I think it’s left open across dynasties to ensure that cheap speculative DoVs are always discouraged, even when a dynasty is drawing to a close. If I can see you’re about to win or that the game clock is about to run down with me losing, that shouldn’t give me carte blanche to fire off some terrible 1%-plausible scam on the off chance.

Even a single Against vote is a good indication of a bad DoV, then… Taken at face value, I suppose this means the players are generally fair-minded when it comes to assessing DoVs.

I believe its fair to give a blank slate to people for DoVs when its a new dynasty.

If the carryover is intended to punish people for something, I don’t believe that punishment is remotely close to being reliable because an overwhelming majority of dynasties don’t have victory conditions/DoVs in its first week anyways.

[Duke] Yes, I think that’s a given, although maybe the single-AGAINST is a bit narrow. I assume it’s only there to cover situations where multiple DoVs are up at once, and the enactment of one fails the others: in which case a DoV with one yet-to-be-convinced AGAINST vote might still have passed, in isolation.

[Cuddlebeam] Is that belief just a subset of you believing that speculative “this probably won’t work but pause the game everyone, I want to try it” scammers should be given a blank slate for DoVs at all times, though?

Hmm… I hadn’t really considered this, but the only apparent way for a DoV to be Failed without any AGAINST votes is that another DoV must have been Enacted instead. Otherwise the 5-day rule would simply mention failed DoVs, and specifying this detail would be unnecessary.

(In fact, that could be the most fitting reason why a 48-hour-old proposal is said to have “timed out”: it passes even with zero comments, on the strength of its author’s implicit vote.)

In any case, if the safeguard seems appropriate for within a dynasty, even for a moderately contentious DoV, it is marginal from the perspective of another dynasty (which seems to be what Cuddlebeam wrote above). Wouldn’t it make sense to punish frivolous DoVs more harshly, and have a higher threshold for that?

(Ah, scratch that. A Votable Matter needs to have more than 1 valid Vote cast on it to be Popular.

I hate that I can’t edit comments.)

(Which means there is a second way for a DoV to fail without AGAINST votes: an abnormal lack of interest in it, namely 48 hours with zero votes other than the would-be victor. I cannot imagine this ever happening… Right?)

@Kevan: I agree with that there should be some measure against it, I just don’t believe that having the week penalty pass into a new dynasty is a good enough measure to consider seriously.

I guess there could be a situation where players were somehow barred from voting on a DoV, but it’s very unlikely.

From the “within a dynasty” viewpoint, this proposal is saying that the closer a frivolous DoV is made to the end of the dynasty, the less we mind. Is that the case?

In practice the disincentive usually remains because the scammer won’t know exactly when a dynasty will end, and what might look like a safe final-hour scam could backfire if the game lasted another week. But in something like the Boss Fight dynasty we all knew when the final scoring would happen - anyone with a sketchy scam up their sleeve would have had nothing to lose (beyond social disapproval) by firing it off before the final Monster’s final attack.

I get that you want the rule to send a message… Practically though, I am only proposing to formalise what already happens: the perpetrator of a last-minute scam doesn’t really expect to lose out by being barred from declaring DoV in the first few days of a new dynasty.

Then again, this also goes the other way: my own proposal was made for mostly symbolic reasons, exactly because of how unlikely it is to have an actual effect on gameplay.

So let’s discuss this a little more.

Can we find a meaningful way to punish nuisance DoVs? Say, if a DoV is failed and had Quorum votes AGAINST or the Emperor voted AGAINST, the author cannot make another DoV for a month? Would that be too harsh?

(I didn’t want to self-kill just yet, but this DEF doesn’t change anything without TyGuy voting, right?)

All right; putting this on the back-burner to avoid holding up the queue.