BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

good idea

Better to have a consistent rule.

“I feel like if someone legit wins, they shouldn’t have that win taken from them simply because someone else got people to rig the votes / got an admin to prioritize enacting their DoV first.”

Is that really a “legit win”, though, if it also let other players win? Is it fair that the others have the win taken from them simply because someone else was quicker to post a DoV?

The big thing that the current bunfight DoV system prevents is victory through a broader “everyone wins” scam. It’s hard work to pull a precise “I alone win” scam off without giving away that you’re up to something - it’s much easier to make a more general scam that just makes everyone win, or one that makes a few players win but where you know (from timezones or how busy certain people tend to be) that you’ll be in a position to react first. BlogNomic often has issues with split-second timing suddenly being extremely important, and it’d be bad to enshrine a really big example of that at the top of every dynasty.

I think fairer directions to take here would be “if multiple players achieve victory at the same time, one of them is selected at random as the true winner” or “if multiple players achieve victory, none are considered to have achieved victory” (maybe with a clause where winners can be persuaded to decline the victory to leave one player standing).

I think that rigging the vote should be a legitimate play.

I also prefer vote-rigging to timing-based sniping.

But this doesn’t just allow “rigging the vote”. It also allows rigging the admin system. Which isn’t a good thing to have.

Is it really any easier to pull of a scam when everyone wins? Many dynasties don’t even support mechanics that can have multiple winners. Such scams still seem pretty rare, so it still makes sense to reward the person who found/pulled off the scam.

It’s easier to sneak through a rule of “blah blah and repeal paragraph seven” where paragraph seven is the only one stopping anyone from taking an infinite number of actions (and thus winning), than to sneak through “blah blah and Clucky alone is immune to paragraph seven”.

From the end of last dynasty, it was plainly easier to get “various players who’ve signed the right treaties have all won” through (and hope that the others wouldn’t unidle to DoV, or would DoV too slowly) than “Josh alone has won”.

Everyone-wins scams are rare because of this current disincentive against them. There’s no point trying a “blah blah repeal paragraph seven” scam right now because your DoV will be followed straight away by multiple others, and yours isn’t guaranteed to be first to enact.

But an “everyone gets an infinite number of actions” scam doesn’t actually let everyone win. In that scenario, its still the person who uses their infinite actions to win. Then the game is in hiatus, and no one else can use their infinite actions.

Fair, that wasn’t the best example. Something like that that doesn’t require any actions, then, and just flips everyone to already having achieved victory.

It will always be easier to sneak a broad “change these rules in a general way, so that everyone has now won” scam past the group than a specific “change these rules in a way that references Clucky by name, or all Turquoise team players who currently Underwater, or something, so that Clucky alone has now won” one: the latter will get more scrutiny because you’re more clearly up to something personal.

If we say that only the first DoV counts, that’s a big incentive to start trying everyone-wins scams if you think you’re the only person who’ll notice them, or the only person who’ll be awake when they’re enactable.

But its already the case that many scams fall under the “First to notice / first to be able to execute the scam”

Its weird to me to treat some of those scams differently in terms of if you actually win or not.

Take something like the 4th Dynasty of Josh: https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=The_Fourth_Dynasty_of_Josh

Which ended very quickly due to a poorly worded rule: https://blognomic.com/archive/not_even_kidding/

I really don’t think it would’ve been fair to Purplebeard to be like “lol good point but I have more friends than you so I actually win”

That DoV was immediately followed by one called So Have I, which failed. Ais523 said “Generally, what we do with such DoVs is not vote for them straight away so they can’t be adminned first…” in response, which may well have been the etiquette at the time.

Which does raise the question of why we weren’t imposing the (very obvious) solution of always, always enacting DoVs in chronological order. I’d assume Ais’s point was part of a wider sense of fairness at play when multiple DoVs arose - and that we’d deliberately retained the option to choose between them rather than always giving the quickest shouter the win. “lol good point but I posted a DoV first so I actually win” isn’t always going to be fair either.

I feel like that post kinda answers your question:

“Generally, what we do with such DoVs is not vote for them straight away so they can’t be adminned first…”

The multiple DoV’s scenario happens rarely enough that I don’t think anyone considered the “offer win shares to effect what order stuff gets passed in” angle. Instead we just followed convention. But as convention isn’t always good enough, better to codify the convention now.

But you’re not codifying a convention of “generally enact in order” (if that eleven-year-old convention even exists any more), you’re proposing “always enact in order”. Ais523 is acknowledging that there are exceptions where we’d want to give the win to a later declarer because it was more deserved.

Multiple DoV scams happen rarely because if they go a bit wrong they’re worse than useless: if I pull a scam of “surprise, I repealed the second paragraph not the third, so the monster doesn’t exist any more, and we all win” and Josh DoVs thirty seconds after me, I can’t be sure that I’ll survive it - even if everyone intends to vote fairly, all it takes is one person voting on Josh’s DoV but not mine by genuine accident, and I’ve lost.

Giving scammers a solid gold “if you DoV first, they can’t take that away from you” would shift the scamming game significantly, I think.