I’ve avoided weighing in on all of this so far, but my concern is twofold:

1) If we remove timing coordination from the dynasty then what’s left? I find coordinating with a team more fun than most, sure, but if we remove it then the dynasty becomes a game of who can spot a sequence that can be squeezed out in the smallest number of moves - and for some players not even that, as if they come online after a plan has been hatched then all they really get to do is sit there and do as they’re told, as the actions that could disrupt a plan are totally reduced to ‘the other team finishing theirs quicker’.

2) As a corollary to that, this proposal doesn’t really alleviate timing issues, it just focuses them. A lot of rounds will simply be reduced to “which Mastermind can act quickest”, which is a fight ais will always win.

@Josh:

Re: 1), this is really a problem of scoring being too easy at the moment – we haven’t really iterated much on the core mechanic of Targets yet because we’ve been focusing on other things instead.

I feel like perhaps the problem is that the fun part of the dynasty is “the team works together to achieve something” and that working together is currently done in terms of timing coordination, because the problem of finding a route to a target is simple enough that you don’t really need a whole team working on it.

Re: 2), I don’t think it’s correct to say that I’ll always win it, but that doesn’t really matter – I agree that I have an advantage over you in that respect, and would expect to win maybe 75% of the time, which is already enough to unbalance things.

I am not sure how to vote on this. It places substantial extra workload on Masterminds due to introducing some fairly complex tracking, and somehow manages to make basically every member on the team feel irrelevant, including the Mastermind (in that it basically devolves to “one person comes up with a plan to follow, the other players put in resources and are otherwise basically just puppets”). The most fun moments this dynasty for me have been when we’ve been in the middle of a series of actions and rolled high on the DICE48s, forcing us to improvise to regroup a workable plan with the remaining actions before the other team see what we’re doing and stop us, and this proposal basically makes those moments into pure exercises in Masterminding rather than having the whole team improvising. So those are reasons to vote against.

On the other hand, removing the timing issues seems like it may be necessary for the health of the game as a whole; the necessary levels of timing coordination under the current rules are clearly unacceptable to some players. BlogNomic has long given the advice of “if you aren’t enjoying the game we’re playing, change the rules”, and the timing-related posts we’ve seen recently are a consequence of that, I think. Sometimes, you have to make the game worse as a game in order to make it less onerous as a hobby.

I have been wondering whether the DICE48 is too short, but lengthening it wouldn’t remove the need for timing coordination – it would simply increase the flexibility in what time of day to coordinate at, whilst substantially slowing down the pace of dynastic gameplay. I think that would only work if you also slowed down the pace of core gameplay to compensate.

To be fair to SingularByte, this only adds an additional possibility to allow the Mastermind to execute a sequence of Heists if the Participants want to do it that way. The existing way would still exist after this, so I don’t agree that this removes timing coordination, but offers an alternative for those who can’t.

I’d be curious to know if folks think that by simply offering an alternative, everyone will go for that over executing Heists themselves, even though they could still do it on their own if this Proposal was enacted.

If the idea of Mastermind-executed plans is really that compelling, doesn’t that tell us something about the state of the game?

Hmm, I’m out of slots, but a potential solution: make it easier to spread out a series of changes over multiple hours without the other team interfering (probably by preventing one team changing words that the other has changed for 24 hours, meaning that blocking needs to be done indirectly, and also ensuring you can’t use Guesses to change words that changed recently). If you combine that with making the targets more difficult (e.g. via Broken Swords), then timing synchronisation becomes relatively less important, and strategy / adapting to changing conditions becomes relatively more important.

That does sound viable.  Withdrawn.