Eh, I don’t know… We get into murky territory when we start having to prove peoples’ states of mind.

I guess this just entrenches the (perceived) status quo ante, so it is unlikely to have a very malign effect. But I think my reflexive preference is for a slightly looser set of rules around this.

We’re already there with the posting of a DoV requiring the poster to believe that they’ve won. It seems okay to me for DoV posts and votes to both exist in the same, higher plane, where we step outside of the tactical game and take a genuine poll on what just happened.

“Okay” is exactly what it seems!

As noted, Raising the Bar changes the status quo and it’s a change that I like.

Just taking a bit of a historical deep dive, the current wording around votes having to reflect a genuine belief in the victory of the poster dates back to 2006. It looks like it came in as part of a package of changes due to Bucky issuing an apparently insincere DoV, but the change to the mens rea of the vote was uncommented on at the time. Prior to this change, the test was that players should “respond to the Declaration of Victory saying whether [they regard] it as legal or illegal”.

So this isn’t an eternal and unchanging bit on BlogNomic, although it is a very old one.

In what situations is it desirable or useful for a player to vote FOR a DoV that they agree didn’t technically work, or AGAINST one that they think did?

Is it just having the option to legally vote “close enough” on a DoV that overlooked something minor?

That’s one use case, sure.

For whatever reason, I’m currently looking at a blognomic that seems, however temporarily, to be dominated by what I call the “nod-along” approach - players who don’t propose, vote with the majority, rarely make impactful arguments on direction, rarely take dynastic actions, aren’t either competitive to win or shaping the long-term discourse of the game. I guess that’s an inevitable corollary of the world reopening - the increase in competitiveness over lockdown was perhaps the actual diversion from the norm.

That’s a slightly depressing read on where we are, perhaps, but also: it’s now been, what, five or six dynasties since we had one that was actually competitive, as in, more than one player at the end of the dynasty who was actively trying to win?

There isn’t a solution to that, other than “wait for the wheel to turn”, but making it slightly easier to tap out of uncompetitive games will hopefully speed up the wheel, increaseing the number of entry points for new or returning competitive players. That’s my theory, anyway.

I think we might be seeing a different angle on the old, dormant dynasties of 2015-16, except instead of a round dwindling to two actual players (where the problem is then obviously perceived as “not enough players”), it dwindles to six or seven, with only two actually playing (and the problem is less obvious).

And that reopens the strategy that low-player dynasties had prior to the Dormancy rule: that if you can make everyone else bored with the dynasty, and have a plausible claim at being ahead on gamestate, you win. Speeding that wheel by making it even easier for a group to say “yes we are bored with this dynasty” risks just amplifying that.

Yeah, okay, having thought about it a bit, I’m convinced.  I think I’d probably encourage going a little further even than this, though; maybe a thought for the dormancy rework proposal.