There his been a proposal to decrease my score for allegedly violating the metarules. I would like to present a few points in my defense, in the spirit of debating Nomic proposals.
Background: I created two extra accounts, called falsifian_minion_0 and falsifian_minion_1, and used them to pass two proposals.
- First, the metarules are implicit rather than explicit, as far as I can tell. That means the metarules can be nothing other than whatever a reasonable person would take them to be. Keep in mind that I am a stranger to this group, and found the game through the web.*
- Reasonably, I would think the metarules would say things like "don't register multiple accounts to create an advantage for yourself in the game".
- I registered my first extra account for the sole purpose of fixing a glaring error on the landing page of the game, which could have turned potential users away: the dates were reported wrong on the "Help" and "News" pages. I registered my second extra account only because I lost my password for the first.
- I made it completely obvious that the extra accounts were mine. I could have made up a name, or even convinced a real person to act on my behalf. Now, which is worse: convincing a friend to join the game just to sneakily pass my proposals, or obviously adding a fake account just to fix the home page? Ask yourself, which should the metarules prevent?
For the above reasons, I will vote AGAINST proposal "kill_minions_00" unless it is amended so as to not dock any points.
James
* The closest thing to an explicit statement of the metarules that I could find is here:
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/ecmanomic/TSjUMkJHArE/discussion and I found that link while composing this post.