Topic: The kill/trade game - page 5. (Read 9259 times)

Shit sorry... got so carried away with delusions of Alliance grandeur I forgot to send a PM

Sending now.

You know, you two, (wdmw, FenixRD) I'm still waiting on your round 4 responses.

No coercion here. Free to do as you please!   Let it be known we are a just and merciful Alliance. As always, there is a "bounty" to restore yourself to neutral status (where you will be treated from then forward as an "ethical trader" until you again prove differently). In the rules of this game, the Alliance enforces ethical trading a certain way. This is because there are only two choices, Trade or Steal (aka Kill), and no option to, say, "decline to meet" or whatever.

So, in order to "pay off the marker" on you (you personally, based on your current "ethics balance"), you must allow your partner to choose Kill whilst you choose Trade, TWICE. Once this occurs, you will be eligible for the same protections the alliance offers to its members, should you so choose.

The kicker is, you may be "blackballed" by ethical traders in the following way: If you do indeed choose trade, but your partner also chooses trade, you will have traded; and this does not decrease your "marker" value (2 in your case). That is of course somewhat of a dick move on the part of the ethical traders, in the sense that you are trying to make good and they aren't allowing you to repay your debt; but, it is met and largely prevented by the chance that, you might have decided to NOT pay down your marker and chosen Kill again: in which case an ethical trader will have been again killed unethically, increasing your marker further! So in the event that you have a net debt, it is in your best interests to choose trade; and it is in the ethical traders' best interests to choose Kill, until balance is restored.

Note: Do not confuse this with wealth redistribution or socialist concepts. The Alliance makes no distinctions regarding who has a poorer balance of points and does not try to have points restored to any particular individual. The Alliance exists merely to protect against unethical trades by providing a method of tracking "unpunished, unethical Kills" as a balance to be corrected in a future trade with *someone*.

Are you being forced?  The choice is yours, but if you want a positive outcome in your actions with others...

But you are now forcing me to keep my security...

Black market justice has my back!

Sorry FenrixRD, didn't get the message. I just jumped in quickly as i was away for the weekend so that i wasn't holding the game up, didn't even look at the score or previous actions of Ekaros.

Point taken.

Ekaros has effectively Blacklisted himself though. 2 unwarranted kills... 1 could be explained as opportunistic if immoral, as it could have been a way of guaranteeing an early lead and then trading his way to victory, 2 is the sign of a cold blooded killer...

given that everyone now knows this, in a few rounds he'll find himself on the bottom instead of me...

if the game goes for a few more rounds that is...

Posting to note that the Alliance recommended to Camel that he choose Kill because Ekaros would almost certainly choose kill; and that the Alliance would back him up if he did it. Sorry to see that Camel chose (very strangely!) to trade against Ekaros, who did indeed Kill him. Perhaps he made this decision before receiving our PM; even then, it implies he has not been watching round 1 or 2 very closely. Sorry about your loss, Camel.

Following recommendations would have resulted in the ending:
Ekaros: 3
Cameltoemcgee: 3

instead of 6 and 2, respectively.

Everyone else, either independently or as a result of participation in the Alliance (I will not attempt to disclose who is who; it works better when it is shadowy, injecting a bit of imperfect-ness into this perfect information game), performed according to recommendations. As in, wdmw's Kill was ethically and statistically supportable; if you go through the rest of the rounds, you will see this. Thus, future traders should treat wdmw as an ethical trader; and to treat him otherwise will be viewed poorly by the Alliance.

Carry on!

Excellent point. If I ever do this again, I'll change "kill" to "steal."

And, as to the "decline to meet: you have been blackballed," that's coming in in game two.

I'm gonna go ahead and take the time to post something I'd said in a PM or two...

It makes no difference that the choices are called Kill and Trade. Since you do not remain dead, they may as well be Steal and Trade. Calling it Kill is a bit of a red herring, or something. From a game theory view, the most simple but sensible way of playing is to Trade, and Steal from someone who has one or more previously "uncorrected thefts". Once their previous "thefts" has been corrected back to zero, society should resume trading. (There is no "decline to meet: you have been blackballed" response to give to thieves in this game, so your only choices being Steal or Trade, and Stealing against a thief who has been fully "corrected" would be itself unethical, therefore you must trade.) This works in here because it is a perfect information game. In life, thieves typically rely on their ability to have the theft unknown to most if not all parts of society.

I'm assuming the killers will eventually end up only being able to attain 1 or 0 points.  Either they will attempt to trade but everyone will know them as killers and they will get killed, or they will continue killing and everyone will kill them as well and they will only have 1 point each.   

Whereas the consistent traders will be averaging around 2 all the way.

Given enough rounds the traders will be at the top and killers at the bottom.

The killers will take a while to re-establish their bonafides, if that's what they want to do.

Why do you think so?

Since there is very little incentive for peace, we may have some rogue players

Well, game theory states that it will eventually settle down.

I'm not sure why, but I find this really fascinating to watch Will it turn into all out war, or will eventually a stable kind of peace be settled ... *eats popcorn*

Round Three:
Players: 8
Maximum societal points: 48
Maximum individual points: 9

0 Rassah <--> wdmw 3

2 Elwar <--> FenixRD 2

2 FCTaiChi <--> Foxpup 2

3 Ekaros <--> Cameltoemcgee 0

Societal total points: 43
Point totals:
wdmw: 7
Rassah: 6
FCTaiChi: 6
Foxpup: 6
Ekaros: 6
Elwar: 6
FenixRD: 4
Cameltoemcgee: 2

Round 4 Roster:

Rassah <--> Foxpup
Elwar <--> Cameltoemcgee
FCTaiChi <--> FenixRD
wdmw <--> Ekaros

Well, the later games won't have a pre-set end number of turns. In "War," (and the later games) in fact, I'm going to set a victory condition.

That sounds fun.  Do these type of games take into account people like me who will try to win within the parameters of the game? ie.  I would probably trade for awhile and then try and doublecross to jump ahead at opportune times.   I like to test boundaries.   Does it require a large sample size to even things out?

Yeah, the basic idea has been done dozens of times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_war_game

The goal here is actually not this prelim game. I have some decidedly not basic variations I want to try out, including, as I said earlier, trying to start a war (and then seeing what can be done to prevent it)