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Thursday, December 23, 2004

Forum on scamming

Hey, y'all.

I was wondering if we might talk about a way to codify our feelings on exploiting loopholes in the rules. I know a lot of us disagree, but I also think we're cool enough to get the other side and strike a balánce.

From what I've seen, I think most of us agree that there's a grey area when it comes to scamming. Some scamming is clever, cute, and undeniably legit; some is just linguistic gerrymandering.

  • E.G.: My move last Dynasty where I had Sirrus marry Juila without her accepting the proposal? There were some obvious deficiencies in the wording, I did it once, got a laugh, and then proposed a fix. I think that was okay.


  • E.G.: My planned move last Dynasty where I would have declared victory, pointing out that the Victory rule says you can declare victory when you have achieved that Dynasty's victory condition, along with how the victory condition didn't explicitly say it was a victory condition? NOT okay. Would've been stupid and awful and you all would've hated me.


SO. What I'm proposing is that we figure out some way to articulate what's okay scamming and what's stupid. We'll never get the grey area totally out, but it might help if we define it.

Examples of what such an amendment might add to the rules:


  • Punishment for repeatedly exploiting the same loophole, or failsafes against it. Maybe we could incorporate some kind of freeze when a new loophole is exploited, that would allow amendment before it's milked for all it's worth. (Note that a series of repetitive actions might only exploit the loophole once.)


  • Emphasis that theme rules should be worded very carefully to prevent unintended behavior. Like when Cayvie radioed in with no living members. Yes, this is common sense in reality, but BlogNomic ain't reality, and most such stipulations are trivial to write in. We could 1) Encourage voting against proposals when such loopholes are caught, or 2) create a mechanic by which to amend loopholey proposals midvote.


  • Some kind of nebulous code of ethics that somehow articulates the level of analness that we find unacceptable. Hard, but maybe worth a shot?


These are just first things to come to mind. In any case, maybe in this thread we can hash this stuff out, find some concrete words to describe what we think, and formulate a proposal.