AWIY's blacklist of dishonest peoples

[NTJedi]

tibbs said:
But who's opinion do you base the list on?You can put up a list, but how can you guarantee it's accuracy? There are always two sides to every story.

Ideally the original treaty should be created, sent and signed on the website where only those individuals involved have access until the game has been finished. Each individual should be allowed an optional brief comment. The games current method of communication has no way to review messages, treaties or trades.
Any individual which is part of the treaty can mark the treaty as being violated or honored then the host of the game should be allowed to vote an opinion as well.

tibbs said:
He said I broke the NAP, yet he stealthed his army(whose capital is north of me) through my territories and suddenly started taking independant armies and thus causing the collision and annihilation of one of my armies.

In my view, an army of another nation sneaking through my lands and then taking lands that border my nation and causing the destruction of my army voids any pact or peace treaty.

NAP's should be updated to include "NO SNEAKING ARMIES or SCOUTS without PERMISSION on specified provinces" otherwise the sneaking army could be caught by local milita and/or patrollers thus being a violation. I'd definitely recommend everyone including this for future NAPs otherwise face the possible consequences of a loophole.

[NTJedi]

Sandman said:
Anonymous attack spells make the idea of a database of trustworthy players pointless. What happens when one player casts a misleading anonymous ritual to dupe another player into attacking a third party? Both dupes will accuse the other of violating their NAP, and to an extent, both will be right.

Anonymous attack spells cannot be proven without hacking into the turn log. These cannot be made as part of any NAP for this reason.

[jutetrea]

I'm failing to understand a lot of the angst here with non-violate NAPs. Usually its just a delay as you dissolve the nap, wait 3 (or however many) and then attack.

That sneak thing with Tibbs I wouldn't consider a breach of NAP. Everyone has to expand, running into someone elses army and getting annihilated sucks but its not like he purposefully attacked you. IMO the better thing for him to do would have been to apologize and possibly reimburse you for some of your troop costs, or give up the province, or share the revenue of the province for x turns. If he didn't offer I would ask, if he says no and it really annoyed me I'd dissolve the NAP and then attack.

Now, if it was a blocking move and it would hem you in, that's a different story. I'd just assume he was being a jerk and dissolve the NAP. Leave it to him to convince you otherwise.

Now my question is, what really consitutes a NAP if every little thing isn't laid out.
- obviously direct military contact
- map spells? I would assume so, but I know others differ
- preaching?
- Aggressively (subjective) spreading dominion?
- Instigating others to map bomb you? Probably, but i'm guilty of this one once. (Didn't break the letter of the law, but bent the heart a bit) The other party didn't believe me ,were goaded into attacking me and losing.
- Targeting for someone else's map spells?
- Giving away priveleged info?
- Troop buildups?
- Border fortresses?
- Forum badmouthing?
- Anything else?

[NTJedi]

Aethyr said:
Blaalz, you make some excellent points. To clarify, I was not necessary advocating that NAPs be ignored, nor was there intent to dinegrate those to adhere to them out of their own personal sense of honor (or sheer pragmatism). To further clarify my own position, I will personally avoid entering into NAPs unless I have some confidence they will be upheld by the other player(s), and then (most likely) only for a finite period of time. Why? Because I intend to honor my agreements, but do not wish to limit my future flexibility. That said, am I saying I will absolutely never break an agreement? Probaly not, but under the right set of circumstances, who knows...

That's all fine... sounds good.

Aethyr said:
Finally, I absolutely concur with your observation that you will carry YOUR past experiences from game to game. On a human plane, this is to be expected to some degree. What I sharply object to is the notion that there should be some sort of "master list" of "violators" presumably to help other (new) players. It would be just as silly to suggest that there be a list of names of those who commonly ally with each other (secretly or not) so the rest of us know who to watch out for.

The purpose of the list is to simply record the events and treaties of each game. Historical information which can be used by new players helping remove one of their MANY disadvantages.

Aethyr said:
After all, I'm sure there are many "positive" experiences that are carried over from game as well, yes? Over time, these experiences lead to greater confidence and an increased likelihood of a future alliance, yes? It could be argured that this puts the other players without this benefit at somewhat of a disadvantge, yes?

Correct... yet the new players should have as many disadvantages removed as possible for better game balance.

Aethyr said:
And all the while everyone feels "honorable" about keeping their agreement. So, you protect your backside so as to concentrate your attention on a foe who may not enjoy a simular advantage. Where's the honor in that?

As I have previously been saying, "Players can break NAPs without warning or blindly drop games". The only individuals not wanting to record the historic events of a game are those wanting to keep the joy of taking advantage of new players to the gaming community.

Aethyr said:
This is a war game premised on world domination. Should there be temporary alliances? Sure, but the concept of a "binding" and permanent NAP seems quite incongruent to me, and keeping some type of global list based on this premise would (further) imbalance play.

I agree there should not be any "binding" and/or permanent NAP. If there was a record of the treaties from each game which became available for view by everyone once the game was finished then you can bet veterans and new players would be visiting this website. The information would only display what veteran players already know and what should be known by new players thus bringing a closer game balance. Otherwise the new players will continue to be the blind pigeons.

[DrPraetorious]

It goes both ways.

There are advantages to taking risks in general - so if you sign NAPs with people, and gamble that they'll keep them (which is generally what I do), you're going to be in better shape in those games where it pays off.

OTOH, if you have a reputation for *rarely* breaking NAPs, this may be to your advantage since suspicious neighbors will waste troops guarding their borders with you. If you break them a lot, obviously they won't sign NAPs with you at all.

One of the enjoyable things about MP dom3 is the great diversity in strategy and approach. Any effort to "enforce" honorable play risks jeopordizing that.

As for lamers, I'd support a list of quitters 100%. All's fair in love and war, but if you quit too much (which is obviously open to interpretation), I'd like to know.

But I think any such list is invariably going to devolve into a recrimination-filled flamewar; this discussion has been very civil so far because the one person who's name-was-named happened to have a good sense of humor about it.

As for anonymous attack spells - if someone casts an anonymous attack spell at me, and I know it was them, I attack them. Likewise if someone starts walking void spectres through my territory. I strongly oppose "legalism" in dominions3 - the ingame communications aren't stored, and I'm not going to go over my ingame diplomacy with my lawyer. I'd much rather deal with someone who occasionally breaks their treaties than someone who tries to weasel around with what they do and don't mean.

Finally, as an American, I reserve the right to attack anyone who has both the intent and ability to acquire anonymous attack spells which they might cast against me .

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Anybody worth keeping a NAP with would be willing to discuss, or inform you if direct military conflict is/may become a problem. I feel you get out of NAP what you put in- though it may be less than an alliance.

I'm less annoyed with the person I signed a NAP, left them alone a year, and then they surpise attack me than I am with a person I've been sharing non-critical information/trades, or communicating with every turn - who then backstabs me. If they break an alliance without warning, then I'm going to have issues. But the less involved, the less I care.

[NTJedi]

DrPraetorious said:
As for lamers, I'd support a list of quitters 100%. All's fair in love and war, but if you quit too much (which is obviously open to interpretation), I'd like to know.

I previously discussed this issue with Gandalf, basically the list would contain just facts as listed below.
Name/Contacts of Individual:
Game Turn when player dropped:
Number of remaining provinces owned by the individual when the player was dropped:
Name/Date of the game:


Obviously one bad game drop wouldn't ruin a reputation, yet a dozen will make any game host frown at having that flaky/lamer player participate.

[Aethyr]

NT--

Either I'm getting tired, or you're wearing me down...I think we agree more than we disagree, and I'm totally with you on the list of players who "drop out" as long as we recognize that none of us are immue to circumstances beyond our control. So, we'll all need some "grace" from time to time.

[Rathar]

This thread and a website based on this concept are very very bad ideas.

The potential for witch-hunt is enormous plus you immediately run into the problem of who polices the police. There are more reasons why this is bad, very bad but those are sufficient imho.

Take a step back, put on your common sense goggles and stare at this again.

Rathar

[Sieger]

Gandalf Parker said:
I think all of this also goes with the requests that keep popping up to "add diplomacy to the game". Adding diplomacy options to a menu would place game-restrictions on the actions. Such as game-managed NAPs.

It wouldn't necessarily restrict actions. In Master of Orion 2 you could establish an alliance, or a non-aggression pact. You could break either in a violent manner, there was nothing hardcoded that prevent you from doing so. However, the AI (and this tended to have a galaxy-wide effect) becomes very unpleasant towards a nation that repeatedly breaks treaties. If you are at war you could also declare a peace treaty that had a set number of turns in which you wouldn't attack one another. You could violate that, too, and if you did the diplomatic hit you took across the game was pretty significant.

Basically in MOO2 diplomacy just made the overall single player game more interesting, you could completely ignore it if you want, you could also, of course, use it to your advantage (make peace with strong neighbors while you work against weak neighbors and et cetera.) In multiplayer it was just a convenience factor, in that it let your diplomatic relations be expressed in an easy to see panel, without restricting any specific type of action.

Not that I want Dom3 to be MOO2, they are both great games and there's no reason to try to make one more like the other. It's just the first example that came to mind when thinking about diplomacy as it has been implemented in other turn based games. Thematically the lack of diplomacy may make sense, in MOO2 while one goal was galactic domination, there were multiple ways to win the game. In Dominions, you're a pretender god fighting against other pretenders to become the sole god, "there can be only one" so the story itself kind of makes diplomacy meaningless.