The sloppy proposal-writing argument is junk; you can’t get better without practice.

Long live the Fast Veto!

I agree with Zuff. The fact that I can’t propose more than two proposals hasn’t stopped fatal flaws. See this proposal for an example.

Perhaps allow S/K proposals to be removed from the queue after 12 hours to prevent spamming? Other than that, let’s let people propose more! If anyone writes a lot of junk (like say, self-kills 20 proposals the same day or something) we can always take measures against that player, no need to punish anyone else.

Arth makes a good point.

I have a few proposals up my sleeve to deal with this, if anyone is interested in proposing them on my behalf, give me a PM.

I like Arthexis’s idea.

The counter-argument isn’t just about proposal etiquette. With this many players and proposals, the game has the potential to move incredibly quickly. This is sub-optimal for players who are either is unusual time-zones our, like me, who can’t access at work and thus can only really get involved once every twelve hours.

It’s always been a conscious design choice to make BlogNomic
slower than it strictly speaking needs to be- sure, it’s not as slow as Agora but it’s still good to make sure that things start open for a fair while rather than blinking in and out of existence. This, like the fast veto, increases the speed of the game, and this I’m against it. Two days really isn’t that long to wait.

Josh: Except this wouldn’t create anythign that someone would HAVE to read.  It would, in fact, remove things from the game that there is no longer any point in reading.  Sure a proposal may come into existance and then dissapear without you getting a chance to look at it, but it’s not going to affect the game at all.

Sure it will. It’s not unusual for a proposal to go through two, three iterations before hitting on the wording that will get it passed (or before the author gets sick of it and moves on). When those proposals are done over the span of 4 days or so, everyone gets a say - everyone gets to be involved in the discussion. When they’ve over the course of two hours, the blog basically becomes an outpost of IRC.

At best, this will result in proposals going through more iterations as they are rapidly proposed, killed, and reproposed without going through a thorough vetting process. At worst it will mean that all the fun stuff is done by those who can be online at peak times, leaving others (i.e. me - yes, this is selfish) with nothing to do but come online, vote and go off again.

And my complaint isn’t that it will create content that I don’t have to read, it’s the exact opposite. As a player I *want* to read all the content, and participate and discuss. I don’t want it shuffled away before I even manage to get a look at it.

When all is said and done, a two-day turnaround for a proposal is not that slow.

[zuff, Ienpw] I don’t think the sloppy proposal argument was ever meant in regard to new players getting better at writing proposals. It’s just that if you can self-kill and repropose anything at any time, there’s no reason not to say “ah, what the hell” and publish something which you’ve been working on that you know could have used one more re-reading. We will see more sloppy proposals from veteran nomic players, and we see enough already.

[Amnistar] The people who were voting on it would have to read it! They’d have to close-read multiple versions. And although an absent player wouldn’t have to read them upon his return, he would still have to skip over them, to scroll between them to see if anything else significant happened in his absence.

I think there’s also a little tragedy of the commons here - although the blog is obviously unlimited in size, encouraging the most active proposers to make even more proposals (“Don’t like my horse-racing mechanic? Self-kill! How about metalworking?”) is going to make the less vocal players feel sidelined. Limiting us to two bad ideas every 48 hours seems fair enough. And I speak as someone who often has about twice as many ideas as he can propose, in a busy dynasty.

CoPseudoV per Josh.

Kevan:
I think the problem is with those proposals that are obviously going to fail, because they are badly worded or simply too unpopular or disruptive, yet they are stuck in the queue, clogging everything up. It happens every now and then, and every time it happens, the game slows down for at least a full day, and that makes it less fun for everyone.

[arthexis] How would failing self-kills out of order make any difference to this? If the oldest proposal has been self-killed, then we can already fail it; if the oldest proposal hasn’t self-killed, then it doesn’t matter if we remove a bunch of newer self-killed proposals from the queue, we still have a non-self-killed proposal blocking things up at the end of it.

Fail self kills after 24 hours? It looks like a good middle way.

Heh, Kevan makes a good point. The problem isn’t proposals that have been self-killed, it’s obviously failing proposals that haven’t been self-killed. This does nothing to incentivise that behaviour.