BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Psh I’m not holding a grudge. I agree that the temporary un-adminning was a bit rough though.

Qwaz, you are most certainly not most of the community.

I don’t know about BlogNomic, but in Agora, the same people who usually preach about the occasional scam being good for the game complain loudly when a scam is perpetrated against them.  Including me.  People will calm down, I think…

The discussion in Loose Ends, and Darth Cliche’s second-to-last comment in particular, prompted me to respond, but since the CfJ has now passed I’ll vent my frustration here. The reason for this is that Darth Cliche’s behaviour has recently gone from merely annoying to being actively disruptive to the game, and I’m not just talking about his dictatorship ‘scam’, which I maintain is only a scam in the broadest sense of the word, and not the nomic kind of bending the rules in one’s favour, since everybody knew the loophole existed when the proposal passed. Him abusing it after it had been pointed out by somebody else should not be seen as cleverness on his part.

Rodney said: “A player on IRC last night was saying how they were idle as long as DC was playing. Any player that unfun to play with is a serious issue.” This wasn’t me, but I certainly understand their position. I may have not so subtly implied in the IRC channel that I would not mind if were no longer a player in this nomic (but would not actively seek out to ban him), and I respect him enough to repeat it in a public forum (I’d like to stress at this point that this is not at all a jab against whoever Rodney was referring to). The way DC plays, the way he likes to think he’s more important and popular than he really is, and the way he lead this dynasty were part of the reason I haven’t unidled (a lack of time being the other, deciding factor).

First of all, this quote by Darth Cliche: “particularly the ban against spamming, which made even slight spam such as joke proposals and CfJs be considered spam in the eyes of the players [ruined everything for me]” is utter and complete nonsense. These things have always been encouraged here (I know the one I linked to is old, but it still makes me snicker). No one ever gets upset if somebody makes a joke post or points out something amusing in the ruleset or gamestate. Jokes that are simply not funny, or only amusing to one or two other players however, have no place on the front page of the blog. If you need someone to point out why this post is completely bereft of humour and could in fact deeply upset some people who may have have dealt with this issue in the past, you have bigger issues to deal with.

As to why I dislike the way you play, there are several reasons: the way you can snarl at players without provocation (there are better examples, but I’m already spending too much time on this) hints at either a bad sense of humour or a serious case of passive-aggressive behaviour. The patronizing way you sometimes talk to newer players may have put some of them off playing the game. Your way of ‘attempting to win’ seems to consist solely of nominating yourself every time a new emperor is elected (at one point inserting your name into Excalabur’s proposal suggestion for no real reason at all).

Although you present yourself to be a frequent scammer, every single scam I’ve seen you attempt has either been a direct copy of someone else or a joint effort that I hesitate to believe was initiated by you. In fact, the one time you have genuinely made me laugh was when you posted this comment to the wiki page of Bucky’s third dynasty: “I was involved in the scam too. I CoV’d on a proposal so it could be enacted early. Other than that, I had no idea what was going on.” If voting on a proposal (presumably because someone told you to) is now considered scamming, Josh should thank me for handing him his last dynasty when I ingeniously voted for the billboard proposal.

As to why I think this dynasty has been unpopular with so many players, including me: remember my last dynasty? Remember how a big problem (of many) with it, and the main grievance that players aired, was that it was trying to be too much like Dwarf Fortress? Not to toot my own horn, but I at least tried to steer it away from that direction and give the dynasty a unique identity, after making the mistake of mentioning DF at the start of the dynasty and (often accidentally) copying some of its mechanics. The only ways that you directed this dynasty from my point of view were by proposing a combat dynamic that is almost an exact copy of the one from your last dynasty and supplying the stats for weapons and items in nethack so that this dynasty could be even more of a nethack clone.

This is not to say that you have no redeeming qualities. You have picked up your fair share of admin work, for example, which is never a bad thing, and I will be the first to admit that my complaints are all individually minor issues, not remotely serious enough to warrant a ban. Together, though, they cause me to believe that your presence does not improve the nomic, or the entertainment I personally derive from it.

This has been long enough, so I’ll end it here. There have been, and still are, a lot of players in blognomic I have genuinely enjoyed playing with, and you are simply not one of them.