Sunday, August 22, 2021

Proposal: Voters Offer Their Empathy

Enacted popular, 7-1. Josh

Adminned at 22 Aug 2021 17:21:59 UTC

Create a new dynastic rule, “Statistics”:

Each Legislator has an Empathy, a publicly tracked integer (that can be positive, negative, or zero, and defaults to zero).
Each Legislator has a Veto Usage, a publicly tracked nonnegative integer that defaults to zero.

Whenever a Proposal not authored by the Wielder of Vetoes is Enacted or Failed, then:

  • If the proposal was vetoed, the Veto Usage of the Legislator who vetoed it is increased by 1;
  • Otherwise, if the proposal was self-killed, no changes are made to Empathy or Veto Usage;
  • Otherwise, every Legislator who ever voted AGAINST the proposal (even if they subsequently changed their vote) loses 1 Empathy, and:
    • if the proposal had been open for voting for less than 48 hours, each other Legislator gains 1 Empathy; or
    • if the proposal had been open for voting for at least 48 hours, each other Legislator who voted FOR that proposal gains 1 Empathy.

The Admin who Enacts or Fails the proposal must update the dynastic tracking page to reflect these changes, unless someone else does so first. However, a failure to do so does not count as failure to enact/fail the proposal.

Set the Wielder of Vetoes’s Veto Usage to 3.

Tracking the FOR/AGAINST voting tendencies of players. I’d love to see lots of proposals pass (despite all the vetoes), so I’m going to be biased to the side of the FOR voters.

Also tracking the vetoing tendencies of players. Right now, it’s just me vetoing things, but given the nature of this dynasty, that may well change at some point. (So far, I’ve vetoed three proposals that were stuck in the queue from the previous dynasty.)

This proposal is also me saying that the expected activity cycle of this dynasty is 48 hours (the length of time it takes for a proposal to time out) – we shouldn’t be punishing players who can’t get to a proposal before it quorums, but may consider mechanics that benefit players who get to a proposal before it times out.

Comments

Clucky: he/him

22-08-2021 02:51:58 UTC

I’m not really a fan of punishing people for voting against a popular idea, especially if they can’t even change their vote later. I think this hurts discussion, and makes people more likely to just go with the flow rather than risk speaking out about what they believe to be a bad rule. (Take your proposal where you accidentally made it so that people don’t clock in. The red x is a good way to single something is wrong with the proposal, where text might just get missed)

Where I think this really breaks down is that it applies to failed proposals too.

In theory, this could allow you to make sweeping changes to the dynastic rules that no one wants, but they would be actively punished for voting against. And so now you get this game of chicken to see who is going to be willing to sacrifice their own state in the game for the overall sake of the blog.

Stuff not made by you, we could maybe hope out for a veto on, but counting veto usage could turn getting vetoes into having gameplay relevancy so that isn’t great either. So I think you see a lot more proposals time out as people are hesitant to bother to be the one voting against them.

Bucky:

22-08-2021 03:17:45 UTC

I don’t think negative Empathy is necessarily a punishment.

Clucky: he/him

22-08-2021 03:31:19 UTC

The fact that people get empathy by default for not voting makes it pretty clear to me its supposed to be a punishment—otherwise you run into issues on the other side of things where a person isn’t able to get on and cast a vote in 12 hours and suddenly misses the opportunity to lose empathy.

ais523:

22-08-2021 03:43:21 UTC

I’m intending this as an incentive to vote FOR proposals when you’re on the fence, but not as a major incentive (it doesn’t even do anything yet but change a number). I think it’d be reasonable for the number to go down every now and then.

It’s worth noting that, say, the original “Nine to Five” wouldn’t have been a disaster to pass-and-fix; it’d have been easy enough to unlock the actions with a fix proposal or CFJ, after all.

I do think “ais523 might exploit this to force through proposals” is a valid concern, though, so I’ve excluded my proposals from the tracking.

Clucky: he/him

22-08-2021 03:49:07 UTC

I still worry this is going to result in more proposals timing out because they are clearly unpopular but people don’t want to take the against vote penalty.

Clucky: he/him

22-08-2021 06:14:13 UTC

against

Josh: he/they

22-08-2021 09:25:36 UTC

for

Madrid:

22-08-2021 09:32:05 UTC

for

Kevan: he/him

22-08-2021 10:18:35 UTC

for

Janet: she/her

22-08-2021 13:28:50 UTC

for

Darknight: he/him

22-08-2021 14:38:40 UTC

imperial

Raven1207: he/they

22-08-2021 16:50:44 UTC

for