Comments inline. On 12/30/20 3:38 PM, Aris Merchant via agora-discussion wrote:
I'm not sure I like this for several reasons. To start off, I don't think two uses are enough to centralize something.
This is a fair enough complaint. I would tend to disagree, but if we're going to have this argument, it would be better in a different thread.
I'd prefer to just see the language duplicated in each place for now. Then, if we are going to centralize it, there are problems with this way of centralizing it, to wit:
I would like to say that, valid though your reasons are, I do not think that any of them constitute such a fundamental change to the organization of the proposal as you suggest below.
1. The first sentence seems to suggest that someone can plan to flip *any switch*, without limitation, which is confusing. It doesn't actually do that, because the rule doesn't say that players CAN do it or provide a method. Still, on my first read through, I was rather confused, and I could see it being a point of confusion in future.
Include something about authorization then? "When a person is authorized to and does plan to flip a switch..."
2. Adding yet another adjective to describe switches seems a bit messy, although I'm not sure there's a good way around that.
This one is easily remedied by not labeling them with adjectives. I included that sentence purely because Agorans like to label things with adjectives. It's not a dealbreaker for me if we have to get rid of it.
3. Securing something at power 1.0 doesn't do much? That's not a huge objection, it just felt weird.
I included this part because I didn't want people to be able to plan to flip any switch. I wrote this proposal in the morning and didn't want to look up the rules around it so I left it as it was so that someone would complain and give suggestions to fix it.
So, in summary, I would prefer to see the current language just copied if we're only going to use this twice. If we want to centralize it, I'd prefer it be done differently. I think the current language for this is very clean and self-explanatory,
In my (biased) opinion, my generalized method is just as clear and self-explanatory. It says the same information but is in a dedicated rule and allows for more combinations.
and if we want to centralize it, I'd just copy it. It would look something like this. "A switch is planned if and only if it is designated as such by the rules. An active player CAN Plan to Flip eir own instance of a planned switch, specifying any valid value for that switch, by announcement. At the beginning of a month, every player's instance of the switch is set to the value e mostly recently specified by Planning to Flip. If a player did not Plan to Flip eir switch instance in the last month, it is not flipped."
I do not like this restriction you have created on only flipping one's own instance. In practice, if we were to have more examples of planning to flip in the ruleset, it would be a highly used case, but I would say that planning to flip singleton switches has just as many applications as flipping one's own switch. Saying "their own instance" each time we need to use it is a minuscule amount of boilerplate.
Change that one fact about your suggestion and I would argue that our two methods of handling it are far more similar than different. You just introduce the definition first whereas I introduce the function first.
If we wanted to not have yet another adjective, we could change the first sentence to be something like "A switch is planned if and only if the rules state that it can be flipped by planning." That seems even messier, but hopefully someone can clean it up?
If the Agoran public finds this wording more palatable, then sure. It doesn't matter to me.
-Aris
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