Tag Proposal: [asymmetric]

Question

I've cooked up a few king-of-the-hill challenges, mostly in the sandbox, and a few of them are asymmetric in nature.

They're not really cops-and-robbers because it's not really about cracking a code, nor is it a meta-challenge that you might expect from the more common idea of Cops and Robbers (normally, these target a specific submission and crack it by a certain deadline). The roles in this kind of KotH are also distinctly different and require completely different strategies and code.

There are currently only 2 challenges currently tagged as both king-of-the-hill and cops-and-robbers. But there are also a couple of other challenges in the same vein with asymmetric roles:

• Liars and Guessers - Liars and Guessers have different goals and play a different role in the game
• Red vs. Blue - Each team has slightly different movement options.
• Sandbox: The Ever-Changing Labyrinth - Maze masters and Adventurers have completely different roles

Options

I see a few courses of action here:

A new tag: asymmetric

Pros:

• Represents a distinctly different idea from what CnR challenges most frequently represent, which usually require one role to go head-to-head with a specific submission from the other role

Cons:

• Creates a new tag that may potentially be confused with cops-and-robbers
• There are not very many challenges of this nature
• Probably only makes sense when paired with king-of-the-hill and might be confusing in other contexts.
  • Might be remedied by calling it multiple-roles instead, but this might be too similar to cops-and-robbers

Use cops-and-robbers for this purpose

... And tag all currently untagged challenges accordingly

Pros:

• Re-uses an existing tag

Cons:

• This would exclude any challenges with cooperative but asymmetric roles, though no challenges of this nature exist, to my knowledge.
• The culture and typical usage of this tag would create an alternate meaning for this tag that only applies when paired with KotH

Remove the cops-and-robbers tag from the two challenges also tagged king-of-the-hill

These two tags should be mutually exclusive. Some KotHs simply have multiple roles.

Pros:

• No new tag
• No overloading of an existing tag with a strong culture of a specific meaning that isn't compatible in an immediately obvious way.

Cons:

• No way to distinguish KotHs with multiple asymmetric roles.

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Anyway, discuss

Answer 1

Create the asymmetric tag

Currently, cops-and-robbers is used to serve this role, which is an imperfect fit. Robbers typically just aim to crack specific cop answers in standard CnR challenges - they can, to all intents and purposes, ignore other Robbers (and cops can ignore other cops)

asymmetric would cover challenges where:

• there are two or more groups of answers (for example, dwarves and trolls) which are interacting with each other, and
• within each group of answers, there is interaction between the answers

This second point is the key distinguisher between cops-and-robbers and asymmetric - if the answers in each group don't interact with each other, it's not asymmetric.

Note: I feel like the name "asymmetric" doesn't appropriately present this key point. It works, but I feel like it could be a better name. Feel free to make suggestions

Answer 2

The tag has now been created

as a result of a discussion in The Nineteenth Byte.

As caird coinherringaahing points out, we can always delete it if we feel it's no longer relevant.