Daniel Lepage on 21 Nov 2003 02:09:57 -0000


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Re: [spoon-discuss] Re: [Spoon-business] Stone Swapping 


On Thursday, November 20, 2003, at 08:47 PM, Craig wrote:


To Donate a stone to another player, a player must choose a stone of
eirs that is on the board and another player who already has at least
one stone on the board; the chosen stone becomes a stone of the chosen 
player.



The player should have to be allied. Otherwise this provides further
incentives for an alliance (say, yours) to take on an undeclared ally
(say, SkArcher). That way he can move in key places, yet transfer his
stones into your alliance if they start to threaten your position. That 
gives all of the benefits of being allied with almost no disadvantage.
I agree with your first sentence. However, you'll note that it costs em a 
move, whereas any reasonable alliance would want to maximize the
productivity of its moves. You will also note that bd has offered SkArcher an alliance; we have no intention of having an undeclared ally any longer 
than necessary. Formal alliances allow for greater freedom in where you
place your stones, which is a good thing for any team.
Personally, though, I see PGo's alliances as more of a means to an end. We want it to be political, which we accomplish by providing a means for people to work together. In fact, I think I will propose an amendment to encourage 
backstabbings, thereby enhancing the political aspect. It will be ready
soon.
The big problem with backstabbing is that people will remember. Theoretically, I could backstab all my allies, stated or undeclared, whenever I wanted, but then I'd have very little chance of ever entering into an alliance with anyone again, as nobody would trust me not to stab them too.
What we could perhaps make use of is some sort of alias mailing system... each player could be assigned an alias from a given set, such as {"Red","Green","Blue","Mauve", etc.}; a script could then be devised that, upon receiving an email from me with subject PGo:Blue:Wanna Backstab Turquoise?, would look me up in its table to discover that I'm Green, lookup whoever happens to be Blue, say, Sagitta, and Sagitta would get a message from the script with the subject PGo:Green:Wanna Backstab Turquoise?; e'd know it came from Green and talked about Turquoise, and the PGo map would show stones owned by Green, Blue, and Turquoise, but e and I would never know which player was behind each color.
A few modifications would allow this to hold multiple sets of aliases at once, so one subgame might be using {Red, Green, Blue, etc.} while another used {France, Italy, New Zealand, etc.} and another had {Falcon, Eagle, Hawk, Titmouse, etc.}.
And then some subgames could allow things like grey and black press (to steal some Diplomacy terms), where messages can be sent anonymously, or even with faked senders or fake recipient lists.
(This is an idea that originated a while ago during a conversation with another player about how a game like Diplomacy could be made into a subgame; I also got some ideas from reading about various online Diplomacy hosting tools, like the DPjudge at www.diplom.org, which has all these features built in to the games themselves) 



There are two big problems that I can see with this sort of anonymity:
1) New players - if a new player joins B Nomic, and then joins PGo, and at the same time off-yellow pieces appear for the first time, it won't be too hard to guess who's off-yellow
2) Victory - if Chartreuse wins the subgame and suddenly bd is 200 points richer, it is again not too difficult to deduce the identity of Chartreuse.
OTOH, grudges and inherent mistrust can make things more interesting, so perhaps this sort of system isn't needed just for backstabbing; but I'd still love to see a subgame with Black Press. 

--
Wonko

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