BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

@Josh: you think a proposal with a typo in the rule it’s quoting, which receives support but is broken due to the misquote, is a “bad proposal”? I’d think this is an ideal situation to give the player in question their slot back so they can publish a correction; generally speaking, such proposals aren’t reproposed at all if their author has to wait for them to time out. Just look at the sidebar: only four people are proposing. You think it’s a good idea to punish those players, who are helping the game, when they make a mistake?

[ais523] If only a few people are proposing, I think it’s actually quite useful if flawed proposals are self-killed with “ah, my mistake, maybe someone could repropose a fixed version of this”, to encourage some of the quieter players to step up with an easy proposal. (Which also gives a little more time for players to look for other problems with the proposal; self-killing after three comments and four hours can mean you need to make another self-kill when someone wakes up and points out a bug that’s still there in the second version.)

@ais - I simply don’t agree that having players use their proposal slots on proposals that are - for whatever reason - not passable is a punishment. I’m happy with the fact that it takes a couple of days for proposals to pass, and - as Kevan says - happier still if those days allow for thorough bug-testing. The one thing that I dislike is the same zombie proposal popping up three or more times.

For this stage in a dynasty the number of proposals in the queue is fine - fine enough that the admins apparently can’t keep up with it.

But this is because I’ve always been for vetoes being procedural, nothing particular against this one.

And it only seems right that the RNG’s reward for being RNG is getting to Veto/redo eir proposals at will. :p

@Kevan: When’s the last time that’s actually happened? We didn’t have a procedural veto for months, and in all that time, I can only remember a couple of occasions in which a good proposal with flaws was reproposed by another player. Most of the time, IIRC, the proposals just got lost and weren’t reproposed at all, or were reproposed with the author’s second slot.

The current system seems to be doing exactly what it should be IMHO.

Idle against, per lilomar.

[ais523] Oh, I remember it happening a few times in the last few dynasties I played, often as someone just helping out and proposing a fixed version with a “hope the original proposer doesn’t mind” comment. It’s always good to see it, it seems a lot healthier than “self-kill, please veto so that I can try again” - it fosters a bit more community, and it gives other players the option to sharpen the wording (or add their own spin) on whatever the flawed proposal was.

Idle for, for what it’s worth, for the reasons Kevan and Josh mentioned.

Also, I’d like to see the flavour of the veto restored. The veto icon used to be a rare sight; the emperor would only use it on very dangerous/bad proposals that they strongly felt shouldn’t pass. I feel that having one’s proposal vetoed should be seen as a BAD thing. Seeing players ask for this grand display of dictatorial power when a simple mistake is noticed in a proposal diminishes the magic for me. That’s what self-kills are for.

Perhaps the solution is to make the veto actually a bad thing, then? Lock the player out of proposing for 48 hours, or something? There’s no reason to use a slowveto at all, pretty much.

This is the slippery slope of giving out abilities which a wholly benevolent Emperor wouldn’t hesitate to use. There’s no reason for a benevolent Emperor to use a slowveto, nor is there any reason for a benevolent Emperor to refuse a repentant player’s “self-kill, please veto this”, so we might as well explicitly allow self-kills to be failed out of order. And we might as well allow any proposal to be failed out of order, since anyone who saw their proposal tanking would obviously self-kill it.

How good or bad would that be?

I remember when I was a newbie, I asked what the proposal queue was for. (Most other long-running nomics use proposal batches or distributions instead, in which people vote on a bunch of proposals all at once, mostly for logistical reasons.) The reason I was told at the time was that it meant that proposals which depended on each other (fix proposals, etc.) could rely on a particular order of enactment; in BlogNomic, we frequently write proposals whose effect depends on whether an earlier proposal passed or not; this makes sense, but it doesn’t explain why proposals can’t be failed out of order. The only real reason not to fail a definitely failed proposal (say, a self-killed one) out of order is the slot limit; but I wonder if the slot limit/veto thing has ended up too tightly intertwined with the other rules, and that’s what’s causing all the controversy. (In a way, it doesn’t make much sense that the “penalty” for posting a bad proposal depends on how controversial the other proposals in the queue behind it are…)

As I see it, it’s the RNG’s job to keep the dynasty running smoothly, and the fast vetoes are definitely a useful tool towards that end.

ais523:

“I wonder if the slot limit/veto thing has ended up too tightly intertwined with the other rules, and that’s what’s causing all the controversy. (In a way, it doesn’t make much sense that the “penalty” for posting a bad proposal depends on how controversial the other proposals in the queue behind it are…)”

So, what is the reason behind the slot limit? I assume it is to prevent spam, but is there another reason?

@lilomar: It was in place before I joined; I don’t think I’ve ever asked about it before. Of course, it’s a nomic; even if there is a good reason, we can always change our minds, and maybe find out what it is by experiment.

If there is no limit, the Proposal queue can expand indefinitely… we could have 100 Proposals to go through at once.

Only theoretically, and, theoretically, that could happen now, or at least active Players x2. But if none of those proposals violated the Fair Play rule on spam, then would that be such a horrible thing?

I don’t see that happening though, although, maybe just raising the limit would work as a trial, to say, five proposals at once and no more than eight a day?

I would vote against that.

Many players of BlogNomic manage to participate in the breaks in their working day. The 2-proposals-per-day rule ensures that players who only have 10 or 15 minutes at a time to read, digest and vote are not grossly disadvantaged. Speaking personally, I like that BlogNomic is low-intensity.

I wasn’t suggesting we do so, as much as requesting reasons for not doing so.

Someone commented, right after I joined, that they didn’t want to vote to change the core rules because they were probably that way for a reason. I hold the opposite view. Any rule that doesn’t have a reason for existing is a bad rule. If no one knows what the reason for a rule is, that rule may no longer have a reason. Google for the monkey banana hose experiment (dunno if it was a real experiment, but it’s a good metaphor).

So I wondered if anyone knew the reason for this particular core rule. That seems like a pretty good reason to me, except it doesn’t really address why using up all of your slots on worthless proposals (s/k’d or vetoed) is a punishment, as ais said.

Just trying to examine some underlying assumptions.

(Yes, I believe that real-world constitutions should be living documents as well.)

Most Nomics have a simple limit on the number of proposals a player can make at a time - I assume this is intended to stop a single prolific player from overwhelming the game (if they’re bad proposals, it’s spam; if they’re good, then it’s more like one person’s game design project than a Nomic), and to prevent the proposal dependencies from getting too complex.

Even with two slots, we have a lot of “if proposal X failed, this has no effect” and “if proposal Y passed, replace P with Q throughout this rule”, because people want to play with good ideas as quickly as they can. With three extra slots, either we’re going to have more dependencies to track, or more branchingly disconnected gameplay directions. It’s perhaps just my personal aesthetic, but both of those seem like less fun.

The First Dynasty of Chronos Phaenon ended due to a scam where one admin posted and self-killed a large number of proposals in sequence, after emptying the queue, and won off the dynastic side-effects of failed proposals.  The 3/day limit was pretty much the first thing to happen next dynasty. 

The 2-in-queue limit is ancient, either present in Kevan’s starting ruleset or added before the start of the first dynasty.  Some dynasties have made exceptions to it with little in the way of ill effects.