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

["Craig" <ragnarok@xxxxxxxxx>]

>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.

This is simultaneously what makes it interesting and what makes it hard.

>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.

I like this. It lets people remember who is trustworthy without associating
any such things with individual players.

>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.

Wow. I would love to see such a thing.

>(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)

Hey, this gives me an idea! Diplomacy and my suggested Merchants subgame
deal with two very different aspects of international relationships on a
smaller scale. What if we somehow combined them? Ideally with black and grey
press? It would be the mother of all political subgames!

>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

True.

>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.

What if the next game of Go simply began with Chartreuse at an advantage and
multiple people, including bd, got richer?

>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.

Absolutely.

 -- Teucer

"Be vewwy vewwy quiet. We're getting mawwied."
 -clsn

ragnarok@xxxxxxxxx
teucer@xxxxxxxxxx


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