I think it was mechanically quite playable (if a bit boring), but this became a bit untenable as player numbers dropped off. And regional development forums slowed things down even for those of us who could have them.

Yeah. Player counts dropped quite rapidly, but metas is still a plausible end to a dynasty imo; really liked the box style last time we did a meta

* 10th (?) meta btw for clear ref

Yeah to be honest, I’m not sure that the faults of this dynasty had very much to do doth it being a meta.

I think the “forced Alliance” mechanism of Regions made this more difficult, as we didn’t really want to betray each other by going for our own WinCon, but that meant trying to come up with convoluted Proposals that would allow dynastic gameplay that would result in a single winner. Since it wasn’t a true Alliance in the ruleset sense, there wasn’t a mechanism for mantle-passing, so the “not-quite-Alliance” and “single victor” were in conflict.

All of that to say that a roll-off seemed inevitable, and in the face of that, any Proposal more complicated than that seemed doomed to failure. We voted down a Proposal by Bucky to roll off by Population, only to do exactly that later on.

I agree that it wasn’t a property of the meta so much as a convergence of forced not-quite-Alliance plus a drop-off in players.

That felt a very murky beginning, and I think the meta-ness was in part to blame: the lack of Imperial leadership (both generally, and in allowing DEF votes) plus the three absent players slowing the queue down to timeout speed made it hard to pick out where the game was really going, or what the ruleset would look like when the queue cleared. It eventually picked up speed at a time when I’d taken a few days away, and finding myself in a Region with one inactive player and Bucky planning weird zero-notice scams with my name on wasn’t enough to draw me back in.

I had some sympathy for SingularByte idling out after repeatedly getting Development Forums not quite right, in a way that they couldn’t retract. I think Events may need an overhaul to get them closer to being a blander but more reliable keyword that just works when we need it, rather than something that seems to need as much close reading and nerves of steel as writing an events system from scratch each time.

The core-amendment stuff, and Jonathan’s comment about perhaps counting recently-idle votes, makes me wonder if core amendments need to become something else entirely, rather than a vote among whoever happens to be around. It doesn’t seem good for the dynastic game to give players who have strong opinions on core a reason to stay present in - or even join - a dynasty that they otherwise don’t intend to play.

@Kevan obviously you know that I am not on team make-core-amendments-harder. But including recently idle players seems reasonable (although, is unidling to vote against something you feel REALLY REALLY strongly about that much of a barrier?). Generally I think that it’s actually fine for the core rules to change to match the current mood, which can shift dynamically in the medium run (say on the order of a couple months). I really don’t think we’re going to break the game. As long as the barrier to change the rules isn’t high, it’s also easy to put it back once the fun’s over.

What’s really scary is a bad rule getting stuck in the ruleset because a plurality of people don’t see the issue/can’t follow it/cba with the core rules. But I digress.

A lot of core changes aren’t mood, though, they’re just trying to write a clearer and more functional ruleset. I feel like we are maybe missing a framework for that - like you said a while back, the BlogNomic ruleset really could use a good editor. Narrow add-a-sentence patches that people can get behind as an easy “yes this definitely fixes the one thing that just happened” aren’t always the best route to a well-written core ruleset.

It’s hard to know how much an unfortunate core amendment can “break the game”, because there’s not always a clear throughline of cause and effect. Was the ambiguous enactment sequence at the end of the previous dynasty something that could have happened under any core ruleset since 2005, or was it set up by a forgotten core amendment that we could have considered more carefully?

I agree with your first paragraph! I’m not as concerned about the second - temporarily broken dynastic play seems fine (even if the break is in the core rules) provided that we have CFJs as a fallback. To that end, I think folding them into a generic votable matters framework was a misstep.

Best case it’s a quick and obvious fix; middling case it’s a distraction that stalls gameplay and the queue while a subset of players discuss how best to repair things; worst case it hits during endgame (as happened last dynasty?) and the choice of fix also decides the outcome of the game.