I don’t think anyone left because of the alliances.

And switching to Undeclared Alliances doesn’t prevent people working together, it just prevents them having to declare it, being able to communicate privately under No Private Comms, and being able to pass the mantle.

A team who’ve worked out a plan and don’t need to pass the mantle because they’ve already agreed who to pool their efforts towards won’t be affected by this, beyond the advantage of barring their opponents from communicating.

CoV to give lendunistus more of a chance to weigh in.

I’m mixed about this: I’m technically at a disadvantage if this fails since I’m not part of the bigger alliance, but I also don’t really know if I care (plus I’d rather have some communication than none at all)

for now, will think about it more though

(also, I disagree with kevan on how this will prevent people from working together: I’d say private communication would be very important here since people would have no idea how to fulfill each others’ agendas. yes, you could develop a code of some kind, but I think that’d qualify as a “creative strategy”)

This is a proposal to block all private communication. If No Private Communication is enabled (which it is) and Declared Alliances is disabled, players will not be allowed to communicate privately with one another any more.

This will stop a new or disorganised team from working together by privately discussing the game. It will not affect a team who agree a plan and share their submitted Agendas for reference prior to the proposal’s enactment.

@Kevan just because they share their agendas doesn’t mean they’re getting them! there’ll still be a lot more in the pool than theirs

Knowing the exact wording of a bunch of Agendas that exist in the game, wherever they may be, is still useful information.

these imperial deferentials make me nervous — i’m here to focus on the mechanics of the game, i truly do not have much of a grasp of the politics of what’s going on with y’all’s alliances right now. i’m inclined to vote to ensure fairness for all players, but i’m not actually sure what’s fair here!

You aren’t obligated to vote at all even with the imperial deferentials. It’s perfectly acceptable to allow us to sort this out amongst ourselves. You turned Alliances on in your AA, so as long as you don’t see them being an essential part of the mechanics, you can reserve the right to have no other opinion.

> A team who’ve worked out a plan and don’t need to pass the mantle because they’ve already agreed who to pool their efforts towards won’t be affected by this

I don’t buy this claim if they lose private communication before agenda assignment. If such an arrangement existed, the team would be at a severe handicap should their designated winner get a particularly bad agenda draw, whereas with mantle passing available the alliance could designate their winner and successor separately.

[JonathanDark] The “perfectly acceptable to allow us to sort this out amongst ourselves” route is this timing out and passing with 3 votes in favour, irrespective of whether Lendunistus casts a meaningful vote. 3 v 2 is, indeed, not much fun.

[Bucky] This proposal will time out a couple of hours after your 23:59pm Wednesday deadline passes, which (depending on when Lemon distributes the Agendas and how quickly admins choose to clear the queue) may well be enough time for those awake in that timezone to discuss their Agendas and quickly agree who to get behind.

But if you’ve got a good and functional scam in place (one that lets you win instantly after the 7-day deadline, or generate infinite resources, etc), it doesn’t matter. In that position it would make sense to disallow mantle passing and private discussion among other teams, to make life harder for them at comparatively little cost to yourself.

Kevan, would it help if I voted against this? I’m seeing no need to keep alliances up if the current one is literally more than 50% of the machinists in the game, but if that creates more worries than it solves, I can swap my vote?

Alternatively, we could probably all just exit the alliance before the deadline passes so there’s no ability to discuss anything like who to support. After all, the only person I intend to actually support to victory is myself.

CoV

I agree with Kevan: anyone who decides to join afterwards and ally with someone will be at a disadvantage, since they won’t get to communicate while the big alliance has already worked out a plan

plus the agenda deadline’s also positioned before this proposal’s timeout

I guess I’d better show that I’m serious about my vote. I’ve left our 3-person Alliance and set my Alliances to empty, just to show that there’s no conspiracy to dissolve Alliances just after the Agendas are handed out from the Great Machine.

Ditto

I appreciate the gestures of Alliance blanking, but it is a daily action, so there’s still a technical window to change it back, depending on when things happen.

My main question mark is on Bucky’s only claimed intention for the proposal: that it might bring some players back who were scared off. Saying “join BlogNomic, there’s a team of three and a team of two who’ve been discussing strategy privately for weeks, but you can’t join those teams, and no you can’t start your own team either” doesn’t seem that promising.

If the intention is that we won’t have teamed Alliances any more and will all be lone wolves, and that’s great for new/returning players… turning off Declared Alliances just doesn’t do that. It removes the requirement to declare Alliances, but players are still free to honour and pursue earlier plans and agreements they’ve made.

I can’t see what we’re gaining from this, or why people are supporting it.

Fair enough, CoV   due to the argument that turning it off might be more hostile than desired against new or returning players.