BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Why is “to directly or indirectly cause a Broker to achieve victory” necessary? Do we not want to save this prohibition cover, for example, a direct text injection scam that the discoverer just uses to graffiti the ruleset?

In practice I think we treat this bit of fair play as a flat prohibition on non-dynastic scamming; might as well just make it say that.

*save > have

Maybe, but we’re fine with white-hat scamming: if we accidentally lock the game somehow, but find a tortuous core scam that would get us back out of it, that’s a cause for celebration rather than a frowned-upon breach of Fair Play.

Breaches of fair play are only theoretical, though, right? They require a subsequent CfJ vote to have an actual consequence. So white-hat breaches of any fair play rule are fair game - we just don’t sanction them.

This is why they’re “should"s.

Oh, sure, I’m not worried that it would be denying us the option, just that this rule should - as you say - reflect what the practice actually is. We shouldn’t tell new players that the etiquette is “never ever use core scams for anything”, if it’s not.

as I am averse to tacitly endorsing non-victory core scams. (Aware that that’s also the status quo but would prefer to see a comprehensive fix rather than something half-done.)

The half-done version works, and is objectively better than the current version, though. I thought you were against letting the perfect be the enemy of the good?

What’s an example of a non-victory core scam where we’d seriously frown at the player and consider barring them from the game? All I can think of is messing up the readable gamestate in a meaning-neutral way (without going so far as being an act “meant to make the game unplayable”) and foiling a rival’s victory (which would be hard to argue as not having indirectly caused victory for whoever goes on to win instead).

I thought you were against letting the perfect be the enemy of the good?

Right, this is a fun role reversal for us! I’ll let you contemplate whether there is a counter-hypocrisy on your own time :)

Let’s be clear though: your reluctance to consider a pretty clear-cut improvement request makes me pretty sure that you’ve got a couple of in-case-of-emergency core scams up your sleeve that you’re not willing to give up, and I don’t want you to have those - I don’t want anybody to have those - so I’d rather tighten up the ruleset and am willing to use my vote to incentivise that change. Call it letting the not-at-all-great being the enemy of the okay-fine.

Not willing to get sucked into concrete examples of harmful non-victory scams - I’ll let other voters use their own imaginations - but I will add that if you’re genuinely adverse to the idea of what we’re “telling new players the etiquette is” then you shouldn’t really be objecting to the idea that a victory-exclusive clause in this rule is tacitly encouraging new players to propose new core rules scams, just in case.

I’m good, thanks, I know we have different attitudes to amending core: you like to see a big move-fast-and-break-things first draft that we can enact now and fix up later, I prefer to keep the ruleset sturdy at each iteration and make sure we’ve checked all the angles.

I assume extending core-scam victories to all players is uncontroversial, and needs fixing. I don’t know in advance how controversial it would be to put white-hat core-scamming into Fair Play as well (you yourself started by saying that such scams are “fair game”?), so it’s a bad idea to make the first amendment dependent on the second, in case the answer is “very controversial”.

, I guess