Draft: Anti-Retroactivity Compromise

[Looney]

The following is intended to be a less-objectionable substitute for
BobTHJ's motion "Violations & Retroactivity," which was defeated. At
the moment, it is only posted for discussion, and is NOT being
officially submitted.

Draft Motion: Anti-Retroactivity Compromise

The following texts shall replace the corresponding rules in their
entirety:

Rule 104--Ex Post Facto Changes Forbidden
No rule-change may take effect earlier than the moment of the
completion of the vote that adopted it, even if its wording explicitly
states otherwise. No other game action may take effect earlier than
the moment when it is declared, though game actions may take effect
later than this, and need not take effect in order of declaration. No
game action may have retroactive application, except for those game
actions that are needed to resolve disputes over the course of past
events (i.e., RFJs and appeals).

Rule 207--Requests for Judgment
The Judicial Review Period shall consist of the present game week and
the previous game week.

If there is disagreement among the players about the legality of a
move made within the Judicial Review Period or the interpretation or
application of a rule within the Judicial Review Period, then an
active player may seek a Ruling by submitting a Request for Judgment
(RFJ) to the administrator, who shall assign it a case number. The
submitting player shall be considered the Petitioner for the RFJ. The
RFJ shall take the form of a statement to be judged TRUE or FALSE. The
Petitioner should also assign a title to the case, and may optionally
include arguments regarding the RFJ statement. Disagreement, for the
purposes of this rule, may be created by the insistence of any player.

When an RFJ is invoked, it is a duty of the administrator to, as soon
as possible, select a Judge as described in the rules and publish the
RFJ, along with the identity of the Judge. The Ruling on the RFJ,
including comments by the Judge, shall guide game play in regard to
the issue addressed by the RFJ. If two or more rulings conflict on an
issue, the latest Ruling shall take precedence. The Ruling shall only
guide game play during or after the Judicial Review Period that was in
effect when the RFJ was first submitted; the game state in turns prior
to that Judicial Review Period shall stand as originally reported
(after taking into account the effects of any prior RFJs).

[Roger Hicks]

I like this. It essentially accomplishes what I was attempting.
However, it does not solve the Rule 1 quandary....can a player violate
the rules? I don't see a way around this other than:

* Accept the fact that rules can be broken (a fundamental law of the
universe) OR
* Amend Rule 1 to declare specifically what occurs when rules are broken

In any case, if this were proposed I would vote for it as it solves
the retroactivity issue.

BobTHJ

[Tovan]

I like this as well. As far as breaking the rules though, the
judicial review period would cover that. You can request for
judgement on legalities of moves, actions or otherwise and it would
then be judged upon. Do we need to also need to add judicial review
wording to rules #209 and #210 as well? What do you think?

On Jun 27, 11:02 pm, "Roger Hicks" <pidge...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I like this. It essentially accomplishes what I was attempting.
> However, it does not solve the Rule 1 quandary....can a player violate
> the rules? I don't see a way around this other than:
>
> * Accept the fact that rules can be broken (a fundamental law of the
> universe) OR
> * Amend Rule 1 to declare specifically what occurs when rules are broken
>
> In any case, if this were proposed I would vote for it as it solves
> the retroactivity issue.
>
> BobTHJ
>

> > (after taking into account the effects of any prior RFJs).- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[pitboss]

Although this seems to be a move in the right direction, I argue that
the last sentence of (draft) Rule 104, although necessary in its
current form, negates any value to the change: "No game action may
have retroactive application, _except for those game actions that are
needed to resolve disputes over the course of past events_ (i.e., RFJs
and appeals)."

With this wording, the round would have encountered the same issues
since retroactive actions are still allowed "to resolve disputes."
This is what got us in trouble in the first place.

I argue that the only way to go is to modify Rule 1 to declare that
when a player violates a rule (accidentally or on purpose) they cease
to be a player (by definition, players play by the rules, if a player
stops following the rules, they are no longer a player) and to adopt a
strict no-retroactive actions with no exceptions rule. Although this
seems harsh, I believe that this will accomplish a couple of things:

1) Today if a player simply decides to stop following the rules, they
can remain a player and it is up to the rest of the players to simply
"ignore" the non-playing player and anything they attempt to do that
is illegal. This change to Rule 1 will make it easy to deal with this
kind of player. Even though we haven't seen this kind of player
recently (I think Baron Von Skippy was the last time we saw this), it
can easily happen at any time and we're currently powerless to do
anything about it.

2) It will keep players focused on proposing rule-changes (and, yes,
sub-games) that are actually playable. That is, if you propose a rule
that is so complicated that no one is willing to take the risk of
trying to officiate it and possibly becoming a non-player, the rules
and sub-games will simply not take effect. This will finally act as a
brake on the rambling, wide-ranging, complicated sub-games that we've
suffered through for the last 3 rounds.

I will not support Looney's drafts proposals because I believe they
make the immutable rules significantly more complicated and more
likely to allow loop-holes and that they will not fix the underlying
problems.

-pitboss

["Looney" Lurie]

No. Judicial Review Period doesn't affect the role of the Judge, nor
the appeal process, so it need not be mentioned in those rules. Appeals
to old RFJs could serve as loopholes by which major retroactive changes
could be made in spite of these new rules, but presumably players will
vote down any troublesome appeals.

As for Rule 1, I don't really have any fix to implement. Nor do I see
it as a major problem. Perhaps one of the concerned players (pitboss?)
should write a separate motion to address that issue.

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[Tovan]

I still dont like the idea of changing rule 1. What if the player
makes an innocent mistake? I makes mistakes all the time in these
games and most of them would have resulted me in becoming a non-player
with that kind of ruling. What or who is to decide if someone broke
the rules? I can see adding it into the mutable section as part of
the RFJ, when one player feels that another player has broken the
rules, then a RFJ is submitted declaring this. I also feel there
would then need added wordage to the appeal process to handle this as
well as maybe another process to take care of the issue that caused
the RFJ to begin with, example:

Player 1, as a officer, mistakenly allowed another player to keep some
entity and forgot to remove it from that players inventory. According
to the rules that he was the officer of, he was supposed to remove
these entities or enforce the player to remove them in some way. He
forgets and the time has passed where he can go back and take care of
that problem. If he catches the problem, he can do a RFJ himself to
correct the issue retroactively. But if someone else catches him, he
broke the rules and is therefore a non-player, the rule that he was
the officer of becomes a blue-rule, and that part of the game is now
dead. Now, add into the mix if this rule was the basis of any other
rules. How many paradox's does changing rule #1 have the potential to
create in this example?

Now a change is fine, and sometimes required. I would even go so far
as to suggest that we move the RFJ, appeal process to immutable status
and deal with those types of players (We even had discussions on
changing the rules to deal with that specific player if I remember
right, even set up a new forum to talk amongst ourselves :) I will
think on this issue over the next two weeks (I am off of work due to
summer shutdown) and try to come up with something. With luck, and a
lot of conversation on this forum, I think we can nail this down :)

On Jun 28, 9:00 am, "\"Looney\" Lurie" <comp_wizard11...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

> ___________________________________________________________________________­_________
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[Jef]

As I see it, we have several issues:

1. Game actions should not be retroactive: Looney's proposed change to
{Rule 104} addresses this, and I will support that change.

2. Errors or missing recordings of game actions by officers need to be
taken into account. I've always thought of corrections not as "game
actions", but simply a correct reconciliation of the game state. With
this stance, however, a problem arises when the game state gets so
out-of-date and impacts other potential game actions that the
situation is perceived to be unmanageable. The Judicial Review Period
would put a statute of limitations on challenges to the game state. I
know from discussions with Pitboss that he has concerns that this
allows as a game strategy the purposeful mis-recording or omission of
game events by officers as a game strategy. But I say it is up to the
players to monitor the accuracy of the game state to ensure that
doesn't happen. This seems like a fairly clean way to handle it... I'm
not really sure what complexity Pitboss is referring to in his
criticism of this approach.

3. Rule 1 specifies that rules cannot be violated ("All players must
always abide by all rules currently in effect"), but does not specify
what happens when they are. I think kicking out the player is too
draconian and would quickly lead to no players at all. I will point
out that Pitboss would likely have been kicked out of at least the
first round of Nomicron were this the case--I'm sure all of us have at
least one time when we inadvertently violated a rule. To his point
about the complexity of subgames... I think there would be a better
way to handle this situation in the officer rule--specifying
consequences for failing to keep the records up to date. Of course, a
change to Rule 1 is required to authorize that... at least in my
opinion. I'll come up with a draft change to Rule 1.

-Jef

[Ouroboros]

Pitboss puts forward a reasonable suggestion: that a Player ceases to
be a Player when he violates the Rules. However, this would be very
difficult to enforce, as Jef has pointed out.

Perhaps we should consider a corollary: the Round moves into
Convention when a Paradox is demonstrated.
In past rounds we have observed concerted and accidental effort to
move the ruleset towards an exploitable paradox. It may be time to
ditch the idea that a demonstrated paradox brings down the ruleset,
and temporarily take the Round into Convention to address the paradox
and perhaps re-factor several rules, then head back into the game at
hand.

["Looney" Lurie]

Usually by the time anybody manages to trigger the paradox rule, the
round has already reached a period of stagnation, and we'd rather reset
and start over. There have been cases where we've kept a subgame alive
between rounds because it hadn't been there long enough to stagnate
(e.g., Nomicron Hold'em, Rounds 6-7). However, in most cases, the rules
are a mess, and we're better off cutting them down to just the initial
rules (with maybe a few others; things like the "Point King and Whale
Scum" rule might be worth keeping).

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[Ouroboros]

Sometimes I dislike being so equivocal, but it may be that the
impending complexity and paradox causes the stagnation. What I'm
suggesting is that the PARADOX declaration be made less a "let's end
the game right now" and more an opportunity to put the points-earning
on pause while a brief period of increased activity (3-day turns)
might attempt to put the ruleset into a more manageable state. Of
course the first motion of such a convention could be "let's bag this
round, declare a winner, and start again". Or that could be the fifth
motion.

On Jul 2, 7:12 pm, "\"Looney\" Lurie" <comp_wizard11...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

[Looney]

As nobody has posted any objections to the text, I am submitting this
motion for official consideration now, with no changes. For reference,
here is the motion text:

Motion: Anti-Retroactivity Compromise

The following texts shall replace the corresponding rules in their
entirety:

Rule 104--Ex Post Facto Changes Forbidden
No rule-change may take effect earlier than the moment of the
completion of the vote that adopted it, even if its wording explicitly
states otherwise. No other game action may take effect earlier than
the moment when it is declared, though game actions may take effect

later than this, and need not take effect in order of declaration. No
game action may have retroactive application, except for those game

actions that are needed to resolve disputes over the course of past

[pitboss]

I vote No on both.

-pitboss

[Silverius]

I vote Yes on this motion (Anti-Retroactivity Compromise).

~Silverius