Mildly . This doesn’t target either of the main real problems with the last dynasty and feels like it would gum up the works in a way that’s not that helpful.

My understanding that the main concern people had was people unidling at the end to gain winshare. Had this rule been in place, Zack, Lulu and I all wouldn’t have gotten any equity (as only Nomicers can have equity) as we would’ve needed a way to get off the bench before the Lacunexit went off

It wouldn’t have done anything about telling darknight and raven to reinitialize, but that is a separate issue not trying to address here and so not worth getting into at this time

I could see an issue with this one where non-admin players can’t unbench themselves even if otherwise permitted since as far as I remember, players can’t edit the player list.

@Clucky No, players unidling for winshare is fine imo. Players inciting other non-active players to unidle/reinitialise for winshare for lols is what I had a problem with. I am happy to live in a world where a player can come off the bench and exploit a purely self-interested scam. This is the exact kind of overreaction stemming from an inability to agree terms that I allude to in the last para of my comment on the chat thread.

At least from how I’ve interpreted the reactions I saw I feel like the end of the dynasty would’ve played out very similarity if everything else had gone the same way I just hadn’t pinged others to have the opportunity to join in on the fun.

Happy to have a discussion on if that sort of behavior is appropriate at another point (also worth discussing how much ‘coaching’ of other players is appropriate) but this proposal is specifically intended to try and address Kevan and SingularByte’s concerns around people joining a dynasty at the end and in doing so, undermining the work they felt they did during the dynasty and would prefer to keep the the proposal discussion focused on that

As a Building Block I don’t think this addresses anything. If it didn’t occur to the last dynasty’s players to include or insist upon an “oh and idle players can’t join this” clause in the roll-off, it wouldn’t have occurred to them to activate The Bench Building Block either.

If it’s an occasional problem that sometimes idle/outsider players will misread a dynasty as being broken or abandoned and brigade it, that needs some permanent core solution rather than relying on a dynasty’s players to anticipate when it’s going to happen.

The thing is that it *did* occur to players to try and go “oh and idle players can’t join this”. Such a rule was built into the original lacuna rules, and people pointed out the problem in the proposal. People just didn’t care enough to vote it down.

But presumably, were this in play instead of the rules you added you could’ve added a rule like “Nomicers cannot be unbenched during a state of Lacuna, but otherwise may unbench themselves at any time” rather than the carveout you did add, and that fix would’ve worked for Josh’s proposal too.

(that being said, reinitializing should definitely bench you if both are on. And SingularByte raises a very good point about only admins being able to unbench people. Might have to track the bench on the wiki instead)

I was considering proposing something like this, but making it clearer that it was a rule that would only be switched on during endgame scenarios, rather than something to be left in place all dynasty (probably by requiring dynastic rules to turn the state on explicitly), and possibly banning all or most dynastic actions too – the idea would be to have prebuilt wording for “this is the endgame, we don’t want players to interfere” rather than needing to write it out separately each time.

With the current wording, I think there’s too much risk of something like this being turned on by mistake early in a dynasty, and I think that would be undesirable.

@Clucky: I don’t think it was so much a case of “didn’t care enough” as “voted before noticing the problem, then didn’t come back to CoV until after the problem was pointed out” – that’s part of the reason why it prompted me to increase the minimum enactment time to 24 hours, to give players a chance to re-evaluate.

“People just didn’t care enough to vote it down.”

I can’t speak for everyone but my mindset during voting was “Raven and Darknight could reinitialise and spend Jokers before this enacted, but they probably won’t because they aren’t playing the dynasty and no active players have a reason to talk them through what they wouldd have to do”. It crossed my mind that an idle player would tell them what to do, although this seemed unlikely. It didn’t occur to me that new players could still unidle, I guess because I vaguely assumed that the Lacuna rule was covering that.

Unidle protection also wasn’t built into the original Lacuna rule! We only remembered to add it after the Lacuna had already started.

per ais

  I’d be in favour of something like this being an occasional thing that you activate later, or something for specific dynasties. I do suspect some of the issue in the last dynasty was that the average score was far too generous a starting point.

A simpler and permanent keyword definition (“If the game is in ‘Lockdown’ then players cannot join the game, reinitialise or unidle.”) would probably be helpful. The players’ reaction on approaching some possible endgame or chop situation would hopefully become “this needs a Lockdown” rather than scrabbling together some milder (or deliberately flawed) custom version of that, if they think of it at all.

@Kevan: My preferred way to do it would be for unidling to be allowed, but for the player to not count as a player for dynastic rules and DoV voting. (That way, you could allow unidling during DoVs.)

@SingularByte: Starting at an average works well in most dynasties (I like to use the median), because normally you need to be top in something to win and thus starting at the median does start new players some distance behind (but not normally irretrievably so). But it didn’t work last dynasty because Equity represented a win share, rather than being something you needed to have the most of to win. I guess this is one of the cases where guidelines that normally make things work properly ended up being inapplicable, and the fact got missed until it started to cause problems.