BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Well, it’s eating it there too. But there’s a diff there if you know how to use the wiki.

A problem I could see here is that there are proposals in the works that use player instead of realtor. Another thing, is that typically ‘player’ is used for all current active people, then Realtor (or similar) for non-emporer players. In addition, I don’t see in this revision where it says that the Eli Curf/Emperor has to be a non-idle person, since it just says ‘player’.

I think currently the Eli Curf can be idle, that itself doesn’t make a metadynasty. But I haven’t been around for that occurrence I think.

And I agree, I’ve already soured on Player as being the catch-all term; I think I’ll edit in “Registrant” instead.

I do not like the idea of splitting “Players” and “Realtors” into two separate things. In my mind a player is a Realtor, and having “non-Realtor Players” overcomplicates things.

^ i agree w/ zack

I’ve changed ‘player’ to ‘registrant’ for my own edification, which lets us keep the player/realtor synonym. @Zack/lemon, does that help? We’re still both players and realtors.

I haven’t had the chance to read through the full diff yet but generally I like the current system of idle players not counting as players, with a few explicitly defined exceptions. If we were going to change it up I think I’d prefer to see something like “idle players do not count as players except where explicitly specified”, but that seems more likely to lead to error than having one blanket list of exceptions. But maybe when I read through your proposal more fully I’ll change my view.

No, I don’t think a Player/Registrant should ever be allowed to not be a Realtor.

why are we replacing the core ruleset?

I’m very hesitent of core rule changes that are just “replace the ruleset” and thus not stuff that can be easily diffed.

But… you can diff it, that’s why I did it that way. The linked wiki page’s first revision is the current core, so you can look at the wiki diff.

It’s even possible to show a diff against the current ruleset by swapping in the revision ID of another page.

This is a big edit that will need closer scrutiny to make sure it’s not accidentally redefining everyone as a non-player, or something.

I’d put a red line under “Realtors are active players capable of taking game actions and voting” for meaning that anything that blocks game actions makes those players disappear. There are also silly questions about whether someone’s internet connection going down would mean they were no longer a Realtor.

How does a person actually become a Registrant? “A human with access to the blog who is not already a Registrant may make a blog post making clear their wish to be a Realtor” seems to skip over that, and to suggest that someone who’s applied to join the game and been given a blog account isn’t yet a Registrant.

I think that last paragraph is enough for an , I’ll come back to the rest of it another time.

And having seen this written out I’m not sure how I feel about it as a concept. It’s probably shifting towards a model where the game has ongoing Registrants who stop being Citizens at the end of one dynasty and decide whether to become Realtors at the start of the next, which does make more intuitive boardgame sense.

Firstly, I like the ambition and I don’t want to discourage that. I have come to this proposal wanting to vote for it, and will do so for any future revisions, but there are some wording issues, and I have ended up on the fence about the core concept.

Kevan lists some wording issues; I’d add that “A Realtor is idle if any of the following are true:” makes idleness a platonic variable, which I dislike as adding new ways in which the platonic gamestate can disassociate from the observable gamestate seems like a bad idea, especially when one of the criteria rests entirely on the untestable interior mental state of a subset of players; although I do acknowledge that this shifts the concept of ‘idleness’ into a more transitional state from being a player to being an observer.

It seems to remove the provision by which idle Admins can still act as Admins, which doesn’t come up often but is, I think, an important thing to have around just in case.

I think I’d be more comfortable with this if the Core used generic language for player and emperor, but there are some weird bits in here that I have to wrap my brain around. For example; “This is the Ruleset for BlogNomic; all Registrants shall obey it” now means that idle players have to follow the rules even though they’re idle, which has some weird externalities given that there doesn’t seem to be a way to stop being a Registrant. Could I wait until Cuddlebeam was idle, and then get a bunch of rules passed that forced him to vote in certain ways on Agora proposals, and then get him banned from BN when he failed to comply?

but I’m not against a follow-up.

@Kevan: re: red line; I see how it’s true from a rigorously logical standpoint, but colloquially I think it’s fine, and the ruleset is already littered with things like that where something else takes away a capability, but we don’t go back and say they are no longer the position that gives them the capabality. E.g., Special Proposal Voting says the Eli Curf can vote VETO, but Malign Emperors saying they can’t doesn’t mean that when it’s on, Eli Curf isn’t an Emperor.

It’s implied that becoming a Realtor also makes one a Registrant, but on the flip side, this is relying on the rigorously logical standpoint. That’s worth clearing up.

@Josh: idle players currently have to obey the ruleset, they are realtors for the purpose of “Ruleset and Gamestate”. This is exactly the kind of thing that this makes clearer!

Re: idle admins: I defined Admins to be a subset of registrants and not of players so that they can still admin. But this does reveal what might be a problem with the current ruleset as well- is there is such a thing as an idle admin? They’re not marked in the sidebar.

@pokes… Oh yeah that’s a good, albeit wild, point.

At the moment, Admin isn’t really a class of player, it’s a property that a player can have… It is all a bit nebulous though.

I also appreciate the ambition, and the diff presented as a solution to the difficulty of this type of shotgun-breadth change. I just like our current, silly, ever-changing term.

I think it’s true that our ruleset is missing a line that defines Idle Admins to be “Idle players that were Admins when they were last Active”.