Ladle/Operations needs a rewrite

[blondie]

Hadrian's Wall of Text

Sections include: "Rules," "How the Ladle Works," "Things to Know," and "Responsibilities & Duties"

Fort is hard enough. This page is as hard to comprehend as tax code of 18th century France. It was said that one man in a generation could understand it.

I'm going to start untangling this page today and will explain and propose revisions in this thread.

[compguygene]

Others have complained about the complexity there. I haven't seen a path to a re-write that would cover things completely as it does, but if you can, it could make things better for the community. If people don't understand the rules, the rules have no purpose. I thought it was pretty clear. Only recently have I learned from others how complex it can be for many to read.

[Z-Man]

Go right ahead. But remember that for most apparently broken, complicated systems with many rules, these also started simple and easy. Then, every time somebody thought they were smart and worked the rules to their advantage, but violated the spirit of the thing in the process, new rules were made to prevent that in the future.
So, for each rule, research when and why it was put in place. Your simplified rules need to cover that case just as well.
In essence, your rules need to be smarter than all the future smartasses together if they are to hold up. And really dumb and explicit at the same time, because people apparently don't grasp basic concepts such as "only edit your own team" on their own. So, good luck.

(I'd personally ditch the whole "nulla poena sine lege" ideal. Give the team leader council the power to distribute bans and disqualifications as they see fit. It's not like anyone is going to lose their heads, after all.)

[sinewav]

Fort is hard enough. This page is as hard to comprehend as tax code of 18th century France.

Fort is hard? Since when? Also, Ladle != Fort. Why not just make a new competition with simple rules and see if it becomes more popular? Really, the "wall of text" is more like a light pamphlet. Perhaps some pictures would help for all the idiots who can't be bothered to read a few paragraphs? Participants really only need to read the dozen bullet points under "rules for players" then use some common sense and good sportsmanship. If they don't have the latter, then no amount of revisions will help.

[blondie]

Sinewav, it's close to 3,400 words, taking the average native reader over 17 minutes to read. If that's not bad enough, now consider that for about half of its readers English is a second language.

Maybe that would be ok if it was well outlined and separated into distinct sections, so that one only needed to read one section to answer one question. In fact, complete information about any topic is spread throughout the document.

Some of what are in effect rules, such as you must play in the designated server, are not stated in "Rules" but rather in "How the Ladle Works."

This rule about designated servers applies to every team, yet is buried below descriptions of exactly how to reset the Challenge Board, something essentially trivial which applies to exactly one person a month. To reach the rule about exactly which server you need to play in, you have to read past things that don't apply at all to you, as well as things that are blatantly outdated and not done, such as:

Team Leaders meet in IRC in the #armagetron.ladle channel on freenode (IRC web client) 45 minutes before the opening rounds. This meeting is to make final preparations for Ladle, and to solve any problems that have arisen after the brackets were chosen.

That is in the very same paragraph as:

Team Leaders can discuss moving to the secondary server (examples: the majority of the players are from the same region and want to play on a closer server, or the primary server becomes unstable). Both teams must be in full agreement before switching servers. If no agreement can be reached then play must continue in the primary server. If there is no backup server (for instance, in the opening round) a public Fortress server may be used if both teams agree. If a team tries to bully their opponent by refusing to play in the designated Ladle server they are in forfeit. In the extremely rare case of a missing primary and secondary server, teams should be accommodating to each other and the rest of Ladle by quickly moving their match to a public Fortress server and making the best of the situation. Please be agreeable and stay on time.

How is someone to know what is actually followed and what is not? What is a rule (If a team tries to bully their opponent by refusing to play in the designated Ladle server they are in forfeit) and what is a suggestion (Please be agreeable and stay on time)?

The tone and applicably of content varies wildly, even within paragraph and bullet point.

For example, from "Rules for Players,"

Changes may happen at any time until the cut-off for the provisional placement of teams, which is currently 18:00 GMT on Thursday before the event (See Stage 2 for more information).

In the same bullet point, we go from a hard rule, to somewhat relevant, but non-rule information about when the cut-off is, along the way mentioning the "provisional placement of teams" Then we link to Stage 2, which is a paragraph about byes and late additions and bracket placement. That's an entirely separate topic, which has been shoehorned into a bullet point that is simply about the deadline for editing your team sign-up. The next bullet point returns to adding players after the bracket has been set.

Each operation or rule needs to be dealt with as it answers its own question. If I want to know the deadline for adding or editing a team, just give me the deadline. The other information answers other questions.


The Ladle, you seem to need a reminder, is self-organizing. It is not run by rule of law, it is run by whoever participates. Rules are never actually rules, they are guidelines the community chooses or chooses not to enforce. The more explicitly stated rules there are, the more the spirit of the event is obscured. By stating what a team explicitly may or may not do, the implication is that only those things are allowed or prohibited. In reality, anything that is against the spirit of the event is discouraged, regardless of whether such thing is explicitly prohibited or even, as with CT in Ladle 82, explicitly allowed.

I heartily agree with Z-Man. Before Operations/Rules/Regulations, there were simply Guidelines, and only that was an addition around Ladle 13. We would be better served by a full understanding and embracing of the self-organizing principle than detailed rules.

A lot of the information about "How the Ladle Works" is entirely unnecessary. The Ladle is a monthly fortress tournament that works however its participants make it work.

[sinewav]

We would be better served by a full understanding and embracing of the self-organizing principle than detailed rules.

Oh good, the "self-organizing" buzzword again. Guess what? We "self-organized" into the current system. Feel free to "self-organize" into another one.

The Ladle is a monthly fortress tournament that works however its participants make it work.

How its participants made it work is exactly how it is today. We have basically the same people as last year and the year before and the year before that and so on. Quite a few people are happy with the rules just how they are, except for one troublemaker and her gang. I guess it is your job to convince everyone otherwise otherwise.

Good luck.

[blondie]

your ability to ignore content and get defensive never ceases to amaze.

WE did not self-organize. YOU did. Of the 53 revisions of the past four years, you have made 48 (90%). Three of the five you did not make were minor grammatical/formatting changes. Those 48 edits represent over 1000 additional words, increasing the document's size by half.

[sinewav]

WE did not self-organize. YOU did.

You're right, I made all the rules without anyone's input. I'm such a jerk. I ruined Ladle. I guess I should make an apology thread too.

How many minutes did you say it takes to read the Operations page? Seventeen? So what is that, about half a match of Fortress? Four or five rounds? This is expecting too much from people who literally spend hundreds of hours playing Armagetron?0

I guess if you want to reorganize the rule page, that's fine. Always room for improvement. But it won't make more people play and it won't stop people from cheating the system.

[compguygene]

I think that we all need to recognize a couple of simple things here. When nobody else wanted to make the effort to setup a system of rules to keep cheaters from cheating the system and cheapening out the Ladle, sinewav stepped up and wrote up the Wiki page in question. We should all be grateful for that. We should all also remember that this debate between "self-organizing" and "rules" that was in many ways a debate between sinewav and concord/blondie goes back to that time.
I hope that we all keep in mind what Z-man said that I have quoted here.

Go right ahead. But remember that for most apparently broken, complicated systems with many rules, these also started simple and easy. Then, every time somebody thought they were smart and worked the rules to their advantage, but violated the spirit of the thing in the process, new rules were made to prevent that in the future.
So, for each rule, research when and why it was put in place. Your simplified rules need to cover that case just as well.
In essence, your rules need to be smarter than all the future smartasses together if they are to hold up. And really dumb and explicit at the same time, because people apparently don't grasp basic concepts such as "only edit your own team" on their own. So, good luck.

(I'd personally ditch the whole "nulla poena sine lege" ideal. Give the team leader council the power to distribute bans and disqualifications as they see fit. It's not like anyone is going to lose their heads, after all.)

I am really looking forward to see what Blondie comes up with, and seeing how we all can help refine it.

[blondie]

one the largest problems on this page is that it describes all states of the Ladle, rather than the current state. This is leading to bloat and confusion, as only part of the information is relevant for a given Ladle.

Some examples:

Per tradition, the Ladle will be played on the first Sunday of every month (except for January, which will take place on the Sunday following the first Tuesday of the month).

This line probably doesn't need to exist at all. It states "Per tradition" which means it is not an operation or rule, it is a tradition. The information about the traditional scheduling of Ladles is information that is relevant to the scheduling of Ladles, but not to the playing of them. Instead of giving a general rule for when any given Ladle is, we can just state when the next Ladle is. Of course, this is already done in Ladle blurb. This entire line can probably go away. If the community someday forgets its own traditions, then there's nothing wrong with way ladles are scheduled changing. By writing a tradition in a place where it might be interpreted as a rule, we get some confusion. Is tradition, or is it set in stone?

As I begin to organize a revision, I'll be looking to move the information which is documentation of traditional ways of doing things to an appropriate place. There are different levels of knowledge that we need to serve. The majority of people have no interest in a 300 word description of how to reset the challenge board for a new Ladle. That's a deeper level of information which can be served by "Further Reading"


Another example

The opening round of play will start at 18:45 GMT for a 16 team bracket, and 18:00 GMT for a 32-team bracket.

As far as information for the general player, this is redundant with the Challenge Board, which clearly states when the opening round is. The real reason this line is on the page is to document the traditional way >16 brackets are scheduled. It helps to describe all states of the Ladle, rather than the current state, which is already described on the Challenge Board. Something like this belongs on the deeper level, as well.


Much of the entire section "How the Ladle Works" can be moved to an appropriate place. The problem is that actual rules (or what we have used as rules in the past) are hidden in this section. The example I cited earlier was the server assignment / forfeit rule. The origins of this rule are controversial, and I believe its entirely the rule's fault that there was such a conflict in Ladle 82. Technically, ABC's actions were not in conflict with any Rule, they were in conflict with… How the Ladle works. Common sense was entirely on ABC's side, who objected to one server and were willing to play in any other server from the same continent. However, CT had the wikipage on their side, and this made them in the right, and gave them the means of enforcing that right. The reason there was a 30 minute delay was because ABC had the spirit of the law on their side, and CT had the letter of the law on theirs. Not only did the rule do nothing to alleviate the conflict, it, and the inaccuracy of the server quality tracker, caused it. The incident serves as a strong argument that we should allow common sense, compromise, and good intentions to solve more of our problems. Rather than prohibit actions, which sometimes are for the greater good if against the letter of the law, prohibit bad intentions.

I plan on adding a rule along the lines of,

You may not manipulate sign-ups in any way that creates an unfair advantage.

This is an elastic or spirit-of-the-game clause which can cover any shenanigans that otherwise would need to be explicitly forbidden. The problem with explicitly outlawing individual infractions is that it creates a logic where what is not explicitly forbidden is permissible. This is the "But it's not against the rules" defense. Instead of defining all the infinite ways one might seek an unfair advantage, let's just explicitly state that you may not seek an unfair advantage. As Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, it might be tough to define, but you know it when you see it.

There's no ambiguity about what's cheating and what's not. If you are going against the spirit of the rules or trying to bend them, you would now be risking the community judging that you broke them.

[compguygene]

When I took an honest look at the page I had some of the same ideas. This is sounding like it could become a real improvement.

[Ratchet]

I don't understand why you're so defensive, sinewav? I understand that you wrote a vast majority of the original page in question (assuming the previous posts are stating facts) but what is the problem with someone suggesting the same content could be better organized?

I think blondie made a valid proposition offering to make the page more idiot friendly (which seems to be the approach of most successful businesses/companies/communities) and less like a scavenger hunt.

Yes, maybe for most people it is already simple enough. But, if for nothing else, the page could be made easier to read for those who aren't native English speakers.

[sinewav]

I don't understand why you're so defensive, sinewav? I understand that you wrote a vast majority of the original page in question (assuming the previous posts are stating facts) but what is the problem with someone suggesting the same content could be better organized?

Not defensive at all. I penned the majority of the current page, but it was written by me, kyle, dlh, and Flex on top of previous authors. The reason the page looks as it does has to with the fact it was written a few lines at a time over the course of years. You write code, right? Same thing. Code gets added where needed and massive rewrites happen occasionally. I also is this rewrite looks like an attempt to solve a problem that doesn't exist and might cause way more problems in the future as rules are reworded. It should probably be done with a small committee rather than one person to ensure all the points are covered (error checking, etc).

I think blondie made a valid proposition offering to make the page more idiot friendly (which seems to be the approach of most successful businesses/companies/communities) and less like a scavenger hunt.

If you make it idiot friendly, you might be left with idiots. The complexity complaints are grossly exaggerated. Keep in mind nearly every line of text I wrote was first posted on these forums for approval before being inserted into the wiki. If it passed the readership here, then it is fine, IMO.

Yes, maybe for most people it is already simple enough. But, if for nothing else, the page could be made easier to read for those who aren't native English speakers.

Get some non-English speakers to volunteer and help with the rewrite!

[Ratchet]

I can certainly respect that, and I don't particularly disagree with anything you've said. I do believe it is important to conserve the original meanings of the rules within their respective context if they are going to be re-organized or "re-written."

Maybe, rather than a vast sweep of changes, blondie could make a temporary page for his "new and improved" Ladle Operations and thus be able to gather input from the community in that regard. Then, as a whole, the active ladle participants can determine whether or not the purpose of the original page was kept intact.

I think maybe that would reduce the toe-stepping and allow the possibility of what some people will perceive as "needed" reformation.

[blondie]

Keep in mind nearly every line of text I wrote was first posted on these forums for approval before being inserted into the wiki. If it passed the readership here, then it is fine, IMO.

This is false. How it is false serves to highlight the problem with some of the overly specific/explicit rules. Since we already started discussing the server rule, and since it has been the most significant rule controversy of the past year, I will use it as an example of how some of that page was written.

The relevant revision is 43787, 8 July 2013.

Sinewav added:

Both teams must be in full agreement before switching servers.'' If no agreement can be reached then play must continue in the primary server. If there is no backup server (for instance, in the opening round) a public Fortress server may be used if both teams agree. If a team tries to bully their opponent by refusing to play in the designated Ladle server '''they are in forfeit'''. In the extremely rare case of a missing primary and secondary server, teams should be accommodating to each other and the rest of Ladle by quickly moving their match to a public Fortress server and making the best of the situation. Please be agreeable and stay on time.

Additionally, Sine.wav revised "an issue with the primary server" to "a serious issue with the primary server"

Not only was this paragraph, which a year later created the scenario where a team could claim a Ladle final by forfeit, not proposed on the forums for the community's approval, it was not even quoted after the fact to make people aware of the exact language which was added. No significant discussion preceded the addition, and absolutely no word approval followed the revision. Unless you actively check the wiki "Recent Changes" log, it would be very difficult to notice it's addition or the massive significance of the addition until it became amazingly relevant in Ladle 82. Time transformed an arbitrary and unilateral revision into a hard and fast rule.

This was either because no one approved of the addition, or because no one seemed to think it was a significant change addition. The reason for the latter was that Sine.wav did not even quote his revision on the forums, but instead posted a link and summarized the changes made in a single sentence. He did not ask for feedback or seek community approval, instead simply mentioning a change had been made. He did this the night after a Ladle, in the very same Ladle thread, before recordings were posted, in the midst of gz's and server ratings, and his rule change was quickly buried under all the usual things that go on in Ladle threads. Sine.wav did not make a new thread to bring attention to his added paragraph, nor brought up the revision in his later posts in the thread, even though his original post had been ignored.

It was ignored for all these reasons, and because Sine.wav, in the one post he did make about it, called it "a clarification for server disputes." The reality was that he had added a paragraph and a new Ladle rule. His post itself moved on to a second subject.

Here is the post in full:

I wrote up a clarification for server disputes on the Operations page. Basically, play where you are supposed to until the server gets unbearable for both teams. I've seen teams return to the same Ladle server after multiple crashes, so please don't cry about lag. Hopefully this helps us avoid problems in the future. With so few servers available for tournaments we don't have the luxury of choice in this game.

One possible solution is to come up with a way to easily transform any server into a Ladle server. Do do this we need more people with Administrative access across a broader range of servers. Then it is a simple matter of rincluding some kind of default/reset.cfg, then ladle.cfg, and finally ladle#_authorities.cfg.

Something to think about.

The way the post was buried in the Ladle forum thread the night after the ladle, the way it was worded as a "clarification," Sine.wav's failure to quote his addition, and the lack of community discussion preceding a rule addition are all inadequate. If one didn't know better, one would look at the way he did all this and think he intentionally tried to hide his revision.

Sine.wav's claim that "nearly every line of text I wrote was first posted on these forums for approval before being inserted into the wiki" is revisionist history at best. In this example, he neither sought approval before or after his insertions. What at first is a harmless wiki revision becomes with the simple passage of time a stone-cold rule that was followed as if gospel.

The approach that the Do's and Don'ts of the Ladle should be explicitly defined is what allows this to happen. Self-organization is not a "buzzword" as Sine.wav called it a few posts up. Self-organization is not only the guiding and founding principle of the Ladle, it is a valuable resource that allows us to work out conflicts with as small a legal document as possible. This maximizes common sense solutions and creates a setting both day-of and throughout the month where teams are working out compromises amongst themselves to solve issues instead of fighting over conflicting interpretations of what the rules say.

On another note, Sine.wav's doom and gloom about a revision of the Operations page which has not yet happened is pretty funny.