BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

[Kevan] Your statement for this proposal, “Looks like we’re into an endgame window of three players chucking a lot of dice, so let’s speed that up, it doesn’t need to take five days.” Yet you’re also proposing a hold-up in Advancing the Queues if certain Groups don’t have at least one Jostling Visitor, which would not “speed up” the endgame at all, but would do the opposite.

Can you explain your position a little more clearly with regard to the Jostling issue, whatever that issue may be? It’s confusing.

Ah, the intention is to say that as well as Advancing the Queues every 46 hours, Bucky can also advance them as soon the meaningfully active players have submitted their moves for that turn.

A Visitor can only become Jostling if they’ve moved somewhere in the current turn, so I’m using that as a yardstick for whether or not a player has made their move yet.

[Kevan] I think what you’re missing (or perhaps setting up intentionally) is the scam that your proposal opens up, so let me state it more bluntly.

Any one of the Groups that you have named in this proposal can simply set up their Visitors such that none are Jostling and refuse to move any of them, thus holding the entire game hostage until another Proposal closes the gap. This would cause a delay in the endgame rather than hasten it.

Instead of spending time patching the scam, I think it would be better to not allow it to be created in the first place.

That was unintentional, and although I see where you’re coming from, I don’t agree that it follows. This isn’t repealing the 46 hours, so the ruleset would have both “If the Proprietor has not done so in the past 46 hours, he may Advance the Queues” and “The Proprietor may Advance the Queues at any time, so long as…” - to my eye that gives two mechanisms by which the Proprietor can pull the lever, rather than the second overriding the first.

I think that’s exactly where the hole is, though. Because you didn’t repeal the 46 hours, you have two statements which can also be argued to be the same. Advancing the Queues after 46 hours is at the same time “at any time”, the time being 46 hours. Thus, the non-Jostling Group could prevent the advancement.

A better proposal would be to amend the 46 hours advancement so that it’s clear that the non-Jostling restriction does not apply.

If Josh hadn’t already voted on this as quickly as he did, we could have worked out better wording. As it is, I felt like I had to toss in my vote against to prevent a potential scam, as remote as it may seem to be.

Or a better wording of the “at any time” may be simply to have added “at any time before 46 hours since the last Advance the Queues” to make it clear that these rules and their associated restrictions are distinct.

Yeah, that would work.

I’m generally loathe to overwrite big rules towards the end of a dynasty, so as not to make the ruleset unnecessarily confusing to any future historians.

The new timing is optional and I won’t be advancing as early as I’m allowed to under it.

FOR but will CoV if both JonathanDark and Trapdoorspyder object.

Is “If the Queues have been Advanced four or more times since 12:00 on 29 November 2022” in the middle of advancing the queues intended to count the in-progress advancement as one of the four?

Yes, which I think “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.” endorses.