Sunday, April 10, 2011

Declaration of Victory: Queue Manipulation for Fun and Profit

Passed, 14-0 after 12 hours with the emperor’s FOR. Josh

Adminned at 10 Apr 2011 11:46:28 UTC

My piece is currently at Mornington Crescent. Therefore, I claim Victory.

Comments

Florw:

10-04-2011 00:05:15 UTC

for

ais523:

10-04-2011 00:11:45 UTC

for Thanks to my teammates, lilomar and florw. And to all the admins who didn’t admin the proposal to stop us doing just this.

Summary of what happened: florw had UNLEOC in his Trail (due to a slight route-planning mistake earlier). I Leaped him at Covent Garden (from Leicester Square to Holborn) last thing on Saturday, then a few minutes later, first thing on Sunday, he moved to Knightsbridge to get the K and unlocked Mornington Crescent (having to try twice, as the first time he tried to update the GNDT to a null string, which of course doesn’t work; this explains the two posts on the blog, with only the second one effective). lilomar followed up by moving to the freshly unlocked Mornington Crescent, and making this DoV. This had been planned days in advance, and pretty much everything else we did was just a distraction (apart from my first attempt to form UNLOCK, which was a genuine attempt to win but derailed by Josh’s Leap).

lilomar and I had been working together for quite a while (as was probably made obvious by the earlier rule-insertion scam); as florw appeared to be the only player also trying to win, rather than prevent me winning, I recruited him as well, for the purposes of winning this dynasty. As usual, all members of the conspiracy cooperated in coming up with the plans.

A quick mention goes to Darth Cliche, who voted on a proposal without knowing why, but it was instrumental to the whole thing. (It let us change our own votes to quorum/antiquorum proposals at the exact moment we needed, so that we could ensure lilomar was the only admin online when proposals needed adminning a particular way.)

Klisz:

10-04-2011 00:24:07 UTC

for I’m always here to help slightly with a scam without knowing what’s going on!

Klisz:

10-04-2011 00:28:44 UTC

Oh, by the way, I think I’ll ask this before the dynasty begins this time: Would you like Syl (my sister, designed the header for Wakukee’s dynasty) to design this dynasty’s header? (I can’t make any guarantees since I don’t know what the theme is going to be, though.)

lilomar:

10-04-2011 00:30:49 UTC

Several things will have to be decided before that decision can be made. The first of which would be if this DoV is agreed to be valid. Others include who will be running the next one, and what the theme will be.

Btw, if anyone has any theme suggestions, feel free to throw them out there :)

Winner:

10-04-2011 00:57:24 UTC

for World Nations theme…

Travis:

10-04-2011 05:58:01 UTC

for

Cunning and legitimate win right there.
I was wondering how that E in UNLEOC was intended to be used. I guess it was a mistake but your plan was robust enough that it didn’t matter.

In the big picture though, I think it’s a bit disappointing that the game can be influenced to such an extent based on predicting when admins will be logged in, and if they will interpret the rules in a way the benefits players. Why aren’t the rules set up so they effect gamestate as soon as the right number of voters say to enact or kill a goal? Then the admins would just keep the ruleset page and everything consistent with the gamestate.

Darknight: he/him

10-04-2011 06:25:58 UTC

for

Josh: Observer he/they

10-04-2011 07:10:41 UTC

That’s annoying.

for

Well worked, team.

William:

10-04-2011 07:38:12 UTC

for

Kevan: he/him

10-04-2011 08:13:52 UTC

for Nicely done, a bit surprising that the UNLEOC wasn’t deliberate. And that Saakara’s constant, silent queue-slowing was just their own little idea of fun, rather than a favour to someone.

[Travis] If proposals enacted automatically and invisibly, it’d make it much harder work to play the game, most of the time, because you wouldn’t know if the ruleset (or gamestate) that you were reading was correct - you’d have to comb through the pending proposals to see if anything had changed, before taking the most trivial of actions.

So far as I remember, “admin wins because he could have enacted a popular proposal but chose not to” hasn’t actually ever happened before, although I’m sure it happens on a smaller scale here and there. Which is a bit of a shame for dividing the player base, but I think we’re probably balancing it as fairly as we can - admin have to do a lot of boring legwork over the course of a dynasty, and if they get an occasional edge from that, fair enough. We could have a rule saying something like “if a proposal has expired but has not been processed, admin players may not take game actions other than processing that proposal”, but we’d probably just lose some admins, which isn’t good for the game.

There might be some mileage in a “citizen’s enactment” - if a proposal has timed out but nobody has enacted it, then any player may post a comment to the end of it and enact it themselves as best they can (the only trusted ability an admin has is the ability to edit any blog post, and edit the GNDT setup). But really, this hardly ever happens in a way that matters.

Florw:

10-04-2011 08:33:51 UTC

Kevan:  UNLEOC was deliberate in the sense that we planned it in after realizing I had already used my Hop.

Purplebeard:

10-04-2011 09:03:18 UTC

for

Chivalrybean:

10-04-2011 14:10:27 UTC

for At least I was here when someone declared victory this time {:0p

Chivalrybean:

10-04-2011 14:15:29 UTC

I’d like a dynasty where there are two or more teams pitted against each other, and lots of secret dealings (even across teams!)

Roujo: he/him

10-04-2011 15:03:13 UTC

for =)

Bucky:

10-04-2011 18:45:30 UTC

for

I had my own scam planned based to get around the Automatic Locks (using the GMT oddity to change the ‘M’ in ‘Mornington’ twice) but was waiting for Automatic Locks to enact so it wouldn’t screw me up.