Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Proposal: Ghost Town

Reached quorum 3 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 22 Dec 2016 20:11:16 UTC

Enact a new rule, “Dormancy”:-

If there are fewer than five Villagers, then BlogNomic is Dormant. While BlogNomic is Dormant, actions defined by dynastic rules may not be taken, and proposals may not be submitted.

Player numbers are dwindling again, and there’s always the perverse incentive for every player to react to this by simply encouraging it further: if everyone else stops paying attention and no new players join, you win. Maybe it’s worth seeing what happens if we raise a flag and pause the game instead, when this happens.

Trying this as a dynastic rule, could make it a core if it seems to work.

posted by Kevan at 21 Dec 2016 22:42:00 UTC Comments (5)

Comments

Matt:

12-22-2016 03:33:19 UTC

against I feel this will only exacerbate the situation of few new players. It’s more encouraging for a player to join if they see recent activity instead of a nomic that’s been idle for a while.

quirck:

12-22-2016 11:21:45 UTC

for I don’t think it’ll work, but let’s see

Kevan:

12-22-2016 12:52:56 UTC

[Matt] Does it not seem encouraging to new players if the game has made an explicit announcement of “not enough players, please join”, though? I assume we’d make a blog post or sidebar banner to that effect, rather than having the game slide into unexplained silence.

A dormancy rule would also give a stronger incentive for existing players to encourage their friends to join the game, when things got quiet.

Brendan:

12-22-2016 16:36:36 UTC

I do not disagree with this idea. It could be interesting to also offer a sort of interim minigame to play while waiting for numbers to creep back up, too. Most board games are for 2-4 players!

Zaratustra:

12-22-2016 18:39:49 UTC

for