On Thu, 2017-11-23 at 12:03 +1100, Madeline wrote: > What is a "timing scam" and how do I go about performing one?
It's a scam that could be trivially prevented by other players doing a particular action, and often it's obvious what the action is; but the action in question only has a very limited time period and you do the scam right at the end of the time period so that nobody else has the chance to see what it is and respond before the time runs out. Alternatively, it's a scam that anyone could do once a time period opens up, but only the first person to do it gets away with it, so you do it at the first possible moment so that nobody else can do it before you. In both cases, the key property is that the scam only works because it's performed at a very specific time, relative to some other action. If you see plyers sending an apparently pointless message to the lists, a very common cause is that they're trying to see exactly how long it'll take to arrive so that they can time a messge accordingly. The simplest example of a timing scam is an easily performed action that gives you an arbitrary number of votes on a proposal. If you do that early during the voting period, other people will just repeat it (once they know what it is), and get even more votes, to outvote you. If instead you do it immediately before the voting period ends, people won't have a chance to use it to outvote you, because you can't vote past the end of the voting period. On Thu, 2017-11-23 at 01:05 +0000, Alexis Hunt wrote: > A timing scam is generally any sort of scam or even just a regular > action which needs to be performed at a precise time to work. The > purest form, I'd say, is doing something in between two other things > being done in an unexpected way; Alex has a particularly great > example that I can't recall. My favourite timing scam was probably my win by Clout (defined as "a higher voting strength than everyone else's put together"). At the time, there was a system in which the players with maximum voting strength had it set down to 1 at the start of each month, and then an officer would increase some players' voting strengths. Also, you could spend assets to perform small adjustments to players' voting strengths. Right at the end of a month, I adjusted some players' voting strengths to produce a tied maximum value, dropping a lot of voting strength out of the game; then at the start of the next month (only a few minutes later), I did some more adjustments until my voting strength was higher than everyone else's put together. This couldn't have been done at any other time of the month; the scam of setting multiple strengths to maximum could have been counteracted if players were aware of it (via adjusting strengths to break the tie). Additionally, if I hadn't claimed the win immediately at the start of the next month, the scam could have been broken via players increasing their own voting strengths manually; I wouldn't have been able to keep up (because the combined assets of the rest of Agora were worth a lot more than mine, even though I'd been saving up). Not exactly a timing scam, but also a moment of near-perfect timing, was when there were rules punishing players for having too many assets at set intervals. BobTHJ, who determined the exact timing (being the relevant officer), decided to give me a whole load of assets just before e was planning to enact the punishment. However, because e had automated eir reports, the asset transfer was in a separate message from the actual report that carried out the punishment. I somehow managed to send an email between the two of eirs, transferring back the assets in question to the Lost and Found Department (the equivalent of Agora owning assets today) and beating the scam. It wasn't a true timing scam, though, as e could have done the two events in one message and given me no opportunity to interfere. -- ais523
