i just play with my friend most of the time- and when hes not on i play alone for about 5times the amount of time i spend,
(but i have to say "its funner with my friend.")

The absolutely singular solution to any kind of pre-agreement, whether conceived intentionally beforehand or simply friends helping each other out, is a fully anonymous table as has been mentioned.

Ryan, I know you want to make this game as fair and as inclusive as possible. But your real enemy here is human nature itself. It is a fact that as people play together here, there will be good and bad sentiments between them, and this will be reflected in the choices they make on the board. As long as there are names attached to the colors, this will be a persistent factor in the outcome of games.

I Agree with r0n (yikes ;)

As has been repeated, your definition of "PGA" is quite vague.

By your definition I don't PGA. Typically if I join a table with a friend or two there we will try to make our land layout workout and not attack each other if we don't have to. When it tactically makes sense we announce to everyone that we're trucing.

So we didn't "team up against other players without them knowing" but we also didn't attack each other. Is this a PGA?

"Team up" in Ryan's initial post to me means an explicit but hidden agreement (either by AIM or other external communication, or by a coded signal in the chat--like illegal signalling between judges in athletic competitions). An unspoken alliance during the game (such as not blocking off another player on a peninsula you share) is not a pga. It can't be a pga because it could not have arisen before the game.

1. I am surprised people are still here arguing that PGA is not cheating. Ray, the creator of this game, has declared it is.

2. Ryan has defined what constitutes a PGA. Read carefully.

3. If you don’t agree with his rules, don’t play then. You make a choice to come here and play, and if you are so against his rules, why bother and force yourself to do something you are so against? The kdice community don’t need you cheaters here.

Now the next step is to decide how we punish those PGAers. First off, I think there should be solid proof that someone is PGA. Simply posting here saying A & B are PGA is not good enough……as there may be malice accusations……perhaps a screen cap is suffice?

I agree that there is no true line... its more like one of these 'i know it when i see it' scenarios.

1) Playing with friends is one thing. You'll probably be nicer to your friend and thats not too bad.... just a little unfair.

2) Playing with the same set of people, often at the top tables, with game to game alliances isn't too bad either since these game to game alliances are known by this small group.

3) Using these alliances to get points from players who don't know on a large scale is definitely not good. This is what I'm taking action on. It's like pluging your website is ok but spamming the forum is too much and would be banned.

I hope this makes sense. I love the social/political aspect of this game but like anything it can be abused. It's not a fine line but it's obvious in certain cases when it gets out of hand. Fortunately most people don't need to worry about this.

"If you team up against other players without them knowing it is a very unfair way to play"

I see this is a bit vague and has been misinterpreted. I need to add: game to game alliances that are unknown. Unknown alliances that arise in game aren't bad and can be a good strategy.

Probably the best way to sum this up is:

There are lots of people here that new or playing very casually. If you're a better player, or relying on more advanced social/political strategies please don't take advantage players who don't know. If you abuse this then you'll probably catch my attention. In the meantime I'll be thinking of ways to model the game so this works without the abuse issue.

Ryan, thanks for the reply. I really feel you should invest some extra time now in this discussion and am very pleased to see your active participation.

"3) Using these alliances to get points from players who don't know on a large scale is definitely not good. This is what I'm taking action on. It's like pluging your website is ok but spamming the forum is too much and would be banned."

'large scale' seems to be the term that is critical here. When you have some time, could you go into some examples of what you consider 'large scale' and what you don't consider 'large scale'?

I don't mean to ask this so that we all know what we can get away with. I don't mean that at all. I just want to use it to try to help determine what was done in the khistory that would be deemed 'large scale' enough to be penalizable. Honestly, the ex-caballers that still play don't do anything in category 3) any more, and we don't really do anything in category 2). I would say we average somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5.

Yeah, I don't see it happening much. I think mainly because of monthly resets. Without the monthly resets the top players had too much power and could really abuse everyone.

Again, the "large scale" thing is vague. But it happened before. I'm going to treat it like any other abuse. I listen to complaints about everything, abusive chat, porn, and pga. Sometimes I take action in severe cases.