The Fourth Dynasty of ais523
September 6th, 2010 - September 30th, 2010
Contents
Ascension Address
Scene: a Cessna 150 flying from Funafuti International Airport to Gotham City. Fourteen passengers are somehow crowded into the back of the plane, which has been customised with many bizarre additions over the years to provide extra space. A small television is sitting in the middle of the floor; a series of adverts end, showing the start of a news program.
“...and the breaking news tonight is the hijacking of a light airplane en route to Gotham City. The plane was a special one-off trip to rescue holidaymakers stranded in Funafuti by complications caused by the reversal of a wish. It currently isn’t clear precisely who the hijacker is, but it appears that they managed to take the pilot’s place before the flight started, leaving the passengers with no clue what happened, although I see some of them are starting to notice already. In other news, the mysterious box at the back of the plane contains a huge bunch of snakes, and giving a news report whilst trying to fly a plane is surprisingly difficult.”
The plane lurches badly, and screams are heard from the back, but then levels again as the news report cuts out. The screams don’t seem to abate though. Then the report briefly cuts back in.
“One of you just had to look in the box, didn’t you?”
...
Eventually, after an eventful five hours after which the hapless passengers finally determined that the snakes in question were not venomous, or in fact dangerous in any way, the plane lands in an unfamiliar disused airfield.
“Welcome everyone! The reason you are here: is so I can prove that I’m smarter than you, more knowledgeable than you, cleverer than you, and you’re all idiots. It shouldn’t be hard; some of those snakes are smarter than you by the sound of it. This will be about… puzzles, quizzes, challenges, that sort of competition. And you’d better set some for me, and each other, too. Or how else could I prove myself better?”
Players
The following players were active at the beginning of this Dynasty:
ais523, Bucky*, coppro*, Clucky*, Darknight*, Darth Cliche*, flurie, Galdyn, glopso, Josh*, Kevan*, parsley, Princerepulsive, Qwazukee*, Wakukee*
The following players were active at the end of this Dynasty:
ais523, Bucky*, Darknight, Darth Cliche*, EvilToaster, flurie, Kevan*, lilomar*, Thane Q
Final Ruleset
Posts of Interest
- Competition Introduced the main mechanic of the dynasty.
- It's The Winning That Counts Allowed Competitions to be won, in addition to just shuffling IQ around.
- Fixed proposal count The first Competition. It wasn't really participated in much.
- Authorization requested Bucky requests to create a Competition, without giving any details but a couple of restrictions and some hints (saying it's based on a minigame from a previous dynasty)...
- Bribery Contest ...and it turns out to be a Competition to see who gives the biggest bribe to Bucky. A nice example of a minor scam.
- Competition Competition A Competition to award people for creating Competitions.
- Chorus of Disapproval Allowed a quorum of Befuddled to get rid of Competitions they didn't like. (Bucky, not surprisingly, was rather critical of this proposal.)
- To the Podium Made Competitions end once they'd awarded a Medal.
- Three Gods Josh proposes a Truth Teller/Liar-style Competition (which was never created, for some reason).
- Turtle Hurling Kevan also proposes a Competition, this one based on a Flash game (eventually created here).
- Patience test Josh proposes to give an award to the first player who comments on a Competition, based on how late that comment was; and Darknight instantly commented on it to stop anyone winning anything.
- Runners Up Allowed Competitions to give lesser Medals to people who didn't win.
- Ok, if I can't trust you to keep answers secret, I'll set the questions The Riddler starts a puzzle competition, because nobody else can be trusted not to give away the answers. Only one puzzle is asked, and nobody gets the correct answer.
- Golden Ratio The victory condition that the dynasty was won via; five Gold Medals, ten Silver Medals, or a combination, are enough to win.
- Tricking people out of Medals An attempt to make IQ relevant for victory; it may well have been very important in the dynasty, except that the dynasty ended before it could be enacted.
- Seal of Approval A proposal that approved Kevan to create Competitions, despite not being enacted.
- Five Gold Medals Kevan's DoV.
Ascension
Kevan exploited a bug in the rule for competition creation, which allowed proposals to approve Competitions even if they hadn't been enacted (and in particular, even a pending Competition could do that). This allowed him to create a sequence of massively biased Competitions that he could win trivially, achieving victory.
Miscellaneous
Commentary
This dynasty really didn't work well, and I don't know why. I think part of the problem is that BlogNomic has a huge aversion to unenforceable rules (apparently it's impossible to rely on the honour of people to keep information secret if the rules say they should), severely restricting the sort of Competitions that could be made, and that no subgame caught people's interest quickly enough; and only me, Josh and Kevan were really active in competition creation. Incidentally, I had three puzzles ready for that puzzle competition, and gave the easiest first; I might use them in some other context eventually (as nobody got the correct answer to the first). (Also, BlogNomic is very good at breaking cryptograms; I started them intentionally easy, and should have started them much harder.) CallForJudgement
