Will be voting against this. Floor 62 is below floor 63, but the coincidence of which floors are currently part of the Debris Zone does not give the zone a fixed location. If the Debris Zone in fact includes “the top floors that are not part of any other Zone” then the wording of the rule should be rewritten to make that clear.

While it could have been that the Debris Zone encircled the entire building, I feel that the Debris Zone’s zone status is defined by the phrase, “Each Zone represents a number of Floors.” and since we know what floors it represents, and said floors are all clumped above the Earthlink Zone, the Debris Zone is as well. The Zoning rule didn’t need to specify the location, because it will always end up being the same location (it was no coincidence).

I think it’s pretty cut and dry. Zoning says:

“Each Zone represents a number of Floors. A Citizen is said to be occupying a Zone if their current Floor is represented by that Zone.”

“Any Floors not allocated to a Zone as a result of this calculation are instead allocated to the Debris Zone”.

Due to the nature of the Zone calculation, the Debris Zone will always be one contiguous block of floors at the very top of the tower. Therefore, it is unreasonable to say that there is no Zone below it, because there is always exactly one Zone below it, in this case EarthLink.

I think that the Debris Zone doesn’t technically exist as it is not a rule or subrule, and therefore Brendan is correct to observe that it sits outside of the ruleset schema.

@Josh I strongly disagree; to say the Debris Zone doesn’t exist because it’s not attached to a rule defeats the entire purpose of the Debris Zone. The rule Zoning even explicitly forbids any rule from being called Debris so there’s no ambiguity.

@Zach I agree that the way that the rule covering the Debris Zone is written is profoundly flawed

That we both agree on haha. Maybe it’s best if we go back to those floors being inaccessible due to space time paradoxes or something like that?

The reason I am being so stubborn is because I only voted FOR Going Down under the interpretation that Brendan would move to trolley 62. If that’s not the case then I would have voted AGAINST and the proposal would have failed 3-3 with Kevan’s DEF because if Brendan doesn’t move then I want to stay on floor 32.

Neither you nor anyone else who voted on the proposal seemed to identify this as a problem at the time. I don’t really like this trend of retroactively coming up with tenuous interpretations of rules that suddenly make them do nothing. And in any case, CfJs like this one exist precisely to make rules do what they are supposed to. Someone who believes that the rule is well written would also presumably think this CfJ has no effect. The only reason it’s raised is because a small minority of players has offered a novel interpretation. These players should be the ones who would like to see the fix applied, unless they’re more concerned with breaking things than in making the rules work properly.

Floor* 62, not trolley 62 (autocorrect)

That was @Josh.

FWIW I would agree with you if the rules said something like “Zones cannot be defined any other way”, or if it was called the “Debris Area”, “Debris Region”, or “Debris any-word-not-given-a-specific-meaning-by-the-ruleset.”

@redtara Sure, I’ll cop to nod-along voting on the original prop. We’re not all perfect; we don’t all read every proposal super closely, and sometimes things only turn out to be broken through testing.

For me, the term Zone is defined as “Each dynastic rule or subrule”. It’s not an exclusive definition, nor is it airtight, but it’s all we have.

I’m not interested in “it’s not my job to fix this”. If there’s a problem and you can fix it then fix it. This idea that there is a whole invisible etiquette about who is or is not supposed to fix an issue based on perceived positioning puts me out in hives. If someone cares enough to fix it then it gets fixed; if no-one does then it doesn’t. If it doesn’t an the small minority get to keep exploiting the broken rule then good on them.

I’d maybe vote for this if it also changed the rule to read clearer but this just applies a ‘fix’ that puts the gamestate into what is, in my opinion, an incorrect state, for little gain all around - I don’t see that Brendan or Lemon massively gain from being stuck in Debris. I’m a little nonplussed by the apparent trend to bully players who vote “wrong” with hectoring responses and sweeping denunciations of motives and appeals to etiquettes that I don’t recognise - something that has come up more than once recently. At the moment this is passing; I’m not going to be persuaded to change my vote, and I’m happy to leave it at that.

I’d say that the Debris Zone existed as a Zone.

“Each dynastic rule or subrule may be referred to as a Zone [which] represents a number of Floors equal to 72/n [...] from the bottom of the dynastic ruleset up” is one way to define a Zone, and “Any Floors not allocated to a Zone as a result of this calculation are instead allocated to the Debris Zone” is another.

That seems enough to move someone from the Debris Zone “to the top floor of the Zone below the one they currently occupy”. It would misfire if Earthlink went up to Floor 64, or if there were 73 dynastic rules and the tower was 100% Debris, but at the time of the CfJ enactment the Earthlink Zone was Floors 58-62 and the Debris Zone was Floors 63 and 64.

@Brendan “For me, the term Zone is defined as ‘Each dynastic rule or subrule’”

You’ve taken that out of context, the full sentence is “Each dynastic rule or subrule may be referred to as a Zone”. For me, that doesn’t define a Zone, that just classifies Rules as being Zones. I believe the next sentence, “Each Zone represents a number of Floors,” is what defines a Zone.

Now, if we put Zone as a synonym for Rule in Synonyms, then I’d agree with you.

@Zack I think that was aimed at me rather than Brendan.

I didn’t take the sentence out of context - I go on to say “it’s not an exclusive definition, nor is it airtight, but it’s all we have”, and I also, let’s not forget, wrote the proposal that put that sentence into the ruleset. I was just reflecting on what it meant to me, and I stand by my interpretation of the rule.

Sorry yeah, I meant @Brendan. I’m multitasking too hard right now lol. We’re going to have to agree to disagree, but to quote one part of one sentence in one paragraph and say “it’s all we have” to justify your point when it’s not all we have is what I call taking something out of context.

Omg @Josh not @Brendan, what’s the matter with me

Josh I’m quite happy for you to vote against if that’s how you want to vote, but I will challenge your reasoning if I don’t agree with it. The speculation on motives was unfair and I’m sorry for that but it is frustrating to have “actually the rules don’t say what everyone thinks they mean after all” type arguments come along and try to derail the gamestate when we’ve had two periods of deliberation and voting already for this specific issue (the original Debris Zone proposal and then the actual movement proposal). And I’m inclined to think the other way about the triviality. Because its a fairly small issue we should just make the gamestate reflect what everybody assumed it would.

Also don’t forget that my welcome back to Blognomic was certain players cooking up tortured interpretations of the rules in order to unplayer me so this has perhaps made me a bit sensitive to people just deciding to ignore their way out of dealing with the effects of proposals that I’ve authored and which have been duly approved, which I think is fairly reasonable. There’s not much point in playing a voting-based game otherwise.

“Everybody assumed it would” is strictly false.

@redtara All of that is fair, but at a certain point we do have to agree to disagree.

All I can offer here is the promise that I’m not voting on this cynically or with an agenda - I really do think that, as written, the Debris Zone is more a phantom zone than an unmapped, contiguous part of the tower.  As I said - I’d vote FOR this if it also straightened out the rule.