on principle.

What’s the principle?

a) the generic gameplay idea of wanting to create mechanics that aren’t broken by new players, and especially not locking them out because you can’t think of a better way to handle them; and b) the purely selfish idea of rather liking scams where people swoop in last-moment and pull off something spectacular.

Does the new-player-as-resource thing not bother you? You’ve spoken before about the unreasonable pressure of timing scams (“if I just stay awake until 2am, I can take a fifth action and win”) - does this not also go for “if I can just ask a trusted friend to join this blog and type some things, I can win”?

It does bother me, but there are various caveats.

First, BlogNomic has a trivial such scam in the core rules: get more new players to join than there are existing players, and pass any proposal or CFJ you want. (I believe this was tried once, leaving me in an awkward position of trying to play both sides as I was one of the few overlapping players between the invader and invadee.) The standard counterscam to this is well known but not always possible to enact (and requires yet more new players). Core rules scams are frowned upon, but I feel that dynastic scams that involve someone entirely unrelated to the nomic so far are also frowned upon (or they would presumably have been tried more often).

Second, it’s not really necessary to recruit new players for scams because there’s nearly always sufficiently many existing players who are willing to go along with it, often with nothing in exchange. At BlogNomic, I’d estimate the number of players willing to go along with this at around 40-50% of the player list at any given time; higher towards the end of a dynasty (because towards the end of a dynasty, fewer players have the chance to win entirely via existing dynastic mechanics, and a core-mechanics based trick like introducing a flawed rule is more likely to be noticed and more likely to be voted down even if it isn’t noticed). I never used to have problems finding an admin to do something for me that was non-time-critical and helped me win (although I used to use IRC, which no longer really works because nobody else is there; I don’t really want to have to make a Slack account).

Third, I prefer it when game mechanics are designed such that giving each player control of a few extra players wouldn’t really break things (really large numbers, OK, but a few, I’m fine with that). This is hard to do, but tends to give much more scam resistance than assuming that everyone is playing to their victory condition (which is one of the worst assumptions you can make in Nomic; it is nearly always false).

It’s interesting to note how this sort of thing is typically handled at Agora (which has also been in a slump recently along with BlogNomic). One perennial “problem” Agora has is that sometimes we have rules allowing players to be artificially created (often in large numbers), and even when we don’t, people frequently somehow find a way to pull it off anyway. As a result, players are on the lookout for any proposal that could be scammed via the addition of duplicate players (and vote them down when they notice). I have a fond memory of a scam that took months of planning that involved creating a hundred identical players in an attempt to gain a dictatorship, and we had to jump through a lot of hoops in a Rube Goldberg sort of way to get them to do anything interesting, because there were no straightforward uses for them. (The scam ended up failing; I can’t quite remember why, but I think it was for an unrelated reason.)

Another safety valve that often exists at Agora in one form or another is a sort of limit that allows suspicious new players to be temporarily locked out from play (for long enough to pass a proposal rectifying the situation); these have evolved over the years. This dynasty actually has something pretty equivalent: the Attack mechanic. The dynastic rules could defend against any number of newly joining players via preventing them taking daily actions for a couple of days (giving time to Attack), and allowing Attacks on new players to be made outside the normal daily/weekly action time limits. I’m not sure this would necessarily improve the dynasty (and I’m almost positive it won’t become relevant), but I guess I could propose it anyway; I haven’t made a proposal for ages.

Your second point applies less to this dynasty than most (and deliberately so): asking a less active player to help with an Attack or Escape could end up with them effortlessly backstabbing you, at great cost to you. But being able to recruit a trusted human with no stake or interest in the game undermines that. It’s not a big deal in the early game - if someone had gotten a friend to join, support an Attack and then leave, there’d have been plenty of time to react and punish the recruiter for it (either with dynastic gameplay or a healing proposal) - but in the endgame it’s worth deciding in advance whether we’d object if that happened. I’d gladly have this tactic removed from my armoury, because it’s boring and I wouldn’t want to have to make the call on whether to use it to win.

Designing a game where cloned or mind-controlled players wouldn’t break anything sounds fun as a one-off - I enjoyed the Hivemind mechanic in the Jupiter dynasty even if it never came to anything. But yes, “hard to do”. And it’s limiting to try to stick to that every dynasty, with a lot of basic mechanics like trading and take-that-attacking needing elaborate restrictions to function at all fairly.

I’ve wondered a few times whether it’s worth actually giving BlogNomic an explicit “endgame” mechanic: we define a criterion midgame such that the game is bound to be over shortly after that point, and when it’s met then the door clangs down, no more bets please, and the active players alone play it out. (Well, unless someone joins and proposes convincingly to be let in.)

(Have wondered if it’s worth adding a trivial countermeasure regarding the first point. It’s just wearying to think of this being excitedly misread by Agora as some sort of announced challenge.)

I’m not sure if Agora itself has ever officially invaded a nomic that hasn’t outright baited it first (B Nomic doesn’t really count in this regard). That said, sometimes a group of nomic players who met each other via Agora have decided to stage an invasion unilaterally, without any support from the actual nomic rules; this is something that is very hard to stop (and players who are outside the subset of invaders have no way to stop it via game mechanics either, because it’s not being done as part of the game; this can be quite frustrating, about the best that can be done is to invade along with them and vote the other way).

I suspect that Agora (or sets of Agorans unofficially, which is what happened last time) are unlikely to invade BlogNomic again except under two circumstances: a) BlogNomic intentionally throws out a challenge (explicitly via email/blog, or implicitly via invading in the reverse direction); b) a time happens when Agora is undergoing high activity and BlogNomic is basically dead (in which case the main point of the invasion would be to mobilize people to repel it, hopefully reigniting the nomic as a side effect). Hopefully the players in question are at least now aware that BlogNomic sees this sort of trivial core rules scam as Bad Style.

Doesn’t Agora track its relations with other Nomics? This “we will brigade your Nomic if we deem it ‘basically dead’, we think this will reignite it, you’ll thank us, no charge” service should really be opt-in.