Rule Amendments

[Krill]

1. If you think that we require a rule that states we can not talk or discuss the game during pauses due to game admins reviewing the game, then suggest a rule and we can discuss it, and then the teams can vote on it.
   
2. We also trust teams to not contact other teams out of game before ingame contact, and not trading screenshots prior to paper, but we still have rules inplace incase someone breaks them. Even a simple "No frivolous requests for an admin judgement" would go along way.
   

 

[Lord Parkin]

Krill
It should be clear: "No turn discussion during tme out"
Every member can read there, but nothing post about the turn. GA can controll this very easy.

So the difference between a prolongation for turn discussion or the deciding on game matters is clear.

Eh? No turn discussion while an admin decision is being made? Why?

This seems totally pointless and unnecessary to me (not to mention unenforceable in the case of MSN chats and the like). What does stopping a team from discussing which direction they want their exploring Warriors to move add to the game? It seems like pointless bureaucracy to me.

Sorry if I've missed a bigger purpose behind this, but from what you've posted above it seems like this would basically be saying "freeze all game discussions in all private forums if someone wants an admin ruling". That's just silly, IMHO.

 

[Niklas]

The bigger purpose would be to stop people from abusing the "call on admins" in order to prolong the time they can discuss. But I really think that's the wrong way to go about it. I honestly don't think any team would do that, since everyone is well aware of it being morally wrong, rule or no rule.

 

[Krill]

We have rules that ban certain things that may be morally wrong. Not banning other things that we decide may be morally wrong and expecting teams to abide by the unwritten rules creates confusion and ultimately discord between the teams. We ought to be consistent and just make a simple 2-3 sentance rule that states it shouldn't be done.

"x.y requesting a pause for an admin judgement to prolong the amount of time to discuss a turns actions is prohibited" would be a good starting point.

A side note that we should have considered is that while we have created a ruleslist we haven't created or decided on any punishments if a team brakes the rules, wether accidentally or on purpose, which makes it alot harder for the game admins to decide on a suitable punishment if necesarry.

 

[DaveShack]

The most annoying thing for me about this discussion is the assumption that a team would delay the game on purpose. We've already had way too much complaining on the part of 4 of the 5 teams because the 5th one wants a simple and minimal amount of democracy in their play. Lighten up already!

In a PBEM the usual reason for failure of a game to progress is lack of anyone to actually play it for one of the teams. In a pitboss we have an emergency valve for that, in the form of the turn timer and ultimately a kick to AI.

 

[Krill]

For discussion:

4.7 - Pausing
If a situation arises which requires an administrator's ruling prior to proceeding in-game, the game will be paused until the administrator's decision is posted. If a player finds the game paused, the turn tracker thread must be checked for a possible ruling request or delay request before unpausing.

The problems with this proposed amendment are twofold; as we can see from Huschs' posts at least one person in this game feels that we should stop all game discussion during such periods because it is "unfair". Lord Parkin has already listed the reasons against this, and there is one more: it will damage game participation levels if we ever get into a situation that requires admins to keep a close eye on the game with multiple requests for rulings, such as in a long war, which is always a possibility. I'll come to the second later.

To help limit the any such advantages gained from asking for admin rulings, we should create a rule that limits the amount of times the admins are asked for minor rulings; leave it up to the admins to decide what is minor. It would work better the more active the game admin would be though.

We already have a rule that allows for pauses in the game, and we also have a mechanism for decreasing the amount of time the turn can be held for. Adding an additional rule that leads to a pause of indefinate length makes perfect sense when we need an admin ruling, but can be abused, requires a rule and punishment that stops teams from gaining an unfair advantage from the additional time to think, which as Husch has demonstrated some people want. The rule that I propsed above would help solve that without any side effects, and a gentle punishment of gained time is removed from that teams future turns stops the game from being bogged down. The 4 out of 5 teams that don't want the game slowed down may like the idea that the game is kept moving.

The second problem is that it doesn't have a punishment mechanism, it is effectively an "Or else" rule. This is relatively minor, and can be rectified by saying the pause shall be restarted asap and the time lost from that teams trun shall be added on via leaving the puase on for that long, or a reload if a teams turn is rolled over while a pause should be in effect.


On an off topic note, Dave, your comment that this rule is "annoying" is not useful to this, democratic, discussion. If there is a problem with the propsed rules, please comment on them.

 

[dutchfire]

I'm more worried about the turnplayer making an irreversible decision, say whipping a city, and then claiming he was hit by lag when he finds out it was a bad move than about a team delaying the game on purpose.

 

[DaveShack]

On an off topic note, Dave, your comment that this rule is "annoying" is not useful to this, democratic, discussion. If there is a problem with the propsed rules, please comment on them.

I think you may have misinterpreted my comment. I don't like the allegation that a team (my team in particular) wants to hold up the game. There are continuing comments about that, which are beginning to rise to the level of trolling IMO.

As for the rules, what guides me personally is a preference for judgement calls over mandatory punishments. That's just how I am. I prefer to assume the people I'm playing with are honest and honorable, and we accepted a volunteer game admin so that the circumstances can be reviewed impartially.

 

[Renata]

The last several turns (Kazakhstan's mishap aside) have been much more the "fault" of the Cavaleiros than of the Mad Scientists, so if anyone should be getting the blame currently, it should be us. I agree that no-one should be blamed, though. The turn timer is at 24 hours and not 3 hours for a reason.

As for the other topic of discussion, I'm used to the GOTM. In that competition, unless you've had a crash, you don't get to replay anything. It doesn't matter if you've figuratively just walked your entire army off a cliff because your cat jumped on the keyboard, you're stuck with it. I've gotten to be comfortable with that level of strictness. But is it really needed here? Do we (collectively) really want to be so paranoid about someone possibly taking advantage that we remove the ability to recover from moves that can't even be seen at the time they're happening? If we want to formalize it into a "thou shalt not mis-use this ability," then fine, but can't we just leave the consequences to Ginger Ale's best judgment?

 

[Niklas]

I agree with Renata completely.

Also, personally I think it's perfectly fine if a team wants to pause the game because it needs more discussion. We've done that plenty of times in the PBEM-styled Civ3 MTDG2. Why would it not be allowed just because we now have a turn timer? The purpose of the timer, as far as I can tell, was to ensure that no team could hold up the game for extended periods of time because they lacked turn players or whatnot. But surely in the rare cases when you need to discuss a lot, it should be ok to pause?

 

[Renata]

Isn't that formalized already though, Niklas? It's been a while since I've read the rules , but I seem to recall something about teams being able to get extensions somehow.

 

[Niklas]

Yes, it is in the rules already. But the rules don't specify what constitutes a valid reason for asking for an extention. Personally I think needing extra time to discuss something is a very valid reason, but from the sentiments put forward in this discussion it seems that there are those who don't agree. Hence my post above.

 

[Provolution]

Well, from what I see here, I learn a lot about team culture, convictions, values and what to expect from future relations from the respective teams, so it is indeed interesting to read.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Asking for extra time every now and then is fine. If a team requests extra time all the time though, that becomes a bit of a pain for the rest of the players.

Hopefully that won't happen in this game, though.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Well, from what I see here, I learn a lot about team culture, convictions, values and what to expect from future relations from the respective teams, so it is indeed interesting to read.

Really you're only learning about the convictions and values of individual players, not the teams as a whole. If one person is really well-mannered (or really argumentative) in a particular discussion, that doesn't tell you anything about what the rest of the team is like. You may find the team of the well-mannered person to be very deceptive and untrustworthy in the game, or you may find the team of the argumentative person to be quite friendly and amiable. One person alone doesn't dictate their team's philosophy - that wouldn't be a democracy game.

 

[Krill]

The last several turns (Kazakhstan's mishap aside) have been much more the "fault" of the Cavaleiros than of the Mad Scientists, so if anyone should be getting the blame currently, it should be us. I agree that no-one should be blamed, though. The turn timer is at 24 hours and not 3 hours for a reason.

I agree with Renata completely.

Also, personally I think it's perfectly fine if a team wants to pause the game because it needs more discussion. We've done that plenty of times in the PBEM-styled Civ3 MTDG2. Why would it not be allowed just because we now have a turn timer? The purpose of the timer, as far as I can tell, was to ensure that no team could hold up the game for extended periods of time because they lacked turn players or whatnot. But surely in the rare cases when you need to discuss a lot, it should be ok to pause?

I agree that if a team really needs time to discuss something important, they should be granted a pause; we already have rules in place to grant a pause of up to 5 days, with each team voting against the pause removing 24 hours from the maximum length of the pause.

What we don't need is to have this feature and a method of abusing the pauses. We need pauses for the game admin to look at the situation and make a ruling, but we don't want teams to abuse this to give them more time for a discussion, as they can already request a pause using rule 4.1, quoted below.

Spoiler :

4.1 -- Turn Timer
The PitBoss server will give each team 24 hours in which to play the save and pass it on to the next team. If a team is unable to play in time, they may post a request for an extension in the turn-tracker thread, and state the reason they believe it should be granted. AFTER the extension request and rational have been posted in the turn tracker, that team may then pause the game.
The game may remain paused up to 120 hours, at which point any team may un-pause the game so play may resume.
An official vote to “continue sooner” may be posted by any team in the turn-tracker thread. Each such vote by a team will reduce the 120 hour extension by 24 hours.

--

@Dave:

Yes, I may have misinterpreted your comment. Each team has 24 hours to discuss the turn, and we are nearing the point of the game where major events could definately require time to sort out; if this time is required, each team is, according to the rules, allowed to requesst a pause. The rule that we are discussing doesn't pertain to this though, it pertains to teams requesting an admin decision, which means a pause could be for an indefinate period, until the admin is able to respond. That's the difference.

And at Provo: Et tu, Brute?

 

[General_W]

Notice: This is only my opinion. I am not speaking for team SANCTA.

As someone that's been involved with this from the beginning and who helped write the ruleset, I'd just like to offer my perspective on pausing the game.

When we wrote the rule, the express intention was to be very generous in allowing teams to pause the game. Or, put another way, we'd rather error on the side of having too many pauses than too few.

I think there are a lot of new MTDG players here who are used to PitBoss games where the goal is to play and finish a game as rapidly as can still be fun. The MTDG has always been (and hopefully always will be) a different sort of animal.

It was actually a narrow vote that moved this game away from PBEM into PitBoss. If we were doing this as a PBEM (as we have done all MTDGs up to this point) the game would, in essence, be paused every single turn!

We moved the game to PitBoss to accelerate things – but we don't want it to move so fast that we destroy the heart of what makes the MTDG unique… and that's the team interactions.

As the rules state:

4.1 -- Turn Timer
The PitBoss server will give each team 24 hours in which to play the save and pass it on to the next team. If a team is unable to play in time, they may post a request for an extension in the turn-tracker thread, and state the reason they believe it should be granted. AFTER the extension request and rational have been posted in the turn tracker, that team may then pause the game.
The game may remain paused up to 120 hours, at which point any team may un-pause the game so play may resume.
An official vote to “continue sooner” may be posted by any team in the turn-tracker thread. Each such vote by a team will reduce the 120 hour extension by 24 hours.

All that is required to pause the game is for the team to post – and offer some kind of a reason. It does NOT have to be a "good" reason.
If Team A thinks that Team B's reason for pausing the game is stupid or that a Team B is abusing the pause feature, then Team A can vote to reduce B's allowed pause time.

Any team that abuses this pause rule will quickly find themselves voted down to only 24 hours of allowed pause time each time they request a pause.

True, that still allows them 48 hours to play each save – but this is WAY faster than any abusive team could hold up the save if this were PBEM. Not to mention, I'm pretty sure the diplomatic consequences of this behavior would far out-weigh any benefit of having a few extra hours to discuss things.

The reason we've organized an MTDG is to allow for a higher level of team interaction and team-team diplomacy than occurs in your standard "let's get this done as fast as possible" PitBoss MP game.

This is already moving way faster than a PBEM game. Let's not get so focused on speed that we sacrifice the reason we're playing an MTDG.

In conclusion: As per the rules, I think any team should be allowed to pause the game for any reason, as long as they post in the turn-tracker. If your team doesn't like the reason for the pause, vote to reduce it by 24 hours.

 

[peter grimes]

Very well-put, General_W.

It seems that there is a very vocal, though small, contingent here that is excited about trying to think of all the subversive ways a team could possibly keep the save from coming back around as quickly as possible

As Niklas said, simply needing to discuss which way a warrior moves, not to mention myriad other contingencies, is a perfectly valid cause for an extension.

 

[General_W]

Discussion of this topic seems to have died down, so I'd like to officially propose an amendment to the Ruleset:

2.2 Every team should feel free to ignore any random events which they perceive as negative to them. Procedure: The first team-member to log on to the server for a given turn will see any random event notices for their team. If the event is viewed as "negative" the player is free to force the game to quit, and then can log back in… which will cause the game to load without any random event occurring.

Unless we'd like to modify the wording somewhat – I think we should really try to get a team vote on this before it becomes a real issue in-game.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Team Saturn already discussed this a while ago, and came to a unanimous decision in favour of all teams ignoring random events that they choose to.