On Thu, 2014-01-02 at 20:37 -0500, Fool wrote:
> Hmmm... I'm pretty sure he meant to repeal all the rules. We can go
> ahead and figure this out without knowing what the end state is, no? We
> should be able to come up with a generic way to replace the ruleset with
> some "bootstrap" rule that replaces itself with an arbitrary ruleset, or
> something like that.
Arguably, one of the reasons Agora's survived so long is not just that
the players are generally opposed to mass ruleset replacements (which
have a tendency to kill nomics outright: look at what happened to
Nomicapolis), but that the rules themselves make mass replacements very
difficult. The Black Repeals would probably have destroyed Agora if they
actually worked (seeing as they attempted to repeal every rule without
replacing them with anything), but they didn't.
Resetting the entire ruleset down to one rule is also a very bad idea
due to the high chance that it ends up flawed in some way that either
makes the game outright unplayable, or else contains a scam that allows
someone to take complete control, who is subsequently incautious in what
they do with the power. The first scenario happened in B Nomic; the
second scenario also almost happened at one stage ("almost" in two
senses, given that it didn't even in the ruleset everyone thought they
were using, and additionally given that most of the gameplay of B turned
out to never have existed in the first place).
--
ais523
