Although some sanction may be warranted for brazenly flouting the “should” in “A Scoring should reflect how much the commenter thinks it fits the Prompt”, banning a player from the dynasty is the sort of extreme sanction that I wouldn’t want to see applied for anything less than a Fair Play problem.

Josh’s admitted strategic motives further detract from his case.

@Bucky What in god’s name are you talking about

Okay, apparently Josh isn’t doing this for his own strategy, just trying to remove Raven’s strategic impact on some other players. Vote stands.

I don’t have time to lay out my full thoughts on this tonight, but fundamentally agree with everything that Josh says here, including the final statement about a commitment to play the game. It’s very well put.

We’re losing too much to the idea that BlogNomic should go out of its way to accommodate a regularly returning player who neither wants to play Nomic, nor play the dynastic games we create.

I’m not fully sensing why my strategy of hunting favourites is singled out as “enabled by rogue players”; but I’m not fully on for or neg yet. Feeling a bit exhausted from a week of play; and multiple times of this in the recent week.

light def

@chiiika I don’t follow, sorry; you are not an even incidental target of this proposal, and I’m sorry if the wording of it makes you feel like you are.

I do not think that I can have a proper say in this, as I have not been here long enough to properly acclimate to the community. 

To be honest, I’m very conflicted on how to vote on this. I think this partly reflects the earlier discussions which were caused by me yielding for a round. Being active should be an indicator that one is present and interested in playing the game, regardless of the period of time that one is prepared to play for. My vote reflects a stance that if one does not wish or have the capacity to properly engage, they should idle until they are ready. HOWEVER, this also means that should Raven at some point be ready to truly engage in the game, I want them back. I don’t hold grudges. I believe that “Idle” should be less absolute of a status.

While I am FOR making Raven idle, I am AGAINST locking them that way for the remainder of the dynasty. 

Just to note that my hope is that this is the end of the matter, either way; I won’t be revising this so please don’t worry about arrow votes, I intend to respect the decision of the blog on this, at least for this dynasty.

That said, TDS, if it helps, precondition unidling is on - so Raven would have a route back into the game if this passed, it would just require him to make a positive pubic statement suggesting that he was ready to play, under which circumstances I at least would certainly vote in favour.

I wanted this dynasty to be light-hearted and fun. It’s been really nice that it actually attracted more people over its lifetime and, other than Raven, has had good participation, and very few have dropped out over anything other than time constraints. I really want to keep it that way, and if Raven’s behavior is making this un-fun and unfair, then I support this decision.

Given Josh’s point that Raven would have a route back in, I feel better voting , especially now that the cooldown period after idle was recently reduced from 96 hours to 48 hours.

I’m conflicted on this. But I have a lot of respect for Kevan, Josh and JonathanDark’s opinions here. I also feel that the concern around Ravens play has been raised a few times already and it hasn’t changed. Its definitely a heavy handed move that I don’t feel great doing

for now, want to hear from Raven though.  Why are you phoning in the reviews and the submissions? What are you getting out of your current involvement with the dynasty?

Looks like he’s already left discord =/

So yes, removing Raven from this one specific dynasty does seem fair to me at this point, if they’re not playing it on any level, and have, both here and in the various other places where this has been raised with them, still expressed no intention to. (And I think this does need the unidling restriction, to avoid an “actually what prevents” unidling 48 hours later, Raven seeming to be guided more by the letter of the ruleset than discussions around it.) They’re welcome to Precondition their way back immediately, or to join the next dynasty if they’re going to play it.

Trying to take a neutral minimalist approach to a game that you’re not really following is very hard to do! Dynastically, Raven’s 5-point scoring seems intended as a generous neutral boost to everyone equally, but they’re obliviously biasing the game by rescuing Flops and voting late on early Backronyms. In proposal voting they seem to be trying to vote neutrally by casting DEF votes, or lateish FOR/AGAINSTs that match any emerging consensus, I assume with the intention that these votes will have no impact and won’t bother anyone: but that still has biases around timezones and contentious discussions, if they never reassess those votes. (The latter was a big part of why I passed on the previous dynasty, when it went up to two minimalist players.)

Raven’s strongly passive playstyle has been frustrating for the proposal game this dynasty, perhaps because the dynastic game is such a simple one. Any rule change I’ve thought about proposing (or voting on) has had to go through the filter of considering how a fully passive player would interact with it. I was torn on whether to even bother trying to amend the rating system, because Raven voting sequentially or at random would be more disruptive than them giving everyone 5. (When I did write it, I took time to do so in such a way that if Raven didn’t read the proposal and carried on giving everyone 5, it wouldn’t hold the game up.) I’d rather not have to factor all this in.

It does feel as if BlogNomic has been on the cusp of a new, more engaged era for the past few years, but that passive players keep sinking the more fragile dynasties by joining them and not playing them, and then (if the game gets quieter) quickly agreeing to any suggestion that the dynasty should be abandoned.

I don’t know if the idle system is unclear and needs a rehaul or explainer, or if it’s just a couple of players who have unusual misunderstandings and superstitions about it. (Raven said this week that they didn’t want to be blocked from unidling at the very start of the next dynasty by idling now, when the rule has never worked like that in the time that they’ve been here.)

It feels like there’s a stigma for some players on idling, as if it’s a slight on them instead of a “this dynasty is not for me / I don’t have the time” statement. It’s curious to me what anyone would get out of passively participating in a dynasty rather than idling.

The only thing I can think of is the mention of “kingmaker”, as if contributing the minimal amount of dynastic actions and proposal votes was seen as helpful. There’s clearly a fundamental misunderstanding among some passive players of how they think they are perceived by other players. When that “bubble” is shattered and it is clearly shown to them that their passiveness is not at all appreciated, their confusion is so great that it leads to rage-quitting.

At this point I think this has become a moot process as it appears he’s left all together =/

It is moot for this specific incident, but it’s still important to have the discussion for future players.

I always have great respect for a player who chooses to idle out, but I suppose it rarely comes across when they can be gone in a couple of blog comments and there’s nowhere obvious to say that. Maybe we should shift idling requests to always require a full blog post, to make them more of a goodbye, and encourage others to respond, as much as they would if the player had stayed to the end of the game. DoomedIdeas got some response for theirs, in retrospect not enough from me.

For stigma, the game does go easier on passive players than idle ones, in some ways. An idle player bursting in to try some scam or kingmake (whether it succeeds or fails) might be seen by some players as impolite; a passive player waking up to do the same, less so - if anything it might be seen as fair play since the group allowed it to happen in plain sight. We literally have an “Endgame Wordsmiths” rule on the books right now that stops unidling players from influencing the outcome last minute, but no equivalent for passive players. If I wanted to give up and kingmake this dynasty, the ruleset is telling me I should nod through every round passively until endgame, rather than take a break and potentially miss my chance.

I still don’t know what Raven meant by seeing themselves as a “positive kingsman”. They talked as if they just wanted to give everyone the same meaningless score increase. I don’t know whether they also had an eye on the fact that they could switch to potentially kingmaking a specific person in the final round (giving them 5 and everyone else 1), if asked to.

Maybe this hints at a dynastic or admin-level “ombudsman”, someone who can act as a neutral party to handle passive players and encourage them to find a better purpose for their play, or to perform some introspection and see if they truly want to keep participating or if they’re just going along out of some sense of peer pressure.

It would be similar to Mentors in terms of neutrality and non-strategic advice but a long-standing position for anyone who needs it.

Not quite sure how to implement it or who should be among its ranks.

I think it needs to be more cultural than that. If the group saw passive play and idling more like they might in other social games (somebody scrolling through their phone at a boardgame night and saying “oh, my turn? I, uh, pass” for the fifth time in ten minutes; somebody having to leave a sports match early after playing an amazing first half), everybody would be treating it as a bigger deal, with no need to wait for an ombudsman to step in. I think the model for what it means for a player to tune out of gameplay or leave the game is currently much less clear for a very ambient online game like BlogNomic.

It can also be handled by how we create dynasties. Passive dynastic play is already discouraged, or its effect diminished, in more complex rulesets - the Acronym game is unusual for being deliberately simple and light. In a dynasty with a lot of resources and mechanics, a player who snoozes for three weeks and still has zero Coal, Wood, Iron or Sheep will have much less ability to influence the game at that point than the those who have been playing it. And in a dynasty which has complex, compulsory rules, a passive player will actually idle out if they decide that even the lowest-effort route is too much for them.