Seems bad that players will be discouraged from intentionally going idle, even if they know they won’t be around to vote for a while.

What problem is this trying to solve? Returning players potentially resulting in one Client having two Attorneys?

Basically yes, that’s the problem it’s trying to solve.

For the other half: has discouraging idleness by itself historically been a net bad?

I’m not positive that we’re limited to one attorney per client in the first place.

Only via “excluding non-State Clients who are already represented by other Attorneys”, which prevents clients other than Connecticut having more than one attorney.

Structurally (e.g. the Ruleset hypothetically saying “each client is represented by up to one attorney”), there isn’t this limit, but mechanically there is. Unless I’m misunderstanding something.

(Tangential information of maybe-interest: unlike the last dynasty, I’m storing the private information not on paper but in a (backed up!) database; creating and resolving cases is currently done programmatically. When I say ‘structurally’ what I’m really thinking of is the difference between having an attorney field of a client table (insufficient!) vs. what I have: a representation table with attorney and client fields, that in our current Ruleset happens to have no duplicate clients, except for potentially Connecticut or doubling up via idling.)

Historically it’s hard to measure the effect because people rarely explain why they’ve chosen to idle, let alone explain why they’ve chosen not to idle.

Anyone who’s considering stepping temporarily back from BlogNomic (perhaps for Christmas) will, under this rule, explicitly lose all their progress on one of the game’s core resources. So there’s a strong incentive to “soft idle” instead, and just not log in for a while - it slows the game down for everyone who’s still playing, but the idler doesn’t lose out.

We should definitely do something to clean up non-State Clients who end up being represented by multiple Attorneys, but this solution seems unnecessarily broad.

Additionally, I favor clients having teams of attorneys.

I idle from games either because life is hectic or because I’m not interested in either the theme or the mechanics of the dynasty.

I usually idle this way: some random thing keeps me from checking for a few days, so I miss those few days’ worth of proposals, which makes the rules that much harder to understand, so I delay checking what’s new for a while longer, and so on. It’s a positive feedback loop initially caused by small random noise, and something like this would push back enough against that loop to keep me in line. But it sounds like it doesn’t work the same way for other people, so: 

I’m all for clients having teams of attorneys, but am planning on staying out of authoring any proposals that have a whiff of being beneficial or detrimental to any player subset.