“As an Assisted Action, a Criminal with no Heat can Perform Community Service. This increases their Heat to 1, and empties their Former Partner list.”

Increases their Heat to 1? What if their Heat is more than 1?

Oh, stupid misread. Sorry.

I think there are too many possible bugs

First, I dislike that you don’t get any bonus for assissting someone. Both criminals should be rewarded. There is currently no reason for me to help someone else. They’ll just add me and cash in.

Secondly, I think squares might grow a little too fast. Its a cool mechanic of “longer wait, bigger reward, but someone might steal it out from under you” but I’m not sold.

Thirdly, any actions that are not daily/weekly actions are open to abuse. You need friends to abuse this one, but its still open to abuse.

Most importantly, Perform Community Service has a race condition. Does the list get cleared and then the partner added, or does the partner get added and then the list is clear?

If it is the second one, with the “you can be your own partner” bug it allows you clear your list without consequence whenever you want.

Oh, I misread Perform Community Service too. It still has flaws though.

You can only Hack the Police computers O(n^2) times until everyones partner list is clogged up. Theoretically, the game could get locked down because no one can work with anyone else and no one has the lack of heat to clear their list. So i’m still against.

The bugs can be clared up.

The reason you’d help someone else is so that they’d help you in the future (presumably, with a prearranged agreement). You’re going to need to actually work with others to arrange deals, not just flavourwise work with others (and the bar on repeating partners prevents this being done trivially via faction formation). It’s something that AFAIK hasn’t been tried before, so I decided to use a dynasty to see how it went.

Also, the fact that everything eventually locks up (until someone joins or unidles) doesn’t bother me, because it seems likely to be quite a way in the future. If it’s within the next couple of months or so, it’d make a nice natural end to the dynasty, although I doubt it’ll happen that soon unless the pace of the dynasty is very fast.

I’m still not sold on the mechanic.

If the dynasty requires teamwork in the sense that I just need to signal “I’m willing to work with Bucky” and then Bucky can do something that benefits both of us, that seems reasonable.

But for this, it takes more communication. I also need to contact Bucky so that he’ll help me later (once our lists are cleared, which we need to go find even more help for).

All it really does is greatly reward players who spend a lot of time on IRC.

Furthermore, in order to work really well everyone needs to be actively playing. In any dynasty, you only see like half the players really doing that. I just think before too long we’ll have to spend send so much time hacking the police computers that nothing fun will ever get done. It’ll turn into “well, we need someone to hack the computers to reduce our heat so we can reset our list, but I’d rather use my actions to generate money and have someone else do the hacking”. Stalling becomes to optimal move, and no one has any fun.

If something like that happens, I’m sure we can propose to help avoid the stall. And I’m open to proposals that help improve the situation, as you see it. If you don’t like a rule, there’s no reason why you can’t change it…

idle against; I dislike the idea that the actions are one-sided as this means I can never really safely partner with someone with an expectation of future benefit.

I’ll vote for to get quorum if needed and it’s clear it will pass.

If you provide the benefits to the helper as well, I’d probably be willing to support this. I feel like you could also allow room for bigger hiests that way (like, if I work with coppro and coppro works with Bucky and Bucky works with me, and none of us are on each others lists, we could do a 3-way heist for Great Power).

It seems that there’s quite some support for symmetrising this. I’m out of slots, but wouldn’t object to someone else making the proposal, and we’d see how it could go from there.

I don’t like the symmetry idea.