This is perilous for allowing the game to drift into Dormancy Hiatus, rendering proposals and actions invalid without anybody realising that this has happened. The base Dormancy rule is easy to remember to check because it can only ever be triggered during the act of idling a player, and just counts players.

We may need to quietly denote a new class of player who isn’t Active and isn’t Idle but is something like “Passive” - where they can still vote and take actions if they want to, but we won’t ever count them for Dormancy.

I would really be interested to hear what players like Raven1207 and Darknight feel that they’re getting out of being present in a dynasty but doing little or nothing in it, that they wouldn’t get from being idle but still chatting on the Discord.

That’s why I added the text to encourage some sort of tracking. That said, I would be open to the idea of a new class of player instead (but then you’ll have to write the Passive-player checker to go along with the Idle-player checker… 😁)

I was thinking opt-in, or applied by proposal, rather than automatic.

although leaning a little towards an arrow – this has the issues that a) once the hiatus starts, the nonposting players can’t then make proposals, so would need to make a CFJ if they wanted to start things back up on their own; b) with this wording the Hiatus turns itself back off after a week, which is a little weird but probably won’t end up mattering.

There are also some cases where further proposals aren’t actually required to keep the dynasty going, e.g. endgame-like situations in the dynastic gameplay where it’s unlikely that any proposals will pass anyway, so people don’t bother trying to make them. I assume that we turn the building block off if we assume that that’s going to happen, but it may end up happening by surprise. (coppro II was an extreme example – towards the end it was entirely about the dynastic gameplay, with no expectation of any proposals being able to pass, and Bucky accidentally idled due to making no blog comments. Having a rule like this in that dynasty would probably have caused even more accidental idlings and/or a lot of spam proposals, although I guess the obvious thing to do with such a “don’t idle me” proposal would be to remove the building block.)

Yeah, the problem is that we would ideally like to use a “dynastic endgame” state to automatically turn it off, but such a state is necessarily dynastically tracked and would be hard and probably incorrect to specify in a Building Block.

This might just be an untenable solution. I’ll wait and see what others have to say.

Amongst other things, this poses the question of whether BN is a friendly space to people who aren’t massively motivated by the proposal side of the game but are motivated to take game actions.

My personal feeling is that dormancy is too blunt of a tool for this type of problem - as this dynasty shows, if you want the proposal game to be bubbly it’s possible to provide mechanical incentives to encourage that.

I see both Kevan’s and Josh’s points. Darknight gave his opinions in Discord already regarding what they get out of a dynasty. It seems like this will neither push such players into a more active role nor discourage them from passively observing and voting.

I like Kevan’s idea of the Passive class of player, and maybe when new players unidle, they start in this Passive class and move to the Active class after their first Proposal or dynastic action.

In any case, the irony is that the very players that this would impact didn’t weigh in on this proposal.

Withdrawn