BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

Reputation needs to be defined in an immutable rule. Otherwise, this lock on victory is almost useless because it would easily be amended out of the way – if players can set their Reputation via mutable game action, why bother collecting Triumphs for the purpose?

Also, the protective $s need to be inside the sentence, not afterwards (but having only two of them means they don’t really matter – it would be much easier to remove a couple of dollar signs than it would be to Triumph often enough to Retire).

Meanwhile, I don’t like the Rude mechanic – this just seems like a way to unfairly make it much harder for players who are in the process of idling out to win if they come back later in the dynasty. It’s basically a big “you must be online every 48 hours, otherwise you lose” rule.

Oh I have no problem at *all* penalising players who idle out by going silent. If players dont want to be in the game then they should idle out properly; it’s good that we have the timeout but I have always seen the silent idle as essentially disrespectful to other players.

I’ll up the $ signs but I do want this to be possible (if hard) to tamper with.

I just think that it’s very hostile to new players, and players who can’t be constantly active, to create mandatory activity requirements. I’ve been trying my best to place this dynasty in a space of “even if you can’t be constantly active, you can still help your team out every now and then” – and that in turn gives the less-active players’ teammates a reason to try to prompt them into activity and keep them involved in BlogNomic. In a way, part of the skill of this dynasty is trying to make use of all the resources your team has, and that includes uninvested players – and if that involves making them invested it would be for the health of BlogNomic as a whole.

The idle timer is 7 days, but this effectively creates a requirement to be online every 48 hours, and to pay attention to the posts being posted. A 48-hour requirement is hard for some players to meet, e.g. if a player has Internet access only on weekdays (which I guess is rare nowadays, but has been the case for some players in the past), you could timing-scammingly make it much harder for those players to win by triumphing in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Besides, you are severely underestimating the difficulty of interfering with this sort of rule. As a simple example, it takes one Heist Action to edit “48” into “4” and make the anyone you want on the losing team Rude (it is not hard to find a 4-hour window in which a particular person won’t be online – people have to sleep sometimes), and that has no protective dollars at all. Fixing just that problem is unlikely to help; I expect there to be many more examples of that sort of thing. I strongly recommend that you participate in the dynastic gameplay in order to avoid Imperial blindness; this is the second proposal you’ve posted recently which doesn’t take the ease of modifying rules into account (the first was The Exotic Toolkit’s Electronic Identification Spoofer, which gave a very complex and difficult method to get around a protection that was already trivially breakable with a single Heist Action, and in fact has already become broken as part of the process of the “rebuilt” heist).

I’ll thank you not to imply that I’m not interacting with dynastic mechanics; once again you are exhibiting the blindness that comes from assuming that ones point of view is the only logical one and that other people can’t validly disagree, or don’t find the things you find problematic to instead be interesting.

Also, basic reading comprehension - the 48 hour clause is in an I rule, not an M one.

The Community Guidelines state that the “rhythm of a dynasty of BlogNomic should not be less than 24 hours”. 48 hours is plenty. It is the full duration of a proposal and the full duration of the Heist action countdown timer.

Disagree with the proposal, vote against it if you wish, but kindly do me the courtesy of stopping - fully stopping, eliminating from your thought process - any attempt to infer or imply my gameplay or activity levels from anything other than my own direct statements. I do not want to hear your opinions about my playstyle again, especially not infered from two measly proposals. Community guildelines again:

Players should be careful to be respectful of other players’ plays and approaches to the game. The proposals of other players represent their labour, given to the game for free, and may represent their idea for the dynasty or may advance their agenda; there will often be reasons to object to some of these but it is important that objections focus on the merits of the play, rather than its reflection upon the player.

The paragraph with the 48 in it would be immutable under this change, so no need to worry there. I share Josh’s sentiment about inactive players though, and will probably be for this. I’m under the impression that trying to pester the inactive into more activity is unlikely to make them invested, and at any rate doesn’t make for fun gameplay. Pinging someone to get their attention isn’t a skillful endeavour, and if anything it’s more just a matter of who gets more players who are willing to do something on their team (which can be quite frustrating for the active players if their team is inactive).

Explicitly requiring a minimum of activity for a chance at winning feels like a better approach here. It’s not all that much of an ask to spend 5 minutes looking at the blog for a Triumph every two days, and if you’re away for a while but still interested in the dynastic game I’m sure the group will understand a proposal to remove your Rudeness. I’d support a further proposal to evenly divide the non-Rude players across teams, to ensure every team has a roughly equal amount of active players.

That comment was directed at ais

Coming back five minutes later to apologise for the tetchy response above.

, though it’d probably be a good idea to also protect “If a Participant has the Rude Characteristic within their Reputation then they may not declare Victory.” to prevent it from being one-action neutered by messing with the word Rude

Ah now that I DID miss.

I missed something too – this proposal doesn’t make Reputation publicly tracked. As such, both marking a player as rude, and retiring, become impossible due to Orphan Variables. Also, a ban on declaring victory is generally pretty strange at BlogNomic because it doesn’t prevent you achieving victory, it just prevents the dynasty ending as a consequence. (There is one other potential wording mistake, in addition to the one Habanero noted, but I’m going to leave that to try to scam it rather than offering a correction.)

I was considering vetoing this, both to protect the players who have scored already (in that this proposal somewhat raises the chance that Triumphs will become irrelevant due to scam) and to protect the relatively inactive players on my team, but you have argued your case well and persuaded me to merely vote against instead. 

Seems only fair that I waste my next slot on fixing that.

@Habenero “I’d support a further proposal to evenly divide the non-Rude players across teams, to ensure every team has a roughly equal amount of active players.”: I’d also support this, but it could be hard to word correctly and I’m not sure whether we could come up with a clear wording that’s easy to resolve; some of the “obvious” mechanisms of randomising that are fairly easy to manipulate, and some of the fair ones are hard to describe and apply.

One that might work is along the lines of “roll DICE1000 for each non-Mastermind participant and assign the players with results below the median to ais523’s team and players with results above the median to Josh’s team”, but even that becomes awkward to word in an easily understandable and nonscammable way.

It should also be noted that you can arguably immediately declare everyone on the losing team Rude upon winning, since right after the Triumph is posted the losing team has “not made such a comment when required”. I’m inclined to pass-and-fix regardless.

(For what it’s worth, I’ve been wondering whether this proposal is an attempt to get a target word into the ruleset, but “reputation” is five edits away from “exemption” which is far enough for me to be OK with letting it through.)

Pass and fix works for me, and I’m on the side of a minimal amount of effort to participate, mostly because it does help when your plans require team effort, and you need to know who will be able to put in the effort required to carry out certain plans.

No shame if you’re unable to commit the time, but it’s important for others on your team to know that. It’s the unknown or unsure that’s the problem, in my opinion.

I guess my viewpoint is that “one action every 48 hours” is significantly more than a minimal amount of effort. I don’t play most dynasties because I’m unwilling to commit that much time to them, and I guess there are a lot of prospective players in the same boat.

(That said, the pace of core gameplay is substantially faster than that nowadays; you ideally have to be online every 4 hours to be able to make the edit window of every possible proposal, because missing an edit window can often put you at a severe disadvantage in guiding the course of the game.)

Regarding the 48 hour pacing, I think that players who desire slower pacing do have the responsibility to stand up for themselves and make the changes they want to see in the dynasty. That really is the bare minimum of dynastic participation. If you’re not around to shape the rules, you can’t reasonably expect that the rules are going to fit your preferences or time availability.

Consider that 48 hours coincides nicely with the Proposal timeout period, which should be a strong first indicator of what sort of participation pacing is going to be most beneficial.