If we punish a player for being kingmade against their will, doesn’t that invert kingmaking into a kind of assassination mechanic?

I suppose so. I’ll try out some wording to counteract that a bit; but prohibiting kingmaking is within the scope of this rule so I am keen to keep the spirit of the change alive if possible.

We can’t have it both ways, can we? I understand the argument that this could be weaponized to thwart a player’s otherwise legitimate attempt at victory by assisting them against their will, but if we don’t judge a DoV on its merits of whether or not ALL the rules were followed, then this No Cooperation rule doesn’t have any teeth.

There is a possible enforcement mechanism, which is account banning for not following Fair Play rules. That would cover even idle Seekers. It doesn’t help the hapless player who unfortunately would get penalized for something out of their control, but it’s more of a preventative measure. Few idle people would take the effort to perform a one-time player victory assassination. I don’t see it as being worth most peoples’ time, especially those who tend to be idle anyway.

Anyone who’s that extreme already has the ability to register for a new account, ask to be made unidle, and then cause all sorts of rule violating havoc before being banned, so I don’t see this as being any worse.

This looks like it’s still kingmaking-as-assassination.

If two players are vying for victory and a third performs some unprompted action to push one of them over the line, this proposal is saying that the pushed player will be barred from declaring victory. That means that their rival will almost certainly win instead.

I think kingmaker-prevention has always been more about avoiding creating mechanics that would allow a trailing player to make a big, cheap difference to the position of a leading one, than something which we build the machinery for but rely on etiquette to prevent the kingmaker usage of.

The mens rea of assassination contraindicates this rule’s requirement of a “sincere attempt to ‘kingmake’ for the Declarant”.

“co-operating to effect Victory” clearly includes things like voting for their DoV, so I recommend a Veto.

[Josh] There’s still the inadvertent assassination from players who have overlooked, forgotten about or misunderstood the No Cooperation rule, which won’t be much fun to be at the pointy end of, if somebody makes a bored but genuine “eh, I can’t win, I give all my apples to the leading player for playing a good game, let’s get this dynasty over”.

If we could have a magic rule to handle this, “kingmaking actions are illegal and must be reverted” would probably be preferable to “kingmaking actions are allowed but also punish the target”.

@Kevan Yes, I considered the accidental use case when writing this, but my conclusion is that I don’t mind it as a side effect; it’ll happen a few times but the likely outcome is not that a player loses their victory but that the game gets patched by CfJ.

There is no wording here that covers every use case; for a start, there’s a huge difference between a situation where the accidental kingmake targets an already-frontrunner, one where it targets a close contender, one where it targets a no-hoper, and one where it targets a confederate. Mere “revert this, don’t do it again” is inadequate in several of those use cases, but a CfJ will be the likely outcome in many of them. In the meanwhile, preventing the game from ending and everything getting swept away in the uphold-upon-victory is really just a sensible backstop.

@Kevan also consider that this wording only says “they are encouraged to vote against all DoVs”, but there is no must, which leaves room to have subjective judgement on the situation, e.g. your hypothetical scenario.

[Josh] Kingmaking, more than cooperation, probably does have a clear definition - something like “performing an action which results in another player becoming able to declare victory where they couldn’t have done so before”. If it can be defined, we can kill it.