[The Elder Scrolls - Unofficial Patch 1.42] Black Drake

[Mergor]

I'd very much like you to define "spirit of the rules" for me Ventos, and also do it in a way that is in line with the exploits both teams have been making

[Captainnorway]

If anyone has anything else to add, i’ll be waiting until tomorrow to make a final statement…

[Ventos Mustel]

I'd very much like you to define "spirit of the rules" for me Ventos, and also do it in a way that is in line with the exploits both teams have been making

The only difference between this and the scenario described by the ubiquitous 'no besieging to deny retreat' rule is that it generally takes more than one unit to execute. And sure, it happens sometimes that friendly units just happen to be positioned in such a way that it affects retreat paths without that being the primary purpose of them being there, but this is very obviously not that case. There is no room for argument that this was a deliberate maneuver and could not have occurred except as such.

And it seems clear to me that you knew this was going to be ruled an exploit, but figured you could slip it in anyway by arguing that should only officially be counted as one after you've already gotten your use out of it.

As for you bringing up save scumming for missions in consecutive allied turns, that is both completely unrelated to this exploit, and entirely un-policeable without resorting to the admin measures I proposed in the hotseat discord, since by virtue of it being a save-scum exploit any result that comes from it could easily just be luck.

[Jadli]

@Isenbard indeed

@jimmy Well, ok. But do you mean it wasnt brought up because nobody reported you? Or someone brought it up, and admin said its fine? Those are two very different things. Either way, discord rules/admins often may differ from TWC (especially outside of the Hub), so really depends. Its generally considered an exploit around here as far as I know (and I dont allow this in my hotseats... and I wrote the rules of this HS btw)... and our admin thinks the same.

Anyway, sorry, but the whole claim of "one turn notice" for this is a joke, right? You definitely must have known this move would be controversial and that there would be discussion about it (or definitely Mergor would, if not you). And what are players supposed to do, when they are thinking of doing such a move? First check with an admin, whether this move is allowed. (as admins ask players in like every hotseat out there, which I believe you agree with) Which is what we did in regards to the land blockades.

But of course you guys didnt do that, instead you did the move without asking so that now you can use the argument that you already spend X hours on it, so you shouldnt be forced to replay and could whine about retroactive ruling? Sorry, nope. Thats not how it works. Its not retroactive, its now. You guys should know better

Also, comparing this to the previous ruling about land blockades of ports is very misplaced, isnt? As its very different situation. In the port issue, nobody actually used this move in their turns, we just thought about whether its allowed or not, so we asked admin/players (which is how it should work). And he implemented it, active one turn later, it wasnt affecting anyone or anything. Here, the disputed move was already done, heavily affecting one side, so the required solution is very much different. Either way, this is not really adding a new rule.

I have said it before and I say it again: I would want a full discussion about past happenings and grievences regarding rule breaks in this hotseat. Those calls of mine were always ignored and shrugged off. If we are going this way and applying a blanket ban on exploits whether they are in or out the ruleset, that cannot be avoided anymore, especially that the hotseat is dotted with different rulings regarding things that are missing. Last turn, a ruling was applied a turn after, now its suddenly applied right away even tho in both cases something is missing from the ruleset. That makes this ruling arbitrary, inconsistent and one which that generates drama. This turn, we made a move that simply was not banned like a lot of others moves each team does each turn and were ridicolouled for it. Why are you surprised the HS is so drama-y?

And generating missions was just an example, I am sure there are plenty of other things each side abuses. If a blanket ban stays, then we have to gather ALL exploits, add it to the ruleset, and either penalise them right away (full replay for the previous x turns where the usage of these mattered) or only penalise them next turn.

And to be honest, yes, Isenbard is right. This devolved into a game where we take every advantage possible. But if Jadli dares say that its only the fault of me, I have nothing more to say. So if you really want to "play clean" than we better do a whole rule revision before continuing this hotseat.

Past grievances: its not in our power to change the past?

Land bloackdes: Again, the two recent rulings are not really comparable.

Clarification of rules: Well, perfect. If you have some moves/exploits on your mind that you are not sure whether they are allowed or not, post them, so that admin can clarify what he considers it allowed or not and we can add it to the rules. Thats literally how things should work in a HS, whats so surprising about this? (good thing to consider is also to stop exploiting whatever the game lets you)

Gathering and penalizing all "rule breaks" from the entire HS: How does this even make sense? Its like the the weirdest thing I have heard in a long time. Sure, lets investigate every turn in the last 5 years.... Why not just restart the HS then, with a new ruleset? (ah, we already got BD 2, nevermind). In those 5 years, we have had 4 admins (or more), some of them very likely would have had different ideas on some rules/moves...

'no besieging to deny retreat'

Oh yea, and this important rule instance I forgot to mention

If anyone has anything else to add, i’ll be waiting until tomorrow to make a final statement…

I hope you dont drop your admin position as the previous admins did

[Mergor]

I have asked you to define "spirit of the rules" for me Ventos, because as far am I aware, the current definition of that, which is accepted across basically all communities (as its added to every HS), is tied to me right now.

"In this mindset, if the move does something eerily similar that the rule that can be connected to it tries to prevent in theory, then the admin has the right to not allow the move."

As a side note, I wrote these, and made it acceptable across hotseats because of drama that generated when admins ruled or had no choice but to rule arbitrarily.

Back to "spirit of the rules." The key word here is "tries to prevent." In the spirit of the rules interpretation, the surronding rule tries to prevent situations where an army could be scattered. I have argued with captainnorway about this rule, he said that he considered influcing retreat paths included in this rule. Which is fine as a subjective interpretation, but apperantly this is heavily contested objectively, nor does it have to anything with what the rule tries to prevent, the reason for its existence.

As for the "no besieging to deny retreat" that rule tries to prevent a situation in which an army that could run inside a settlement is denied from doing so, because the settlement is besieged. Similar to the ban on the YoYo bug. As we have clearly demonstrated, the army did not have room inside anyhow and the same thing would have happened if the army runs to it "naturally."

Using either of these rules to ban any influence on retreat paths is a stretch and has nothing to do with "the spirit of the rules". The spirit of the rules mindset exists to prevent usage of loopholes in rules, not to extend existing rules arbitrarily to new instances. The influence of retreat paths to this magnitude has not been considered before and its not even part of the Universal Exploit List. So you are wrong that we knew this was going to be an exploit, we honestly believed that since this rule did not exist, it was just clever. Hence why we did not ask the admin about it.

EDIT: I am not opposed, even supportive of adding this rule to the Universal Exploit List, and using that List for this HS. But only from next turn due to issues I said already.

[Jadli]

"A heavily contested objectively": Sure, the only person I have seen to contest this heavily is you.

There are no rules accepted (or you could say enforced) accross all, nor most communities. Every admin can pick any rules he/she wants when starting a HS (even in the Hub or on TWC). Players/admins from different communities have different ideas. Furthermore, this HS was started 5 years ago (there was the anniversary yesterday btw. What a way to celebrate it ), when discord didnt even exist. With an admin, who isnt around anymore and a ruleset made at that time (and compiled by me).

Therefore, that something isnt included in a list of exploits that was made (by you, while you assumedly didnt know about this move) years after this HS was started has a little relevance to arguments about rules in this HS. Obviously, neither is your universla list effective in this hotseat, as its not in the OP.

And anyway, admin's decision is always final (especially so, in situations like this). He does not have to follow or obey any ruleset or community agreement.

EDIT: I am not opposed, even supportive of adding this rule to the Universal Exploit List, and using that List for this HS. But only from next turn due to issues I said already.

Perfect, so you just said you agree its an exploit . I assume there is no need to continue this dispute then, and you replay. Because, why would you use an exploit in your turn, right? (again, whether it is or isnt in the Universal list has a little meaning for this HS, as its not effective in this hotseat. Therefore, its also irrelevant whether you add it to that list now or a turn later. We can add the list, sure. But its completely separate from this issue right now.)

[Ventos Mustel]

It didn't have room inside the fort all the way at the other end of Skyrim. It absolutely had room inside Falkreath, or the fort north of Falkreath, or in Morthal, all of which it was deliberately prevented from retreating to.

[Mergor]

Ventos, that is beside the point. Influecing retreat path is a different beast from those rules you brought up, and when discussing whether something can be banned right away (because whether a rule covers this or not matters) it is something dinstinct.

Whether its an exploit or not Jadli my points are about something entirely different (and we made it believing its not an exploit due to our previous experiences). The question here is, can this be banned right away when the rules allow it, and in my opinion no rules extend to this. My argument is that no, at this point we cannot, because it was legal to do it when it was done. That is why I consider this would be decision arbitrary (for now captainnorway did not make a final decision by his own words).

Furthermore, your argument works against you Jadli. If you consider this ruleset uninfluenced by anything else but itself, and a ruleset, which clearly details exactly what it considers an exploit, then throwing "no exploits" at me does not work, because the ruleset does not considers this an exploit, as it is not named. Saying that the exploit list of mine has little relevance on the HS means that anything that was agreed to be an exploit after the rules of this hs were set in stone has similarly little relevance on the HS... "Its not in the OP" as you say.

The admin definitely has to follow its own hotseats ruleset tho, I hope you agree.

[General Dragon.]

I believe it is fair to say, the spirit of the rules have been "bended" several times on both sides be it regarding rules or regarding roleplay "definitions".

You definitely must have known this move would be controversial and that there would be discussion about it (or definitely Mergor would, if not you). And what are players supposed to do, when they are thinking of doing such a move? First check with an admin, whether this move is allowed. (as admins ask players in like every hotseat out there, which I believe you agree with) Which is what we did in regards to the land blockades.

Except with that one we had no admin before that was settled and you decided with your side, that the case should be no land unit can block ships, so don't say "we asked the admin" first. Captainnorway had to be brought in to settle it normally, instead of you acting like the "judge". And this isn't the first time either you nonchalantly decided on something to go this or that way, because you think it should be this or that. I believe you didn't ask the admin, if you are allowed to trade your huge city in the same turn to the orks, so that they can spawn the best ships in a totally other side of a large landmass via missions, if it's fair or not.

One of the main problem comes from Jadli, that we were too "lenient" instead of voicing our opinions always. Atleast from what I can reflect on me and mergor definitely remained silent on some of the antics you pulled on the sole reason, that we didn't want to create arguments everytime and went with, that if you think you can do that, then we can do the same in some similar fashion.
On the other hand everytime we did something, you thought is "far-fetched" you indeed raised your voice but always in a way, that implemented you and your side is always the right one, hence again, we deciding to not make a public tavern argument in this thread hence me and mergor always saying, we have our own "grudges" it is just we didn't make a full "drama" situation out of it. Some of the past arguments are literally were you and your side clearly adamant being the right one, so making the talks pretty much like we are talking to brickwalls.

Looking back, maybe we should have done it differently in some other way to resolve some of the past stuff earlier.

[Jadli]

Indeed, we had no admin before. Therefore, we couldnt have asked one about the interpretation of the port blockades rules

With the port trade, I actually asked Mergor first before doing the move, and he said he/you will not object it (which is how things should work btw, especially when you have a tired admin), cause he himself was thinking of using the same move.

For the rest, I see no point trying to stir some old (or newer) stuff up and derail the issue at hand, but you indeed seem to have many grudges that you are holding back...sounds pretty unhealthy.

Again, If you guys feel this way, not sure if the HS should be continued, as apparently, it will very likely only grow these grudges/wounds...

EDIT
Btw, to clarify with land blockades, as you are misinterprating that greatly. What happened was that I asked him about whether him/you would be against or for allowing, as I found there was surprisingly no precedent for it. He refused to tell me his/yours standing unless I tell him the exact place/move I think of using it, so that he could give his "objective opinion". So then captain was brought in.

EDIT 2
Yea, Ventos posted in the same time the same thing

Anyways, as you see, in both examples you wrote, I actually first contacted other relevant players (or at least tried to), before actually doing the move . Which you guys didnt in this retreat exploit case. The fault is only yours.

[Ventos Mustel]

The land blockade issue was literally nothing. Jadli got his wires crossed and was thinking of the rule from BD2, I pointed out to him that that rule wasn't in this one, then Mergor caught wind of it and blew it up into a whole thing of reserving the right to argue for whichever way suited him when it came to his turn ('I'll have to see the situation first before I decide')

[Mergor]

I love how you bring up a past issue to paint me in bad light. I also love how you completely misinterpret me. Across the whole way, my only issue was that Jadli wanted to unilaterally decide, I must have underlined that 4-5 times. That is the whole reason captainnorway was brought in, because of my adamancy... If this is how you see me, why do I bother making my case? Dragon is right, talking to you is like talking to a brick wall.

[Jadli]

Nope, read our posts again. We wanted to "unilaterally decide" only once you refused to tell us what interpretation of the rule you support.

[jimmy_dude]

Ok, this might be a bit of a long message, but bear with me, if you read the whole thing, you hopefully will understand where I’m coming from. I doubt this will change your minds, Jadli or Ventos, but I hope you will at least not take me as a “joke”, even though I am a newer player than you, I really don’t appreciate that. I just ask you to read this as objectively as you can, and for you to consider both viewpoints here:

Going into this move, while I figured this move might be controversial due to its relative complexity and people's reputations for throwing the challenge flag at anything they can, I had no assumption that it was at all illegal when playing it (as I mentioned already, I can think of multiple times when I’ve done very similar moves, told everyone what I did and exactly how I did it b/c I was proud of it, and no one has even once thought it was cheating). As you guys have pointed out, there are three rules which could be argued to ban it, under certain viewpoints:

• Surrounding armies/navies to deny retreat
• You are not allowed to besiege an enemy settlement to deny enemy retreat into it
• The blanket ban on bugs/exploits

Let me start with the first rule. In all my experience, the surrounding armies/navies to deny retreat ban clearly refers to banning the trick you can do where if you surround all escape paths for an army, it instantly dies after losing rather than retreating somewhere. It’s generally banned across all hotseats so that’s clear enough. However, the move I did does not wipe the army (in fact, my goal is the opposite, to keep it alive until it can be used), and specifically allows the army to always be able to retreat, which Mergor was saying earlier as well, so I cannot be denying retreat if I am giving the army a path to retreat (you might not like the path I’m giving it to retreat, but ya shouldn’t have left that guy out there!). I think that in this case, the rule itself, and its “spirit” is primarily to ban any move where you surround an army so you wipe it out after every defeat. This is just a completely different type of move, with a different goal, so I think it’s always a stretch if you’re trying to claim that it is automatically covered. Perhaps there’s some sort of well-known precedent on TWC for this being covered, but regardless, the rule as it’s written and it’s spirit don’t really cover this at all.

For the second one, I never sieged anything during the whole process of setting this move up, so this doesn’t really apply. I don’t think the spirit of this rule really applies either since even though the end result (a draw out) was similar, no siege/yoyo bug was ever needed to do it since your fort was always too full to accept the army, so what am I supposed to do, say that an army that retreats to a full fort is “protected”? It’s part of the game that forts can get full, so you have to account for that when doing your turn.

For the last one, I’ll actually agree with ya here. The move’s an exploit, like pretty much everything else we do as good hotseat players like scouting, reloading battles for good results, farming traits/ancillaries/missions, even unit positioning cheese on the stratmap like blocking strategic passes with unwinnable battles. My question here is, why should our move make the list of “banned” exploits? I personally don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong or game breaking about the move: it’s just placing some armies at convenient locations, and then just running some battles to get the army to retreat where you want it (which you can control since it’s your turn, and your move). When it’s not your turn, we know there’s a lot of things your enemy can do such as move around units freely and attack units you left out, so whenever you leave units out, it’s already part of the risk that your armies might retreat somewhere inconvenient to you. So my point is that: yeah, this move is an exploit, but by any standards a lot of things in hotseating are. I instead ask why this should be banned now, when the rules and precedent don’t ban it. I guarantee that if you guys found a clever move that wasn’t covered in the rules, you’d be arguing hard that it should be allowed.

As for precedent, I will clarify the instances where I’ve done something very similar to this:

1. In the second HSHub SS, as Norway, repeatedly defeated random HRE catapult east of Hamburg all the way to Arhus, which had a full army of HRE’s ally Denmark’s troops inside, and was able to eventually get two draw-out wins against the garrison and take the city. I placed tons of units in its retreat paths to prevent it from going back to Hamburg. Funnily enough, Jadli you were one of the admins here! (I don’t blame you if you don’t remember it but just wanted to mention that). No one either called me out for doing this, or ruled on it, and I was still proud so I talked a lot about it, so it’s not like some secret move I tried to slip in there.
2. Before this, I had done a “denying retreat” trick against Francisco in the previous ss6.4 hotseat on hshub where, after getting a win against his two Hungary armies with OP generals, I blocked their retreat path out of France, causing them to retreat in range of one of my other armies instead, which was able to defeat them again leading to the generals’ death. There was also no issue there even though I talked about the move with Francisco after in dms, though there wasn’t a need for me to make this public either since so much happened that turn anyways.
3. Even before this, one of my best early turns was in YTWM’s youtube retrofit hotseat, where as HRE I used a controlled retreat to get two drawouts on Sicily’s forces by kicking around a random Milanese unit in a controlled way. I know that it’s not HSHub, so it’s a different feel than TWC, but he also had the above rules except possibly the forced drawout ban (which I think is the least relevant one here anyways), but I was very proud of this one. Since it’s a youtube hotseat, I actually have the whole turn on youtube if you want to see exactly what I did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st7iBn3SSTM&t=3s

All three of these hotseats had all three of the above rules that could conflict with the move (except the YTWM one which might have been missing the forced drawout one), and it was never once called into question for any of them. I don’t think I “got away” with them since I was super proud and public about the first and third point here in particular, and the second instance was no secret either. If this type of a move was widely considered an exploit on TWC, I’m surprised none of you brought that to my attention sooner!

I have also tried thinking of this from your point of view, and yeah, if something was widely accepted as banned, I’d be pretty mad here too in your shoes, but I guess the question is, is that really the case here? It seems some TWC people don’t agree this should be banned by default with this ruleset, which makes any claim of it being universally banned on TWC sketchy, and a lot of those same people sure seem to have been awfully fine with this kind of move over the past several years in the HSHub, or have just mysteriously not been present.

From my point of view, it seems like you guys are just stretching the rules to cover your own oversight. I felt, and still feel, that the precedent AFAIK and the wording + spirit of the rules are in favor of allowing this move. If you have some specific examples of this exact move being banned on the TWC (which may very well be the case for all I know), please enlighten me, but I can't help but feel this way if the move is getting banned for just being too powerful without much other reasoning or precedent.

TL;DR: read the message

[Ventos Mustel]

There is no world in which it makes sense to have the rule against walls of units to block agents but allow them to block retreats.

You keep going back to arguing that the yoyo bug wasn't used, which is entirely irrelevant. You all seem to want to avoid addressing the point I'm actually making there, which is that long before Brokil got to that position you were surrounding the other garrisons he would have naturally retreated to, to prevent him from doing so.

[jimmy_dude]

Well what I'm trying to say is that I did in fact partially block off his path to other garrisons so that he retreated to the fort, so that's true and I'm not arguing that I didn't do this intentionally. My argument is that the move should be allowed since doing that isn't inherently wrong or exploitative any more so than other clever army placements and such, and that the current rules and precedent doesn't apply to this case. I'd say it's stretching the rules in your favor to say that "building unit walls to stop agents from moving is banned, so therefore doing something similar to adjust where units retreat is also banned" where agents are moved on other players' turn and is a completely different mechanism of movement and situation, since the rules' goals would be completely different.

[Ventos Mustel]

Again, not the primary argument. The rule against besieging to deny retreat exists to prevent exactly this sort of scenario, it just takes more units to do it by physically occupying all possible paths to the garrison.

[PercivallKorrupt]

I personally do not even think it as an exploit. I looked over the move as Jimmy was going over it and let him do it. I check rules daily and try to be thorough that I'm not breaking any rule and found this not to go against anything laid out in the rules given. It didn't seem like an exploit but rather clever. The orcs took Morthal far reaching past their own territories. So, instead of allowing an army to retreat to possibly defend a territory, they were directed into a different path allowed to retreat to another location they acquired. As mentioned, the rule of "surrounding and denying retreat" was made from absolutely destroying an army that would have lived otherwise was not being contested here. They were not denied a retreat. They were not being sieged to deny entry into a castle. The army was kept alive and strategically used to get an advantage I'd believe any player would have done. The problem here is Jimmy thought of it and nobody else. It isn't like one move was made and it became a game changer. It was highly thought out and complicated and required having enough support around the area to make it possible and I believe the Orcs put themselves into a position to let this happen due to an oversight. No rule has clearly been broken here and if a council would like to be made to talk about the legality of such a play then by all means. But I can't see how this could be outright banned when it absolutely does not go against any known rule and wasn't as one trick game changer by an exploit of the game. It was all about movement, positioning, and enough resources to be able to make a play. Highly different from a simple unit blockading any port or a bug of the game. I'd like to suggest the opposition to consider this was just one set of strategic moving and planning that was over looked as a possibility on their side. They weren't pushed back half way through Skyrim - as they were already half way through Skyrim anyway just pushed back a couple of territories back to the sea, they weren't denied their retreat but denied a specific direction to go that's not in favor of their faction(I could argue when an aldmeri army that was placed in cover that wasn't supposed to be hidden denied assistance from its neighboring armies retreat into a location that was not ideal and an oversight on our part but did not complain because it was an oversight even though it allowed the downfall of aldmeri in valenwood). This wasn't some one trick pony, it was well thought out and required much resources and well planning and I'd argue that the orcs side outstretched their reach and allowed something like this to happen. And would conclude no rules broken here and, imo, not even a bending of the rules. Although, as some believe it an exploit, I would like to consider that it wasn't an exploit due to the complexity of the situation. There would be rare instances that this could be pulled off and could have been easily avoided if not due to the outstretching of reach the orcs putting themselves in this position. I hope y'all take everything I said into consideration and at least ponder over it as this type of play is currently split down the middle in it's idea of legality when no clear rule has been broken here as far as I could see and many others have attested to.

[Mergor]

I think the bottom line here is that we honestly believe that what we did isn't banned by the rules, or that the surrond rule (or any other) extends to it. The latter is important, because it shows that what Ventos and Jadli believes is not at all objective, the interpretation that it extends to influencing retreat paths is not entrenched or widely accepted at all (as shown by how its missing from the Universal Exploit List, a proof that we do not just say this because it serves our interest). This, and if we accept that the ruleset of this hotseat is self-contained (isn't influenced by outside rules or precedents), thus it only considers exploits it itself lists, then we believe that if the admin wants to be fair in his judgement and base it on the ruleset, than he does not ban this move right away. Instead, there is a vote on whether what jimmy did should be banned or not in the future.

[Captainnorway]

After reading through every post, and reflecting upon what had been said. I have decided to ban the move… resulting in a replay.


While i understand that some might not see it as an exploit, but rather a clever move, i do not. And why it’s been allowed in other platforms, i cannot say. (As far as know, other platforms are less likely to dissallow some exploits)


I can understand why some would deem it allowed, given the phrasing of the rules. But it is to my understanding that it should not he allowed in this hs, since i would still see it as an exploit.


The move was well made however, and congrats to jimmy and the gang for setting up the battles.