BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

This is the kind of Proposal where having a “diff” tool would be handy, rather than each person having to make the edits themselves as a test to see the changes.

So in summary, beyond reorganizing text to make it more readable:

* Eliminates the ability to remove Admin status from a player via Proposal or CfJ
* Players wanting to become Admins must do it through Proposal, not CfJ (so they couldn’t do it during a Hiatus)
* Raises the bar to change a player’s name to an enacted Proposal rather than just by request

If I messed up that summary, let me know.

On bullet point one, it doesn’t eliminate it - Proposals and CfJs can do what they like, it just doesn’t explicitly call it out.

Admin was an oversight, will fix.

Name change is by proposal in the status quo rule.

Thanks for the clarifications!

Out of scope for this proposal, but “sidebar” could probably use an appendix entry, and a consistent decision on capitalization.

Is “Precondition Unidling” the only way for idle players to create proposals? Or can they “make… votable matters” per “Recusants” via some other affordance that I am missing?

Thanks, I’ve clarified the wording a little.

While you’re at it, patching up the Dormancy issue mentioned on Discord might be a good idea (unless this already does that and I missed it)

I agree that a rewrite is needed, but this particular rewrite has a significant scam in it – if an admin illegally removes a player from the list of active players in the sidebar, then with this wording, the player is actually idled even though the removal was illegal, and that allows an admin to trivially take over the game by idling everyone else and forcing through a CFJ.

This is why it’s important for the list of idle players to be “tracked” by the sidebar, rather than just defining a player to be idle if their name isn’t on the sidebar.

The “core proposals are legal in Interregnum” change also doesn’t work perfectly (if there’s any dynastic rule giving proposals in general a dynastic side effect, it would mean that the proposal wouldn’t be legal even if the direct effect of the proposal itself were entirely confined to the core rules).

There’s also a typo, “Recusants on that matter are considered to Active”.

I’m generally in favour of this sort of change, but we need more than a single edit window to get the details correct.

Oh, “their changed status of the relevant Seeker” is probably also a typo, although it’s less obviously wrong.

No, sorry, that’s nonsense. “If a player does something illegal they can take over the game” - yeah, no shit, taking over the game is trivial in all cases if you start from a position of being willing to break the rules, I can declare every player idle now if I want to completely disregard the ruleset.

I’ll fix the typos though.

@Josh: The current rules block that scam (a few years ago Kevan and I worked together to ensure that they would). Taking over the game is not that trivial even if you’re willing to break the rules – in BlogNomic’s early history attempts at that sort of thing were very frequent, and as a result the ruleset has a lot of protections against it.

Also, I think this proposal is now invalid, because you edited it after it already had votes on it?

Looking over a diff:

* Another change is that idle admins “may act as Admins” more generally, giving them the ability to add new arrivals and to idle departing or absent players. Those both sound like reasonable forces of nature, though.

* “When a Seeker becomes idle due to inactivity” is a little loose, as “inactivity” isn’t explicitly defined earlier in the rule. (Would it trigger if player said “sorry I haven’t been playing, please idle me”, etc.)

As for the actual meat of idle players being able to make proposals and CfJs:

* Does the rule work as written? “When an Idle Seeker makes or votes on a Votable Matter” reads to me as reaction rather than permission; a reaction to actions that can’t be taken.

* It’d be good for the Nomic if more core fixes were made, and if those changes had to convince a broader jury than just some shrugging dynastic players. But there’s a cost at the dynastic level if players are strongly incentivised to save their core amendments for the dynasties that they aren’t playing. Core proposals can drain time and energy away from discussion of dynastic posts, slow the queue when contentious, and worst case stall the dynastic game by breaking something; that’s all the fun of the fair when it’s coming from an active player, but could get tiresome from an idle player who has already walked away.

@ais You can correct typos.

One issue I generally have at BlogNomic is that I can never seem to find a good time to do core rules proposals. Early in a dynasty you don’t have slots, and late in a dynasty a) they typically don’t get enough scrutiny to avoid mistakes and b) it’s often important to use slots on failing dynastic proposals in order to give a false impression of what your plans are.

And “The current rules prevent people from breaking the rules” is a less persuaive argument than maybe you think, especially when your base argument is “people can take over the game by breaking the rules.”

@Josh: no, it’s “the current rules ignore attempts by people to take over the rules”. Illegal actions simply just don’t change the ruleset/gamestate – they may change the tracking page but that doesn’t mean the ruleset or gamestate changes, it just causes the tracking page to be wrong.

This is part of why I think we should probably start tracking both possible gamestates when there’s a dispute – it’d a) make it clearer how the tracking mechanic works and b) make it easier to fix the tracker once the dispute was resolved.

Correction: “the current rules ignore attempts by people to break the rules”.

Right, but your against vote on this is based on the idea that there’s a game hijacking scam - for a variety of reasons, including the explanation you’ve given, there just isn’t, within the ruleset.

@Josh: So this proposal changes the way the rules determine how someone is active, by causing them to check the sidebar tracker directly. The rules don’t have the power to prevent someone directly editing the tracker because it’s an actual observable object, rather than a piece of gamestate – as such, if the tracker does get illegally edited, it triggers “A Seeker is only Active if their name is on the list of currently active Seekers in the Sidebar”, because the name then wouldn’t be on the list, and the rules wouldn’t imagine it to be on the list just because it had been illegally removed.

Doesn’t “in response, an Admin shall add them to the roster in the sidebar” make the sidebar roster gamestate?

Yes.

Actually, I’m now really confused about how the rules work (or whether they work). The core rules say “The Ruleset and Gamestate can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset.”, and then define certain things to be gamestate even though the rules don’t have the power to prevent them being changed (e.g. the sidebar, and the Imperial Styles page). So we have a situation where the rules assert that something can’t be changed, and yet it’s clearly possible to change it despite what the rules say (there have been instances in the past where wiki pages linked from the ruleset have been edited even though the ruleset says they can’t be).

As such, it may well be the case that the ruleset refuses to acknowledge the changes. It’s often tricky to work out how to handle the situation where a nomic ruleset contains a false statement.

This makes me a bit less worried about the potential scam – instead of unambiguously working it becomes very unclear what the effect is, with it probably not working, which in turn would probably give enough leeway for the BlogNomic playerbase to disregard it.

@Kevan The interpretation of the word “When” does a lot of work, there, and I think it could be fruitlessly debated whether that constitues permission or a reaction. The ruleset currently seems to use it in a variety of contexts - “When a votable matter is first put forward it is considered Pending”, for example, sets a status at the time at which the event happens, which would support the idea that the action in this rule is legal in the doing.

The argument about perverse incentives on core proposals is a fair one. All changes have ripple effects and I guess we’ll see what they are when a change is made.