BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Seemed a bit of a shame that we slid into the stagnation antipattern again, there - reaching a point where, as an individual player, it’s in your best interests to keep the game quiet in the hope that other players will forget to take actions or idle out.

Tracking it back, this seems to start with having a game mechanic which requires players to be explicitly unanimous in order to progress: once you have that, it becomes a problem that less active players hold the game up, so you agree to penalise them, which creates an incentive to let as many opponents as possible lapse into silence so that you can penalise them all. At which point the game is about keeping things as quiet and boring as possible.

Perhaps any “penalise inactive players” proposal should be treated as a warning sign in future?

I think that’s probably a good policy, and goes in line with the general idea that just being more active (ie having more free time) shouldn’t make you automatically better positioned to win. It’s tempting to want to incentivize activity, because it makes the game more interesting, and keeps proposals from hanging around forever, but explicit rewards/penalties always seem to lead to unsatisfying play.

I wonder if there’s a way to use some sort of sliding-window system to adjust for high-activity versus low-activity players, while allowing both to be effective when the opportunity arises. (“Quorum for fast-track proposals is equal to the number of players who have posted or commented in the last three days,” or something.)

By the way, Kevan, should I assume you made the new logo? Thank you!

You shouldn’t. Looks like it was Tantusar.