Also, I wouldn’t say that “those within it are committed” to it being a legal way around it. I’ve always held the stance that I’d be uncomfortable actually passing messages back and forth. Saying that a past discussion has taken place is one thing, but anything beyond that is an area that I wouldn’t be comfortable being in.

I may have painted with too brad a brush… But the problem with alliances is, once you’re in one, you’re kind of on the hook for the things your allies say, too.

this rug pull.

Deliberate message passing in this way has sharp limits. SingularByte and Lulu could only privately communicate messages by relay that either JonathanDark or I approve of.

But the assertion here goes one further, and illegalizes a practice that has been standing all dynasty, namely telling new alliance members what old alliance members have said WITHOUT any explicit instruction to do so. This dynamic is necessary for alliances to be mutable and still function.

i don’t see what the problem is with message-passing?

@lemon In that case why is No Collaboration even on, if you’re happy for people to trials circumvent it? Might as well turn it off altogether

passing messages isn’t the same as having No Private Communications completely disabled; it requires people to reveal their comms to other players to communicate, thus making those comms more public! just like with the Alliances rule, the exceptions to No Private Comms still give other players more information about what’s going on, and i think that translucency is valuable :0

I don’t think I understand what you’re arguing here. Are you saying that passing messages should result in a public disclosure, like any other breach of No Collaborations? Or are you saying that the passing of the message is itself a disclosure that makes the comms more public? Because allowing for larger cabals doesn’t seem to me to be making anything more public…

i’m saying that the passing of the message is itself a disclosure that makes the comms more public, the same way that knowing who’s-talking-to-who makes the comms more public :0

You think that an alliance talking within itself is public? That makes no sense to me.

maybe it doesn’t work that way in practice, though. i don’t really get the point or benefit of a cabal that’s half of the playercount — it seems like too many players to place your trust in, & i know i’d prolly take advantage of the strategic intel & espionage opportunities involved in message-passing if i could — but i suppose one exists regardless of me not getting it! if you feel that that’s making things unfair i’ll go ahead and vote

i guess i just hadn’t construed message-passing as being an inherent/exclusive feature of a capital a Alliance :0

With No Communications it literally has to be a feature of an Alliance - communicating outside of the Alliance is forbidden, no?

(I do agree that a 4-player cabal seems unwieldy, and wouldn’t fancy it myself - but if it must exist I’d rather it didn’t do it by blowing a hole in the implicit restrictions in the rule Alliances around the sharing of information.)

sorry, i’m a bit sleepy. when i said “capital a Alliance” i wasn’t thinking of the mechanical term — i just meant like, an agreement with genuine intention of fully working together from all parties. i figure it would be easy for people who aren’t committed to working together to still pass on messages for one another, and that makes it ‘more public’ to my eyes because a greater percentage of the neutral parties in the game are seeing these passed messages! (with ‘fully public’ being that every neutral party sees it.)

but on further thought, especially since actual game-mechanical Alliances can be changed pretty easily (hey, should we change that?), there’s little reason to actually rely on neutral parties to ferry information around :0

There isn’t an actual four player cabal right now. Or if there is, I’m not in on it.

Meanwhile I’m worried about the extent to which the first sentence might retroactively require me to disclose private communications that weren’t intended as message passing but might be construed that way; either it’s up to my judgment (and I think the whole thing is stupidly vague), or it’s up to the judgment of people who haven’t seen the communications, or I’m required to disclose everything including stuff that clearly does not violate the current version of the rule.

Or I can counter-CFJ arguing that the situation is objectively unreasonable and this CfJ should not be retroactive.

Or I can quit. In which case, congrats Josh you got me again.

I think maybe when Josh wrote “does not allow for the passing of messages from third parties outside of the Alliance” he meant “does not allow for the passing of messages on behalf of third parties outside of the Alliance”?

Regardless, what’s written there is impractically broad.

@Bucky All the denials of a four-person Alliance would be more believable if the wiki hadn’t said for the last several days that there was a four person Alliance, with no effort having been made to amend that presentation despite multiple people feeling like they’d had to deny that it existed… I can’t see the contents of your inbox, all I can do is read the wiki and assume that it is an accurate reflection of the gamestate.

The wiki says there are four two-person alliances.

This version has clear and obvious problems even beyond what I’ve called out - for example, if you get a rule required private disclosure from the Great Machine, you are not allowed to share it with the rest of the alliance, because it’s a message from a third party.

Actually, the new wording doesn’t even care whether the original message was private. So no quoting proposals inside an alliance chat.

@Bucky Both of those problems are made up - the Great Machine does not count as a Machinist for the purposes of the rule No Private Communications, and the phrase ‘as if that third party were communicating with each recipient within the alliance directly’ means that this change is limited to communications on the same terms as those covered by the rest of the rules. Next?

Declared Alliances should also probably treat the Great Machine as out-of-scope but that is a pre-existing problem that I don’t feel bad for not having solved.

Hey. lemon, wanna be in our alliance?

  CoV.
After discussion on the discord, I’ll agree that this is actually too broad. As written, it can make public disclosures of information from ex-alliance members prohibited.

Josh, are you arguing that the Great Machine is not a third party? Neither of the restrictions this CfJ would impose discriminate between Machinists and non-Machinists as the message source.

I have to agree with Singularbyte about this. The CfJ would have been fine if it had specified private messages from third parties, but omitting “private” is going too far.

@Bucky I’m not sure that I believe that question is sincere, but for what it’s worth, my previous comment answers that point if you read it properly.