Questions about revenge

[Hashoosh]

Hey we're living in a time when people are willing to spend millions of dollars building custom hardware to search abstract mathematical spaces for imaginary money with no intrinsic value, and are getting rich doing it.

Most (is there anything that isn't fiat?) money has no intrinsic value, BitCoin or otherwise.







I'd still sell it immediately if I had any.

[Merovech]

Hey we're living in a time when people are willing to spend millions of dollars building custom hardware to search abstract mathematical spaces for imaginary money with no intrinsic value, and are getting rich doing it.

Most (is there anything that isn't fiat?) money has no intrinsic value, BitCoin or otherwise.







I'd still sell it immediately if I had any.

Ehh, there are the material values, which are usually quite small, but not completely negligible.

[Lord Parkin]

Eh, I'm not really big on the self-sacrifice/revenge mentality. My goal is always to play the best game I can. I've never crippled my civ to "get back" at another player, I don't see the point. If I happen to incidentally fight someone that got on my nerves during the game, there'll of course be some sense of added satisfaction. But I wouldn't change my game plan to attack them just because they grated on me at some point.

As for playing anonymously, I think my sentiments on that have already been covered in detail by my sock puppet accounts.

[NobleHelium]

You should add an "Efficacy" Column

EFFICACY

[ ] Eh, it kinda worked
[ ] This poll was never going to work
[ ] Maybe in a less sarcastic community

Works fine, 15 answers so far And yes, I'm including Noble's answers in that.

I'm pretty sure I already answered before this thread was created.

[Old Harry]

Notes to self:
1. Attack Catwalk, Cyneheard, Lord Parkin and Merovech freely,
2. Attack antisocialmunky, Dhalphir, Kuro, MJW (ya that one) and Twinkletoes89 with caution
3. Avoid attacking Boldly Going Nowhere, Ceiliazul, Molach, WilliamLP, Bobchillingworth, Commodore, Hashoosh and Gaspar unless I'm going to kill them.

Thanks Catwalk!

[Catwalk]

You're welcome!

[Lord Parkin]

1. Attack Catwalk, Cyneheard, Lord Parkin and Merovech freely

So the usual then.

[WilliamLP]

As for playing anonymously, I think my sentiments on that have already been covered in detail by my sock puppet accounts.

Shhh, don't give my true identity away.

[WilliamLP]

My style when losing (and when winning, too, I think) is to maximize what I see as my civ's position relative to the other civs in the game, with extra weight given to those civs who are at a similar level to me and less weight given to those who are far ahead of or far behind me.

On the topic, this part resonates with me the most. If I'm attacked early, and I see that I don't have a realistic chance to win the whole game anymore, now I need something else to play for. I may be able to win the duel with the attacking player. It could be a negative sum game relative to the rest of the world (or maybe not) but I don't really care that much, nor would I feel guilty about breaking some moral code I don't really understand.

I see a couple of tendencies from some players sometimes:

1. Confusing "is" from "ought". How you are treated in future games will depend, in part, on how you react in previous ones, regardless of whether you think this is fair, or whether you would change your reactions yourself. Also within the same game most people will have a tendency toward playing more like a duel (as above) if you make an aggressive first strike early. Whether or not this is "stupid" or irrational or whether the idea is abhorrent to me (it isn't) there is a predictable cause and effect here.

2. People can be very poor at seeing symmetry between themselves and others. Maybe this even helps certain people be more competitive but that's another topic. I'm convinced that some of the same players who see revenge as terrible when they are the recipient would find clever logic to justify it as the correct play if the roles were reversed. It's a known fact about human behavior that a lot of times we react on emotions and then find the reasoning to justify it later.

[Lord Parkin]

As for playing anonymously, I think my sentiments on that have already been covered in detail by my sock puppet accounts.

Shhh, don't give my true identity away.

Actually, a little known fact about RB is that every single account aside from your own is run by me (#solipsism). I use multiple computers and proxies so as to preserve the illusion of this being a vibrant active community of real people spread over the globe. But really it’s just you and me here.

I give the different users different quirks and personalities for my own amusement. For instance, when writing as Sullla I crank up the pomposity and verbosity. As Ichabod I meditate and channel my inner child. With Gaspar I tweak up the jerk knob a bit. As mackoti I keep responses terse, then apply a filter to add and remove random letters before posting. With Lord Parkin I try to represent the very essence of amorality and chaos. You start to get the picture. Sometimes when I run out of ideas I set up accounts to be smurfs of pre-existing personalities (#inception), though of course in the end they’re all me.

Of course, there isn’t enough time to type out every post myself, so some users are partially programmed. For instance, most of the time Krill is set to automatically generate offensive one-liners. If you pay attention it shouldn't be hard to pick out many of the other high-profile bots.