This notion seems incoherent to me. I don't think an action (in a game) can be illegal without consequences. I'm not sure it can in real life, either, but I'm less sure of that, and I see the issues as separate. Again, this may be as far as we get on this, but I'll lay out my reasoning a bit further:
1. Competition should be fair.
2. If something is illegal without consequences, some people's morals will allow them to do that thing and others will not.
3. If the thing is advantageous, the people with the laxer morals will win more often.
4. That is unfair, and thus should not be a part of how competitions are run.
I fail to see how it is incoherent to have a rule that there are no consequences for, other than moral consequences. Indeed, the rules against hacking the server, etc. you seem to agree to this point on. "We need to have trust" in society at large, no?
You haven't addressed my logic at all. Yes, of course we need some trust in society at large (or at least, everyone's lives are much better since we do). We nevertheless have penalties for breaking that trust, whether they be legal or social, and if there are no such penalties for a thing, I think that's usually the same as that thing being okay.
In a tournament environment, especially one against strangers over the internet, you have to assume that social consequences go out the window, since the prize is likely all that matters to an unknown participant. Therefore, we need tournament regulations. To actually be regulations, they need to have consequences, or else they fail to regulate anything.
Okay. But your logic does not actually lead to the conclusion that such a regulation IS not a rule. It leads to the conclusion that it SHOULD NOT be a rule. Even if we are to accept it, which I don't. However, my larger point there was that it is not incoherent. And you know, I am not the only one who finds it coherent, so maybe you are incapable of understanding it (which would truly be sad, if true), but that doesn't make it incoherent. You're just going to have to trust us on this.
You're right, I'm not using precedent to mean "previously handed-down judicial decisions". I'm using it to mean "previously community-accepted behavior". I'm sorry I misunderstood your position; I continue to maintain that given our respective preconditions, we both came to reasonable, contradictory conclusions on this front.
I mean, beforehand, I agree, and I could well see how you might be like "I don't see why this is against the rules", if you hadn't taken the time to really study the matter. But when it is explained, you should be like "oh shoot, you're right." Because they're pretty straightforward. In any case, that you got away with it before is certainly no basis for it to actually be legal, only some slight basis for you to perhaps think that it is so.
Stop repeating this without addressing my reasoning for why it is false. Online dominion is a very different beast from paper dominion, and has no particular reason to fall back on the rulebook AT ALL. If it did, the differences between isotropic and the real rules would result in people "cheating" all the time, e.g. by hiding the top card of their discard pile.
Stop ignoring my point that the rulebook for offline dominion is perfectly able to be realized online, and that you in fact give no objective reason why it cannot be. I mean, you give some reasons why you think it SHOULD not be, I grant. But that does not mean that it CANNOT be. You keep asserting that they're different, but you have not actually established that.
Notes being illegal is obviously not universally held either, as I've just demonstrated. So I don't really follow your logic here at all.
This is my point precisely. It is not clear. In situations where it is in fact not clear, that's where you go to the rulebook. The rulebook does not say you can do it, so you can't do it. You don't have the right to assume that you CAN do it, because that is not something which you can just generally assume, because it's not uniform across the board.
Follow that?
Stop switching between in-game and legal perspectives. Laws that are difficult to enforce are often a good idea because a) when they CAN be enforced you don't want to let the culprit off the hook because there is no law on the books and b) their mere existence is a strong moral deterrent for some people, and we should do whatever we can to stop people from doing things that are ACTUALLY BAD for society.
In-game, only enforcing things when you happen to be able to is terrible and unfair, and using the extension does not cause any real harm to society, so there are no justifications for avoidable unenforceable rules.
Again, we can have discussions like this on what the rules SHOULD be, but these reasons have no bearing on what the rules actually ARE.
There's a really important point here that I'm surprised hasn't been brought up by more people, so I'm being liberal with my use of bold. I freely admit that there are unavoidable unenforceable rules in online Dominion. The obvious example is collusion/collaboration. Two players in a multiplayer game could be sitting next to each other, or use any communication device, to conspire against another. One "player" could in fact be a whole room full of Dominion experts conferring about what to do. These are obviously against the rules, and obviously unenforceable. This is an unsolvable structural flaw with all online competition, and it is a compelling reason not to use online competition for things that REALLY matter. I accept that we have to trust people not to do these things, because there is simply no alternative except not holding online competitions. However, this is not a good reason to add additional, unnecessary unenforceable rules. I agree that the line is blurry, and I don't think anyone can draw it. My opinion about where the extension falls in relation to that line is inevitably colored by the fact that I think it makes it a better game, or at least those who do not accept my arguments will always see it as so colored. I think this is the strongest argument against my position, and I'm really surprised that it has only come up once, in passing, near the beginning of the thread.
Because the whole thing is irrelevant. We are not discussing what the best game would be. If we were, I would be talking about re-wording throne room, buffing scout, doing all kinds of stuff. But no. We are talking about what the rules ARE. Whether they are enforceable or not does not change whether they are rules. Ontologically, they cannot be anything else. You can argue that they don't exist, but man, I can point to them. So I mean, that is not the argument. Furthermore, these rules CAN be enforced, it just has some level of tediousness to do so. But again, that's not relevant if everyone just lives up to the agreements they've made.