This is the Referee's weekly report. (This introduction is not self- ratifying.)
Given the reregistration of Elysion/Mischief, and discussions about Blot/Fugitive status, I'm going to start this week's report with a bit of history, back from September 2009. (For reference, here's a ruleset from this time period: <https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora-official/2009-September/007066.html>) In September 2009, one of the win conditions (a win by Solitude) was to be the only active first-class player who is legally able to win. At the time, the player base was split into two subsets: first-class players were human players (the concept which nowadays is just called "player"), but contracts could also be players, forming a type of second-class player known as a "partnership" – those didn't count towards the win condition. If a contract was a player, its parties were jointly responsible for ensuring that it obeyed the rules; in particular, if a contract would be given a Rest (the equivalent of a Blot), every member of the contract would be given a Rest instead. Late 2008 / early 2009 was a time of heavy economic activity, and in order to help automate trades, there were contract-based banking systems. One of the most important banks was "The People's Bank of Agora", generally just referred to as "the PBA" – it had its own currency, with prices set automatically based on which assets were selling and which assets were being sold (when you bought an asset, its price would go up; when you sold one, the price would go down). For reasons I no longer remember (and which might or might not have made sense in the first place), the PBA was a partnership rather than a regular contract; and as one of the most important ways to trade assets, almost everyone was a member. By September 2009, the economy had started to become less important, and the PBA was less relevant, but it still existed, and many people who had become members during the contract's heyday were still members and hadn't left. The main economic subgame in September 2009 was a "cards" system; players would be dealt cards from the Decks of Government, Justice and Change, and the cards would either do something continuously while held, or could be played to cause something to happen. The relevant card here was a card named "Stool Pigeon", which allowed the player who played it to specify a player and create a Rest in eir possession (with the restriction that no single player could be Stool Pigeoned more than once every 72 hours). Incidentally, the Cabinet Order "Dive" in the current ruleset is somewhat reminiscent of the Stool Pigeon card. All this combined to form a scam (which is not too hard to see once you've been told which rules and pieces of gamestate are relevant…): in order to set up for a Solitude win (for myself and co-conspirators), I left the PBA and then played a Stool Pigeon card on the PBA. That wasn't quite enough to win on its own, but it got most of the way there; I got the rest of the way using a combination of a) additional Stool Pigeon cards; b) transferring a Dunce Cap card (which prevented its owner winning, couldn't be destroyed, and couldn't be transferred until you'd held it for a week); and c) a number of act-on-behalfs via contract to make players inactive and thus not counting against Solitude. Here's the message where it happened: <https://www.mail-archive.com/agora-business@agoranomic.org/msg17498.html> Now, at the time, it was possible to be a party to a contract without being a player. Elysion ended up in this situation by default; e was a member of the PBA back when it was a heavily traded bank, was deregistered for activity in April 2009, and yet that didn't cause em to cease to be a memer of the contract. This therefore had the side effect that, when I set up the Win by Solitude, Elysion ended up gaining a Rest at the same time as the active players which the scam was targeted at. Per the rules at the time, this made em a Fugitive (which was defined as "a person who has one or more Rests but is not a player"), despite the somewhat weird way the Rest was created. As such, the Insulator (equivalent of today's Referee) was required to report the Fugitive status. Eventually the concept of a "fugitive" in the Ruleset got repealed. It has since been re-enacted, but is now tied into the current Blots system, rather than the old (but suspiciously similar) Rests system; Elysion is not a Fugitive under the current definition because e has no Blots (and also because e is currently registered). But there's something of an Agoran tradition of saying "under some past ruleset, this player was a Fugitive". Was the situation recognised at the time? Here's the Herald's Report from October 2009: <https://www.mail-archive.com/agora-official@agoranomic.org/msg04178.html> and the Insulator's report, published 2 minutes later by the same player: <https://www.mail-archive.com/agora-official@agoranomic.org/msg04179.html> These two reports are in contradiction, with the Insulator's report saying that Elysion was a fugitive, and the Herald's Report saying that there were no fugitives of the new law. (IIRC BobTHJ had heavily automated eir offices – this may have been an example of the automation breaking down.) Shortly (by Agoran standards) after that, in November 2009, something interesting happened: proposal 6556 passed <https://www.mail-archive.com/agora-official@agoranomic.org/msg04223.html> This was proposal to give 1 Rest to every "fugitive of the old law", as written in the Herald's report at the time – thus making the "unofficial Fugitive" status official. (To give a sense of how quickly this was – the same batch also contained proposal 6563, which limited Stool Pigeon to applying only to first-class players, presumably to fix my scam.) As far as I can tell, the Herald's report wasn't published again until April 2010, but by then Elysion was on the same list as all the other Fugitives, as they all had an actual, Insulator-tracked Rest: <https://www.mail-archive.com/agora-official@agoranomic.org/msg04538.html> That isn't the end of the story. The status in question was "formally forgiven" by proposal 8617 on 17 October 2021: <https://www.mail-archive.com/agora-official@agoranomic.org/msg11762.html> (with the Scroll in question being this one: <https://www.mail-archive.com/agora-official@agoranomic.org/msg11711.html>). However, it is unclear whether or not the proposal in question did anything, as it didn't define what formally forgiving a fugitive meant. It is worth noting that the description of "Fugitive" on the Scroll in 2021, "someone who last left Agora before completing eir penal sentence", doesn't match the definition of Fugitive at the time that Elysion became a Fugitive (because the definition at the time was "has a Rest and is not registered", but didn't require the Rest to happen before the deregistration did). So my conclusion is: Elysion was once nonregistered and impure – but not as a consequence of a rules breach, and in fact the deregistration happened before the Rest was gained. The same combination of statuses (nonregistered and impure) was, shortly afterwards, used to "officially" mark a large number of players who had deregistered while under some form of punishment, and with "fugitive" being rules-defined at the time, the Herald's report basically just listed the fugitives without defining what that meant. Years later, the Herald's report was still reporting much the same list, but the description wasn't a perfect match to the list contents, because although nonplayers who were fugitives under pre-2009 rulesets were given Rests in November 2009 to make the lists match up, there were other ways in which nonplayers could gain Rests in 2009, and yet the report hadn't taken that into account. Most likely, it had been forgotten. BLOT HOLDINGS (self-ratifying) ============= No Blots exist. INFRACTIONS (not self-ratifying) =========== No infractions were noted nor investigated last week. No infractions have been noted nor investigated so far this week. -- ais523
