To be perfectly honest, I think we should just perfect the merit system and get rid of recommendations/citations. They never made sense to me as a game mechanic in a “competitive” game (in the sense that there is a winner).

I think Nomic is not entirely a competetive game, it involves colloboration as well. And a community as a whole may well have mechanisms of rewarding or punishing members.

That is a fairly short sighted point of view. The merit system encourages individuality / methodically chugging to maximize a methodic result. Its quite simply boring.

The recommendation system turns it into a game of teamwork/backstabbing. You can’t just do your own thing—you need to work with other people to move up. It makes a far more engrosing game and enabled overall effort to be rewarded, not just “aww look you powered a machine… have some victory points”

Nomic is a cooperative game, I agree. But I like to look at the *dynasty* as a competitive game.

As a Nomic player I’m not necessarily playing to win the dynasty. As a Worker, I am. Therefore, my Worker’s actions should further my own gamestate relative to others. The recommendation system does the opposite.

I could understand why people might not agree with me, but this perspective makes the most sense to me and is a lot of the reason I was attracted to Nomic in the first place.

And Clucky: how is spamming “beneficial” actions (as defined by the rules) hoping for someone else to recommend you working with other people. Because so far that’s the only way recommendations have happened, which not coincidentally resulted in the same set of people getting rep (or at least a large subset of it) that would have gotten it from a fleshed out merit system.

right, but the point is that it wasn’t some formulaic automatized thing that can be abused

you keep saying that giving other people reputation can’t help yourself, but I disagree. I scratch your back if you scratch mine is one of the older tricks in the book.