Maybe this is a bit radical but I would support a complete repeal of the edit window. It encourages the constantly-online gameplay you mention here. It also reduces the value of being a careful proposal writer (since others will just point out the issues for you to fix instead of voting you down and making you repropose). Seems a simple enough solution to the problem to me

I would also think that being online for every edit window isn’t as massive of an advantage as you make it out to be. You can still perfectly well mention an issue to get people to vote something down once the edit window is up, or not mention it to your benefit. I’ve sometimes even tactically avoided mentioning issues until the edit window’s up to get people to vote a proposal down because I don’t like the change.

Re: being online for every edit window being a massive advantage, it normally doesn’t matter, but is occasionally dynasty-winning. See this proposal, for example: if I hadn’t suggested edits, the likely outcome would have been the Crusher being repealed (either directly in another proposal, or else first becoming overpowered and later being repealed as a consequence), but I needed it to exist in order for my plans for the dynasty to work (the plans didn’t care about what the machine actually did, but did care about the cost to purchase one, and no other machines had a similar cost). Pointing out the balance issues caused the proposal author to rework the proposal into something more balanced, which left Crusher still in the ruleset in a way that I wasn’t obviously responsible for, and I later used it to win the dynasty.

To the proximate point, I would say: it’s a matter of playstyle but you can choose to not comment on every proposal during its edit window. The game will not slide into the sea if not every proposal is perfect, and some mistakes in the ruleset is good creative tension for any dynasty. More importantly, the game is not a fire whose fuel is you. Some of your commentary has been off-base, either in substance or intent, which I assume is a factor of it being harried; give yourself permission to check in once a day and simply vote against proposals that don’t work. People can repropose, or fix things. Life will go on.

To the broader point, the edit window vexes me. I’m caught between two stools: wanting to avoid a return to Protosals, and acknowledginig the reality that writing technically competent BlogNomic proposals is hard and removing the ability to edit is a veterancy bonus in a game already stuffed with them. I have in the past advocated for removing the edit window but I don’t think that the game currently has a pass-and-fix or fail-and-retry mindset so it would result in a painful period of adjustment that would likely see the edit window reinstated before it would see the cultural change that I’m looking for.

Ais has mentioned the huge power of edit-window feedback before, but I’ve never really felt it as a player, when deciding how to react to a proposal that could harm my position. It’s counterbalanced by the fact that the commenter risks revealing that they care about, or at least have been thinking about, some particular resource or mechanic.

The Crusher example seems a bit oblique, but the fact that I can’t easily see what the Crusher proposal was reworded from does make me wonder if post-feedback proposal edits should be more explicit, to emphasise that risk - allowing voters to easily compare the version that a commenter didn’t like to the version that they accepted.

@Kevan “It’s counterbalanced by the fact that the commenter risks revealing that they care about, or at least have been thinking about, some particular resource or mechanic.”:

This is actually the main thing that makes the pressure worse – if you only try to improve one or two proposals in a way that benefit you, people will quickly figure out that that’s what you’re doing and work out what you value / what your plans are. If you improve every proposal you leave no trace.

The strategy really is one of selective improvements – you leave every proposal you touch better off, so that your feedback is valuable and people incorporate it into their proposals – and the game is better off for it, you just happen to gain an advantage by slightly guiding the nature of the fixes. (There’s a second advantage: for skilled players, simply just having a less buggy ruleset is a big advantage, because it reduces the chance that the dynasty will collapse under the weight of the bugs and be ended via a random process, and increases the chance that your skill will be a relevant factor in winning. It isn’t unheard of for a dynasty to end up with no useful gamestate variables as a consequence of buggy rules, and at that point any skilled play earlier in the dynasty is likely to be invalidated, with the possible intention of introducing intentionally broken rules.)

FWIW, whilst agreeing that protosals don’t work well in BlogNomic, I’m not sure I fully agree with the essay about the reasons, especially in an edit-window system where proposals are generally substantially revised between when they’re submitted and when they’re voted on (and effectively become mini-protosals that only the players who are online get to give feedback on). In a way, a proposal written by an inexperienced player is very similar to a protosal that costs a slot – it is very likely in practice to contain mistakes that make it impossible to safely enact, and if those aren’t fixed in the edit window the proposal gets voted down. Even proposals written by experienced players can do that sometimes (e.g. “Disclaimed”, which I wrote, contained a bug that broke scoring and nobody mentioned it until after the proposal was passed, which held up the game while we tried to fix it).

Perhaps a better variant would be for there to be a protosal system that costs a slot, along the lines of “if you make a proposal, it can’t be voted on until the author gives permission”, but that seems somewhat incompatible with the current queue system. (The system I mentioned in the OP is similar – it in effect gives a way to edit proposals if the other players agree with the intention but disagree with the wording, but fixes the queueing issues by moving the edited version to the end of the queue rather than leaving it in its original position.)

Or as a much wilder idea: remove the edit window and simply give newer players more slots to compensate for their proposals breaking more often?

Yes, the drafting-phase idea is my fantasy preference, and I think the 3.0 plans had that mechanic included - so if that ever happens it wil certainly be helpful. Not possible on EE alas.

“More importantly, the game is not a fire whose fuel is you.” - this is one of the hardest things I struggle with. Well said!

My take on the edit window, as a newer player compared to most of you, is that I find it very valuable. People have often pointed out easy-to-fix flaws that made my Proposals more palatable, and as Josh pointed out, the culture of pass-and-fix is lacking, so until that changes, we need this in some fashion.

How do we push the culture back to pass-and-fix? It’s hard to say. There’s a pervasive feeling, at least to me, that everyone is constantly scanning for scams, and pass-and-fix isn’t sufficient to avoid that. One little mistake, and someone activates a scam and gets ahead or achieves victory, so the pressure is on to craft a Proposal just right. Plus, you might want to sneak in a scam yourself, so crafting a disguise takes time and effort, and you need the 4-hour feedback to see if you did it correctly. If someone spots it early, you can say “oops, my bad” and remove it and try something else later.

Maybe it’s just a matter of making it acceptable that every Proposal will have flaws and exploitable scams, and part of BlogNomic play is riding that tension every time you introduce a Proposal, with no recourse other than to get better at both not introducing unintentional scams and disguising your own. Game-breaking flaws (as opposed to scams) would just have to be a thing, and if the dynasty has to pause to fix them, it’s in the service of allowing people to not have to be so viligant during the 4-hour edit window.

This is all just stream-of-consciousness thoughts from me. I haven’t really done a deep examination of it, and I probably repeated points others have said here or in essays. Sorry if I did, I wasn’t trying to plagiarize.