BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Another from-idle chip-in: does this mean that in dynasties with a heavy layer of activity that exists in secret between the Emperor and individual players directly, non-Emperor admins can only idle players at the risk of fouling up gamestate royally? And the only way around that is that essentially only the Emperor can idle players? Which means that the Emperor *has* to be an admin?

This would allow people who just want to play the game but don’t want to engage in the voting aspects of the game to grind stuff to a halt. I suppose you can pretty easily get around that today if you really want to by simply leaving a random comment once every 7 days. And we don’t really see that happening.

But I guess a bigger problem is, dynasty actions can be performed privately. Which no one other than myself actually has any idea of knowing when Snisbo last performed an action and thus could be rendered idle.

Real-time interaction on discord is a fact of gameplay in the current era of BN. If an admin wants to know whether a player can be idled based on private information, why not just DM the emperor and ask? The edge case of “well it would be betraying secret gamestate to disclose that” seems like it can be addressed in a dynastic rule easily, if necessary.

A good example is the previous dynasty, where players placed bets with the Emperor in secret, and bets weren’t necessarily placed every day since some days had better things to bet on than others. A player could go several days before exercising a single dynastic action, which in that dynasty would have only been seen by themselves and the Emperor, and even more, the results of that player’s activity were only reported when resources were won from the bet. If they were lost, nothing was posted publicly about it, so no one else would be in the know.

It feels like part of the Emperor’s job might be to update a “status” of player activity. The downside there is that in a heavily-private communication dynasty, even revealing that some dynastic activity took place might reveal a portion of an otherwise secret strategy. I don’t have a good answer for that.

Per my comment above, the answer is a dynastic rule: “because this dynasty has a heavy layer of private information which may never be disclosed even as a binary state, taking dynastic actions does not count toward the idle timer.”

I take that back…I do have an idea. Start with the presumption that players area active, as we already do, with a Core player status tracking page.

If the Emperor of a dynasty has not seen any posts or comments as per the idle checker, and has no knowledge of any dynastic actions via the gamestate page edits or in private communication, they could then update that player status tracking page with the player as Inactive. It’s then up to an admin to double-check and deal with it (which could be the Emperor themselves if they are an admin).

This wouldn’t give away anything until the player is truly idle, at which point if they are, it’s going to be obvious anyway when they are made idle and their gamestate is commented out from the tracking page.

Even without private communication stuff, “taken a dynastic action” is still a bit awkward for admins to check, as it requires scrutinising the wiki history to see whether an edit was a valid action (rather than a layout edit, or an invalid action).

No great harm in a false negative, where a player isn’t idled because an admin wrongly assumed that their invalid action three days ago was a valid one. But it’s potentially a nasty surprise if a blog-ignoring player who’s also made mistakes in their last few wiki actions can suddenly be idled for inactivity.

“nor made an edit to the gamestate tracking page” would be easier all round, in the same way that the existing timeout is a content-agnostic “posted an entry or comment” rather than “proposal or vote”.

While it wouldn’t actually have addressed Snisbo’s situation in this dynasty, I did consider the update-the-gamestate-tracking-page wording, only to remember that the tracking page is actually a special case rule, and I didn’t necessarily want to reference it in the second rule of core. I suppose this whole mechanism could be moved to that special case rule, but it seems like that could trip up new admins.

All right, changed from a core proposal to special case.

Fair point on scope. Maybe “an edit to the wiki”, then, which would work out about the same in practice.

I’m not sure how I feel about the proposal more broadly, though. How we define idling is how we define the act of playing or not playing BlogNomic.

Does this edited version actually address what you were trying to address though? Snisbo still would have been idled under these changes.

I might vote for this version but I would vote against the previous version.

I would have been idled still, yeah, but this would catch a lot of similar cases that aren’t *entirely* justified as calling someone inactive. I think a majority of dynastic actions are public changes to the wiki, so this would catch most of them.

I still feel that people who take dynastic actions but don’t actively vote on proposals are not great for the game, as it slows the proposal process down

True, but then you get into realm of mandatory voting. Right now, all they would have to do is comment to remain “active”, but commenting doesn’t directly advance the Proposal process, although it can generate discussion. A player could also comment “foo” and be compliant and yet not help Proposals along in any way.

https://blognomic.com/archive/results_post_13_october#comments

I vaguely recall wiki comments being interpreted as comments for idling purposes during some past era.

Re: “I still feel that people who take dynastic actions but don’t actively vote on proposals are not great for the game, as it slows the proposal process down”

There aren’t always proposals to vote on. For example, no proposals were made between December 22nd 2011 and January 1st 2012, despite active gameplay, resulting in four players going idle at once. (https://blognomic.com/archive/stalled)

Err, five players.

so make one. we’re playing a nomic here

I’m not sure what’s down the road of normalising action-only gameplay. If some people play BlogNomic as a static boardgame and others play it as a Nomic, the people playing it as a Nomic are usually going to win - unless there’s some pressure from the static group to keep the ruleset static (either by voting proposals down, or socially expressing frustration at the rules changing unfairly). That feels like a trajectory that’s taking us away from being a Nomic.

per Kevan and also because making a comment takes a grand total of 30 seconds

I don’t think this is exactly promoting action-only gameplay. It’s just setting up an environment where if commenting/posting slips someone’s mind because they are engaging with actions, and so don’t realize they’re close to timing out, they don’t get idled for it.

If someone wanted to do action-only gameplay now, they just as easily could, all they have to do is post one non-vote, non-productive comment per week, which still is not interacting with the Nomic aspect of BlogNomic, and I think the fact that nobody has done that shows that nobody *wants* to.

If we ever end up in a situation where someone really doesn’t want to vote; propose; or engage with proposals, then we are going to have to patch it out anyways. No reason not to give forgiveness in the ruleset for accidentally forgetting, imo

I feel like the solution there is to reintroduce the “you can fast unidle if you timeout” rule. Feels like that was removed for no good reason. No one was actually abusing it I guess people were just worried that someone might.

[Snisbo] Allowing some good-faith oversights is definitely the motivation, intention and effect of this proposal, but it’s getting there by changing our official printed answer to the very big game question of “at what point does the ruleset consider someone to have effectively stopped playing BlogNomic?”

Currently, yes, if a player just wants to play the dynastic action game then they have to self-consciously post a null comment to avoid being idled. (Or, more subtly, casting what they think is an uncontroversial vote, which I think is something that happens already.) If we remove the need to even do that, that feels like the ruleset is giving a meaningful endorsement of dynastic-only play. It’s hard to know how that would actually shake out, though.

[Clucky] Fast unidle was removed in March 2023 with the rationale that it was giving players a mild but weird incentive to time out rather than walking away. If you’re a good few days inactive, your choices are between “voluntarily idle and lock yourself out of the game for four days” and “carry on doing nothing and rejoin the game at any time”.

You would still receive the penalty for “failing” to play bn in the next dynasty, when I think this is not nearly as bad as checking out entirely

I kept going back and forth on this, but I’ve ultimately landed on the side of “this is a nomic, and active means participating in blog posts and comments as part of the nomic” even if that participation is in the form of null comments.

It’s part of the “agreement” of signing up to be an active player: you’re stating that you have the time and the ability to make regular posts and/or comments. If you can’t for time reasons, BlogNomic may not be for you, at least during the time when you’re too busy. If it’s technological reasons (posting from phone, accessibility) then we should try to solve those issues directly rather than making them part of the excuse to not participate. If it’s mental load (I can’t juggle remembering to post/comment and all my other life things I have to remember to do), we could also look at those types of issues directly and see if things like reminders would help.

(My previous comment was directed at Clucky)

@Kevan I’m sure that this functionally won’t change anything, but I do see where you’re coming from. I won’t be upset if this doesn’t pass, because I absolutely understand the objections, I just personally think that the potential consequences of changing it are negligible, as *if* it becomes an issue, we can always change it back.