Monday, September 12, 2011

Proposal: The Quantity Theory of Insanity

Reached quorum 6 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 13 Sep 2011 02:16:32 UTC

Remove “, which defaults to 15” from the rule “Cabin Fever” and add, to the end of that paragraph:-

When a player unidles or joins the game, their Sanity is set to the arithmetic mean of every other Survivor’s Sanity (rounding up).

Now that Sanity is directly connected to two victory conditions, new players probably shouldn’t be entering the game with the highest possible Sanity. Similarly, anyone who idled out and missed a couple of weeks and starvation and misery maybe shouldn’t be able to pop back up entirely unaffected by it.

posted by Kevan at 12 Sep 2011 13:34:31 UTC Comments (6)

Comments

Prince Anduril:

12-09-2011 15:04:32 UTC

Not sure about arithmetic mean. Would median be more appropriate?

for

Kevan: he/him

12-09-2011 15:21:33 UTC

[Anduril] Perhaps. I think the mean feels instinctively fairer; it’s as if the new player’s strategy before they existed was a smoothed-out combination of everyone else’s strategy. But lumping them towards the majority might be more accurate, since that averaged-out strategy might not have existed. (If the game veers towards a wide and constantly maintained Sanity split - say 5,5,5,15,15 - then a starting mean Sanity of 9 would be fairer to the new player, but a median Sanity of 5 would be more realistic.) Feel free to propose a tweak if you feel strongly about it.

Ely:

12-09-2011 19:24:05 UTC

for I think mean is fairer since all our values are in a quite small range with easily reachable boundaries (it’s fast to get to 0).
I think median is more appropriate for a wide range of more static values (with more possibilities of a strong lead) like Purplebeard’s last Dynasty.

BellEt:

12-09-2011 22:02:51 UTC

for

Florw:

13-09-2011 06:40:23 UTC

for

Blacky:

13-09-2011 07:21:20 UTC

for In this case I also prefer the average, as with a majority o dead people around it would be impossible to unidle.