I’m not enjoying this dynasty
I was enjoying this dynasty earlier, but things are getting increasingly upsetting.
My main problem is that it’s impossible to accomplish anything without the support of several other players, but I’m not getting that support even when it’s in those players’ best interests. For example, we haven’t had a trial pass yet even when there’s overwhelming support. Part of the problem is the artificially inflated quorum; there are some users (Put/Skju) who basically never do anything, meaning that we need far too many of the active players to agree for something to happen. Many of the mechanics aren’t being used much either; I managed to run two Subroutines in a row a while back, we just had the first Drugging ever, etc.
There’s also been a huge amount of use of Proposals for personal gain, which is incredibly exhausting when you’re trying to plot a path to victory. I’m almost convinced that Bucky is in league with Sylphrena at this point (Bucky’s two most recent proposals both effectively read “Sylphrena wins”). Sylphrena’s lead is frustrating enough as it is; he got there through a combination of being lucky, and having good reactions to capitalize on that luck, and although I’m fine with that, what I’m not fine with is all the attempts recently to make it permanent.
Which brings me to the always-online nature of this dynasty. Daily grinds are bad enough. This dynasty is far worse than daily grinds; most of the mechanics come down to hours or minutes. For example, being the first to submit a Subroutine after a Mark-flushing gives a large advantage, because you then know that any Subroutines that resolve before yours must belong to people who didn’t have M4RKs in the queue. Likewise, some actions only make sense if done just before a Trial or Mission deadline runs out, which is a problem if the person who needs to do them isn’t online at the time. This is causing problems for me in Real Life; I don’t have an Internet connection at home, and I’ve been spending all my free time online just so that I can hit important timing breakpoints. This is leaving me short of sleep, among other things.
So why don’t I just idle out? Because the dynasty’s designed to punish idling. I’d lose all the lead that I’ve been struggling to obtain over weeks, and not be able to meaningfully participate in the rest of the dynasty. So it’s a sort of sunk cost fallacy thing.
Anyway, my main argument is just the lack of control over everything. There’s too much proposing to change the rules in a way that hurts me, and not enough trial-Disabling going on. I got really upset and annoyed at Josh saying that there was no rush and we could just wait around for a few weeks with nothing happening, because that’s a) completely unfun and b) would hurt my sleep schedule even more. Waiting for everyone else to get bored is a legitimate strategy in Nomic, I guess, but it doesn’t make things fun for the other players. (Not to mention that an intentional policy of doing nothing makes it impossible to gather information on the other players anyway.) To actually be able to achieve anything, I’d need help from a group of people (minimum size 3 if we were all online 24:7, probably 4 would be needed in practice), and that’s unlikely in a dynasty that doesn’t have actual rules-enforced teams that have a reason to cooperate amongst themselves.
I suspect that much of this comes down to the single-winner nature of BlogNomic. BlogNomic traditionally works around the general plan of “create a game and then play it”, and there are enough people who want to make it a good game (especially the Emperor) that the game improves over the Dynasty and then comes to an end. This is strongly influenced by the Emperor and DEFERENTIAL vote, meaning that some player who isn’t involved in the action can look for good directions to shape the dynasty in.
In this dynasty, proposals are very political in nature; it’s normally obvious what effect any given proposal will have on the race to win (and for the few that aren’t, it’s due to an embedded scam that quickly gets pointed out). This means that the people who it helps vote FOR, and the people who it hinders vote AGAINST. Given how Disabled players have very little chance of winning (due to having basically no game-effecting actions), this in turn translates into “whoever has the biggest alliance”. Part of my problem here is that there are many people who don’t benefit from any given proposal, but who don’t notice why until I spend several comments explaining. It gets very tiring after a bit. BlogNomic’s normal fix for this is the Emperor, but due to the nature of the dynasty, there’s not much Kevan can do but studiously vote DEFERENTIAL on almost everything, so as not to bias in favour of one factor or another.
At this point, I’m not really sure that the dynasty can be fixed, but I’m open to hearing ideas.
Bucky:
You’re in a less frustrating spot than I am. Being Disabled and Exhausted, the only thing I can do is talk and shake things up with proposals.
On the plus side, there won’t be any more meaningful mark-flushes, so you don’t need to worry about that bit of timing.