I’m going to mostly restrict my comments to the 90% of the dynasty that wasn’t wrangling in Lacunexit.

I think I’ll always be slightly sad that this dynasty only lasted a week. In retrospect I should have made the barrier to making an AoA somewhat higher and should have locked in the principle that if a DoV fails that Lacuna is immediately exited earlier; there just wasn’t any real time. I can’t help but wonder what this dynasty would have looked like if it had made it to a month, I’m really curious as to what mechanics might have developed once we got past the tit-for-tat milling and into something a bit more directly gamey.

It was lovely to have a week of busy game - full proposal queues, a steady drip of actions taking place, a palpable sense of behind-the-scenes chat going on. I hope that not too much of that energy has been derailed; it would be nice to take it into the next dynasty as well.

On the 10%:

I think that there will be important conversations to be had about endgame unidling, the effect of long-term demi-active players on a game, and the appropriacy of bystanders attempting to influence game actions in ways that transcend their own self-interest. I will prefer not to see an overreaction to the events of this dynasty but I accept that our collective inability to come to a absolute consensus about what in the events was reasonable and what disrupted the game to purely negative effect will mean that some over-legislation will be necessary. Hopefully the branches will be pruned back over the coming years.

I found this dynasty to be fairly frantic in pace, both in a good way since it kept the proposals coming from multiple players and didn’t really seem to be slowing down, and in a bad way where it felt like any time you weren’t coming up with new ideas, you could quickly fall behind.

The easiest way to score, in my eyes, was simply to figure out some easy ladder combo scams, (sometimes unsuccessfully,) use them, and then to close them off for extra points on top.

With regard to the messy end, I do have to accept much of the blame for it. People can’t necessarily read the tone of the dynasty before they hop in so it would have been on me to talk first rather than jumping to assuming the worst.

Also, regarding the edit window, I’ll freely admit I was staunchly against changing it in the slightest. It felt absolutely required and I couldn’t fathom losing it.

Now though, I’m not entirely sure we need it. Sure fixing a proposal is good, but then so is being able to just submit a proposal whenever you have time without needing to worry about whether it’ll need edits in the next few hours.

Pre-Lacuna, I wasn’t enjoying this dynasty much, mostly because the pace was too fast. Doing well was mostly a matter of trying to come up with two or even three proposals per day that wouldn’t be marked as trash – they didn’t have to be high-quality proposals and there didn’t have to be any reason to expect them to pass, they were just there for the points. Golden Rule grinding was more powerful than most of the other mechanics in the dynasty. (Ladder Combos had potential, but were basically just a “oh, we forgot to ban that word too” that could only be used once per word, and I was too exhausted to really spend much time looking for them.) In other words, I think that the energy that was observed in the dynasty was mostly “fake energy” and would have petered out quite quickly, and I’d be surprised if it carries into the next dynasty. (It’s worth noting that there were very few meaningful improvements to the dynastic rules all dynasty – almost everything that happened could have happened from the initial proposals alone, apart from a couple of Ladder Combos and a Standard Reward increase. There were some timing scams that were introduced mid-dynasty that weren’t in the initial ruleset, but I don’t consider those improvements, and tried to vote them down even though I benefited from them.)

It was also somewhat frustrating to fill my slots with necessary core rules fixes that I suspected would be voted down, and then see them get voted down. At least it’s given me a better view of the specific sticking points that the other players have issues with, meaning that they’re more likely to succeed the next time. But if we’re going to be as pedantic about the core rules going forwards as people were this dynasty, the core rules will need substantial changes to be less likely to randomly cause things to be technically illegal; otherwise it will be hard to get any gameplay in at all and hard to pass any DoVs. Even Kevan’s win was very close to not being legal, due to Imperator Pick not explicitly stating that Merit Score was privately tracked and thus making it an orphan variable; the only reason it worked is that Assessing the Nomicers is written as though it’s all one big action, and because Merit Score is calculated during the action and used during the same action, the action as a whole doesn’t depend on it because its value before the action is irrelevant.

A pattern I’ve noticed over time is that grind-heavy dynasties tend to be a lot more active than non-grind-heavy dynasties, but also tend to leave the players unsatisfied (also that this is a common situation for Imperial blindness; in ais523 I, the dynasty appeared to be going really well, but actually it had turned into a souring mess of competing pools and a heavy and unsatisfying grind, and that was hard for me as the Emperor to notice). The grind this time was worse than usual because you had to write a proposal, not just log in to perform an action. The main thing that kept me going was the realisation that Lacuna was fairly easy to trigger, and I tried to speedrun triggering it in order to be out of the dynasty quickly (and expected to win, initially planning a strategy of doing Roll Off repeatedly until I had won, and then posting the DoV, although I eventually realised that that would fail due to the “heuristic” bug and had to adapt).

I actually enjoyed the post-Lacuna gameplay somewhat more than the pre-Lacuna gameplay; at least it was less about grinding. It was disappointing seeing players throw all the arguments they could think of at trying to invalidate the win, even when some of them contradicted each other; and more disappointing when one of them (“so what if the Dice Roller isn’t giving the right probabilities”) turned out to be correct (the win would have been valid if not for that, but the fact that Dice Roller probabilities are wrong makes it impossible to legally roll a dice because the Glossary requires you both to use a Dice Roller an to give a method that gives the exact correct probabiltiies). But I did think that the previously-active playerlist somewhat got what it deserved for voting down JonathanDark’s reroll CFJ (i.e. “players were arguing about the exact numbers to use and ended up opening up the loopholes that I fixed during Lacuna via Lacunexit, leading to the Equity values becoming much more meaningless”), and I enjoyed that up until the point where the mood turned sour and spiteful. I think I’ve said before that BlogNomic is very bad at handling failed DoVs, and this helped to confirm that (I have strongly considered trying to repeal DoV Hiatus, which would fix a number of problems, although in retrospect I don’t think it would have helped in the case of this particular dynasty). It certainly manifested here; Josh said that the time in the dynasty was 90%-10%, but actually we’ve spend more time in Lacuna this dynasty than outside it.

(It’s also fun to note that I did actually end up retroactively winning the dynasty once Kevan’s DoV passed. DoVs uphold all actions leading up to them, and nobody ever tried to revert my Roll Off – they just voted down the DoV. I considered reverting it myself, but doing so would have required deleting a post, which I didn’t have the technical ability to do. So Kevan’s DoV ended up upholding my Roll Off, which in turn retroactively caused my Roll Off to have caused me to win. It feels like that’s probably a core rules bug – and if it is, it causes enacting the DoV to technically be a Fair Play violation (due to exploiting a core rules bug to give someone victory), which is an even bigger core rules bug.)

Something that confused me was how suboptimal most players’ Heightened Mills were – milling a player with 0 or negative score doesn’t improve your chances to win as much as milling a player with positive score does, and there’s no actual reason to target leading players rather than targeting players you think would be bad at running a dynasty. I assume that much of the strategy there was about trying to avoid players taking revenge on you (in particular it is usually best to mill someone that a lot of other players are also milling, to stretch their revenge ability in too many directions) – but I feel like players could generally have done better when it came to maximising their own win chance. (My own actions were done to maximise the chance that it would be me who did the Roll Off – the “heuristic” scam was obvious enough that I expected other players to have spotted it too, so I made an unpredictable change to Equity immediately before a Roll Off would happen so that other players who tried to timing scam would use the wrong numbers.)

I did enjoy the change to the edit window (once we had the REVISE vote in place). I’ve long been a critic of the effects that the edit window has on pace of play, and having both the REVISE vote and the REVISE-withdraw be on a much longer time limit than the 4-hour edit window was helpful. In a way, it reminds me of the old “fast veto” (which I have for a long time, and mostly unsuccessfully, tried to restore to the game), but without the Emperor discretion (which was the worst part about it and the reason that it usually got voted down). It also reminds me of how there used to be (a long time ago) a culture of intentionally illegally editing failing proposals in order to free up slots, but without the rules breaches and with the other players able to oversee what you are doing. I’d certainly be interested in continuing the experiment, and maybe even replacing the edit window on a permanent basis if it goes well enoguh.

@ais Point of order: my 90/10 split is Playing the Game / Arguing in the comments to Lacunexit, not Pre-Lacuna / in-Lacuna. I don’t hate most of the in-Lacuna activity at all.

Ah, I see – Lacunexit specifically might indeed have been about 10%.

I thought the weeklong duration was reasonable, certainly as full a life for a dynasty as many others in terms of actions taken and decisions made. I think the gameplay was already drifting away from what it could have been, though, that the tit-for-tat Milling seemed a more interesting avenue than who could post the most proposals and write a script to find good Ladder words. I enjoyed the subjective Imperator rating system a lot, despite it being a bit of a wrap-up: the idea of defining a “good player” in such a way that more than half of the group had to agree that they would score in a high percentile on it, to vote it through.

I’ll admit to being fairly sanguine about going into an early chop because (scams and major victory amendments aside) it was always going to be a chop, and I figured (half correctly) that I’d be able to pick up some proposal equity during the Lacuna, particularly with a Bounty open on Core issues that I wanted to fix anyway.

On day-to-day gameplay, I lost some Equity winshare through holding off too long on playing the Ladder game (I was already getting some Mills for being likely to do well, so took my foot off the pedal a bit) and the Lacuna being called before I could catch back up, which was all fair enough. Less fair that I lost more Equity by failing to log into the game between 10:52pm and 11:00pm one night (where if I had I could have spent a Joker), and between waking and 11:52am on Thursday (where I could have submitted two more proposals before Lacuna ended, but had to be elsewhere), but I guess on me for only getting rid of some of the clock-based daily actions.

I thought scoring for proposals was a good and strong mechanic for keeping the game active, although we probably enacted some suboptimal Core changes along the way, given there was some incentive on voters to pass all proposals quickly so that they’d get their score-generating slots back. (I definitely didn’t bother trying to start a discussion on False Until Proven True, despite having some misgivings about whether we actually do expect all binary things to start as false.)

It was refreshing to see a dynasty having five active, engaged players all trying to win it, and having discussions about proposals and the game! So a great shame that it also had two passive, unengaged players staying at the table throughout. It really overshadowed this dynasty, for me, skewing all the voting (it being important to vote early because those are the votes that Raven and Darknight would probably copy) and possibly even being a major factor in Clucky’s fateful misreading of the Roll-Off resolution, if two passive players not caring about the dynasty’s endgame and posting funny memes on Discord about trashing it were taken as a broadly representative sample of the mood of the players and the context of the Roll-Off. I hope this is something we can sort out for the current and future dynasties.

[ais] “Something that confused me was how suboptimal most players’ Heightened Mills were” - yes, this was exactly that revenge-avoidance thing, I suggested it to the group on Discord and we all agreed to it. It also saved us from having to have a boring 23:52 shootout at the end of Lacuna with everyone hoping that their target wouldn’t have enough time to notice and shoot back.

I enjoyed this dynasty a lot. I think the requirement of writing Proposals that wouldn’t be trashed was good and kept the quality at a certain bar. I could have easily kept playing this dynasty out for quite some time.

Regarding the Lacuna times: when I had proposed the Equity chop in the “What we meant was” roll-off proposal, and it got voted down, one of the comments was that we should keep playing. At the time, I felt like I had as much of a reasonable chance to win the chop as other Equity leader. Once that chop was voted down, I took that as a signal that the current Equity scores were not at all enshrined and could change dynamically by any means.

When I got wind of the effort to have a group of idlers join, I supported it, because that’s all part of the game, and we had done very little to protect the status quo at that point, so it was fair game to allow it. It could have happened at any time.

I think the issue was that voting against the roll off at the time was definitely misinterpreted, including by me, as an “anything should still go” attitude, when it was more of, “I want to continue but with the mostly-serious group of players we currently have. I kinda wish that, since it was the latter, there had been more effort to ensure that this was possible. Most of the proposals were flailing about picking a winner rather than continuing in a way that defended the current player base, so it didn’t seem as serious as it apparently was, or at least I didn’t read it that way.

In the end, I didn’t mean to contribute, directly or otherwise, to the events that led folks to idle in frustration. In my mind, you have to own the decisions you make, even if they’re bad ones, and that includes me as well. I didn’t make any such proposals to stop a bunch of idlers from dynamically changing the game either, so it’s on me as much as anyone else

This very thing seems to be discussed fairly well in Put Me In Coach