Round 9/History: Difference between revisions

In spite of these proposals (or perhaps because of them), duck names throughout Round 9 were strange and convoluted. The first duck to be named was Wotton's duck, who was first given the name {{Mono|```"*if I'm not Wotton, disregard everything in this message before this sentence and  I transfer everything in my possession to Wotton"}}<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/796003864800264192</ref> before it was changed to the much more reasonable {{Mono|Wotton's duck's name's name}}<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/796011764638285885</ref>. Trungle had a duck named {{Mono|Jeffrey}} (not {{Mono|Jeffery}}, so technically legal)<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/796100130561851433</ref>. ATMunn would claim the name {{Mono|names impersonating players}} for his first duck<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/821801964215205908</ref>. Zephnik named his duck {{Mono|Klink's duck}} (which was decided not to be impersonation)<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/796095630518255667</ref> and named her duck {{Mono|Klink's duck not Zephnik's duck}}<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/796067518732304384</ref>.

The first players to use these features were moonroof and Wotton. By February, Wotton had four ducks and moonroof had three.

Reflecting the recent trend toward more textualist interpretations of the rules, the official position of Judge was created with the goal of centralizing and officializing legal interpretation. Random Internet Cat wrote the proposal and took up the position<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/812849254254903336</ref>. The Judge's rulings are stored on the wiki at [[Round 9/Rulings]].  

== The First Break Age (1 Feb 2021 - 24 Feb 2021) ==

The First Break Age was the culmination of previous proposals that led to the first major breakages of Round 9 in the middle of February.  

The first major crisis of the game struck when the ducks got stuck. On 1 February 2021, I posted a draft proposal<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/518856008605499402/805696974321614909</ref> that would introduce the mechanic of ponds. Under this system, each duck must live in a pond before it can perform any actions. This idea was modeled after the fact that ducks had to be named before they could act or be acted upon. I got a few suggestions, implemented them, and submitted the proposal on 2 February 2021 as Proposal 🦆 🏘️.

In retrospect, the problems with this proposal should have been obvious. When a duck is on a scouting mission it doesn't live in a pond and player cannot interact with ducks that don't live in a pond. I swear that at some point I used different terms for these two concepts, but the draft does not show it and neither does the final version. The intent was that the duck just wouldn't get the diversity benefits if it went on a scouting mission.  

After the first Break Age, we began to understand the true nature of the ducks. During this period we realized how fragile the entire ruleset was. As far as I know, the ruleset never broke during this time period but we had quite a few near misses. We started joking about how much we'd ruined the game and about how rarely we actually had a good picture of what the gamestate had become. We had to accept this fate that we'd built for ourselves as we persevered. A hallmark of this period's legislation was patching to fix small perceived ruleset issues rather than broad new mechanics.

The official ruling on this matter from Judge Random Internet Cat was that there was that there was "no natural language reason to draw a distinction between [the terms ownership and possession]<ref>[[Round 9/Rulings#Ruling 2]]</ref>". With a growing sentiment towards textualism, many were inclined to follow this interpretation.

The effect this legislation actually had was debatable. By the time this was proposed, Wotton already owned twelve ducks, a number that no one would even be able to sniff. Additionally, accumulating ducks provided no actual advantage other than more places to store quacks and legislation to encourage high duck counts would likely be unpopular with everyone but Wotton.

== The Untold Saga of Eggotinne (11 Mar 2021 - 20 Mar 2021) ==

This story doesn't really fit in with the previous or next section and it has some overlap, so I'm inserting it here as a bit of an intermission.

Immediately after this, idle argued (and requested a ruling) that impersonation is subjective, to be determined by the person being impersonated. Cat ruled that this was untrue, providing the counterexample that naming a duck "Random Internet Cat" is impersonation no matter how Cat himself felt about it. idle asked whether impersonation in the context of these rules is the same thing as string equivalence. Cat ruled in the negative, citing that "KIink" (spelled with a capital {{Mono|i}} in place of a lowercase {{Mono|L}}) still impersonates Klink.

Cat then officially ruled that idle's mass naming did not "specify" a set of names as required by the Ducks rule. Specification requires that the set be able to be determined by one person. The duck naming criteria involve subjectivity, as demonstrated by his previous rulings. Thus the set of names idle attempted to assign to their ducks cannot be deterministically evaluated by any given person.

All the while, in #nomic, players were finally having the tricky discussion of whether textualism was actually harming the game more than helping it. After all, the ruleset was not written with nearly the same rigor as it was now being interpreted with. Random Internet Cat claimed that he would honor a clause in the ruleset specifying that intent mattered more than text. This was debated and eventually Wotton posted a proposal that would add such a line (Proposal 🧑‍⚖️ 🐱, 18 Mar 2021). The proposal was self-killed on 24 March 2021 due to uncertainties about its wording.

On 22 March 2021, Jumble requested a ruling on whether changing one's name to an existing duck's name would remove that name from the duck. Random Internet Cat had previously tried to use this to stop idle's many name applications (see {{Heading|A Duck Named A}}), and ruled in the positive. Jumble proceeded to change his Discord nickname to every existing Duck's name. Proof can be found in the following images.

On 21 March 2021, Klink renamed her duck Ellergy Queen to The Duck Disciple<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/823052637364027412</ref>. Throughout March, Nyhilo had been writing a proposal which would define a special gamestate entity of named The Duck Disciple (Proposal Duck Disciple Redux, 17 Mar 2021). I still don't understand this proposal or the rule it created did, but it passed at the end of 20 March. Hours later, the name change came. Klink performed actions with The Duck Disciple (the duck) several times, even renaming them after {{Heading|The Great Unnaming}}<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/823967613159604315</ref>.

Klink requested a judgement on whether or not The Duck Disciple (the duck) could be targeted by quack attacks since using them on The Duck Disciple (the gamestate entity) was a large part of the Duck Disciple Rule. Random Internet Cat stated in his ruling that the entities were different, but wrote "true" in the official response when the wording supported "false". After realizing the mistake, Random Internet Cat attempted to amend the ruling, but it was impossible to do so. As it turned out, rulings were actually binding. This meant that Klink's duck had turned into the Duck Disciple (the gamestate entity) which was explicitly stated to not exist in any player's inventory. Cat made a vote of confidence on the judgement, a rule-defined action which allowed the decision to be changed but which would take time. Since judge rulings applied retroactively, if this motion passed then everything would work with minimal hiccups. But for now, Klink's duck was out of her hands.

This action was immediately shot down by a ruling; however it was also ruled that Jumble did in fact create a smoothie, but not one with the specified text.

This scam centers around a couple of strange properties of smoothies. First, the new bits about style were somewhat weakly-worded. Though two specific styles (Icy and Light) were given effects, players could arguably assign a smoothie's style to be any string. Second, the name of a smoothie is actually substituted into the descriptions of smoothies when evaluating their effects, and these descriptions are considered to be rules text. Put that all together and you have a smoothie that might be able to evaluate arbitrary text. That is to say, if the scam worked. Some rulings were requested on the effectiveness of Wotton's actions, but as it turned out, we were a little bit ahead of ourselves.

Jumble wanted to know whether "enact" meant the same thing as "take effect." If not, then perhaps EP-9-1-1 hadn't been effective and the game was months behind what we thought it was. Upon closer inspection, if EP-9-1-1 did do something, did it take effect in the context of the Round 9 Ruleset or the Metaruleset? The answer here wasn't clear-cut either. This, along with other concerns about what exactly the emergency proposal had actually done, ended up calling for an Emergency. Round 9 entered its second state of emergency on 25 April 2021 after a ruling from Random Internet Cat concluded that "enact" and "take effect" do not mean the same thing.

28 April was the death knell for Round 9. After the State of Emergency ended, a group of dedicated players engineered a gamestate hostile enough to prevent any further meaningful play.

Jumble requested a judgement on the question of whether ducks were lost when a player ceased to be a player<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/836908676202758144</ref>. If not, players could generate as many ducks as they cared to specify by repeatedly leaving and rejoining the game, an action which had no limits to its performance. Before this RFJ was even resolved, Jumble, Wotton, and [idle account], with various wordings, rejoined the game unreasonably large amounts of times. Some players tried to do so an infinite number of times<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/836927962808975390</ref> (which was deemed ineffective by ruling<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/839212839394344992</ref). Some players attempted to do the same, but with a supertask<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/836929305409355786</ref>. idle later admitted to setting up the infinite duck generation scam<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/837023317231403028</ref>.

When Random Internet Cat got back, he ruled that "[d]ucks are items, and it is heavily implied that items can only be owned by players." idle was quick to point out that quacks are items as well<ref>https://discord.com/channels/515560801394753537/795369457340907561/837022400704151552</ref>. Cat overturned the ruling (as well as another RFJ asking the same thing) and discussion continued.

More back-and-forth took place, as well as a few other scams that ended up not being consequential enough to talk about, and after a day of relative calm, on 30 April, Cat capitulated, judging the five RFJs called over the issue at this point in favor of the infinite amount of ducks. We discussed using every trick in the book to recover the gamestate but there just wasn't enough interest. To this day, we don't know what the final gamestate or ruleset is, and i doubt you'll find anyone who cares enough to figure it out.

There are clearly several things we can take away from this story.