the steps are complete or 72 hours have passed.” which doesn’t prohibit someone else from taking an action in between. Whether it should be legal is a different question.

Anyway, I think this absolutely cannot be considered fair play (regardless of what the “official” Fair Play happens to say) and shouldn’t be allowed in practise

Right – the problem with this sort of thing is that it has to be done as quickly as possible or it wouldn’t work, as Desertfrog was only a couple of steps away from resetting Snail positions and causing the scam to fail.

The core rules leave me in an impossible situation, though; I can’t correct the action due to the game being in Hiatus, so legally I have to revert it. But the action involves making blog posts, and that isn’t something I’m physically able to revert. We might need a CFJ to restore the gamestate.

I also (after posting the DoV) realised that Desertfrog performed steps in the Preparations action out of order (resetting Pecking Order should have happened prior to making the Race post), which also probably influences what occurred – the Pecking Order that I relied on for Fame adjustment was not in a legally possible state. I have no idea what rules effect this has – my best guess is that the Race 5 Post is an illegal official post, and thus the race isn’t ongoing.

@Desertfrog: the core rules don’t define what constitutes a core rules scam and what constitutes a dynastic rules scam. In one sense, it’s a dynastic rules scam because it exploits the interaction of two dynastic rules (the bug is in a dynastic rule in the sense that the “Race ongoing” state becomes true halfway through Preparations rather than at the end). In another sense, players may have an expectation (based on the name) that atomic actions are uninterruptible, and if a dynastic rule is mis-written due to that expectation, the core rules might be considered to be at fault (thus making it a core rules scam). I wasn’t thinking of it as a core rules scam while doing it, but it’s certainly reasonable to hold that point of view.

Good timing scam. I’m looking for flaws and haven’t seen it yet.

I’d consider it a core rules scam as well, there are two significant sources of “unexpected behaviour” being exploited here (that the Race becomes Ongoing halfway through and that atomic actions are interruptible) and one of those is squarely in the core rules

Oops, I wasn’t caught up on the comments before I posted that.

If ais did the award ceremony wrong, then it has to be treated as if it never happened. I agree that he missed the timing window in that case and we reset the gamestate to before desertfrog started the Preparations via CfJ. Thats the cleanest way to handle it.

I don’t think we even need to delve into whether the scam itself was a core rules scam or a dynastic scam, except if you just want to have the academic exercise.

Was the Award Ceremony performed incorrectly? If so, that’s the end of the pertinent discussion, in my mind.

The issue of Snail Fame increases isn’t germaine, I think - it can be cleaned up under “Alter the representation to match what they believe to be the correct application of an incorrectly-applied alteration”, as the award ceremony doesn’t require that Fame increases be declared accurately, only applied accurately.

This is very funny and required pinpoint timing. I’m inclined to go For in it. The counterargument is that “For the purposes of determining the ordering or legality of game actions, the time of an Atomic Action shall be the time that it is completed” - because ordering is specified, for the purposes of determining whether an Award Ceremony is due, a Race maybe can’t be considered Ongoing until the full Preparations atomic action is complete. But I’m not sure I completely buy it myself.

@JD, the reason we’re concerned about it potentially being a core rules scam is because Fair Play says “A Snail should not use a Core, Building Blocks, or Appendix rules scam to directly or indirectly cause a Snail to achieve victory.” and “Snails should vote against any DoV that relies on having broken a fair play rule”. I agree that the DoV is still broken even without it being a core rules scam but it’s another potential issue with this

It’s somewhat subjective as to how unexpected it is that atomic actions can be interrupted by someone else. To me, it wasn’t unexpected; I interpret “atomic” as “you can’t go do something else in the middle of this action” (as, e.g., happened in Card II), rather than “nobody else can do anything in the middle of this action”. The latter isn’t a sensible definition as it would be way too likely to accidentally lock up the game.

As such, I wasn’t really thinking about the possibility that it might be a core rules scam until Desertfrog mentioned it.

For what it’s worth, I can’t find a definition of “scam” in the ruleset, FAQ, or Blognomic Jargon page, so it is possible that different players are applying different definitions. To me, a scam is an exploit of a bug or oversight in a rule. The fact that an atomic action that involves touching both the blog and the tracker is interruptible is not to me a bug or an oversight, as it would cause too many issues if they weren’t. (The fact that the rules don’t say “do all this in one tracker update” possibly is an oversight, but if the core rules were written that way, the dynastic rule wouldn’t have been able to use an atomic action anyway.)

Yeah I don’t find it compelling that this is a Core+ rules scam. There has been plenty of discussion in the past about making atomics uninterruptable but it has been dismissed as being administratively challenging; we also have plenty of rules in the past that put the game into a temporary administrative freeze for things that shouldn’t be interrupted, and we didn’t use those. I think this is a pure dynastic loophole in the way that Preparaions are constructed.

I can’t see any good reason not to vote this, for now.

There’s yet another mistake in the award ceremony: This is incorrect: “Desertfrog didn’t update the Pecking Order at the start of the new race”
I did set it before submitting the blog post, which can also be seen from the wiki history, so the fame modifications are incorrect

(Responding to “As such, I wasn’t really thinking about the possibility that it might be a core rules scam until Desertfrog mentioned it”)

This is a misunderstanding, I don’t care whether it’s officially against Fair Play. Rather I think that this kind of scam shouldn’t be socially acceptable (which it apparently is, based on this conversation)

Still doesn’t matter, I think. ais validly performed the award ceremony action; if he made mistakes along the way those can be corrected as part of the clause around correcting gamestate. So long as he carried out all the steps, didn’t deliberately misperform anything to gain an advantage, and didn’t end up with the outcome being invalidated by an error being correct (i.e. someone having a number of Plays that would change who actually achieved Victory), mistakes in the execution aren’t germaine imo.

Hmm… I think whether I’ve won or not is a very important philosophical point that affects lots of other actions this dynasty. Suppose that someone does an Atomic Action but applies the wrong numbers in some of the tracker updates. Is the action still ongoing, or is it complete (with the tracker being wrong)? If “ongoing” then probably all of us are unable to perform dynastic actions due to being midway through an atomic action. If “complete” then, as far as I can tell, the win works. We’ve generally been assuming “complete” during this dynasty so far (there were a lot of actions completed out-of-order in previous races), although I worry that “ongoing” may be the technically correct reading (and made a post to that effect earlier).

@Desertfrog I’m afraid attempting to change the culture of the game is outside of your remit right now. The rule Victory and Ascension asks you to vote based on “whether or not [you] agree with the proposition that the poster has achieved victory in the current Dynasty” - and that is a legal question, not a vibes one. If you want to change the nature of the game then you’ll have to do so by proposal, which is a matter outside the scope of this current DoV.

The relevant rule seems to be “If authorised by the rules as a result of a Snail’s action, changes to gamestate which is tracked in a specific place (such as a wiki page) do not take effect until the representation of that gamestate has been updated to match the authorised change.”, and the relevant matter of interpretation is on “match” – does it mean “changed to match the exactly correct result of that change”, or “changed in a way that indicates the action that is being performed”? With the latter interpretation, the gameplay so far this dynasty works, and the win works. With the former interpretation, neither works. The former interpretation seems to fit the wording of the rule slightly better, but the latter has been applied by some players, such as Josh, and I’ve been going along with it for the sake of anything at all having happened.

I’m not entirely sure I agree with Josh’s assertion that “if he made mistakes along the way those can be corrected as part of the clause around correcting gamestate”. The rules for Atomic Actions clearly state “If one or more steps of an Atomic Action were done incorrectly, the Snail must redo the Atomic Action; for that purpose, the Snail uses any legal steps that have already been completed in the illegal Atomic Action and only redoes the illegal ones”.

I get that gamestate itself could be represented incorrectly, and then simply corrected by anyone, but then how else do we determine that the steps of the Atomic Action were performed correctly or incorrectly?

I’m trying to find how to separate the carrying out of the steps themselves from the gamestate that represents them. It feels like if we take this to a logical extreme, the steps are nigh-invisible, and we just assume correctness and let the gamestate be correctable after the fact. That doesn’t feel right, but I don’t know how to resolve it otherwise.

<Desertfrog> This is a misunderstanding, I don’t care whether it’s officially against Fair Play. Rather I think that this kind of scam shouldn’t be socially acceptable (which it apparently is, based on this conversation)

This is interesting. Such scams have generally been held to be socially acceptable at BlogNomic in the past; in fact, much worse has occurred. (I considered this scam unacceptable at the time it was performed, but was in a minority; my scam today is a lesser version of the same general idea.)

@JonathanDark: I’m in the same boat as you on this one (“that doesn’t feel right, but I don’t know how to resolve it otherwise” is a very good summary of my position too).

I me it’s pretty clear: the steps were “done” if a good-faith gesture towards completing them accurately that meets a reasonable threshold of attention to detail was completed.

Did ais make a good faith effort to “amend the Fame of all Snails according to their individual Race Fame Modification”? Yes, there is evidence that he calculated it and applied the results of his calculation to the gamestate.

All subsequent steps seem to have been carried out uncontroversially.

If his calculations were incorrect that doesn’t invalidate the fact that the step took place.

If our question is game culture, I would also rather be a game that accepts that in complex action chains occasionally an admin error will take place, and that it doesn’t necessarily involaidate outcomes - if, in Monopoly, a player won the game but it emerged that in their last turn they’d taken too little change so their total amount of money was slightly light, would you argue that that invalidated the game? I also think that disqualifying a DoV on such narrow, legalistic grounds is much, much worse than allowing a clever scam to go through.

I think that the ruleset does make contradictory statements about this, but do not find that any of them rise to the level of convincing me that ais has not substantively achieved Victory in this dynasty.

Hmm… let’s take a concrete example: DesertFrog made the same mistake as me when performing the Race 4 Award Ceremony, and didn’t personally correct the Fame gains (rather, it was me who performed that correction) – that’s actually part of the reason I got this one wrong, as I was looking at the last one as a model. Does that mean that the Race 4 Bucket List post is illegal, and thus that Race 4 is still ongoing?

I think in general the game would be unplayable unless we gloss over that sort of mistake; there’s generally no reason, other than scams and counterscams, why we’d want the outcome to be anything other than “fix the tracker and continue”. We have in general been glossing over that sort of mistake all dynasty, and the game would never have got anywhere otherwise. It would be nice if the rules gave clearer permission to do that, but they don’t clearly do so (there are some rules that can be sort-of read as doing that but it isn’t a natural reading).

So it’s possible that we have a situation of “we’re all treating the rules in the way that makes them playable, until a scam occurs and then we start taking them literally, and discover that the rest of the gamestate couldn’t have happened under those literal rules either”. Some nomics thrive on such things, but at BlogNomic it’s generally treated as an annoyance or nuisance. Ideally we’d fix things to work the way we wanted them to have worked – but if you do that, the victory is unambiguously valid! If we decide we’re going to consider the gamestate correct for gameplay purposes but invalid for scam/victory purposes, we’re going to have to decide where, how, and why to draw the line.

I’d definitely prefer the consistency. I’m ok to go along with “steps are performed correctly unless egregiously shown to be otherwise”. I just needed the definition of the bar that describes what “steps performed incorrectly” actually needs to look like in order to qualify and trigger that part of the Core rules.

Absent a more clear definition of “steps performed incorrectly”, it’s mostly a judgement call, and I’ve come to the side of “ais intended to perform the steps correctly and made a minor mistake along the way”, thus

wouldn’t be fair to slow things down by stubbornly voting against the majority just because I didn’t personally find the scam particularly fun

After thinking it over a while, I’m keeping my vote against this (though I do think it’s quite close). I have no issue with correcting the gamestate per “Alter the representation to match what they believe to be the correct application of an incorrectly-applied alteration”. If ais had quickly corrected themselves before Preparations finished I’d believe the victory to be valid. I think the corrections being made after Preparations are done muddies the order of events enough it’s really a toss-up whether the Award Ceremony was completed before or after Preparations was (and very much hinges on the ongoing vs. complete for incorrectly applied atomic actions brought up by ais).

I also believe that this is a core rules scam and would be against it on Fair Play grounds even if I thought the victory to be valid. Obviously the ruleset is silent on what a scam actually is (much less what causes a scam to qualify as a core rules scam), and my entirely subjective opinion is that interrupting someone else’s atomic action very much qualifies as an unexpected behaviour and is therefore a scam in that core rule (that’s probably just a combination of my programmer brain and lack of experience with the historical attempts to fix the rule though, I imagine my definition of ‘atomic’ is a bit different from the consensus here).

Eh, I think I’ll just go to speed things up a bit, no need to stall things out any longer than I need to if consensus disagrees with me

I don’t like the idea of a tyranny of a (small) majority here; the rules have a DoV threshold as 67%, they specify that we should vote for the DoV based on a genuine belief that Victory has been achieved, and if that threshold hasn’t been met then it’s not the place of the majority to bully or pressure the holdouts.

Which is to say: I respect everyone here to make their decision and cast the vote of their conscience, but I would rather the AGAINST votes stayed AGAINST than switched out of social obligation, personally.

I think Desertfrog’s vote switch is more genuine, based on the commentary that the vote was originally based on “lack of fun” rather than the merits of the DoV. That switch alone is sufficient to allow the DoV to pass.

Actually if I consider only the legality my vote should be because I don’t really know whether it’s legal or not

Honestly I’m a little fatigued of this dynasty as a whole. Sure it’s disingenuous for my vote to not reflect my belief on the merits of this DoV but it’s not illegal, I do see the case of ais and co. even if I disagree, and I’d rather just move things along at this point. There’s always next dynasty.

Okay now I have an actual opinion.

Consider the following passages of ruletext (where the important parts are marked with **):

“...changes to gamestate ... *do not take effect until the representation of that gamestate has been updated* to match the authorised change. One wiki update may contain one or more alterations, or *one alteration may be split over multiple updates*, as long as it is clear what is happening and the alterations are otherwise legal.”

“All steps of an Atomic Action are considered *one action* ...”

“... the time of an Atomic Action shall be the time that it is completed.”

I think that:

1. Preparations is a single action.
2. A single action causes a single alteration to the gamestate.
3. My alteration was split over two separate updates, with ais’ edit occurring between them.
Thus: the alteration of gamestate caused by Preparations was not considered to have occurred at the time when ais performed the Award Ceremony, making it illegal

So I guess I should vote against after all

But as Habanero said, it might just be better to move forward. After all, it’s possible, if not even likely, that the 5th race wouldn’t end up being particularly exciting. So I keep my vote as deferential.

Hm, actually, what bucky said in discord about the race number seems to make it clear that this DoV is not valid, so those who vote FOR based on it being technically legal will probably(?) change their vote.

In that scenario I guess I could safely vote without slowing the game down (also there doesn’t seem to be much difference between AGAINST and DEFERENTIAL in a DoV anyway)

Well, as long as there are other naysayers I might as well be (if my FOR wouldn’t cause a pass at the 12-hour threshold then I don’t see much of a point in FOR-ing). I probably won’t look at these comments again to avoid convincing myself to agree with the majority, being the compulsive pushover that I am

My most recent vote was based on the idea that creating the Race post caused that Race to become Ongoing by default. However, if it wasn’t Race 5 at that time due to the atomic action not being completed, what Race was it?

I’m not changing my vote; I don’t think anything Bucky said is accurate or has additional bearing on the current situation.

I also think it’s a really bad idea to listen to potshots from idle players on Discord. Ideally those idle players wouldn’t be making the potshots, but, you know, certain players do have track records when it comes to respecting games that they’re not in.

(For those not on Discord, his point was a variation on the “atomic actions aren’t complete until the timestamp of their last step” argument, which I aluded to in my comment of 15:31 - but I think it’s contradicted by ‘the historical fact of the occurrence of a defined game action is itself considered to be gamestate’, meaning that while the official time may contradict the order of events, the fact that the events occurred in the order that they did can be ascertained and must be considered to be gamestate.)

Got it, so gamestate Race was incremented to 5, then the Race post was created, making it Race 5 at the time.

Just to be clear I also don’t think Bucky’s point holds any water (and strongly agree idle players have no place in debates for dynasties they didn’t play in), my vote against is unrelated to that