plenty of other ways to try and introduce counterplay rather than just banning a strat that you took advantage of and only want changed now that hurts you

@Clucky Do you have a suggestion for one of those other ways? If not, I do think this is a good solution.

To be fair, this is only doable if the Burglars happen to the the ones who have the Fame/Infamy to pull this off. There’s no guarantee of that.

I’d rather assign a cost to the Preparations so that you have to be really successful at your most recent role in order to use this powerful tool, rather than nerfing it outright.

already posted one but people voted it down so not really inclined to try again

but I’d at least consider voting for something that actually created more interesting gameplay by adding more prepared actions. Simply going “no now that I’m a guard you can’t do the thing I just did as a burglar” is incredibly boring behavior

Or better yet, if the issue is “there is no Guard-side counterplay”, then add one.

jinx with Clucky.

@Clucky: Surely it’s unreasonable to not close the loophole, now that is has been made public? And adding counterplay woud just be a different form of loophole-closing.

I agree that I generally make loopholes public only when it benefits me – but I don’t see why that’s a reason to vote down the fix proposals. I think most common attitude from Nomic players about this sort of thing is “once a scam has been exploited, it should be closed” rather than “once a scam has been exploited, it should be left there so that everyone else gets to exploit it too” – and I also think that it’s to the benefit of the game to play it that way.

(I also note that you were aware of the loophole in question and didn’t publicly reveal it, presumably because it benefits you.)

(To clarify: it’s for the good of the game to let loopholes be exploited by the people who find them and then fixed, because it gives them a reward for finding the loophole.)

It’s not any more of a “loophole” than the stuff that let guards run to an artifact spot the first couple of rounds and camp there

That was indeed also a loophole, and I even tried to fix it before I exploited it (but the proposal got voted down, so I exploited it). If people are going to vote down proposals like “Stasis Breaker” and “Dynamism in routing” that are designed specifically to prevent breaking strategies, then I’m going to exploit those strategies.

The way I see it is: I tried to prevent the “camp on the artifacts” strategy from working via rules changes, the proposal got voted down, then I used that strategy and won the round. If other players had seen the strategy (and weren’t on my team), they could either have voted for my proposal or else proposed an alternative fix to the same problem (and yet the vote on “Dynamism in routing” was unanimously AGAINST, and nobody proposed an alternative). If a player does neither, then having the strategy used against them is a natural outcome of the situation – and I don’t think it’s fair for players to claim that they should be given an opportunity to exploit the strategy later on when it becomes public, when they had an opportunity to stop it happening in the first place.

not sure which proposal you had “blocked the strategy”

https://blognomic.com/archive/too_many_thieves didn’t as it only applies to burglars. if it has passed it would’ve mad stuff easier for burglars to steal it not harder

you also didn’t “win the round”—qenya and doomedideas won the round. all you did was put yourself before the team and bully them out of getting the be the ones to steal the artifact. literally every single round could’ve been won without you doing anything

@Clucky: “Dynamism in routing” blocks the strategy of camping Artifacts by making routes that just camp in one place illegal to submit.

“Too many thieves” also would have blocked the strategy of camping Artifacts a different way: by making Distractions work against it. (The relevant change has since been made in the rules by a different proposal, as someone else copied the wording from mine.) Under the previous set of rules, if a Guard and Burglar were on the same square during a Distraction minute, the Burglar wouldn’t get the Artifact. Under the current rules, they do. The main aim of the proposal was to get that wording changed in order to prevent “stand on the Artifacts all evening” being a breaking strategy, by adding counterplay (using a Distraction at the critical moment) – that wasn’t the stated aim of the proposal, but it’s what I was trying to accomplish with it (and it did end up being accomplished even though the proposal itself was voted down, as the relevant wording got added to the ruleset later).

The “bully them out of” is also not what happened – in fact I offered both qenya and DoomedIdeas the opportunity to be the one to steal it, but they asked me to do it because I was Quick already, and we arranged things to guarantee that every Burglar would be able to make use of the same Distraction to gain enough Infamy to be able to perform a Preparation Action.

Dynamism in routing was voted down for being boring. just like this one.

Too many thieves would not have fixed anything. You’re not the only Agent on that spot. You just have two agents in the same spot who do not officially share a location.

your account of what happened simply isn’t true

qenya, doomeidea and I had the plan all worked out ourselves. couldn’t cut you out with accusations simply because then I’d be the only one at 3 which isn’t good for anyone but me. so had to loop you in on the plan of when the distractions were to make sure you didn’t get in the way of the artifact stealing. but they couldn’t trust you not to sit on the artifact so had to let you take it

@Clucky: I submitted the plan to qenya and DoomedIdeas, who informed me that you had also thought of the same plan and told them about it. You were just as unnecessary to it as I was (more so, in fact, because I was Quick already) – if you hadn’t submitted the plan everything would have gone through the same way.

“Too many thieves” would have removed the “only Agent at a Spot which contains an Artifact” wording from the ruleset entirely – if you look at the proposal, you’ll see that it’s present in the text being removed but not in the text being replaced. That was the primary idea behind the proposal: to remove the wording that meant Distractions didn’t work against a Guard who was standing on an Artifact. (The replacement text was somewhat less important.) And that’s how it fixed things. Please do not make allegations that are trivially easy to disprove.

i never suggested I was necessary. just pointing out that your claim that you were somehow instrumental in any of the successes people have had so far doesn’t line up with my view of how the game has gone. which is part of my reason behind the push to give players in the back more of a chance. most of this dynasty so far has just been luck based, and even if we do get stuff into a state where some actually strategizing can occur it’ll be far too late for most players

if you were trying to suggest that too many thieves would’ve “fixed” an issue that in your mind, distractions weren’t powerful enough, I don’t really know what to say given now you’re trying to say distractions are too powerful

I agree that there isn’t generally much strategising to be done in the current ruleset – I’ve been treating the dynasty mostly as an experiment in trying to ensure that the ruleset favours whichever side I’m currently on, because there’s interesting gameplay to be had at that level, at least.

That said, in my planning for the current round, the gameplay after this proposal passes seems to be interesting for both sides: there are a lot of potential Burglar plans, and all of them seem to be possible to cover individually, but it doesn’t seem possible to cover them all at once. It’s a lot more interesting than the current “the Burglars always win” – it’s somewhat interesting how we got to that situation (i.e. both sides had breaking strategies but the Guards’ took precedence, so when we fixed those, the game was broken for the Burglars), but once the situation has become publicly known it’s no longer interesting to continue in that situation.

The main way in which I was instrumental in the successes is that, if I had been on the other team, the game would have gone differently. Say I’m a Burglar in round 2 – I would immediately point out “the Guards can get a guaranteed win by standing on the Artifacts, because a Distraction doesn’t help with that”, and continue writing proposals to try to change the situation until one of them passed (because there’s no point in playing a game that is publicly known to be fully one-sided). So the fact that I was on the Guard team was instrumental to the Guards succeeding in the way they did – if I had been on the other team I would have tried to get the imbalance fixed by proposal, and then the Guards wouldn’t have had such an extreme advantage any more. All this stems from my belief that, in general, Nomic players won’t allow imbalances and loopholes to continue past the point at which they are publicly known – so if you see an imbalance or loophole that isn’t to your benefit, you can prevent other players using it by publicly pointing it out. And thus, if I see a loophole and keep silent about it (because it benefits me), that is in its own way a way to improve my position in the dynasty, even though I didn’t visibly do anything. (In a way, the best nomic strategies are the ones where you don’t visibly do anything!)

I kind-of assumed you were doing the same thing (and thus assumed you were helping me along with the Successes) – was that not the case?

its honestly kinda insulting to the other players that you think none of the guards the first few rounds realized “the Guards can get a guaranteed win by standing on the Artifacts, because a Distraction doesn’t help with that”

Well, either none of the Burglars realised, or those who did didn’t care enough to try to fix the situation (with the latter being more likely). In either case, the Burglars in some sense “deserve” the bad result, given that they could have prevented it.

People literally voted down your proposal to fix it so I’m really not sure why you think you could’ve gotten something else passed

And regardless, the uber point remains that if you want to actually get people to mix their strategies up you’re gonna have to do something that doesn’t just change the game from “easy for the burglars to steal” to “easy for the guards to block”

I think this proposal will get people to mix their strategies up. For example, I think the optimal Guard strategy after this passes does not involve camping on a single square.

If you think that the gameplay is going to end up Guard-sided if this passes, or will be broken in some way, I encourage you to make the breaking strategy public so that people will try to fix it, rather than letting the game remain Guard-sided.

If this passes, guards will be able to block every artifact and will have no incentive to vote for any other change. No strategy there just boring gameplay

They won’t – the counterplay to blocking every Artifact will be to use a Distraction on the turn where you pick up an Artifact.

This proposal is purely designed to stop the use of a Back Door + Distraction combination to grab guarded Artifacts. It doesn’t prevent Distractions doing their job in other cases.

But without being able to use a back door everyone needs at least three moves undetected to possibly grab an artifact

Can’t block that all with a distraction

Right, but if the Guards are camping the Artifacts then they won’t detect you on the other squares. It’s counterplay to the strategy of camping the Artifacts – but it isn’t counterplay to all possible Guard strategies, because that would break things the other way.

The aim is to produce a ruleset in which neither side has a guaranteed path to success, and where guessing/anticipating what the other side will do gives an advantage. Back Doors beat the “camp the Ingresses” strategy, whereas Distractions beat the “camp the Artifacts” strategy – and for a side with two Preparation Actions (like yours), you can do both and thus beat camping strategies regardless of which is used.

In your feedback voting against my proposals, you’ve been trying to get me to add counterplay to broken strategies and to change the rules so that camping is no longer optimal, and I hope that this change is sufficient to do that (although there may well be other possible broken strategies that I haven’t thought of yet).

There is no counterplay to blocking the artifacts. You’re literally trying to create a ruleset that gives you a guaranteed win this round

There is – if a Burglar and Guard are on the same Spot at the Minute of a Distraction, the Burglar gets the Artifact and the Guard doesn’t catch them.

The current rule reads “For each Burglar who is the only Burglar at a Spot which contains an Artifact (not counting Burglars who have Encountered a Guard this Break-In), set that Artifact’s location to be that Burglar’s name.”. This makes it possible to pick up Artifacts even if a Guard is there, so long as you don’t Encounter them.

“But without being able to use a back door everyone needs at least three moves undetected to possibly grab an artifact

Can’t block that all with a distraction”

Okay I’m done here. No point continuing to repeat myself

Are you talking about blocking the route to the Artifact rather than the Artifact itself? That would work if you had enough Guards – but there aren’t enough Guards for the purpose, because there are too many possible routes to the Artifacts. That’s another breaking strategy that I removed by proposal, via adding extra connections so that almost every Spot would be reachable via multiple routes.

Three moves undetected is easy to get if you know where the Guards are. You can’t block all the moves of an entire route with Distractions, of course – if you could that would be broken for the Burglars. But you can block some of the route with Distractions, and the Guards can’t cover that many Spots at a time (only 4 without the help of Extra Spots, and Extra Spots were weakened recently).

As I understand it, the whole idea behind the dynasty is that the Guards try to protect the Artifacts by blocking off possible strategies, but they can’t cover every possible strategy, so the Burglars can win by picking a route that the Guards aren’t blocking. If the Guards block the Artifacts, you cover it with a Distraction. If they block the Ingresses, you use a Back Door. If they block points in between, you pick a different route that goes around that point (possibly using a Back Door to approach from a weird direction), because there are a lot more than four possible routes to an Artifact. Only one Burglar needs to succeed in order to win the round, so you get four tries to find a route that isn’t being covered.

Ignoring the fact that you’re quick and so can block multiple locations at once (as can other guards)

I guess I just got a hope everyone else can see through your ploy here

The rules for Quick were amended recently. I recommend you read the new rules before making that judgement.

Your continued smug and condescending behavior isn’t doing you any favors here