Re: [spoon-discuss] Redundant rules

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On May 30, 2004, at 11.15 PM, Zarpint wrote:

> > 2) Stasis/Lurking/Lost Souls/Comatose Players
> > 	I see very little to point to Lurking now. The only thing you get out
> > of it is immunity to Garbage Collection. However, Garbage Collection
> > now only puts you into Stasis, which seems to be *better* than being
> > Lurking, because you can't be targeted by anti-player effects and your
> > attributes never change, so you're immune to post-win resets, etc. 
> > Then
> > all of this seems to be better than being a Lost Soul, meaning that if
> > you're going to leave the game, you're better off simply walking away
> > and waiting for Stasis than actually quitting. I don't think we should
> > be rewarding people for abandoning the game rather than quitting, and 
> > I
> > don't think we should be preserving people who join and then just
> > ignore the game completely.
> > 	And then Comatose Players (r1532) seems to run against the spirit of
> > both Lurking and Stasis, allowing us to throw out these players 
> > anyway.
> > (I'd forgotten that we had this rule)
>
> It seems to me that since the GC rule takes precedence over 1532, we 
> can't
> throw out players in Stasis. That was the whole idea - that since it 
> costs
> a few bytes to maintain the statistics necessary, there's no need to 
> delete
> them when we can just completely ignore them, since I figure it's 
> better for
> the game to use a small bit of computer space than to have Robs being 
> garbage
> collected. (If the space is a problem, I can keep the information here 
> at
> dynamicwind.com.)
>
> So we can repeal 1532. It also seems to me that Forced Leave and 
> Lurking are
> redundant here, so we can remove those. We would then have On Leave, 
> Off Leave,
> and Stasis: On Leave for Players gone a short time, who would still 
> affect the
> Game, and Stasis for players who haven't taken actions for a while.

Stasis gives absent players an unfair advantage, however. A player in 
Stasis doesn't lose points if, for example, somebody wins. This means 
that if I go into stasis with 999 points, and then somebody wins, I can 
pop back out of stasis now that all scores are zero, and win myself.

I also don't see why we should bother to preserve information about 
players who have left the game. In the 2.5-year history of this game, a 
garbage-collected player has only *once* ever asked for eir stats back.

A much better solution to this problem would be to require that 
somebody send a notification to a GC candidate two nweeks before 
anyone's allowed to GC em. Had we done that, Rob would've known that he 
was about to be scrapped and could've come back and Lurked.

Prop on the way.

> {{
> Rules are revisable Game Documents. Rules may only be altered as 
> outlined in the Ruleset.
>
> A Rulebook is a collection of Rules. Every Rule must be in at least 
> one Rulebook.
>
> The Ruleset is the Rulebook which contains all Rules.
> }}

This defeats the entire purpose of rulebooks. They're meant to be 
collections of rules or rule-like objects that can be tracked 
independently of the full ruleset, so that not all rules need be in the 
ruleset. This makes it easier to separate some tasks: for example, we 
could make Card definitions full rules, and then make somebody else in 
charge of updating the list of Card descriptions.

--
Wonko

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