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by daniel-levin 3847 days ago
Hey Guys - I'm a big fan of your work, both with, and before Starfighter. Just a few initial comments:

>> If your use of the system decreases Fun for other players, it is a violation of the Zeroth Rule. If it doesn't, we have no strong objection to it.

>> Illegal market manipulation wait, we're not the SEC -- that's very clearly Fun.

>> [Fun] means what we say it means, and our decisions on it are final.

What constitutes 'fun' seems arbitrary. It might frustrating and very un-Fun to be told "Patrick, Thomas, and Erin say no" because the rules aren't well-defined. For example, I don't think that illegal market manipulation is fun - it's just deleterious - and part of the reason it's illegal in the first place. To what extent are you planning on taking user feedback on what 'fun' is? It's not clear to me whether or not it's 'fun' to craftily infer your internal network topology, for instance. Your game has a global audience, so you have to assume that linguistic/cultural/whatever norms aren't shared by all your players.

Also, the contrast on the code samples is way too low. Please make the text stand out more? I can barely read it.

1 comments

It might frustrating and very un-Fun to be told "Patrick, Thomas, and Erin say no" because the rules aren't well-defined.

With respect, the rule is well-defined: it's a walled garden, we're the gardeners, and we will prune ruthlessly. You may not like that rule, but that's our price of admission.

Our rationale for it is simple: we don't want to spend our time being disciplinarians arguing with rules lawyers. I've spent most of my life on Internet message boards. I know how that conversation goes: "You didn't explicitly say that `festering pustule of a fascist` was an insult, so I am innocent of `harassing behavior.` Also, for behavior to rise to the level of harassment..." "I consider running a dictionary attack against someone else's password and then resetting it to something random to be valuable security research! How was I supposed to know that was out of bounds!?" etc, etc

It's not clear to me whether or not it's 'fun' to craftily infer your internal network topology, for instance.

You're always clear to ask. That one's Fun. Probing AWS' infrastructure to attempt to reconfigure that network topology, on the other hand, un-Fun -- it will get the game shut down for everyone.

Your game has a global audience, so you have to assume that linguistic/cultural/whatever norms aren't shared by all your players.

I am aware that we have norms which are not shared by all our players. We're going to enforce them regardless.

Please make the text stand out more?

Noted, I will see what I can do.