Re: [s-d] About panics

["William Berard" <william.berard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12/11/07, Geoffrey Spear <geoffspear@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm panicking because anyone who feels like it can prevent anything
> from happening in the game just by announcing that all of the actions
> are Invalid.


On the other hand, you just have to log a consultation to make your
action valid again.

I do not think there is something fundamentally wrong with the idea in
BobTHJ's RP : normally, the case of "invalidity spamming" was caught
by the fact that validity consultations could then be submitted, and
spammers punished. Now this obviously, slows down the pace of the
game, but this should not be a major problem.

The thing is that people have started trying different things,
submitting invalid actions, or contesting the validity of actions, on
a massive scale, to poke and probe the new ruleset, and , so to speak,
test the water.

I can see how this is freaking people out, I myself am not excluded,
but this definitely was to be expected from such a shift in paradigm
with BobTHJ's RP, and, if people could behave a bit in terms of poking
a probing and fooling around just for the conceptual fun of it, and if
there was a more streamlined process of contesting/submitting validity
consultation/answering on validity/publicly letting now what the
gamestate is, we would not have this panic IMHO...

I think the main issue is that at the end of the day, when so many
things happen so fast with contestations of validity, people end up
not knowing what the gamestate is.

The Ruleset we adopted from the RP was aimed at reducing the maximum
length of so called "quantuum gamestates" to a maximum of a day.
Instead of that, it was perceived as authorizing such gamestates and
not-yet-completely-valid-nor-invalid actions, since the rules deal
with them, then there is no reason we should abstain from generating
them, is there?

I think at the end of the day, that's a fair-play and sportsmanship
issue. I don't think it was very cool from the people who logged game
actions and contestation to test the robustness of the rules to have
done so to such an extent (and I'm not even pointing fingers, since so
much happened in so little time that I don't even remember who it
was). On the otherhand, it is hard to define sportsmanship in a game
whose very nature makes that the clever exploitation of a loophole
will be seen as a well-deserved victory. And really, when thinking
about it, this is just some kind of evolutionary sink-or-swim test for
the ruleset. The robustness of the ruleset needs to be tested at some
point.

On a side note, if anyone feels like including (maybe not in a RP, but
for a later proposal) some kind of implementation of a "Karma" or a
reward/punishement system (on an incentive/symbolic level rather than
really advantaging or disadventaging, e.g giving out awards and
shame-wards every nweek) regarding fair play and blatant abuse of
fragile rulesets, I'll definitely support this motion.

-- 
Will
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