BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

By the way, I’d like to make a point here, mostly to hear other’s thoughts.

I was busy this weekend so didn’t post, but I come back to see I ended up getting blocked out of this dynasty partly because Clucky decided he didn’t like me on a personal level (long term thing) and partly because of a scam (short term thing) that I explicitly warned about ages ago.

Both of these were due to bad design surrounding the recommendation mechanic. Now, I’m fine with bad design getting abused, because that’s part of Nomic. Hell that’s why I wanted to play in the first place.

What I’m not so fine with is why all of my attempts to remove this mechanic ended up getting ignored, and people still heralded only for the very thing I warned about ending up happening anyway.

Does this happen often? The last week or so of this has been quite literally unenjoyable and is not something I’d like to repeat.

All that said, I really like the concept of BlogNomic and I really want to hope that this was an anomaly. Thoughts welcome :)

Typo: “people still heralded” -> “people still heralded it as a great mechanic”

Hrm? For a while you were like “Logical players shouldn’t make recommendation posts”. The whole reason for getting quirck and moonroof in on the scam (other than them already having reputation) is you were being annoying about how recommendation posts were pointless and I wanted to prove you wrong =). You didn’t point out how abuseable it was until I proposed the double thing, which at that point only the four of us really cared. So when you say “all my attempts were ignored” you really mean “my one attempt, only after it was too late to do anything about it” (You could also account for your attempt to increase how often merits are earned, but as I pointed out later that had an infinite reputation loophole so you can’t really be upset about that one either).

Your argument is coming across as basically “I like that Nomic is about loopholes / scheming / teamwork, but I mad that they got used against me”

Your other beef is that we didn’t give you special treatment by letting you have a forklift. Really don’t get how you’re upset about that one… why should we give you an advantage in the dynasty? With the reputation thing, it makes sense for me to help someone else out because in return they’ll help me out and we can both advance ourselves. But there was no gameplay advantage at all to giving you a forklift so why should we do it?

Generally dynasties are bigger than this, so its harder to pull such blatantly obvious scams off. (in hindsight, it was a poor idea to make reputation tied to victory mechanics… it was never really the intended purposes and just got added because it was better to have that then the ‘nobody wins’ mechanic).

And about the “Clucky doesn’t like me on a personal level”. Its true that I found your claims that the recommendation system was pointless annoying, and its double true that your whining about how no one gave a logical reason as to why they voted against your proposal that introduced a giant loophole annoying. But I didn’t ever vote against something just because you proposed it, and no one voted for your rider so its not like I’m the one who caused the rider not to pass (and the proposal passed). So stop acting like a victim.

[kops] Skimming the month’s posts, it looks like you didn’t make any proposals to fix or repeal the Recommendation system, unless I’ve missed something oblique or have misunderstood what’s going on here.

A player saying “we should really fix this” in comments usually gets a lukewarm response, even if most people agree. That kind of warning often tails off into nothing (to the point where I’ve considered starting a wiki page for every time I or someone else says “we should really fix X at some point” and then we all forget about it) but it’s rarely game-breaking - if something boring is getting out of hand, it usually just takes a bold repeal proposal to stop it. If a small clique are abusing a mechanic, then a larger, disconnected majority will probably take it away from them, so long as they have someone to step up and make the proposal.

Thinking back, you’re probably right that I didn’t realize how toxic recommendations were until it was too late. I always hated them, but didn’t quite put 2 and 2 together that they would end the game like this.

I *did* however point out the design flaws related to personality contests long before that. And that’s what I was referring to about you not liking me, not your votes.

I’m not actually annoyed at any of the other things that happened, despite what you may think.

Kevan: good point. I guess all the resistance I was getting to improving merit relative to recommendation prevented me from actually proposing that. You’re totally right though.

The discipline of what constitutes a fun dynasty that people actually want to play is one that warrants further study. With the exception of 100, though, which probably enjoyed a round-number boost, it feels like there’s been a long term trend towards flatter, smaller dynasties.

Seconding Josh re: fun. A game that isn’t fun is a game nobody plays.

Could be interesting to run a quick poll asking people to rate the fun levels of the dynasties they’d played in, and maybe some thoughts on why they were or weren’t fun. The memory of a dynasty isn’t necessarily the same as how it was experienced at the time, but it might unearth something.