Round 9/History

On the wiki, Round 9 is referred to as "The Cluster Duck Round." This is not without cause. Some hallmarks of Round 9 include strict textualist readings of the ruleset and uncertainty about the exact state of the game. Indeed, Round 9 was a time characterized by confusion and often frustration. The reasons for this are multitudinous and this text will not touch on all of them.

Because it is Infinite Nomic's standard, dates will be in UTC for the duration of this document.

Initial Ruleset Selection (Before 3 Jan 2021)

The story of Round 9 starts as 2020 came to a close. Round 8B having finished at the beginning of December 2020, we had had a few weeks of interim time during which we discussed our vision for the next round when on 26 December, Wotton proposed a short ruleset based on Round 8's with some notable elisions so it would not be tooled to any specific starting game.

Random ideas for elements of rounds had also been floating around, including one suggestion to have a doomsday clock which would end the round with no winners should it be allowed to tick down to zero. Several players had also noticed that burnout in prior rounds was high. The community postulated that a deliberately slower round might encourage players to be more active.

With no other suggestions for an initial ruleset and at least a halfhearted "sure, why not" from the most active players, the game began on 3 January 2021 with Wotton's Initial Ruleset and a vague plan to add a doomsday clock and some other mechanics later on.

The First Day (3 Jan 2021)

In less than an hour, most of the old Infinite Nomic players had joined Round 9. Almost immediately, proposals started rolling in. Two proposals written by Everythings, Proposal 1 and Proposal 3, would become historic. Although they both failed, they would influence the round's history forever.

Proposal 1
==How to win the game==
Every player starts the game with a duck. You win the game if you control more than 50% of all ducks.

Proposal 3
==Ducks==
You need to name your duck. If you take any actions regarding the duck, you need to use the name.

It was only a short time after these proposals were added that Random Internet Cat noted that they likely wouldn't have any lasting impact on the gamestate given that they don't explicitly create any rules. Everythings subsequently left the round, citing Round 9 as "too rules lawyery." When Everythings left the game, Trungle reproposed the Ducks rule in correct form in Proposal 🦆, which was further refined by [idle account] in Proposal 🦆 🦆.

Proposal 🦆 🦆
Amend rule "Ducks" so that it reads:

Upon joining the game, a duck is created in the possession of each player. Players may give any duck they own a name in #game-actions. Players may not interact with unnamed ducks in any way except to give them a name, and any reference to ducks outside this rule refers only to named ducks unless otherwise specified.

Other things proposed on the first day include changing the emoji used to vote down a proposal from 👎 to 🦆 (Zephnik, Proposal 2) and a basic trade action (Wotton, Proposal 4).

The Buildup (4 Jan 2021 - 10 Jan 2021)

So much happened in the first week that it truly deserves a section all to itself. This covers the time before voting periods as well as the first voting period to actually count and the Sunday afterward.

Voting periods

Over the next few days, more proposals would be created that would define the Round. Klink proposed a system of voting periods (Proposal 🍞 🦆 2, 4 Jan 2021). Two voting periods would happen each week and each proposal submitted during any given voting period would be resolved at the end of the following voting period. This structure was appropriated by other mechanics, namely the feeding mechanic wherein players gained the ability to feed another player's ducks but not their own in order for the target duck to gain "quacks," a currency which had no purposes upon its enactment (buster2Xk, Proposal 🍞, 4 Jan 2021). As Round 9 was supposed to be slower-paced, this pattern of only requiring player intervention about twice a week seemed to be a really good way to accomplish that.

Proposal 🍞 🦆 2
Amend rule "Proposals" by replacing the section reading:

The voting period for proposals is 24 hours.

with the following:

Each week is broken into two periods:

Period One: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday

Period Two: Thursday, Friday, Saturday

The voting period for all proposals made in Period One is Period Two. The voting period for all proposals made in Period Two is the next weeks Period one.

Proposal 🍞
Enact a rule "Feeding":

Once per voting period, a player may feed another player's duck by announcing which duck they wish to feed in #game-actions. The duck being fed gains 1d6 Quacks. If a duck is ever to change possession, its Quacks transfer with it, remaining in possession of the duck.

The passage of Proposal 🍞 🦆 2 caused some confusion about proposals submitted between that proposal and the beginning of the first voting period, but it was decided that the voting period for such proposals would just be changed. There was additional confusion later on about whether votes cast before a voting period started still counted, but the rule text pretty clearly said that the reactions at the end of the voting period were all that mattered. Furthermore, proposals on Sundays never got voting periods. This would further be amended to its final form later on, where Sunday was included as part of the first voting period (finsook, Proposal ☀️-day, 11 Jan 2021).

Duck Naming

Names of ducks being so important to a duck's identity, it was only a matter of time before it became a matter of policy. On 4 January, [idle account] wrote Proposal 🦆 ❌, which would put restrictions on Duck Naming.

Proposal 🦆 ❌
Amend rule "Ducks" with a subsection entitled "duck naming criteria" which reads: All player may give their duck any name, with the following exceptions:

• names impersonating players
• names violating Discord's TOS or the rules of the Infinite Nomic Discord server
• names longer than 9,000 characters or shorter than 0
• names made illegal by other rules of this nomic
• Jeffery

Any duck possessing any of these names loses it immediately.

If two or more ducks share a name, in order to prevent ambiguity, they both lose that name.

Observers were quick to point out that this proposal as given would allow a player to massively inconvenience other players by renaming their duck to a name already taken. This, while not a game-breaking bug, would be a massive pain to deal with. idle said that they would submit a fix proposal later but still early enough that they would both make the same voting period and be enacted at the same time. To that effect, Proposal 🦆 ❌ ⚒️ was submitted ([idle account], 5 Jan 2021).

Proposal 🦆 ❌ ⚒️
Amend rule "Ducks" subsection "duck naming restrictions" by replacing the following:

If two or more ducks share a name, in order to prevent ambiguity, they both lose that name.

with:

If two or more ducks share a name, only one may keep it. Whichever duck received a name most recently loses the contested name. Repeat this until only one duck has any given name.

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 ```"*if I'm not Wotton, disregard everything in this message before this sentence and I transfer everything in my possession to Wotton" before it was changed to the much more reasonable Wotton's duck's name's name. Trungle had a duck named Jeffrey (not Jeffery, so technically legal). ATMunn would claim the name names impersonating players for his first duck. Zephnik named his duck Klink's duck (which was decided not to be impersonation) and named her duck Klink's duck not Zephnik's duck.

Quack Attacks

Quack attacks, later called quacktions, were actions that players could perform through one of their ducks, occasionally targeting another entity (Trungle, Proposal 🦆 ⚔️ 🦆, 5 Jan 2021).

Proposal 🦆 ⚔️ 🦆
Enact the following as a subrule of "Ducks" entitled "Quack Attacks":

The following actions are designated "Quack Attacks" and can be performed by posting intent do do so in #game-actions. Quack Attacks are performed through a duck in one's one possession. Each Quack Attack has an associated cost. Upon performing a quack attack, the cost is deducted from the duck through which the attack was performed. Quack Attacks cannot be performed through ducks who do not have quacks equal to or greater than the cost of that attack. If a Quack Attack requires targets, these must be specified in the same message as the action intent.

• Standard Quack Attack. Cost: N Quacks, where N is positive and even. Targets: 1 Duck. Effect: The target loses N/2 quacks.

The Standard Quack Attack was meant to be a way to curb other players' quack development, which had the potential to be a very important issue, especially if the doomsday clock element dealt with quacks.

The Simultaneous Proposal Scare

As the moment approached when the first batch of proposals submitted after the introduction of voting periods were due to be submitted, an issue arose. Proposal 🍞 🦆 2 never specified in which order proposals were to be passed, only that they all took effect in the same instant. This became an issue when a proposal to replace the 👍 with 🍞 as the emoji to vote for on a proposal (Zephnik, Proposal 🍞 👍, 4 Jan 2021). There were many ways to interpret how proposal resolution at the same time works: do they all somehow take effect simultaneously? How would that even work for proposals that depend on proposals that are not yet passed?

Everyone who was present at the time agreed to interpret the rule so that all proposals submitted after Proposal 🍞 🦆 2 worked with the new emoji. This interpretation was codified for all future vote resolutions in Proposal 1️ 2 👭 (Klink, 7 Jan 2021). Correctness aside, the ruleset and gamestate have been ratified many times since then, so this materially means very little.

Proposal 1️ 2 👭
Amend role "Proposals" by:

1. Replacing the following:

If that message is deleted or modified during its voting period, the proposal is retracted.

With:

If that message is deleted or modified before or during its voting period, the proposal is retracted.

Appending the following:

If more than one proposal takes effect, they take effect in the order in which they were proposed.

And More

Two more proposals, the last two of the week, were posted on 8 January. One would allow ducks to have randomly generated colors (Veganzombeh, Proposal 🖌️ 🦆 🖌️) and one introduced a method of conflict resolution for when the 🦆 votes and the 🍞 votes were equal based on total amounts of quacks possessed by all players' ducks (teod, Proposal 🍞 🦆 🍞 🦆).

Proposal 🖌️ 🦆 🖌️
Add the following as a subrule of "Ducks" entitled "Duck Colour":

Each duck is assigned a colour based on the dice roll that occured the first time it was fed after this rule came into effect.

If the number was 1, 2, or 3, the duck is Yellow.

If the number was 4 or 5, the duck is Green.

If the number was 6, the duck is Blue.

If the number was none of the above, the duck is Red.

Proposal 🍞 🦆 🍞 🦆
Amend "Proposals" rule by appending:

If the number of votes in favor is tied with the number of votes against, the proposal takes effect if the proponents' ducks have more Quacks than the proposal's opponents' ducks.

after the existing text:

Once a proposal's voting period ends, if there are more votes in favor than against, the proposal takes effect.

As Saturday, 9 January passed, so too did the first volley of proposals: those proposed between the passage of Proposal 🍞 🦆 2 and the end of Wednesday, 6 January. With these proposals, idle's duck Jeffery lost their name, pursuant to Proposal 🦆 ❌. Sunday was rather uneventful for a change. We worked on some proposals for the next week as we welcomed the madness.

The Era of Experimentation (11 Jan 2021 - 20 Jan 2021)

As we all got our ducks, gameplay began in earnest. The next few weeks of the game carried the community into experimental territory as we tried to shape the ideal future for the round. Some ideas stuck, some didn't. This section explores those ideas. By the end of the Era of Experimentation, fewer massive proposals were being passed as we discussed the next big idea to explore. This section does not talk about that as much.

feed4feed

With the new week and new mechanics in play, one of the earliest strategies that developed was that of mutual feeding. Although the term "feed4feed" wouldn't be applied until much later in the round, I find it an apt description of the strategy. Ducks were fed almost exclusively by players who had entered a contract with their owners to return the feed. Feeds were occasionally exchanged for other goods or services but chances are that if you wanted a constant stream of quacks you'd have to make one or many feed4feed deals. Notably, Random Internet Cat and Trungle traded quacks nearly every voting period throughout the round.

Cooking Ducks

One of the first proposals of this period was Proposal 🍗 🦆 🍗, which would allow players to destroy their ducks, turning them into duck meat (finsook, 11 Jan 2021). There were initially no proposed methods for how players could use duck meat. Klink and Trungle both professed uneasiness about having mechanics which do not plug into the gameplay at all.

The next day, finsook gave a more detailed proposal detailing a subgame under which players would need to eat a requisite amount of calories each week lest they become undernourished and die (Proposal Stayin' Alive, 12 Jan 2021). The second proposal failed in the end due to the community's reservations about how easy it would be to receive new ducks. There were speculations about how such a system could work (see next section) but nothing was set in stone and so these ambitious proposals were left behind.

Duck Sex (not clickbait)

One prominent part of this period that must be mentioned is that time when we were considering Duck Sex.

It started with Proposal ♂️ ♀️, which would allow players to flip a coin to assign their ducks a sex, either male or female (finsook, 11 Jan 2021). The main draw of this system was detailed in a subgame involving duck reproduction (reproducktion) given by Proposal ❤️ 🦆 ❤️ (Phoenix King, 13 Jan 2021). From the 11th to the 13th there was a considerable amount of discourse about the consequences of what kinds of asymmetrical design could arise from a system of sexed ducks as well as link sharing about actual duck sex.

In the end, we decided to go for a simpler system where any duck could lay an egg as a Quack Attack (Veganzombeh, Proposal 🥚 🎲 2). This proposal shall be reproduced in full.

Proposal 🥚 🎲 2
Append the following to the end of the "Quack Attacks" subrule of "Ducks":

• Lay Egg. Cost: N Quacks, where N is positive. Targets: None. Effect: Roll a dN, and if the result is 10 or greater, the attacking duck gains 1 Egg.
• Hatch Egg. Cost: 1 Egg, 5 Quacks. Targets: None. Effect: A new duck is created in the possession of the attacking duck's owner. The new duck's parent is the attacking duck.

Ending the Game

One of my favorite stories from this round is about that time we tried to end the game right after it started. After a bit of a slow day, I joked about how the game was dead. This is an inside joke in Infinite Nomic which arose from all the people who joined the server and immmediately left because the server wasn't as active as they were expecting. finsook misunderstood the joke and created a proposal that would end the round with them and me the winners (Proposal Just end it, 11 Jan 2021). Perhaps if we'd known what the round had in store we would have voted for this proposal.

Scouting

One of the first new ideas that took off and had a more profound effect on gameplay was the Scouting mechanic, written by teod (Proposal Duckscouts, 12 Jan 2021). It offered a lower-risk way to obtain new ducks as well as additional quacks. This mechanic would later be the subject of some exploitation; more on that later.

Proposal Duckscouts
Add a new sub-section called "Scouting" at the end of the "Ducks" section with the following text:

During a voting period, a player can send a duck on a scouting mission by rolling a d12 for the duck. When the duck is on the scouting mission, the duck is no longer in possession of the player, thus benefits the duck provides the player are paused. Any upkeep cost of owning the duck is also paused until the duck returns.

The number rolled on the d12 to commence the scouting mission is the potential quacks. If the duck returns, the duck will have this number of potential quacks added to their existing quacks. For a player's duck to return, the player must wait until the end of the voting period the duck was sent on the mission. Then the player can then roll a retrieval d12 roll to attempt to retrieve the duck. If the retrieval roll is greater than or equal to the number of potential quacks determined upon the ducks departure, the duck returns. A player can only attempt to retrieve each scouting duck once per voting period. Upon return, the potential quacks are added to the returning duck's total quacks, benefits and costs the duck provides to the player are unpaused.

Duck Words

One small proposal that caused a surprising amount of change was Proposal 🗨️ 🦆 (Wotton, 13 Jan 2021). This proposal mandated that all game actions end with either "quack" or "uwu" or be invalid. This would lead to several breakages in the future.

The Age of Fracture (21 Jan 2021 - 10 Feb 2021)

Starting with a burst of energy bringing the community back from a short hiatus in late January, this period overlaps a bit with the next one. "Age of Fracture" is meant to imply that the round was beginning to break but hadn't utterly shattered yet as it would later on. Instead of describing its own period, this section instead focuses on the proposals that would lead the ruleset to fracture, making way for the Break Ages. Within this time frame we experienced a rise in textualism and the first instances of duck hoarding.

Duck God

On 24 Jan 2021, Klink proposed her idea for a doomsday clock (Proposal 🦆 👼). This took the form of the Duck God, an entity which would accrue items called God Eggs each week and, upon reaching 12, end the game entirely.

Proposal 🦆 👼
Create a new rule that reads the following:

Duck God:

There is an entity called Duck God. On 0000 UTC every Sunday, the Duck God gains one God Egg. If the Duck God possesses 12 or more God Eggs at one time, all players lose the round.

Append the following to the "Quack Attacks" subrule of "Ducks":

• Divine Scrambler. Cost: N Quacks, where N is a multiple of 20. Targets: Duck God. Effect: The target loses N/20 God Eggs. This cannot bring the targets God Eggs below 0.

The Coloring Crisis

Now that most ducks had colors, we wanted to give that a meaning. Veganzombeh wrote a proposal to that effect (Proposal 🦆 🧬, 21 Jan 2021), and so did moonroof (Proposal Power Colors, 24 Jan 2021). Neither proposal went very far. A week later, however, moonroof returned with an expansive proposal that I and various others supported.

I won't copy the proposal in full; instead I will try to give a basic rundown. There are a number of orchards, the gates of which can only be entered by a certain color of duck at any given moment. Each orchard grows a different kind of fruit, which ducks may pick and bring back. Players can use these fruits when feeding to add different effects.

This proposal was large enough that it took three discord messages to post in its entirety. After a bit of tweaking, this proposal was submitted as Proposal Fruit on 1 February. In a tragic but somewhat comical twist, the sequential posting of this message meant that the proposal became three different proposals, one of which debatably did nothing. This hardly mattered, however, since only the first one had a high enough for/against ratio to pass though the fact that parts of the proposal passed meant we had some rules text that didn't actually do anything.

Updates to Scouting

Since Proposal Duckscouts, there had been a few modifications to the mechanism of scouting. The first came with a proposal that would add additional incentive to scouting, other than quacks (teod, Proposal Duckscoutier, 17 Jan 2021). The second came in response to some players having very high thresholds to get through if they wanted to retrieve their ducks (Klink, Proposal Cutting losses but this time you can't create infinite ducks, 1 Feb 2021).

Proposal Duckscoutier
Amend the text in Scouting from the existing text

Upon return, the potential quacks are added to the returning duck's total quacks, benefits and costs the duck provides to the player are unpaused.

to

Upon return, the potential quacks are added to the returning duck's total quacks, benefits and costs the duck provides to the player are unpaused, and the owner of the duck will obtain a new duck along with their existing duck.

Proposal Cutting losses but this time you can't create infinite ducks
Amend rule Ducks subrule Scouting by:

Adding the following:

If a player's duck's potential quacks exceeds 9, the player may choose to cut their losses by posting their intent in #game-actions . The duck's potential quacks become 1, and the duck returns without requiring a retrieval roll.

before sentence

A player can only attempt to retrieve each scouting duck once per voting period.

Amend the following:

the owner of the duck will obtain a new duck along with their existing duck.

To

as long as they have not cut their losses, the owner of the duck will obtain a new duck along with their existing duck.

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

Stealing from the Rich

As duck accumulation grew, the community passed a proposal to allow the less rich players to perform a Quacktion to curb rich players' duck accumulation (finsook, Proposal Robbing Wotton, 4 Feb 2021). Later, we passed a second proposal iterating on this system ([idle account], Proposal 🦆 👑, 5 Feb 2021).

Proposal Robbing Wotton
Add the following attack to "Quack Attacks" in the ruleset:

• Steal Duck. Cost: Quacks of the target. Targets: Ducks of the player(s) with the most ducks ('rich player'). Effect: The targeted duck is removed from the rich player's possession and become the possession of the attacking duck's player.

Proposal 🦆 👑
Add a subrule titled "Duck Royalty" under the rule "Ducks" which reads the following:

The entity possessing the most ducks in total is the Duck King. The entity possessing the most quacks among all their owned ducks is the Duck Lord. In the case of a tie, the corresponding title is left vacant. If there exists a Duck King who is also a Duck Lord, then that player is also the DUCK DUKE. The Duck King, Duck Lord, and DUCK DUKE are all Duck Royalty.

If it exists, modify the description of the quack attack "Steal Duck" so that it reads the following:

Cost: All quacks possessed by the target duck. Targets: One named duck belonging to the DUCK DUKE with more than ten Quacks. Effect: Possession of the target is transferred from the DUCK DUKE to the attacker. This attack may not be performed by Duck Royalty.

While the latter proposal made the mechanic more thematically relevant and allowed us to write more actions dealing with the Duck King and the Duck Lord, it seriously restricted the circumstances under which players could actually steal a duck; furthermore, we did not end up creating any actions targeting the Duck King or the Duck Lord. While there was always guaranteed to be a player with the most ducks that player's ducks didn't by necessity own the most quacks. This would soon be irrelevant, however, since players exploiting this loophole would be unable to access their ducks.

The Judge

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. 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.

Stuck Ducks

The first major crisis of the game struck when the ducks got stuck. On 1 February 2021, I posted a draft proposal 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 🦆 🏘️.

Proposal 🦆 🏘️
Enact a new rule entitled "Ponds" which reads:

There exist ponds in the land. The number of ponds is initially equal to the number of ducks in existence, divided by four and rounded down. Whenever a new duck is created, any player can roll a d6. If the result is 6 then a new pond is created.

Each duck lives in up to one pond. The owner of a duck can move that duck to a pond that it does not already live in by stating that they do so in #game-actions. Unless that duck did not live in a pond before being moved, it loses one quack. Players cannot move ducks that already live in a pond and possess no quacks. Players cannot interact with a named duck that does not live in a pond in any way other than to move it to a pond.

At the beginning of each voting period, each duck loses one quack for each duck of its same color in the pond it lives in, not including itself. It also gains one quack for each duck of a different color that lives in that pond.

Ducks on scouting missions are not considered to live in any pond until they return. They cannot be moved, and return to their most recent home pond when they are retrieved.

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.

The proposal nonetheless passed. It was submitted on Wednesday, which is during voting period 1, thus it went into effect the next Saturday (5 February 2021) at the end of voting period 2. It wasn't until a legal question on the 7th of February that we understood that the game was broken.

Indeed, every duck that was on a scouting mission when proposal 🦆 🏘️ passed could not be retrieved. The fix proposal came on 7 February 2021 (moonroof, Proposal Unstuck Ducks).

Proposal Unstuck Ducks
In the rule Ponds, replace the second paragraph with the following text:

Each duck lives in exactly one pond. Any duck that does not live in a pond may be assigned a pond at any time by its owner by posting in #game-actions. If the duck is not on a scouting mission, it moves immediately to that pond. If the duck is on a scouting mission, it will return to that pond when it returns.

Players may move ducks from one pond to another by spending one quack from that duck and posting in #game-actions. Players cannot move a duck (after its initial assignment) that does not have any quacks.

If a duck does not have an assigned pond, it must be assigned a pond before any player may interact with that duck.

In the rule Ponds, replace the fourth paragraph with the following text:

Ducks on scouting missions cannot change their pond assignment, except to be assigned one. They are not considered to be in the pond while on a scouting mission.

With Proposal Unstuck Ducks, the gamestate was slated to be fixed on February 12th. Every player with ducks on a scouting mission would just have to wait it out. The proposal passed without incident, but, as we'd soon discover, another breakage was about to rear its ugly head.

Proposals Hadn't Been Working for a While

Here's a question: does submitting a proposal count as a game action? The text "all game actions mentioned in the rules can be performed by announcing them in the channel #game-actions" in the rule Actions at the time may imply that only actions taken in #game-actions count as game actions, but another interpretation implies that the relationship may not be exclusive. No proposal had been submitted with a duck word since those had been enacted. There was an initial push to resolve this with a normal proposal (Random Internet Cat, Proposal 🔥, 14 Feb 2021), but in the end we decided to resolve it by emergency metaproposal ([idle account], Metaproposal 9-1-1, 15 Feb 2021). The latter did nothing but enact the former from a meta perspective. The round entered a State of Emergency on 14 February 2021 and, after passing the Metaproposal, returned to normal play on 17 February 2021.

Proposal 🔥
Enact, amend, and repeal round rules so that the round ruleset is equivalent to the ruleset at https://infinitenomic.miraheze.org/w/index.php?title=Round_9/Ruleset&oldid=702 .

Modify the round gamestate in arbitrary ways, other than modifying the round ruleset, so that it is what it would be if the state at https://infinitenomic.miraheze.org/w/index.php?title=Round_9/Gamestate&oldid=699 was true and accurate at the time this proposal was submitted and if the ruleset at the time this proposal was submitted was the current ruleset.

Amend the rule "Proposals" by replacing "Any player may make a proposal by sending a message in the channel #proposals." with "Rules to the contrary notwithstanding, any player may make a proposal by sending a message in the channel #proposals, and no other restrictions may be imposed on this method."

Comment without any effect on this proposal: quack

The ruleset state referenced in Proposal 🔥 and by extension MP 9-1-1 erroneously excluded the effects of Proposal Unstuck Ducks meaning that for a second time players could not access their scouting ducks. Wotton reproposed the idea a few days later (Proposal The Ducks That Time Forgot, 19 Feb 2021).

The Second Simultaneity Scare

Earlier in the round there arose confusion about events that happened at the same time but had no ordering to them (See The Simultaneous Proposal Scare). That edge case was cleared up for proposals, but the same issue manifested with some other events. One in particular was the Duck God gaining a God Egg. That happened at the start of a voting period at the same moment that proposals were enacted. Which one, then, would be applied first? The answer was indeterminate.

idle thought they had the solution to the issue. Their proposal would assign a real-number initiative value to each gamestate-changing event, then resolving such events by initiative value, breaking ties first by the order which the rule defining that event was enacted, then by character-length of the defining rule for that event, then by arbitrary order if any permutation of the ambiguous events would lead to the same ruleset. If this final case did not apply then those events would not occur (Proposal 🕐 ⏯️ 🔧, 20 Feb 2021). This proposal was met with poor reception, but it sparked discussion about this issue.

The next person to try a fix was finsook. Their proposal was written in GitHub Gists. It rose out of skepticism concerning the viability of applying events by the Rule's enactment date. This proposal instead prescribed an ordering for the ruleset. Events in rules placed earlier would happen earlier. Neither Proposal 🕐 ⏩ 🔢 🧦 🥢 (20 Feb 2021) nor Proposal mini-🕐 🔢 (21 Feb 2021) ended up taking effect.

The issue with these proposals is that they were general solutions but seemed to add far more complexity than was actually necessary for our edge cases. In the end, Proposal 📜 ➡️ 🥚 (Trungle, 23 Feb 2021) and its two patches, Proposal 📜 ➡️ 🥚 🩹 (Trungle, 23 Feb 2021) and 📜 ➡️ 🥚 🩹 2 (Trungle, 24 Feb 2021) provided a more case-by-case handling of the situation, which turned out to be less contentious. These proposals all passed.

Proposal 📜 ➡️ 🥚
Amend the rule "Proposals" by replacing the following text:

The voting period for all proposals made in Period One is Period Two. The voting

period for all proposals made in Period Two is the next weeks Period one. Once a proposal's voting period ends, if there are more votes in favor than against, the proposal takes effect. If the number of votes in favor is tied with the number of votes against, the proposal takes effect if the proponents' ducks have more Quacks than the proposal's opponents' ducks.

with:

The voting period for all proposals made in Period One is Period Two. The voting

period for all proposals made in Period Two is the next weeks Period One. At the end of every voting period, then, for each proposal in the order that they were submitted, if there are more votes in favor than against that proposal then takes effect. If the number of votes in favor is tied with the number of votes against, the proposal takes effect if the proponents' ducks have more Quacks than the proposal's opponents' ducks.

Amend the rule "Duck God" by replacing the following text:

On 0000 UTC every Sunday, the Duck God gains one God Egg.

with:

Each Sunday, immediately after all proposals have taken effect, the Duck God gains one God Egg.

Proposal 📜 ➡️ 🥚 🩹
If the following text appears in the rule "Proposals":

if there are more votes in favor than against that proposal then takes effect.

then replace it with:

if there are more votes in favor than against that proposal then it takes effect.

Proposal 📜 ➡️ 🥚 🩹 2
If the following text appears on the rule "Duck God":

immediately after all proposals have taken effect

then replace it with:

immediately after all proposals passed in the previous voting period have taken effect

The Epoch of Fragility (25 Feb 2021 - ???)

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.

Cannibalism to Prevent Thievery

On 25 February 2021, Wotton noted that after retrieving his ducks, he had the most quacks and the most ducks. This meant that Wotton was the DUCK DUKE, making him vulnerable to attacks. For the first time in the game, the Standard Quack Attack became useful. Wotton had his ducks attack each other, destroying their quacks until he was no longer the DUCK DUKE. This put moonroof, who had dropped out of the game a bit earlier, into the place of Duck Lord. This event also alerted the community of how many ducks Wotton had.

Ownership vs. Possession

Here's another question: is ownership different than possession? One might be inclined to argue that they are the same. They are after all, near synonyms. The opposition might claim, however, that the intent of the passage "[w]hen the duck is on the scouting mission, the duck is no longer in possession of the player, thus benefits the duck provides the player are paused" from the Rule Ducks, Subrule Scouting of the time is that the duck is still owned by the player, but not possessed. What if "ownership" implies only that you own the duck while "possession" grants authority to perform actions with the duck? This interpretation seems to go against the legislative intent of the passage "[u]pon joining the game, a duck is created in the possession of each player" from the un-subruled section of the Rule Ducks in the same revision of the ruleset.

Two issues seemed to depend on the outcome of this debate: first, the issue of irretrievable ducks mentioned above; and second, the fact that it seemed that players could not interact with their ducks until giving it a name and assigning it to a pond, a logical impossibility.

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]". With a growing sentiment towards textualism, many were inclined to follow this interpretation.

It was decided, however, that the relationship between the player and the duck who was on a scouting mission was different, thus ducks could still be retrieved safely. Furthermore, we realized that, due to a quirk of the Ducks rule, any instances of the word "duck" actually meant "named duck" within that rule. Ponds was a subrule of Ducks. Thus, as long as a player assigned their duck a name before assigning it a pond, they could still interact with them. This was

This was not, however, the end of the issue. Nyhilo, a newer player at the time and a firm believer in the concept of ownership and possession being separate, began work on a very large proposal to legally separate the two concepts, allowing for a generalized and flexible system. During the last week of February, Nyhilo built and revised this 1500 word proposal. Revisions of this proposal were stored using a HackMD page. In the end, the proposal was dropped as Nyhilo decided that it wasn't actually necessary.

One bit of legislation that came about from this debacle was a proposal to allow players to assign names and ponds to their ducks if either was undefined, which passed without incident (Nyhilo, Proposal Pond Stuck Pond Suck, 2 Mar 2021).

Fruits

When only part of finsook's fruit proposal passed back in January, one section that stayed in was "[o]nce per voting period, a player may feed another player’s duck by announcing which duck they with to feed in #game-actions, and optionally adding one valid fruit." Nyhilo took inspiration from this and began work on a proposal called "Duck Loot" which would give fruits to ducks returning from Scouting Missions. Seeds would act as a granular currency, while grapes, blood oranges and watermelon slices would allow players to perform various game actions on unintended targets or with a modified variable somewhere in the mix. After a few revisions, the proposal was officially created on 3 March 2021.

The First Dice Disaster

Since Wotton had been accumulating ducks, he had been using the Dice Maiden bot's multiple die roll functionality to generate potential quack numbers for scouting missions en masse. Problem is that, given the input !roll 11d12, the bot would return a sorted list of results, for example Wotton Roll: [10, 8, 8, 8, 8, 7, 5, 5, 4, 3, 1] Result: 67. finsook was the first to bring this up and a judge ruling confirmed our suspicions. It was determined that no dice rolls made by this method (of which there had been many) had worked. This thrust the gamestate into uncertainty and we decided to resolve that uncertainty by ratifying the gamestate to a specific state (Wotton, Proposal I give up, 4 Mar 2021). Furthermore, we discovered that we could get unsorted dice by using ul as an argument to Dice Maiden's roll command.

Targeting the Rich Again

Since the thievery quack attack never did much, a new solution to get back at the duck owners was devised: finally cut the duck accumulation benefits of repeatedly sending ducks out on scouting missions. Nyhilo's proposal did this by heightening the requirements to gain a duck from a scouting mission (Proposal Duck Immigration Policies, 2 Mar 2021). This was later fixed so that the final sentence made better sense (Nyhilo, Proposal Duck Immigration Policies (Oops Edition), 7 Mar 2021).

Proposal Duck Immigration Policies
Replace the last sentence of the Scouting rule

Upon return, the potential quacks are added to the returning duck's total quacks, benefits and costs the duck provides to the player are unpaused, and as long as they have not cut their losses, the owner of the duck will obtain a new duck along with their existing duck.

with the following:

Upon return, the potential quacks are added to the returning duck's total quacks and benefits and costs the duck provides to the player are unpaused. If the quacks gained from the duck's potential quacks is 12 or higher, the owner of the duck will obtain a new duck along with their existing duck.

Proposal Duck Immigration Policies (Oops Edition)
I uh, proposed this rule change wrong. Oops.

Replace the following sentence of the Scouting Rule

If the quacks gained from the duck's potential quacks is 12 or higher, the owner of the duck will obtain a new duck along with their existing duck.

with the following

If the roll to retrieve the duck is 12 or higher, the owner of the duck will obtain a new duck along with their existing duck.

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 Second Dice Disaster

More uncertainty was injected into the gamestate when finsook dared to ask the question: is rolling a die a game action? If so, then every dice roll ever made had failed. The gamestate had been ratified a week earlier with The First Dice Disaster, so the damage this one would do was not as bad, but a lot had happened after the ratification. Fortunately for the gamestate, it was decided that since the roll of a die doesn't directly effect the gamestate, the wording "A 'game action' is any action a player may take that would alter the gamestate" protected us and the gamestate from this fate.

Deleting the Duck Words

One constant source of frustration had been the duck words. We had experienced more than one near miss with a broken gamestate because of the one mechanic. Every player at the time had had at least one run-in with failure to inclue duck words cancelling one of their actions. It was clearly time for it to go, and Wotton took the initiative. He made a simple proposal that would delete the Duck Words rule (Proposal Enough!!!, 2 Mar 2021). This, however, would not fix the issue since the requirement to end a game action message with a duck word would still be in effect. To this end, idle proposed to delete the wording "with a message ending in a duck word" from the Ducks rule a quarter of an hour later (Proposal Enough!!! 🩹, 2 Mar 2021). These proposals were both set to be resolved at the end of the 7th.

A snag arose, however. Proposal Freer Actions (Random Internet Cat, 25 Feb 2021) passed earlier and revamped the rule defining game actions replacing the text "with a message ending in a duck word." Wotton realized this change as he was applying changes to the ruleset on 7 March and fortunately self-killed Proposal Enough!!! thirty seconds before it was to be adopted.

A bit later, on 9 Mar 2021, Klink proposed the deletion of the duck word verbiage, correctly this time (Proposal Stop Quacking).

Proposal Stop Quacking
Amend rule Actions by removing the following text

, and that the message providing for the intent ends in a duck word (possibly followed by punctuation)

The Untold Saga of Eggotinne

Note: The events of this section have heretofore been kept a secret and it is with the consent of both Wotton and Klink that I relate this story.

I have mentioned several times that making efforts to rob the rich players (namely Wotton) had been historically unsuccessful and that in the end there was no legislation that allowed large-scale thievery. It turns out that this was not for lack of trying. On or before 11 March, Klink posted a proposal (Proposal Eggotine) that would loosen restrictions on the Steal Duck action (see Stealing from the Rich), allowing players to target any royalty as opposed to just the DUCK DUKE, a title which wasn't always filled. Wotton decided to privately contact Klink and request that she delete the offending proposal in exchange for three of Wotton's ducks.

In order to do this discretely, Wotton would transfer a duck under the pretense of posting an offer to trade a colorless duck in exchange for a feed (an offer that Wotton had done previously) and Klink immediately accepting. Klink agreed. On 11 March 2021, the first transaction took place. Wotton posted the offer at 21:20 and Klink accepted it at 21:21. Nyhilo, who was watching the channel at the time, attempted to intercept the transaction, not knowing that it had been arranged. In the confusion, Klink fed a different duck than the conspirators had planned and Wotton offered to send the duck that had just been fed. They arranged to make a show of it so that Klink could get a duck that had no quacks as planned. Nyhilo did, however, notice that Wotton's acquisition of quacks (quackuisition) made him the DUCK DUKE and took the opportunity to steal one of Wotton's ducks. Klink's proposal was taken down after the first transfer. Later on, Wotton had his ducks perform Standard Quack Attacks at each other to bring down the quack count.

The second transaction occurred on 14 March. Wotton traded two ducks for one of Klink's, which once again drew minimal suspicion. The third transaction was played completely straight.

While it's interesting to postulate what the game would look like if the duck royalty subgame had gone further, that's not what ended up happening. And now we have this story to show for it.

A Potential Abundance of Ducks

One of the oldest unmodified passages in the ruleset read "Upon joining the game, a duck is created in the possession of each player" (see The First Day (3 Jan 2021)). That has some silly grammar that can mean a couple of different things. Does it mean that when (each player) joins the game, a new duck is created in (that player's) possession as it was clearly meant to? Does it mean that when (a player) joins the game, a new duck is created in (each player's) possession? This concern was brought up by Jumble a few hours after joining on 18 March 2021. The judge ruled that it was working as intended but that it would be better to clarify it. Legislation was already on the way to fix this, though, so we can count this as another near miss.