I still think some discussion around this would be helpful. I don’t agree that voting during the 4-hour grace period for edits is the logical conclusion of this rule text. I’m happy to have my mind changed, but I don’t want the only reason to vote in favor of this to be stopping the voting during that grace period. To be honest, removing this alone wouldn’t necessarily stop that. It could be a tactic useful for anyone wanting to kill a proposal by preventing its edit, outside of any other consideration, and I’m not comfortable with encouraging that tactic.

Regardless of whether it encourages voting during grace period, I am just not a fan of it as a whole. The incentive for engaging with proposals is that it is the main portion of the game we’re playing, and we already have a system to discourage people from not interacting (7 day force idling). We also have another rule which removes sprint if a player is not active (not taking their turn).

This just seems unnecessarily harsh on people who only check the blog every 2 or 3 days, which, as the timeout limit is 7 days, we have decided is not enough time of inactivity to punish someone. (Whether I agree with that is another story, even though I am one of those people who only checks every 2-3 days sometimes)

[@JD] I honestly didn’t think too hard about my vote for the original proposal. The idea of encouraging players to participate was nice but after reading all the discussion I agree with Josh it probably won’t do very much.

I’m likely in support of removing it, the barely-active players will just ignore the penalty anyway and the active ones will just be annoyed by having to login every 2 days to comment/vote on every proposal in case it times out at 48. I don’t think the ‘fence-sitters’ which you mention as the target audience for Vote Meeples are actually real. People are either checked into the game or they aren’t, and no amount of in-the-game encouragement will turn the latter into the former because they aren’t paying attention to begin with

I was partly inspired by the fact that some proposals have been timing out recently. I agree that the rule is easy to work around by making a comment without actually reading the proposal, but was hoping that it would cause proposals to receive useful feedback from a greater range of players (if you’re coming to the thread anyway, why not read the proposal and see whether you agree with it or not?).

For what it’s worth, I think “should you have to log in every 2 days?” is a question that’s worth discussing – it would be nice if we could make the dynasty work even for players that don’t, but that a) might require extending the timeout on proposals and CFJs, to allow such players to give their input and b) would need the game to be substantially accelerated so that it finishes in a reasonable length of time – if we sometimes have to wait a week for a round to end we’ll only be able to fit in 6-8 rounds or so in the length of a typical dynasty. (That said, accelerating the game – presumably in the sense of “it needs fewer rounds to win” – is probably a good thing anyway, regardless of what we decide about the pace of core-rules play.)

On a related topic, the Community Guidelines say “The rhythm of a dynasty of BlogNomic should not be less than 24 hours - which is to say, the ruleset should usually not require players to check the game more than once a day.” I personally think 24 hours is too fast, and have generally been aiming for 48 (although I don’t always succeed in that aim), but it may be that slower gameplay still is better for most players; it’s hard to get a sense of what people think is reasonable until you actually make the proposals! The problem is, going slower than 48 probably needs core rule changes, or else the fast players can sneak a timeouted proposal behind the backs of the slow players. (It is weird, though, that we have a 168-hour idle timeout, but a 48-hour proposal timeout and 4-hour edit window timeout.) At least two players who idled last dynasty explicitly stated that the reason was that they were unable to keep up with the pace of gameplay. 48 hours is often too fast for me too, which is one of the primary reasons why I’m frequently idle at BlogNomic; I’ve had enough free time lately to keep up but there’s no guarantee that that’s always the case.

The problem, of course, is that if you slow the pace of gameplay, then either dynasties will have to have less gameplay in, or else they’ll have to last longer, and both of those have negative effects. So there are tradeoffs here that I’m not sure of the best way to resolve.

I think the ideal check-in-frequency we should expect from players is either 24 or 48 hours, and will oppose any attempts to lengthen the proposal cycle or otherwise. If I wanted a slower game, I’d probably go play some other Nomic. That said, it’s nice that busier players who don’t have time to be there for every proposal can still be minimally active and play BlogNomic without timing out if they want (though maybe this dynasty isn’t the best time to have those players, since one person can hold up the entire dynastic game). I think the pace of the game is just fine as it is, no need to mess with it

I’m still concerned that voting in favor of this encourages rather than discourages voting during the edit window, but since that didn’t happen for this Proposal, making peace in these times is the better option.

I think if someone starts tactically killing edit windows to sink proposals we can deal with that outside of the game. That’s a social problem rather than a rules one