Wednesday, February 09, 2022

Proposal: David Hass-Roll-Off. No? Not a good one?

Illegally failed by TyGuy6 at 11 Feb 2022 01:13:36 UTC, during Hiatus due to Pending DoV. Un-failed.

Re-failed by Josh; cannot be enacted with 6 votes against. Josh

Adminned at 11 Feb 2022 12:50:15 UTC

Enact a new rule entitled “Roll-Off Victory” as follows:

If all of the following conditions are true:
* A single publicly tracked variable shared by all Employees has been designated the Victory Share Variable by a rule other than this one
* A numeric value has been designated the Victory Share Threshold by a rule other than this one
* The total sum of all Employees’ values for the Victory Share Variable is greater than or equal to the Victory Share Threshold
Then the CEO may, once in this Dynasty, undertake an Atomic Action with the following steps, known as Selecting a Victor:
* Randomly select an Employee, with this random selection being weighted for each Employee according to their individual share of the total sum of all Employees’ Victory Share Variable
* Post to the BlogNomic blog announcing the Victor thus selected
Once the CEO has finished Selecting a Victor, then that Victor is considered to have Achieved Victory in the current Dynasty.

I don’t expect this to pass in the current dynasty, but this general concept has come up more than once in recent rounds, and has proven an effective way to make backchannel pooling redundant. I think it’s also a reasonable way to reward clever players without making it necessarily optimal for the rest of the group to gang up on the leader. The mechanism seems worth trialing in the dynastic rules with an eye toward eventually moving to a rare Special Case rule.

Comments

Josh: Observer he/they

09-02-2022 20:59:22 UTC

Mildly opposed to this, not because I can spot a major problem with it on its own terms, but more because I resent the drift away from decisive winners to effectively open pool share decided at an arbitrary time threshold; this dynasty will likely be won by someone with less than 25% of the victory resource, which seems like a silly definition of winning, to me.

Clucky: he/him

09-02-2022 21:30:37 UTC

When have we had a “victory share threshold” in the past? We’ve done victory shares before, but often they aren’t based on reaching a certain treshold.

Furthermore, we already have a proposal in place that has identified a major problem with this sort of threshold approach (it rewards people online at the right time to get their daily actions in) so seems like something we want to back away from not lean into

Josh: Observer he/they

09-02-2022 21:52:03 UTC

@Clucky Basically anything in here tagged Merit Random is going to be this type of victory or close to it; Trapdoorspyder 1 was the most recent one that would have fit the bill, had it resolved conventionally.

Clucky: he/him

09-02-2022 22:56:13 UTC

But the trigger there wasn’t “reach a certain number of victory points” it was “pass this proposal”. It also put a cap on the number of victory points someone could get for their roll, something this doesn’t afford.

I think that shows that a one-size-fits-all mechanic probably isn’t gonna work here.

Brendan: he/him

10-02-2022 00:51:12 UTC

The victory share threshold I was thinking of was the… current one.

Brendan: he/him

10-02-2022 00:52:14 UTC

(As for “online at the right time,” nothing about this says anything regarding a daily action, and it’s triggered at the emperor’s discretion to allow for exactly that kind of “everybody get one last turn in” leeway.)

Lulu: she/her

10-02-2022 02:15:28 UTC

against

Josh: Observer he/they

10-02-2022 09:11:45 UTC

against

Kevan: he/him

10-02-2022 09:30:17 UTC

I do still like the idea of defining a Victory Variable to pre-empt the endgames where everyone just has differently-coloured piles of fool’s gold and it’s hard to get much proposal traction for a method of deciding who’s furthest ahead - gravitating instead towards an unsatisfyingly levelled coin flip, or a metadynasty. “But we agreed two weeks ago that Zirconia was the Victory Variable, and that Pyrite wasn’t” would be a useful thing to have there.

I don’t think it needs a defined Threshold mechanic, though, which would always reward a particular type of infinite-generation scam, and would risk handing dynasties to players who’d taken no actions to achieve them. I think “Zirconia is the Victory Variable” alone is probably enough for a quorum to agree some way to hand out victory on its basis, if a consensus has been reached that it’s time to cut a dynasty short.

And yes, I agree with Josh that randomised pooling shouldn’t become a default. Why not just “most Victory Variable wins”?

Josh: Observer he/they

10-02-2022 12:32:08 UTC

Have we had dynasties where the VP-analogy was labelled as such from the very beginning?

Zack: he/him

10-02-2022 19:45:19 UTC

imperial

TyGuy6:

10-02-2022 20:06:41 UTC

against The generics don’t seem especially necessary.

Kevan: he/him

10-02-2022 20:47:02 UTC

[Josh] We’ve done a few like this one a week into the Activism dynasty, where a variable is set up very plainly as being the victory score, but hedged by not yet being plugged in to the words “achieves victory”, or by being put explicitly beyond a distant calendar date.

Clucky: he/him

10-02-2022 20:59:40 UTC

against

Darknight: he/him

10-02-2022 23:46:36 UTC

against