A Uniquely Stronghold Moral Quandry

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

Have you read T7 and T8?

I don't think T7 or T8 apply, unless you're willing to define "all offense, no defense" as the highest and best goal a team can pursue. The GDC hasn't outlawed defense by fiat, yet, so you can't say that playing defense instead of offense is playing beneath your abilities. Mostly, I think T7/T8 are intended to prevent teams from throwing matches and making it easier for opponents to increase their ranking.

Also, playing defense on an opponent alliance instead of playing offense to outscore them is a perfectly valid strategy. If you're fairly certain your alliance can't get a win against against your opponents no matter what, but you can reduce their ranking points while maintaining your own, that would be a rational strategy using legal robot actions to pursue a valid tournament goal. It would make perfect sense to do it early in the tournament, so I don't think you can rule it out or call it unethical at the end of the tournament. It'd be weird to declare that low-ranked teams may only play in certain ways against high-ranked teams at the end of quals.

The fact that a completely separate team suggested this strategy does complicate things slightly, so you'd have to make the call for yourself if you're doing this primarily to benefit the other team. I think the one ethical rule is that during a match, you should be playing to maximize the ranking of yourself and allies, and minimize the ranking of your current opponents. You start to ethically stray when you start doing things to benefit your opponents at cost to yourself and allies, or when you start doing things to your own detriment to benefit teams not in the match. The trick in this particular example is that I don't think you're necessarily doing yourself a disservice with this strategy.