Bump to avoid idling (do Hiatuses mess with that?).

It looks like I should have come online earlier this morning. How is it that any interaction mechanic we come up with at all is vulnerable to timing details?

What ais523 said.

me too

To possibly answer the question, it’s because any interaction mechanic will have some me-first aspect to it. In regular games, this is balanced by the fact that people take turns one-by-one. But if you’ve ever played, say, Galaxy Trucker, you know how frustrating it can be to be beaten only because you were slightly slower.

I think that the only way to avoid a me-first problem in the context of BlogNomic is to make it such that actions over a given period are simultaneous, regardless of when they are triggered. Agora attempted to do this briefly with Tiger’s space battle, but the one-vs-many approach didn’t work all that well in the context of the inactive game at the time.

The problem then is that actions also have to be secret, and not dependent on intermediate changes in the visible gamestate, otherwise there’s a new timing problem of waiting until the last possible moment to make your choice and submit your actions.

I suppose another direction (which I don’t think we’ve explored yet?) would be to have explicit turn-taking, with a timeout for each turn.

Could we have some kind of tag implemented that hides text until the next day? Then the only public knowledge would be that Player X is doing something.

Two more WHAT?

Perhaps an interesting version of turn-taking would be to have weekly actions, but with a different definition of a week for each person (chosen randomly). That way, the timing scam breakpoints wouldn’t be single moments but ranges, which could potentially be quite large.

You’d think that would result in more timing scams - hitting the slim margin where one range overlapped or did overlap with another. In Aeonomic, we solve this by having a quantum gamestate, where some things can only change at the end of the week - thus as long as you do it before then, your fine.

@spc: The problem there is that it’s to your favour to delay all your actions until right at the end of the week, when you’ve seen everyone else’s (if you’re going cutthroat-to-win style, rather than trying to build a community like Aeo does).

Lol, yes, this is a key difference.

Could action queues be secret then?

aeons + secret action queues seem to solve the problem, but might be difficult to implement. (I’ve seen that done in role-heavy Mafia games before, and it worked pretty well, but I imagine it was a lot of work for the moderator.)

just give ‘em a fancy name and they’ll do it ;)

It might also be helped by having less grindy mechanics =P

Btw, I just ended this blockade by scouting the route with the surcharge. Not that it matters now, given that I’ve already won.