On Sat, 2011-06-04 at 21:03 -0500, Pavitra wrote: > What was it about the AAA specifically that made it successful? Was it > that it was run in the private sector and so mostly insulated from the > rest of the ruleset? Was it that it had several types of assets that > interacted with each other nontrivially? Was it that the rules were > relatively stable over a long enough time for players to usefully engage > in long-term strategy?
I don't know. On paper, it really shouldn't have been as successful as it was; it was a relatively simple mechanic that could be analysed mathematically quite easily, it was rather grindy, it wasn't all that interesting in its own right. Capturing what makes something like that take hold seems to be the core issue with BlogNomic, which lives for that sort of minigame. In Agora, it's not so much of an issue as something like that that's successful can drive play for months, but obivously you need something like that to start with. -- ais523
