Out of curiosity, why the 7 day timeout for dynastic actions instead of a flat 4 all around?

(withholding an vote as technically, the edit window can come back on this if Kevan puts his AA up)

Especially in the early game, not every dynasty has dynastic actions that players can carry out, and I think we want to mostly avoid situations where a player carried out a dynastic action not because it’s the right move for them but because they’re afraid they’ll be made idle otherwise.

Oh its an either not all. That makes sense

I do worry this could run afoul of dynasties where dynastic actions are done in secret by messaging the emperor. Merely the fact that a dynastic action was taken could potentially give information away. But maybe you just don’t turn this rule on in a dynasty like that.

Yeah, or override it with something dynastic.

Here, have an edit window.

The amendment to Core doesn’t seem necessary in dynasties that aren’t using the Block, and it’ll put a bit more cognitive load on new players who’d have to learn the distinction between the new-to-them concepts of Torpid and Idle. The Block could just be a standalone “An Admin may also render an Agent Idle if…”

I’m also not sure this would really help the passive player problem, if that’s what you’re focused on. “Take one action per week” is a small ask in most dynasties, and if passive players are already willing to cast uncontroversial votes to meet the minimum required activity level, I think they’d also be willing to perform the smallest possible game action a few times. Raven’s apparent approach of copying other players’ gamestate edits and seeing whether they get reverted as illegal would be enough for that.

Still very keen to somehow address the passive player issue, and soon, though.

If you’re iterating, this also has two recurring tricky bits with idling players:

We currently count entries rather than proposals because that’s easier to check by glancing at the datestamp on the user’s profile, which is all that the idle checker does. (More obscurely this also saves us from ever having to care whether a blog post was a valid proposal, if anything weird ever happens that affects the legality of proposals.)

There’s also the thing of admins being able to reidle a player immediately for not having done something that they couldn’t do, if they’re feeling perverse. New players won’t have taken any game actions in the previous week, and if they asked to join/unidle in a post rather than a comment, they won’t have made any comments either.

On the second point the proposal text has you covered:

If an Active Player has been an Active Player in the current Dynasty for the past 7 days and meets any of the following criteria then they are in a state of Torpor:

But I probably won’t repropose; it’s a new dynasty so I’ll focus on dynastic proposals for a bit.

I’d like to see a distinction between comments and proposals, as a proposal is a higher bar that should, in theory, demonstrate a more active player than one who simply comments by echoing votes. Mainly, make it a separate bullet item in Tighter Torpor.

I understand that proposal-writing can be intimidating, which is why activity level based on it should be optional.

I’m really doubtful that we can turn a passive player into an active one simply by saying that they have to write one proposal and take one action per week.

I suspect each passive player is passive in their own way, and that we just need to talk to them to find out how they’re seeing the game differently. Darknight, certainly, seemed to have a mistaken impression of what Dormancy was asking idle players to do, and has said a little on the Discord about being adverse to idling in case they suddenly want to play again (which we can clarify or even amend if there are issues with that). They’ve also said they won’t “hog a seat” if this current dynasty doesn’t inspire them, which is good.

I don’t think that Raven has said anything yet about their passive playstyle. If they don’t within a day or two I’ll consider a dynastic rule on the issue.

[Josh] Ah, so it does.

I suppose if raising the bar of minimum activity is seen more in terms of turning a passive player into an idle one (which there is no shame in being), it could help.

That’s how I see this, turning a passive player into an idle player.

I’m assuming that a passive player is otherwise not going to turn into an active player just because the rules push them to do so, and an unwilling active player is likely not much more valuable to a dynasty than a passive player. Either they’re engaged with the dynasty or they aren’t, and if the dynasty isn’t offering a reason to be engaged, then these proposed rules, if enabled, would be a signal to such passive player that the other players would prefer that passive players idle out rather than minimally contributing.

Well, it would be a signal that their previous minimal contribution of “just voting” was no longer acceptable to the group.

That may be enough to prompt a passive player to stop playing Nomic, if they realise and accept that they never actually wanted to engage in the proposing or dynastic gameplay aspects of it.

Or it may equally prompted them to just add one small arbitrary action and one small arbitrary proposal to their regular voting each week, because they think the other players “would prefer that”. If approached in the same passive spirit (the proposal fails or inadvertently breaks some factional tie, the action achieves nothing or swings the game to a particular player), that would still be neutral-to-detrimental to the game.

Mild   but I worry that we’re using building blocks to create too many different possible core rules for dynasties. It can be hard enough for a returning player to realise something has changed without also having to look through the building blocks to realise which version of each rule we’re using.

Despite realising this is a minority position, I remain generally opposed to efforts to speed up the pace of gameplay. 

Wait, is creating a Tighter Torpor “as a new Building Block” saying to add it to the ruleset and lower the idle timeout to four days, or just to put it on the Building Blocks wiki page?

[SingularByte] Strong agree on this. Beyond obvious things like “yes I need virtual actions for this game loop” and “no I am not a Malign Emperor”, it wasn’t really clear how I was expected during Ascension to decide whether to have an edit window, whether we should have the ARROWs again, etc, if they are all, by dint of being default off, seemingly not the way that people usually want to play BlogNomic.

Seems much better to take an actual vote on “BlogNomic players must make one game action per week, this is what BlogNomic is now” rather than kicking that question into the long grass by not changing the rule and just making it an untested Block which future Emperors might want to use one day, as voted on by players who it wouldn’t directly affect.

I still haven’t fully figured out my position on this proposal yet, and will return to it later. However, I had a question for the current players- A few people have noted that these “semi-idle” players are simply voting with the majority, and not posting or talking actions. As a way to still allow non-proposing players to stay active in a dynasty with few dynastic actions, would there be a way to require comments with more than a simple For or Against icon? From what I’ve seen, many players add additional commentary on at least some of their EVCs, so I doubt this would change anything for a truly active player, but since it would require actual consideration of the proposal beyond “what is the majority vote currently”, it might make it clear that we prefer active players to activly play?

Wait, is creating a Tighter Torpor “as a new Building Block” saying to add it to the ruleset and lower the idle timeout to four days, or just to put it on the Building Blocks wiki page?

Good catch! I forgot that with the passage of Brick cloner we no longer have to specify copying Building Blocks as part of a proposal. That means that this Proposal intends to put this into the active Building Blocks, and as a consequence of adding a new Building Block into the active ruleset, it will be copied to the wiki page.

I’m not entirely opposed to having this on in this dynasty, but it’s good for people to note it, especially those who weren’t around when Brick cloner was enacted.

COV simply to test the vote script

guess it doesn’t work on revises, will have to test elsewhere

I would prefer to find ways to encourage passive players to usefully contribute rather than encouraging them to perform one vote and one dynastic action per week – I think the whole “let’s hope passive players don’t pay enough attention so that we can idle them out” thing is misguided.

[Jonathan] “That means that this Proposal intends to put this into the active Building Blocks” - I wouldn’t say it was that clear about where it intends to put it.

The rules do say that when a Building Block “is added to the ruleset” it also gets copied to the Building Blocks wiki page, but the instruction in this proposal is just to “Add the following as a new Building Block”. That reads more like adding it to the wiki page (which wouldn’t automatically copy it here), but it could also be read (in the context of the previous steps being updates to the ruleset) as adding it to the ruleset.

CoV due to the ambiguity of where it’s created.