I am concerned that this may greatly increase the chance of all, or almost all, players accidentally idling out simulaneously.

This would be very exploitable, given that if there is only one non-idle player, that player can make arbitrary changes to the ruleset and gamestate via CFJ (there’s no minimum time for enacting a quorate CFJ, you can CFJ during Dormancy, and with only one player, all CFJs would be quorate by default).

It also isn’t that unlikely to happen – we’ve had long delays before, both due to seasonal downtime, and due to Interregna (it isn’t always the case that the next dynasty starts immediately). Imagine that someone posts a DoV on December 22, and there had been no proposals or CFJs on December 20 or 21. The DoV passes on December 23, and the new Emperor says “Seasonal Downtime is coming up, I’ll wait until afterwards to start the new dynasty”. Players who don’t have a very good memory of the core rules are likely to wait through December 24, 25 and 26. But at that point, they haven’t posted an official post for 7 days and get idled.

More generally, I think it’s probably undesirable to try to force players to post proposals and CFJs. There isn’t always a dispute to CFJ about, and proposals are hard to write correctly – I think that this is more likely to cause less confident players to just give up on BlogNomic entirely than it is to encourage them to post proposals. (The current ruleset is extremely rewarding of proposal-posting, and yet there are players who aren’t posting them much. I think it’s still valuable to have those players around because of their votes – having uninvested players voting delays that point at which proposals are unable to pass any more.)

How could this happen accidentally? An admin has to actively decide to render someone idle, and “may” indicates that it is entirely optional, not obligatory. I imagine only a malicious admin would do such a thing as to remove all, or all but one, active player for any reason.

There’s also a relatively easy fix for the downtime issue: just add the clause “and BlogNomic is not on Hiatus”.

The “if there is only one non-idle player” scenario can happen today, so I don’t see this as being any worse for preventing that.

@JonathanDark: I mean that the players accidentally idle but the admin intentionally idles them (presumably as a method of winning the victory). I don’t think that that would be considered a core rules “scam” as it seems intentional in the way that the rule is written.

There’s another edge case here that any new or unidling player won’t have made any Official Posts recently, so could be re-idled instantly by an admin if they had any tactical incentive to do so.

I’m starting to think we may just need an appendix rule of “the following players do not count towards Dormancy”, if we have a few regulars who tend to stick around to the end of any dynasty they join or roll over into, without really playing it or having anything to say about it. It’s not great that endgame CfJs and chops are often gotten over the line by those players voting politely with what they see as the majority.

[ais] I put an essay on the wiki today about low player Nomic, which indirectly prompted this proposal, if you haven’t seen it. I’d disagree with your view that “it’s still valuable to have those players around because of their votes”, at low player counts.

Kevan’s concern about unidling players is correct; I think ais’ is a bit more marginal. I’d see another draft.

Thanks. Even if I can’t recover the slot due to the crossed against votes, I’ll reconsider this seeing that there’s some interest and it’s worthwhile to do so.

As I’m rewriting this for the next time I can propose it, I’m curious what the thought is around idling a player vs not counting that player for Dormancy purposes. Either way, a player meeting the criteria could cause Dormancy if it’s close to the magic number, but idling them also removes them from gamestate and has a few extra penalties for unidling.

@Kevan:

I’d been meaning to write my own thoughts on two-player nomic! I think it works much better if you stop viewing it as a zero-sum game – I think the ideal is somewhere around the level of “it is neither helpful nor harmful to your own prospects if you help the other player win”. One of the unique aspects of nomic is that you can change anything about the game, including the way that winning works or the effect that it has (you don’t even really need an explicit victory condition if you’re having fun playing the game).

I think having a set of voters who are not in contention to win is generally helpful because it increases the chance that proposals that improve the game will pass, even if they’re bad for one or the other leaders. “This ruleset is broken and no fun to play, but it benefits me so I’ll try to prevent it changing” is a tactic that’s can be quite viable in some gamestates. If you have a pool of voters who will vote the fixes through, then that no longer becomes viable as a tactic and the game becomes more fun as a consequence.

@JonathanDark:

IIRC some previous dynasties have had automatic dynasty-ending conditions if there weren’t enough proposals, which is similar (but probably worse than) an automatic Dormancy.

It also crosses my mind that we could use proposals as a method of counting time, so that dynastic actions would necessarily become slower or impossible if proposals weren’t being made.

CoV on the assumption that the adjusted version won’t directly idle the players who aren’t posting.

“we could use proposals as a method of counting time”

Very intriguing idea!

Withdrawing to post a revision