Suggested .Cosmosis Ruleset

Everyone wants to play a goal they like. But what is fun for some people, is not fun for others. .cosmosis was a way to compromise: it generated a completely random goal for a race. But ever since its inception, people have been abusing it. It is fairly common to see 20 .cosmosises in a row, with people trying to get a goal they both like. The following general ruleset serves as a guideline for stalemates like these, to help decide a goal in a fair manner without giving one player too huge of an advantage due to randomness.

1. Select one person to do the official .cosmosises. This person can be either a racer or a third party. Ignore all .cosmosises from other players. This person sets things off with an official .cosmosis.
2. Each player is awarded 1-2 "strikes", depending on the size of the race. A strike is basically a reroll: if you use your strike (just say "I use my strike"), then the person selected in step 1 does .cosmosis again. This process repeats until all players are out of strikes or all players with strikes remaining agree on the goal.
Basically, striking allows you to remove a goal you either hate or feel gives the opponent a strong advantage. Note however that striking risks an even worse goal coming up which you must race if nobody else strikes it.
(Optional)3. If all players agree, a goal may be striked without consuming any players' strikes. In very large races, a hypermajority (>80%...I just made up that word) may be used for this rule.
(Optional)4. If all players agree, modifications to the goal are allowed. For instance, if everyone agrees to it, RBA may be banned from a goal. Again, in large races, a hypermajority may be used for this rule.

It seems silly to have formalized rules for this sort of thing, but it seems to be needed. If anything, this should be used for tournament races, where one person getting screwed by an unlucky goal (e.g. vs ZFG in an mst race) can prove highly detrimental.

Sounds a lot better than the way it is now. There are usually like 5-6 .cosmosises until we finally get a goal everyone agrees on.

that seems well and good, but then wouldn't people still abuse it with .annihilation? and besides, it seems to me that most random goals are decided before the race begins (with some exceptions).

The only thing I don't like is that in a race of 6+ if just one person doesn't want the goal they can strike it. How often are goals with 3 c-buttons and a BA going to be kept? Or a lot of RBA in general? There are people that will use a strike on those every time and the odds of them coming up twice in a row aren't likely.

Kind of as a side note, I've been thinking we need some kind of "Rules of Racing" to avoid things like Elminster being DQ'ed, Librari seeing the goal and then being allowed to be .removed, and things like Siglemic taking 22 hours. There are no lines and I feel we should draw some so that everyone knows what they can/can't do.

the .cosmosis ideas sound good and i think that both of the optional rules ought to be included. also if you use the "everyone hates it" rule then having more than one strike would be too many.

having an official list of rules for all races is a good idea. having a time limit of something like twice the amount of time that it took the first person to finish should work, if anyone is still in the race then they tie for last place and its over. if everyone or the hypermajority agrees that the racer should be DQed then they are. im not sure after that, some general rules about cheating and the consequences for them. it should probably be in its own post and have the .cosmosis as a sub set of the rules

Runnerguy2489 wrote

The only thing I don't like is that in a race of 6+ if just one person doesn't want the goal they can strike it. How often are goals with 3 c-buttons and a BA going to be kept? Or a lot of RBA in general? There are people that will use a strike on those every time and the odds of them coming up twice in a row aren't likely.

I don't see what's wrong with RBABot's reroll feature. Even if we don't use the bot itself, I think the concept is sound. More than half the entrants must vote to veto the goal for a new goal to be rolled for. Halo (and CoD I think) us(es) this system to determine maps/rulesets. Mario Kart and MPH use a similar system, in which everyone votes for a specific map/track and the one with the most votes is chosen (ties are broken by a random draw), which doesn't really work for us because we're voting to accept/reject a given goal, not voting for a goal of our choice. However, I think it's close enough to reinforce the fairness of the majority veto system (at least to me). The only problem I can think of with rerolling with the bot is that it created a large amount of spam in the channel. Again, the purpose of this is to ensure that we are racing a goal that the majority of people will have fun doing. That's the point of racing, isn't it?

Runnerguy2489 wrote

Kind of as a side note, I've been thinking we need some kind of "Rules of Racing" to avoid things like Elminster being DQ'ed, Librari seeing the goal and then being allowed to be .removed, and things like Siglemic taking 22 hours. There are no lines and I feel we should draw some so that everyone knows what they can/can't do.

This. If we have rules explicitly outlining what happens in these situations, then there's nothing to argue. If Librari saw a goal and was removed because he didn't like it, why wasn't I removed from a race where I didn't even know the goal for 20 minutes? On top of that, I was DQ'd even though Zero left for 3 hours and I could've easily beaten him if I had started playing from the moment that he left. Many people told me I had no right to ask for removal 40 minutes in, even though I proved that I had been attempting to ask from the start of the race. I'm not even going to go in to the fact that it was AniMeowzerz who DQ'd me.

What's done is done and I don't think anything can be done to change that now, but things like this wouldn't be a big deal if we had a set of rules to refer to. I would have no problem with being DQ'd if there was a rule in place stating I can't be removed for missing the countdown (the most important part being that said rule would apply to everyone else). I'm positive there are some people that would not have been DQ'd had they been in my position...and if an op had been in the same situation they likely would've just done .end and restarted the race for everyone.

Bonooru wrote

having an official list of rules for all races is a good idea. having a time limit of something like twice the amount of time that it took the first person to finish should work, if anyone is still in the race then they tie for last place and its over. if everyone or the hypermajority agrees that the racer should be DQed then they are. im not sure after that, some general rules about cheating and the consequences for them. it should probably be in its own post and have the .cosmosis as a sub set of the rules

A time limit is probably a good idea. I disagree with your proposed time limit because if complete novices join a big race (which is bound to have our top players in it) then they won't be allowed to finish no matter how hard they try, which will discourage them. This goes against encouraging people to always finish and never quit so they can have the satisfaction of having finished the race, plus whatever skills they have improved by doing or learning whatever tricks they did. I think it would be especially detrimental in MM races simply because a couple of people are much farther ahead in the metagame than everyone else, and because 1st cycle is excluded from 95% of MM races, so short goals can end up being half an hour or less. DQing somebody for taking longer than an hour is definitely not what we want to have come out of this. Twice the time that last place finished in seems better because it's extremely unlikely that one lone racer is that much worse than everybody else. I say worse because you're never going to lose 2 or 3 hours from bad luck (maybe from a bad decision if it's a puzzle race, but I figured those are exceptions because the completion time has varied from 3 to 9 hours, not counting Siglemic's 22 hour finish). The point of this rule is to prevent people from holding up races just to be a jackass. This becomes less of an issue with multiple race functionality, but it must still be addressed because people are going to want to see the point changes when the race is recorded. Holding up a race may prevent races of the same game in the immediate future from being recorded as well. A so called "hypermajority" vote sounds like a fair idea to me, but it is slightly arbitrary, which I don't think is good. It seems to only work on a case-by-case basis, but maybe that is what is needed for people who are taking 8 or 9 hours. I'm just offering my idea of a time limit of twice the time of the current last place as a suggestion.

The reason this came up is because pokey and ZFG took about 20 minutes to decide a goal for their tourney race, with each of them spamming cosmosis and neither of them agreeing on what came up. Since a tourney match was at stake, neither wanted to lose their respective advantage. This was only resolved after I solicited the striking procedure. People spamming .cosmosis or .reroll has occured many times in the past, so I figured this would be a good system to handle future disagreements.

I totally agree with a general ruleset and I'll help write it if need be.

elm's idea about timing makes sense. how about making a post that has proposed rules and just taking the ones that work and calling it the official set

So far for time limits, we've come up with this.

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1. Entrants are given a time limit of double the time of the previous finisher. If nobody finishes during this time, all remaining entrants will be DQ'd. The purpose of this rule is to prevent people from leaving and holding up races for no reason.

example: 6 player race. 1st: 1:30:00. 2nd: 2:00:00. 3rd: 2:45:00. 4th: 4:00:00. 5th, 6th and 7th are still racing. 8th has forfeit.

The last player who has finished at this point got a time of 4 hours. If nobody else finishes by the 8-hour mark, all remaining entrants (i.e. 5th, 6th, and 7th) will be DQ'd.

If Player 5 finishes at the 7-hour mark, the remaining players can continue to race until the 14-hour mark. If at this point nobody is still finished, all remaining players will be DQ'd.
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2. All players are given a minimum of 3 hours to finish. This supersedes rule #1. This purpose of this rule is to account for short races (especially due to skipping first cycle in MM races).

example: 5 person race. 1st and 2nd finish with times of 40 minutes. 3rd finishes at 50 minutes. Although rule 1 states that the last 2 racers have until 1:40:00 to finish the race before being DQ'd, this is probably unreasonable. If the remaining racers are new people who are just beginning to learn the game, they shouldn't be penalized just because a really good player got such a low time.

With rule #2 in place, 4th and 5th racers still have until 3:00:00 to complete the goal before being DQ'd. If 4th finishes with a time of 1:15:00, 5th player still has until 3:00:00 to complete the goal. However, if 4th finishes with a time of 1:40:00, 5th player now has until 3:20:00 to complete the goal, because it is double the previous player's time and also above 3 hours.
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3. Rules #1 and #2 only apply if half or more of the entrants have finished the race. The purpose of this rule is to prevent multiple novices being DQ'd because there was one good player in the race who did really well.

example: 8 person puzzle race. 1st player figures out the puzzle immediately and finishes with a time of 2:30:00. 2nd player isn't far behind, with a time of 2:40:00. The other players are struggling with the puzzle, and nobody else has finished by 5:20:00. A mass DQ would occur here simply because two people did exceptionally well. Such a mass DQ would ruin the race, so the rules would only come into play when half or more of the entrants have finished.

Let's say player 3 finishes at 5:30:00 and player 4 finishes at 6:00:00. Four is half of eight, so the time limit now comes into play. If nobody else completes the goal by the 12-hour mark, all remaining entrants will be DQ'd.
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Those are the rules we agreed upon as of around 2:30 AM EST. I'm not sure how well I explained the rules or chose examples, so if someone (probably RingRush) feels the need to summarize, they most certainly can.

I haven't heard anything about rules for deciding on a goal, though. Jiano, Runnerguy and I disagreed with the striking system, but I heard most of #zelda liked the idea.

what is the problem with the strikes?

Edit: oops... i cant read. i still like the general idea of a strike although it should be able to be overruled if enough people want the goal. say... 2/3 to overrule?

I posted one basic problem with it in this thread.

We may also wanna take a look at the top10 lists and make an inactivity period rule for hiding their name until they become active again.

or just an idea with top 10,if somebody hasnt raced for a while make them gradually losepoints (this only applies top ten people)

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