MP Etiquette

[Alneyan]

Nagot Gick Fel wrote:
Sometimes. Although most often, devious players will try to use some sort of 'magical time compression' to argue they didn't violate the NAP warning. Consider this: A and B agreed on a NAP with a 3-turn escape clause. Turn 39, A (who used only email so far) sends an ingame message to B to notify him he wants to cancel the NAP. Turn 40 A issues his armies orders to invade B's provinces. Turn 41, A's orders are effectively carried on. A will argue that the 3 turns-delay was respected (39-40-41, implying he sent his notice at the beginning of turn 39, and his armies invaded at the end of turn 41), while from B's viewpoint, only 1 turn passed since he received the message in turn 40 and was invaded in turn 41. Or even zero if he considers that the attack was actually initiated in turn 40. Sounds silly? Yet I've seen that happen, exactly as described.

Heh, that would be a classical example of "why the exact wording of your requests matter". Along the same lines, there would be quite a different between "I won't attack your province" and "I won't attack your provinces", or even "I won't attack provinces" (this one would be only for pacifists). And the same reasoning would go for requests such as "do not give away some information to Pythium"; though you would likely violate the spirit of the agreement when giving someone else this information, to be then transmitted to Pythium.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Alneyan said:
Heh, that would be a classical example of "why the exact wording of your requests matter". Along the same lines, there would be quite a different between...

[snip examples]

Exactly. Reminds me about the heated debate about the wording of UN resolution 242.

[tinkthank]

Great questions! And excellent answers too. I agree with most of them, but will add my newbie two Eurocents here:

- As I. Kant correctly noted, you can't really want to exist in a world in which *lying* was systematically present (in other words, you have to want to live in a world in which there is some form of valence system), IF you want your words to mean anything in a pragmatic context. Thus, NAP's as speech-acts (that is, NAP's that are not exactly complete hot air) must be filled with content, and that means they cannot be broken continually. My view of "etiquette" is based on this; an NAP which can and will be broken at any time is not a true NAP, there must be entry and exit rules. Thus I treat those people who break NAPs as system-breakers and try to defame them in-game and take an aggressive stance against them asap. Of course, this must be contextualized: I only do this for NAPs with me (since I have no idea of how others go about with each other), and since this is a WAR game, I know someone will HAVE to attack me sooner or later, and so if this someone had an NAP with me and basically indicates that it is time to go to war, this is completely acceptable. I try to do the same, for the above-mentioned reasons. That being said, Backstabbing is an important part of the game, but I do tend to try to remember who backstabs when, so I can trust them/not trust them in the future. People *will* remember you as being a trustworthy fellow or a hard-core utilitarian.
- NGF gave the rule-of-thumb that a gem can often be seen for 10 gold -- this will be veeeery different from turn to turn and depending on what you want.
- Keep asking. In an MP game I am currently hosting, I was unsure of the E-mail rule myself, so I asked everyone whether they would accept "magical insta-communication" (I got the basic answer: "yes"). I dont know how new you are, but you may or may not know who the character referred to as "Norfleet" is. In any case, to make the matter very short, Norfleet is no longer here because he got caught hacking the game to cheat, but before that, there was some thread in which he was accussed of cheating by exploiting out-of-game information. I personally did not see that as a "cheat", but others disagree: some want to keep the information flow as in-game as possible.
I think some of these questions and some of these answers should go to Liga's excellent archive.