Editing Round 9/History (section)

== Conclusion ==

There are clearly several things we can take away from this story, ranging from surface-level to structural. 

=== Pacing ===

Let's start by discussing what Round 9 did well. In the author's opinion, the pacing of a Nomic game can be tricky to get right. People have a lot going on in their lives and many of us can't check in with the frequency that some games require. BlogNomic is a fast-paced game with lots of moving parts. You have to check in nearly every day during the most active spells. It can take tens of minutes each day you check in to get your bearings, strategize, and do everything that you want to do. 

Agora is at the other end of the spectrum. Rarely do you have to worry about an action that is to be taken more frequently than weekly. This comes at the cost of speed. It takes a long time to see the fruits of your efforts in Agora, and that is a deterrent for many.

With Round 9, we wanted to create a game somewhere in the middle of BlogNomic and Agora Nomic in this respect. The idea of Voting Periods arose and ended up being very popular (see {{Heading|Voting periods}}). Every action in Round 9 ended up aligned to voting periods. Proposals were passed at the end of the next voting period. You could feed someone's duck once per voting period. You could send your duck out scouting once per voting period and retrieve it during the next voting period. It led to a structure where players only had to check in twice a week to be completely caught up with the game. This schedule really worked for lots of people, so much so that it was adopted for [[Round 10]]. I would not be surprised if we keep reusing it for rounds to come.

This all notwithstanding, the idea of urgent proposals turned the tables back to the side of immediacy a little bit (see {{Heading|Urgency}}), circumventing the issue of the game being unplayable for two voting periods in a row as we twiddled our thumbs waiting for a hotfix to pass. I opine that they enhanced the semiweekly structure even though they did not fit perfectly into it.

=== Simultaneity ===

On to the things we struggled with but eventually got right. It's always a good idea to specify the order that things happen in if they are to happen at the same moment in time, and it is absolutely crucial to do so if one or more action depends on the result of the others. The Simultaneity Scares (see {{Heading|The Simultaneous Proposal Scare}} and {{Heading|The Second Simultaneity Scare}}) serve as cautionary tales. If we hadn't resolved them, they could have spelled disaster for our understanding of the gamestate. The fact that we struggled with this at all is perhaps the fault of the voting period system which aligned many important actions around two crucial points in the week.

To take this one step further, while proposals which simply specify relative orders (e.g. "Event X happens after event Y; event Z happens before Y") can certainly solve the problem -- they did in this round -- it is not hard to imagine it getting very tiresome and progressively more difficult to specify the order you really mean when there are, say, five events at the same instant. idle and finsook's proposals to add more boilerplate for simultaneous events (also in {{Heading|The Second Simultaneity Scare}}) did not pass but indeed have merit for a round where even more actions take place at the same time than in Round 9.

=== Late Introduction of Victory Conditions ===

Now let's discuss what Round 9 absolutely failed at. We did not provide a victory condition to work towards. It's important that nomic games have victory conditions early because they lend the players a sense of direction. Without a victory condition for Round 9, each player had their own goals that they were working toward. Wotton and Nyhilo collected ducks. Trungle and moonroof collected quacks. Most of us were just along for the ride. Once we'd gotten far enough along, however, it became hard to care about the game where there was no goal. It would be hard to add one at that phase, too. Everyone had been amassing resources for so long that setting a goal would probably favor one person over the others. In absence of productive things to do, some of us turned to scamming the ruleset, an attitude that ended up killing the game. Nyhilo made a valiant attempt to introduce a victory condition, but it never came to fruition (see {{Heading|The Duck Old One Endgame (6 Mar 2021-28 Apr 2021)}}) due to these and other factors. If it had come out sooner, perhaps it could have changed the way the round progressed.

I occasionally find myself drawn to one of the most ironic parts of this story wherein one of the greatest ills of the game was bundled with something that may have cured those ills. Proposal 1, the proposal that introduced the idea of ducks in the first place actually included a win condition: owning half of all ducks (Everythings, 3 Jan 2021; see {{Heading|The First Day (3 Jan 2021)}}). When it was reproposed as Proposal 🦆, that section was absent (Trungle, 3 Jan 2021). Needless to say, the round would have played out completely differently had Trungle included the bit about the victory condition in his version. If there had been a win condition from the start, then we would have no cause to scam the ruleset so much in March and April. Perhaps the game wouldn't have even gone on long enough for that to happen.

=== Gaining Items when You Join ===

Since the first day of the round, players gained a duck upon joining. And a loophole in this exact clause is what caused the downfall of the round in the end. If players are to gain items immediately after they join the round, that should be handled with delicacy. I can think of a minor modifications that would have patched the loophole right up: say that you only gain a duck the first time you join the round. Simple, but not perfect if you want people to be able to rejoin and start afresh. If that's your goal, then consider the following further thoughts, fruits of a discussion during Round 10<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/518856008605499402/864643752404189244</ref>:

# Define who can own items. Players in the round? Anyone who has joined before? Can no one own them? These ambiguities allowed the Day of Infinite Ducks scam.
# Place restrictions on registration. If you can leave and join again in the same instant, then you can quickly generate more items than you'll ever be able to use.
# Place restrictions on trading for a period after players join. 

These ideas don't guard against every potential scam, but they certainly make scamming a more arduous task.

=== Vigilance ===

A constant struggle in the game was the failure to balance the infinite duck accumulation achievable by Scouting (see {{Heading|Scouting}} and {{Heading|Updates to Scouting}}). When the rule was proposed, there was really no risk involved in sending a duck scouting and, after 17 January, the performer was guaranteed to receive a duck after a successful retrieval. Wotton was not the first to exploit this but there is no doubt that he was the most prolific. When actions were introduced to combat players with too many ducks, they had too many restrictions (see {{Heading|Stealing from the Rich}}), which Wotton was able to circumvent (see {{Heading|Cannibalism to Prevent Thievery}}). Legislation to get at the root cause, the cheap and risk-free scouting mechanic itself, didn't come until early March when the richest player had a staggering twelve ducks (see {{Heading|Targeting the Rich Again}}). Wotton was able to pay Klink off when she proposed to cut back on restrictions on when players could steal ducks from the rich (see {{Heading|The Untold Saga of Eggotinne (11 Mar 2021 - 20 Mar 2021)}}).

And yet, the fault is not purely in the legislation itself. Had people been watching the game at some of these critical moments, the course of the round could have shifted dramatically. When Wotton attacked his own ducks to reduce his quacks enough that he wouldn't be in first place so that he couldn't be targeted as DUCK DUKE (see {{Heading|Cannibalism to Prevent Thievery}}), moonroof then Trungle had the most quacks. Wotton slowly crept his way back into second place. If either of them had noticed, they could have orchestrated a similar trick of racking up Quack Attacks on their ducks, forcing Wotton into a position where he could be attacked.

Furthermore, if just one other person had had the idea to write a proposal in the same vein as Eggotinne (see {{Heading|The Untold Saga of Eggotinne (11 Mar 2021 - 20 Mar 2021)}}), or if someone had noticed Eggotinne's deletion, Wotton would have had a much harder time paying people off to turn the other way.

The paths to fixing this overarching issue are clear in hindsight. For my part, I just lost interest in the round and I only showed up once in a while to do my semiweekly obligations. If I paid as much attention in the moment as I have paid to Round 9 while writing this essay, I probably would have done something about it. I just had to pay a little more attention.

=== Textualism from Intentionalism ===

The [[Round 9/Initial Ruleset|Initial Ruleset]] for Round 9 extremely barebones. It is possible to follow to the letter, but it does not necessarily prescribe this mentality on the proposals to come. At the same time, it does not have ''enough'' framework to make writing very textualist rules easy. In particular, a clearer way to define items would have been very helpful for the round. And even though I contend that the complete textualism we saw in this round was the result of several rounds of progression toward it, at the beginning of this round, not everyone was clearly on-board. Proposal 🦆 was poorly worded in many different ways. If I had known how the game would progress, I probably would have written Proposal 🦆 a little more explicitly. As a thought experiment, here is Proposal 🦆 redrafted in the famously strict Agoran style:

{{Proposal Box
 |name=🦆
 |text=
Enact a new Power-1 rule titled "Ducks" which reads:
:Ducks are assets that can be owned by players. Players CAN assign a duck they own a name by announcement. Ducks with no name are fungible. Players CANNOT interact with a duck which has no name except to assign it a name.
}}

This mismatch of rule-writing styles caught up with us and in fact contributed to the round's downfall: the Day of Infinite Ducks exploit had existed since Proposal 🦆 itself because at the beginning of the round we struggled to define things as well as our eventual textualist readings would require us to.