While the old version reduces the timeout period if one was idled due to inactivity last dynasty, the new version reduces the timeout period if the inactivity period existed at all regardless of whether anyone noticed at the time.

This new version presents an undesirable situation where, between 96 and 168 hours of inactivity, one cannot tell for sure whether a City Architect is timed out without checking all their activity during the previous dynasty and, if they had a similar 96 hour period during that dynasty, even earlier.

The changes also badly affect players who unidled after a long absence, since players who were idle for an entire dynasty would almost always be subject to the reduced timeout after unidling.

Good point, “timed out” isn’t the action of idling. I’ve changed “if they timed out during the previous dynasty” to “if they were idled for being timed out during the previous dynasty”, which should address that.

Oh, scam alert! An admin can idle inactive City Architects who are already idle in order to subject them to the short timer in the following dynasty. This is also a problem with the current version.

I’m still unhappy with the core concept, here, really, and likely will remain so until such a time as it systemically becomes the case that this is observed by admins rather than being theoretical, or - much worse - something that is applied selectively and possibly punitively.

Perhaps we could actually mark the fact that someone was idled out like this as a comment in the players template along with the dynasty it happened in. We’d need a consistent format for it, but it would help avoid being selective about it.

Since timeouts require a blog post, searching the blog for the word “idle” should find them. Pokes and Lendunistus are the only two that show up as being timed out last dynasty, under that, where Brendan and Raven voluntarily idled. I can’t tell what happened to Chiiika, though.

It may actually be too niche a definition, though, if this hasn’t yet been applied and it wouldn’t apply to any of the current four-days-idle players. (Benbot has consistently timed out of every dynasty they’ve ever joined, they just didn’t join the previous dynasty.)

Oh, I was reading the wrong gamestate page: Trapdoorspyder was the other player to idle out last dynasty, not Chiiika. And they did this voluntarily.

I am starting to wonder if the rule saying that core rules need a full quorum might be a little too harsh given that this one has all green ticks except for a single def, and yet it’s likely going to fail due to too many players being in the process of idling out the slow way. The UnRARe proposal has it even worse since that one is basically unanimous.

I think the slow idling is the problem there. (UnRARe is at 7-0 and would be enactable if the three players who are 5/6 days inactive - Benbot, Misty, Habanero - had voluntarily gone idle instead of staying on the roster and inflating quorum for a week.) That and the fact that new players are naturally a little more cautious about voting early on core amendments.

It would seem a mistake to bake into the core enactment rule the assumption that that 1/5 of players will always fail to vote on all proposals, and another 1/3 will always shy away from voting on core, meaning that quorum is impossible on a core amendment and a less conclusive agreement is always sufficient. In a few days we’ll have timed out the inactive players; in another dynasty we might have (as we have had before) new players who are bolder in their support of core proposals.

[Josh] Reminder that this proposal is just patching something that you asked me to patch, and a few weeks later admonished me for not having patched yet.

Sure we can’t always assuming they will fail to vote, but we also can’t assume that we’ll be able to reach quorum for important things either.

I’m thinking we could just weaken the rule about needing a full quorum. For example, we could say that if a core rule has unanimous votes in favour, then it can count as a success irrespective of whether it’s officially hit quorum (but possibly with some kind of lower limit, like you still need 1/3 of players to vote or some minimum number).

Or we could say that if a quorum of admins has voted in favour, then the rule could fall back to the normal timeout rules rather than just auto-failing on timeout since we’d be able to say that enough experienced players will have had a look at it.

I’d propose one of these myself, but it might be best for me to wait until a few have idled out first.

@Kevan If my vote on this looks decisive then I’ll consider switching it, but I don’t feel compelled to vote in favour just because it’s a problem that I identified; my interest is still primarily that this be repealed, and it being slightly broken works in my favour to that end

[SingularByte] I’d rather these situations tried to involve the players who were present but not voting, instead of looking for a way to move forward without them. If some of those silences mean “I don’t understand why we need this”, and they would vote AGAINST if pressed, they may have a point.