This is a topic that I’ve gotten a lot of questions about and has been widely discussed, both among players and among judges.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I have some very important advice to give, but it’s a delicate subject and I wanted to make sure I gave it my utmost attention.
After a great deal of soul-searching, I believe that I have finally found my voice. I am pleased to present the ultimate Bearz guide to handling bribery and collusion:
Click!
If players are about to collude, show them cute bear photos instead! That should stop any shenanigans straight away.
Happy April Fool’s!
):
I really like this column. I’m happy each Wednesday evening when I come home to read through my RSS feed and come across this.
When I read the beginning of the post, I was curious to hear what you had to say about bribery. It’s a serious problem that I’ve seen come up in interesting ways. Players want to know exactly how the system works so they can game it. The system isn’t meant to be gamed. There is often difficulty in communicating between judges and players, and I think that’s what led to the incident in the article you linked to. I have opinions as to possibly better ways of handling that sort of situation.
I was disappointed that the April Fool’s joke provided no useful information (past the linked article, which I hadn’t read before). When players ask me about something that sounds like bribery, I can’t just show them pictures of cute bears on my phone. While humour is important, and April Fool’s Day is a great opportunity for humour, it doesn’t need to come instead of learning. I recently watched a video guide for how to not deal with stress, which I think does a good job of balancing the joke with the learning. I think a guide on how to get away with bribery could’ve been done very well and have been in the spirit of the day.
I look forward to next Wednesday’s post, now that we’ve gotten past our annual day of jokes.