What I think the lesson of this dynasty may be: an incentive to stay active is, equally, an incentive to idle once you’ve fallen behind.

Idled. Quorum drops to six.

I’d say the lesson was more about the falling behind than the incentive to stay active; I don’t think we’d be seeing the same type of idling without the 20-Frag victory condition.

One might argue, though, that the whole activity is pointless without some sort of victory condition.

Oh, completely. But if the victory condition is “get 20 Frags” and there’s a general sense in the current ruleset that the gameplay is “play cleverly to gain maybe 2 Frags per week”, I can see why a player lagging behind with zero Frags might decide to bow out rather than try to catch up.

I hate to point fingers like this, but the onus falls on Bucky to make it clear where he wants his dynasty to go.  If this is what he has in mind, then so be it.  But if he wants something to change, he needs to start proposing some major changes soon or there may not be many people left to play it.  I looked back at Bucky’s recent proposals, and they have all been “fix” proposals that address some minor issue that was either already fixed or brought up in IRC.

Not sure what the consensus is these days, but I think “Emperor as gamesmaster” is something of a minority view of BlogNomic - most dynasties are led by their players, and don’t require the Emperor to have all the big ideas or fix all the problems. So long as Bucky is voting reliably enough to resolve deferentials, I’d say he was doing his job.

I know that in my own dynasties, I try to act as gamesmaster but only if I think the dynasty’s dropping in activity, or the other players are short of ideas. If people are continuously coming up with ideas without my help, I just let them, as their ideas are often better than mine.