BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Protosals for simple mechanics and your earlier “Out of slots, but someone should propose these…” request seem more befitting the vision of the Emperor than a player. If you can’t wait an hour and a half for a proposal slot, you could always self-kill the one that’s about to time out at 5-7.

Hrm? All I’m doing is suggesting gameplay improvements. Not sure why I need to be Emperor to do that.

We have a system of proposals for suggesting gameplay improvements - that’s what Nomic is. And we have a two-per-player limit on them to stop the blog from getting too noisy, and to stop a few prolific players from overwhelming the game. The Emperor stepping up to make some broad-strokes suggestions can be a good thing; a random player standing up to tell the non-proposing players that they should propose his ideas for him seems somewhat impolite, though.

Maybe it’s time for an essay on protosals.

Is this supposed to be a proposal?

Its not like players have to listen to them. All it does is generate discussion so that proper proposals don’t waste people’s time because they aren’t fully thoughout before hand. If people want to ignore them, they are more than welcome to.

So protosal wasn’t a typo. It’s a combination of prototype and proposal. Clever…

[Henri] Some players make them; they aren’t bound by any rules, they’re just a way of discussing a subject, usually a controversial one, or one that needs very careful attention to detail.

[Clucky] That’s not all that protosals do, though, they also generate confusion - people mistake them for proposals, and later assume that a popular idea must be in the ruleset by now, even if the protoser never actually proposed it. And if it does get proposed, any discussion is split between the proposal and the proto.

They slow the game down. If you make a proposal and people like it, then they can immediately start proposing add-ons and side-effects further up the queue, and the gameplay will hit the ruleset more quickly. If you have a great idea but it’s only a protosal, then we all have to wait for you to consider the feedback and post the proposal version before we can move forward.

From a strict gameplay perspective protosals feel unsporting - we play the game by making proposals, we can get ahead by introducing loopholes and selfish advantages, and we are only allowed two proposals at a time. There’s nothing in the ruleset against being cagey and throwing out risky proposals as “protosals” (and just abandoning them if they prove unpopular), but it feels impolite, and most players refrain from it. Chatting about an idea on IRC is one thing, but quite different from taking a formal straw poll of all active players.

People can ignore protosals, and people often do ignore them, making them less use than a proposal - timid players who would be confident to cast a simple vote can be intimidated by the call for a non-vote discussion, and players with limited time to play the game aren’t going to spend too much of it considering feedback for an idea that might not even get proposed.

We can’t ignore them completely, though. They’re at the top of the blog, they come up in the Twitter feed, and whatever else. I can ignore Nigerian scam email, but I still have to delete it. If every player who used up their two proposals slots also posted a couple of “here are some other ideas which you should propose for me” and “here’s a little idea I might propose when I get my slot back tomorrow, but not if you don’t like it”, then the game would be confusing and noisy place.

Does scrolling less than half a page really take that long? Not everyone using IRC, and certainly not all at once, so its a rather terrible place to get feedback on proposal ideas.

Your argument for why it slows the game down is “If you had proposed a standard proposal, people could write tie offs” but that doesn’t work if you don’t have more proposals to propose. In that case, it certainly doesn’t slow the game down.

Your argument of “If everyone used two proposal slots and also made protosoals” is also kinda silly because that’s not what’s happening here. There isn’t a ton of new mechanics being proposed creating an overwhelming amount of content and if there was I wouldn’t make a protosal

No comment.

Your protosal here doesn’t slow the game down, but if you’d suggested something significant, other players would have to choose between waiting for an actual proposal from you, and going ahead on treading on your toes with their own similar idea. If they choose to be polite and wait, it slows that vector of the game.

My argument of “if” has an “if” in it - if more people did what you were doing (if we actually wrote protosals into the ruleset, as well as “exposals” where you could post two or three extra ideas you had, and encouraged everyone to use these), I suspect we’d all get a bit fed up of it. If something would be bad when made available to everyone, we shouldn’t be encouraging it.

And IRC isn’t great, no, but the best place to get feedback on a proposal idea is to make a proposal! In the five hours this has been up you’ve gotten me grumbling about protosals, someone asking if this was supposed to be a proposal and a “no comment”. Quirck’s nearby proposal got three clear votes in that time.

Sorry I’m using my proposal slots to try and fix loopholes in the core rules and can’t actually proposal more dynastic rule changes as well…

Yeah, we did try giving people extra core proposals in 2010, but took it out again for being needlessly elaborate in 2011. Maybe we should have another go at that.