1/3 isn't all that unorthodox. If brown just declared he'll 1/3, but you'd flagged to purple, you may not be okay with letting purple have 3rd (should he lose), so it's totally fine for you to attack brown, whether or not purple will let you rescind your flag.

basically: you did what was best for you and is within the rules. this is a war game, so that's fine.

true there are technically no rules against that. but Jason T is asking about ethically* was it correct.

opinions differ on this subject, i'll say that up front. my opinion:

if you flag to someone, you should never finish above them. the reason you are still alive is because they had mercy on you when you flagged. otherwise you would be dead, and this whole discussion would be moot. so you owe your survival to them. if i were in your shoes, and if i felt like being superethical, i would tell brown, excuse me, but i dont want lower placement, and if you beat purple down, that forces me from 2nd to 3rd while i just sit still. so you have 2 choices: fight me for 2nd/3rd, or keep fighting purple, but i will have to make it a 2v1 fight against you in my own interests of not being forced to flag 3rd.

if you flag to someone it is extremely unethical to sit there and watch them die, and get higher placement than them instead.

now, as chloe alluded to, this is a war game, and ethics arent the end all and be all. there are several instances where i would try to skirt the issue and hope purple dies and i get higher placement.

but, ethically, i think that once someone accepts your flag, you owe it to them to not finish above them.

I'm unfamiliar with the process of applying ethical judgments based on a war game with no rules.

The real question should be "is this profitable long term".

Ethics is simply the wrong way of looking at it. It is a game with no rules. Is it unethical to lie in poker? No... It is merely a question of long term profitability.

"if you flag to someone, you should never finish above them. "

I agree...

"the reason you are still alive is because they had mercy on you when you flagged."

but not with this part. This isn't the case a good chunk of the time, and it should be the case less often- I think this mentality is a result of early vflags.

I can get around the first part in this case since he asked if he could rescind his flag and purple agreed. In any case purple should have gotten second- I don't let 1/3 fights happen if I'm in second and I flagged to one of the people fighting,

seems a waste of time to say that ofc being unethical will result in a loss of points while being ethical will result in a gain of points, all things considered.

ofc the optimization might say you should be ethical XX% of the time (id guess XX ~= 90), but some people actually care about krelationships moreso than mere points. and those people have the right to ask ethics questions instead of longterm points questions.

chloe im confused about your disagreement with the second statement. would it be more agreeable if i said, "the reason you have better placement/points is because the person you flagged to showed mercy" instead of "the reason you are alive..."?

Monte all I'm saying is that ethics does not apply here. The game is fictional and has no rules. It is no more ethical to play honest then it is to play dishonest. And it is not a waste of time to use words based on their proper definition.

The only thing that is unethical is cheating. And that is because it is a rule set by the owners of the competition and is implicitly accepted by all players in the process of participating.

All other rules are just social constructs created by a group of players with sufficient social pull.

Ethics is not a socially alterable concept. It is an objectivily defined concept.

I'm pretty sure that any mention of ethics within the context of poker would have the whole table confused. The only difference in kdice is the players; not the rules.

If either purple or you agreed to the 1/3, then I think what you did was wrong. If is was a unilateral declaration like you described, then I think what you did was not wrong.

Separately, I agree that regardless of right/wrong, brown would be pissed, and you are of course risking PGE from him, and anyone else who thinks you did something sneaky/untrustworthy. Sitting for a few rounds might be considered silent agreement by some, so that's the risk you take when you "think outside the box".

Any time you go against the common response, you risk that. For example, if someone helps me win over someone else, and then the person in 2nd place says flag, I will not backstab the guy who helped me by accepting the flag (unless they will flag under the guy who helped me). I fully realize that many/most people are surprised by this, and often think I'm doing something wrong in not taking the flag. I do it anyway, because I hate being on the other side of that, getting screwed over by the guy I helped, as soon as they get the flag from the other guy--so I won't do it to other people, even though that's the way things happen most of the time.

Why not just declare you are flagging for a particular place of finish, not flagging to a person?

you should stab and take 1st at any opportunity. This game isn't about ethics, making friends or being nice, f that