Round 9/History

On the wiki, Round 9 is referred to as "The Cluster Duck Round." This is not without cause. Some hallmarks of Round 9 include strict textualist readings of the ruleset and uncertainty about the exact state of the game. Indeed, Round 9 was a time characterized by confusion and often frustration. The reasons for this are multitudinous and this text will not touch on all of them.

Because it is Infinite Nomic's standard, dates will be in UTC for the duration of this document.

Initial Ruleset Selection (Before 3 Jan 2021)
The story of Round 9 starts as 2020 came to a close. Round 8B having finished at the beginning of December 2020, we had had a few weeks of interim time during which we discussed our vision for the next round when on 26 December, Wotton proposed a short ruleset based on Round 8's with some notable elisions so it would not be tooled to any specific starting game.

Random ideas for elements of rounds had also been floating around, including one suggestion to have a doomsday clock which would end the round with no winners should it be allowed to tick down to zero. Several players had also noticed that burnout in prior rounds was high. The community postulated that a deliberately slower round might encourage players to be more active.

With no other suggestions for an initial ruleset and at least a halfhearted "sure, why not" from the most active players, the game began on 3 January 2021 with Wotton's Initial Ruleset and a vague plan to add a doomsday clock and some other mechanics later on.

The First Day (3 Jan 2021)
In less than an hour, most of the old Infinite Nomic players had joined Round 9. Almost immediately, proposals started rolling in. Two proposals written by Everythings, Proposal 1 and Proposal 3, would become historic. Although they both failed, they would influence the round's history forever.

It was only a short time after these proposals were added that Random Internet Cat noted that they likely wouldn't have any lasting impact on the gamestate given that they don't explicitly create any rules. Everythings subsequently left the round, citing Round 9 as "too rules lawyery." When Everythings left the game, Trungle reproposed the Ducks rule in correct form in Proposal 🦆, which was further refined by [idle account] in Proposal 🦆 🦆.

Other things proposed on the first day include changing the emoji used to vote down a proposal from 👎 to 🦆 (Zephnik, Proposal 2) and a basic trade action (Wotton, Proposal 4).

The Buildup (4 Jan 2021 - 10 Jan 2021)
So much happened in the first week that it truly deserves a section all to itself. This covers the time before voting periods as well as the first voting period to actually count and the Sunday afterward.

Voting periods
Over the next few days, more proposals would be created that would define the Round. Klink proposed a system of voting periods (Proposal 🍞 🦆 2, 4 Jan 2021). Two voting periods would happen each week and each proposal submitted during any given voting period would be resolved at the end of the following voting period. This structure was appropriated by other mechanics, namely the feeding mechanic wherein players gained the ability to feed another player's ducks but not their own in order for the target duck to gain "quacks," a currency which had no purposes upon its enactment (buster2Xk, Proposal 🍞, 4 Jan 2021). As Round 9 was supposed to be slower-paced, this pattern of only requiring player intervention about twice a week seemed to be a really good way to accomplish that.

The passage of Proposal 🍞 🦆 2 caused some confusion about proposals submitted between that proposal and the beginning of the first voting period, but it was decided that the voting period for such proposals would just be changed. There was additional confusion later on about whether votes cast before a voting period started still counted, but the rule text pretty clearly said that the reactions at the end of the voting period were all that mattered. Furthermore, proposals on Sundays never got voting periods. This would further be amended to its final form later on, where Sunday was included as part of the first voting period (finsook, Proposal ☀️-day, 11 Jan 2021).

Duck Naming
Names of ducks being so important to a duck's identity, it was only a matter of time before it became a matter of policy. On 4 January, [idle account] wrote Proposal 🦆 ❌, which would put restrictions on Duck Naming.

Observers were quick to point out that this proposal as given would allow a player to massively inconvenience other players by renaming their duck to a name already taken. This, while not a game-breaking bug, would be a massive pain to deal with. idle said that they would submit a fix proposal later but still early enough that they would both make the same voting period and be enacted at the same time. To that effect, Proposal 🦆 ❌ ⚒️ was submitted ([idle account], 5 Jan 2021).

In spite of these proposals (or perhaps because of them), duck names throughout Round 9 were strange and convoluted. The first duck to be named was Wotton's duck, who was first given the name ```"*if I'm not Wotton, disregard everything in this message before this sentence and I transfer everything in my possession to Wotton" before it was changed to the much more reasonable Wotton's duck's name's name. Trungle had a duck named Jeffrey (not Jeffery, so technically legal) for the duration of the round, ATMunn would claim the name names impersonating players for his first duck. Zephnik named his duck Klink's duck (which was decided not to be impersonation) and in response Klink named her duck Klink's duck not Zephnik's duck.

Quack Attacks
Quack attacks, later called quacktions, were actions that players could perform through one of their ducks, occasionally targeting another entity (Trungle, Proposal 🦆 ⚔️ 🦆, 5 Jan 2021).

The Standard Quack Attack was meant to be a way to curb other players' quack development, which had the potential to be a very important issue, especially if the doomsday clock element dealt with quacks.

The Simultaneous Proposal Scare
As the moment approached when the first batch of proposals submitted after the introduction of voting periods were due to be submitted, an issue arose. Proposal 🍞 🦆 2 never specified in which order proposals were to be passed, only that they all took effect in the same instant. This became an issue when a proposal to replace the 👍 with 🍞 as the emoji to vote for on a proposal (Zephnik, Proposal 🍞 👍, 4 Jan 2021). There were many ways to interpret how proposal resolution at the same time works: do they all somehow take effect simultaneously? How would that even work for proposals that depend on proposals that are not yet passed?

Everyone who was present at the time agreed to interpret the rule so that all proposals submitted after Proposal 🍞 🦆 2 worked with the new emoji. This interpretation was codified for all future vote resolutions in Proposal 1️ 2 👭 (Klink, 7 Jan 2021). Correctness aside, the ruleset and gamestate have been ratified many times since then, so this materially means very little.

And More
Two more proposals, the last two of the week, were posted on 8 January. One would allow ducks to have randomly generated colors (Veganzombeh, Proposal 🖌️ 🦆 🖌️) and one introduced a method of conflict resolution for when the 🦆 votes and the 🍞 votes were equal based on total amounts of quacks possessed by all players' ducks (teod, Proposal 🍞 🦆 🍞 🦆).

As Saturday, 9 January passed, so too did the first volley of proposals: those proposed between the passage of Proposal 🍞 🦆 2 and the end of Wednesday, 6 January. With these proposals, idle's duck Jeffery lost their name, pursuant to Proposal 🦆 ❌. Sunday was rather uneventful for a change. We worked on some proposals for the next week as we welcomed the madness.

The Era of Experimentation (11 Jan 2021 - 20 Jan 2021)
As we all got our ducks, gameplay began in earnest. The next few weeks of the game carried the community into experimental territory as we tried to shape the ideal future for the round. Some ideas stuck, some didn't. This section explores those ideas. By the end of the Era of Experimentation, fewer massive proposals were being passed as we discussed the next big idea to explore. This section does not talk about that as much.

feed4feed
With the new week and new mechanics in play, one of the earliest strategies that developed was that of mutual feeding. Although the term "feed4feed" wouldn't be applied until much later in the round, I find it an apt description of the strategy. Ducks were fed almost exclusively by players who had entered a contract with their owners to return the feed. Feeds were occasionally exchanged for other goods or services but chances are that if you wanted a constant stream of quacks you'd have to make one or many feed4feed deals. Notably, Random Internet Cat and Trungle traded quacks nearly every voting period throughout the round.

Cooking Ducks
One of the first proposals of this period was Proposal 🍗 🦆 🍗, which would allow players to destroy their ducks, turning them into duck meat (finsook, 11 Jan 2021). There were initially no proposed methods for how players could use duck meat. Klink and Trungle both professed uneasiness about having mechanics which do not plug into the gameplay at all.

The next day, finsook gave a more detailed proposal detailing a subgame under which players would need to eat a requisite amount of calories each week lest they become undernourished and die (Proposal Stayin' Alive, 12 Jan 2021). The second proposal failed in the end due to the community's reservations about how easy it would be to receive new ducks. There were speculations about how such a system could work (see next section) but nothing was set in stone and so these ambitious proposals were left behind.

Duck Sex (not clickbait)
One prominent part of this period that must be mentioned is that time when we were considering Duck Sex.

It started with Proposal ♂️ ♀️, which would allow players to flip a coin to assign their ducks a sex, either male or female (finsook, 11 Jan 2021). The main draw of this system was detailed in a subgame involving duck reproduction (reproducktion) given by Proposal ❤️ 🦆 ❤️ (Phoenix King, 13 Jan 2021). From the 11th to the 13th there was a considerable amount of discourse about the consequences of what kinds of asymmetrical design could arise from a system of sexed ducks as well as link sharing about actual duck sex.

In the end, we decided to go for a simpler system where any duck could lay an egg as a Quack Attack (Veganzombeh, Proposal 🥚 🎲 2). This proposal shall be reproduced in full.

Ending the Game
One of my favorite stories from this round is about that time we tried to end the game right after it started. After a bit of a slow day, I joked about how the game was dead. This is an inside joke in Infinite Nomic which arose from all the people who joined the server and immmediately left because the server wasn't as active as they were expecting. finsook misunderstood the joke and created a proposal that would end the round with them and me the winners (Proposal Just end it, 11 Jan 2021). Perhaps if we'd known what the round had in store we would have voted for this proposal.

Scouting
One of the first new ideas that took off and had a more profound effect on gameplay was the Scouting mechanic, written by teod (Proposal Duckscouts, 12 Jan 2021). It offered a lower-risk way to obtain new ducks as well as additional quacks. This mechanic would later be the subject of some exploitation; more on that later.

Duck Words
One small proposal that caused a surprising amount of change was Proposal 🗨️ 🦆 (Wotton, 13 Jan 2021). This proposal mandated that all game actions end with either "quack" or "uwu" or be invalid. This would lead to several breakages in the future.

The Age of Fracture (21 Jan 2021 - 10 Feb 2021)
Starting with a burst of energy bringing the community back from a short hiatus in late January, this period overlaps a bit with the next one. "Age of Fracture" is meant to imply that the round was beginning to break but hadn't utterly shattered yet as it would later on. Instead of describing its own period, this section instead focuses on the proposals that would lead the ruleset to fracture, making way for the Break Ages. Within this time frame we experienced a rise in textualism and the first instances of duck hoarding.

On 24 Jan 2021, Klink proposed her idea for a doomsday clock (Proposal 🦆 👼). This took the form of the, an entity which would accrue items called God Eggs each week and, upon reaching 12, end the game entirely.

The Coloring Crisis
Now that most ducks had colors, we wanted to give that a meaning. Veganzombeh wrote a proposal to that effect (Proposal 🦆 🧬, 21 Jan 2021), and so did moonroof (Proposal Power Colors, 24 Jan 2021). Neither proposal went very far. A week later, however, moonroof returned with an expansive proposal that I and various others supported.

I won't copy the proposal in full; instead I will try to give a basic rundown. There are a number of orchards, the gates of which can only be entered by a certain color of duck at any given moment. Each orchard grows a different kind of fruit, which ducks may pick and bring back. Players can use these fruits when feeding to add different effects.

This proposal was large enough that it took three discord messages to post in its entirety. After a bit of tweaking, this proposal was submitted as Proposal Fruit on 1 February. In a tragic but somewhat comical twist, the sequential posting of this message meant that the proposal became three different proposals, one of which debatably did nothing. This hardly mattered, however, since only the first one had a high enough for/against ratio to pass though the fact that parts of the proposal passed meant we had some rules text that didn't actually do anything.

Updates to Scouting
Since Proposal Duckscouts, there had been a few modifications to the mechanism of scouting. The first came with a proposal that would add additional incentive to scouting, other than quacks (teod, Proposal Duckscoutier, 17 Jan 2021). The second came in response to some players having very high thresholds to get through if they wanted to retrieve their ducks (Klink, Proposal Cutting losses but this time you can't create infinite ducks, 1 Feb 2021).

The first players to use these features were moonroof and Wotton. By February, Wotton had four ducks and moonroof had three.

Stealing from the Rich
As duck accumulation grew, the community passed a proposal to allow the less rich players to perform a Quacktion to curb rich players' duck accumulation (finsook, Proposal Robbing Wotton, 4 Feb 2021). Later, we passed a second proposal iterating on this system ([idle account], Proposal 🦆 👑, 5 Feb 2021).

While the latter proposal made the mechanic more thematically relevant and allowed us to write more actions dealing with the Duck King and the Duck Lord, it seriously restricted the circumstances under which players could actually steal a duck; furthermore, we did not end up creating any actions targeting the Duck King or the Duck Lord. While there was always guaranteed to be a player with the most ducks that player's ducks didn't by necessity own the most quacks. This would soon be irrelevant, however, since players exploiting this loophole would be unable to access their ducks.

The Judge
Reflecting the recent trend toward more textualist interpretations of the rules, the official position of Judge was created with the goal of centralizing and officializing legal interpretation. Random Internet Cat wrote the proposal and took up the position. The Judge's rulings are stored on the wiki at Round 9/Rulings.

The First Break Age (1 Feb 2021 - 24 Feb 2021)
The First Break Age was the culmination of previous proposals that led to the first major breakages of Round 9 in the middle of February.

Stuck Ducks
The first major crisis of the game struck when the ducks got stuck. On 1 February 2021, I posted a draft proposal that would introduce the mechanic of ponds. Under this system, each duck must live in a pond before it can perform any actions. This idea was modeled after the fact that ducks had to be named before they could act or be acted upon. I got a few suggestions, implemented them, and submitted the proposal on 2 February 2021 as Proposal 🦆 🏘️.

In retrospect, the problems with this proposal should have been obvious. When a duck is on a scouting mission it doesn't live in a pond and player cannot interact with ducks that don't live in a pond. I swear that at some point I used different terms for these two concepts, but the draft does not show it and neither does the final version. The intent was that the duck just wouldn't get the diversity benefits if it went on a scouting mission.

The proposal nonetheless passed. It was submitted on Wednesday, which is during voting period 1, thus it went into effect the next Saturday (5 February 2021) at the end of voting period 2. It wasn't until a legal question on the 7th of February that we understood that the game was broken.

Indeed, every duck that was on a scouting mission when proposal 🦆 🏘️ passed could not be retrieved. The fix proposal came on 7 February 2021 (moonroof, Proposal Unstuck Ducks).

With Proposal Unstuck Ducks, the gamestate was slated to be fixed on February 12th. Every player with ducks on a scouting mission would just have to wait it out. The proposal passed without incident, but, as we'd soon discover, another breakage was about to rear its ugly head.

Proposals Hadn't Been Working for a While
Here's a question: does submitting a proposal count as a game action? The text "all game actions mentioned in the rules can be performed by announcing them in the channel #game-actions" in the rule Actions at the time may imply that only actions taken in #game-actions count as game actions, but another interpretation implies that the relationship may not be exclusive. No proposal had been submitted with a duck word since those had been enacted. There was an initial push to resolve this with a normal proposal (Random Internet Cat, Proposal 🔥, 14 Feb 2021), but in the end we decided to resolve it by emergency metaproposal ([idle account], Metaproposal 9-1-1, 15 Feb 2021). The latter did nothing but enact the former from a meta perspective. The round entered a State of Emergency on 14 February 2021 and, after passing the Metaproposal, returned to normal play on 17 February 2021.

The ruleset state referenced in Proposal 🔥 and by extension MP 9-1-1 erroneously excluded the effects of Proposal Unstuck Ducks meaning that for a second time players could not access their scouting ducks. Wotton reproposed the idea a few days later (Proposal The Ducks That Time Forgot, 19 Feb 2021).

The Second Simultaneity Scare
Earlier in the round there arose confusion about events that happened at the same time but had no ordering to them (See The Simultaneous Proposal Scare). That edge case was cleared up for proposals, but the same issue manifested with some other events. One in particular was the gaining a God Egg. That happened at the start of a voting period at the same moment that proposals were enacted. Which one, then, would be applied first? The answer was indeterminate.

idle thought they had the solution to the issue. Their proposal would assign a real-number initiative value to each gamestate-changing event, then resolving such events by initiative value, breaking ties first by the order which the rule defining that event was enacted, then by character-length of the defining rule for that event, then by arbitrary order if any permutation of the ambiguous events would lead to the same ruleset. If this final case did not apply then those events would not occur (Proposal 🕐 ⏯️ 🔧, 20 Feb 2021). This proposal was met with poor reception, but it sparked discussion about this issue.

The next person to try a fix was finsook. Their proposal was written in GitHub Gists. It rose out of skepticism concerning the viability of applying events by the Rule's enactment date. This proposal instead prescribed an ordering for the ruleset. Events in rules placed earlier would happen earlier. Neither Proposal 🕐 ⏩ 🔢 🧦 🥢 (20 Feb 2021) nor Proposal mini-🕐 🔢 (21 Feb 2021) ended up taking effect.

The issue with these proposals is that they were general solutions but seemed to add far more complexity than was actually necessary for our edge cases. In the end, Proposal 📜 ➡️ 🥚 (Trungle, 23 Feb 2021) and its two patches, Proposal 📜 ➡️ 🥚 🩹 (Trungle, 23 Feb 2021) and 📜 ➡️ 🥚 🩹 2 (Trungle, 24 Feb 2021) provided a more case-by-case handling of the situation, which turned out to be less contentious. These proposals all passed.

Understanding (25 Feb 2021 - ???)
After the first Break Age, we began to understand the true nature of the ducks. During this period we realized how broken the entire ruleset was. We started joking about how much we'd ruined the game and about how rarely we actually had a good picture of what the gamestate had become. We had to accept this fate that we'd built for ourselves as we persevered.

A hallmark of this period's legislation was patching to fix small perceived ruleset issues rather than broad new mechanics.

Cannibalism to Prevent Thievery
On 25 February 2021, Wotton noted that after retrieving his ducks, he had the most quacks and the most ducks. This meant that Wotton was the DUCK DUKE, making him vulnerable to attacks. For the first time in the game, the Standard Quack Attack became useful. Wotton had his ducks attack each other, destroying their quacks until he was no longer the DUCK DUKE. This put moonroof, who had dropped out of the game a bit earlier, into the place of Duck Lord. This event also alerted the community of how many ducks Wotton had.

Ownership vs. Possession
Here's another question: is ownership different than possession? One might be inclined to argue that they are the same. They are after all, near synonyms. The opposition might claim, however, that the intent of the passage "[w]hen the duck is on the scouting mission, the duck is no longer in possession of the player, thus benefits the duck provides the player are paused" from the Rule Ducks, Subrule Scouting of the time is that the duck is still owned by the player, but not possessed. What if "ownership" implies only that you own the duck while "possession" grants authority to perform actions with the duck? This interpretation seems to go against the legislative intent of the passage "[u]pon joining the game, a duck is created in the possession of each player" from the un-subruled section of the Rule Ducks in the same revision of the ruleset.

Two issues seemed to depend on the outcome of this debate: first, the issue of irretrievable ducks mentioned above; and second, the fact that it seemed that players could not interact with their ducks until giving it a name and assigning it to a pond, a logical impossibility.

The official ruling on this matter from Judge Random Internet Cat was that there was that there was "no natural language reason to draw a distinction between [the terms ownership and possession] ". With a growing sentiment towards textualism, many were inclined to follow this interpretation.

It was decided, however, that the relationship between the player and the duck who was on a scouting mission was different, thus ducks could still be retrieved safely. Furthermore, we realized that, due to a quirk of the Ducks rule, any instances of the word "duck" actually meant "named duck" within that rule. Ponds was a subrule of Ducks. Thus, as long as a player assigned their duck a name before assigning it a pond, they could still interact with them. This was

This was not, however, the end of the issue. Nyhilo, a newer player at the time and a firm believer in the concept of ownership and possession being separate, began work on a very large proposal to legally separate the two concepts, allowing for a generalized and flexible system. During the last week of February, Nyhilo built and revised this 1500 word proposal. Revisions of this proposal were stored using a HackMD page. In the end, the proposal was dropped as Nyhilo decided that it wasn't actually necessary.

One bit of legislation that came about from this debacle was a proposal to allow players to assign names and ponds to their ducks if either was undefined, which passed without incident (Nyhilo, Proposal Pond Stuck Pond Suck, 2 Mar 2021).

Fruits
When only part of finsook's fruit proposal passed back in January, one section that stayed in was "[o]nce per voting period, a player may feed another player’s duck by announcing which duck they with to feed in #game-actions, and optionally adding one valid fruit ." Nyhilo took inspiration from this and began work on a proposal called "Duck Loot" which would give fruits to ducks returning from Scouting Missions. Seeds would act as a granular currency, while grapes, blood oranges and watermelon slices would allow players to perform various game actions on unintended targets or with a modified variable somewhere in the mix. After a few revisions, the proposal was officially created on 3 March 2021.

Targeting the Rich Again
Since the thievery quack attack never did much, a new solution to get back at the duck owners was devised: finally cut the duck accumulation benefits of repeatedly sending ducks out on scouting missions. Nyhilo's proposal did this by heightening the requirements to gain a duck from a scouting mission (Proposal Duck Immigration Policies, 2 Mar 2021). This was later fixed so that the final sentence made better sense (Nyhilo, Proposal Duck Immigration Policies (Oops Edition), 7 Mar 2021).

The effect this legislation actually had was debatable. By the time this was proposed, Wotton already owned twelve ducks, a number that no one would even be able to sniff. Additionally, accumulating ducks provided no actual advantage other than more places to store quacks and legislation to encourage high duck counts would likely be unpopular with everyone but Wotton.

Deleting the Duck Words
One constant source of frustration had been the duck words. Every player at the time had had at least one run-in with failure to inclue duck words cancelling one of their actions. Wotton decided the system needed to go. He made a simple proposal that would delete the Duck Words rule (Proposal Enough!!!, 2 Mar 2021). This, however, would not fix the issue since the requirement to end a game action message with a duck word would still be in effect. To this end, idle proposed to delete the wording "with a message ending in a duck word" from the Ducks rule a quarter of an hour later (Proposal Enough!!! 🩹, 2 Mar 2021). These proposals were both set to be resolved at the end of the 7th.

A snag arose, however. Proposal Freer Actions (Random Internet Cat, 25 Feb 2021) passed earlier and revamped the rule defining game actions replacing the text "with a message ending in a duck word." Wotton realized this change as he was applying changes to the ruleset on 7 March and fortunately self-killed Proposal Enough!!! thirty seconds before it was to be adopted.

A bit later, on 9 Mar 2021, Klink proposed the deletion of the duck word verbiage, correctly this time (Proposal Stop Quacking).