BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

You could have the Seeker responsible for the private tracking rotate (thematically they might be the one who spotted the Opportunity), and then let that Seeker place whatever bid they wanted after seeing everyone else’s as an advantage for being the Opportunity-spotter.

Of course that runs into the same issue as last dynasty with inactive players, so maybe you should have to opt-in to spotting Opportunities to combat this

Neat idea. Hopefully the Fair Play rules would be enough that such a Spotter wouldn’t cheat, and other Seekers wouldn’t falsely contest their reported bid.

There is the small issue that if a bidder and Opportunity-spotter are in a cabal they can collude to lie about the bidder’s bid. Perhaps the Seeker in question should also have to message the Custodian so if there’s a dispute the Custodian can be a trusted authority. That makes the perviously elegant solution way clunkier though

It’s more secure than a pure honour-system (since you’d need two cheaters to cheat without anything suspicious being reported), but not by much. Probably not the best idea

I’ve thought for a while that BlogNomic could do with some sort of secret-tracking script on the server, similar to the dice roller, to save the effort of humans in tracking it. We might need to think about how it would be best designed, and of course someone would need to program it.

I added it to the Laundry List

One approach would be to have a page of messages where any player could add a signed, timestamped entry to it at any time, but the message’s content would be completely blanked out until the writer personally clicked a button to reveal it later on.

Ideally that would just use the blog login credentials to prove who’s clicking the button, although I tried and failed to do this when setting up the Dice Roller. A less elegant version could be done with passwords - when you enter a message you also give it a password, and each message would have an “enter password to irrevocably reveal this message” form next to it. (And a player could just use the same browser-saved or easy-to-recall password for all of their messages.)