On Mon, 2014-10-27 at 09:14 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > On Mon, 27 Oct 2014, Alex Smith wrote: > > Things that have traditionally consistently been of high economic value: > > For "traditionally" defined since 2007. > > Before 2007, the three pillars were (1) the ability to distribute proposals, > (2) voting on proposals, and (3) making up for your rules breakages. This > was repeated for several economies until the Contracts era. > > The idea of paying to distribute a proposal is simple. Proposals make > work for everyone (voters and officers). Writing a proposal is an aspect > of gameplay that's the "creative" part, paying for all of Agora to > review and vote on it is the cost of being creative. > > There was almost always a free path for the "work" proposals (ones > submitted out of duty to fix bugs). > > Since 2007, the "Pay to write a proposal? Agora should be paying *me* > to write this!" attitude has really not been a boon for gameplay.
I'd argue that there's been something of a shift of attitudes in the goal of the game, in that case. A quick look at the Herald's report shows that players like me and scshunt are very high on the leaderboards for Most Wins Ever, despite having been here for only a fraction of Agora's existence. And I'd argue that the main reason for that is that wins are something that we've both decided that it's actively worth aiming for. In my case, I find them an interesting goal because Agorans tend to have a culture of making them difficult and thought-provoking things to aim for, while not obstructively blocking them once they're valid. >From what you're saying, I assume that in the past, "opportunities to be creative" were the end goal of most(?) players, to the extent that they were willing to spend in-game assets to gain those opportunities? This would indeed lead to a game in which things were rated very differently. It probably also explains both why Contracts were successful, and why they lead to the "old" economic systems no longer working. Contracts offered such huge scope for creativity that there was no longer the ability to reasonably charge for it; why pay to distribute a proposal, when you could create a contract and gain your opportunity to be creative for free? (This could also explain why Agora started attracting players like me around that era. I don't gain much enjoyment from proposing /or/ from voting on proposals, unless it ties into some sort of scam; the main reason I make proposals is to shape the game into something that's capable of keeping my interest. In a "pay for creativity opportunities" economy, I'd almost certainly quickly get bored and leave.) That said, this offers a potential path forwards. If the ability to be creative is something that enough players actually value, it'd make sense to simply charge for the creation of Contract Analogue 2014. That should keep the creativity seekers interested (if there are any left by this point), the weird gamestate fans interested (you normally need to be able to create contract-analogues to set it up), and the scamsters / victory junkies interested (again, if you're going to win via contract-analogue, even in the simplest case of "bribe half the players to vote FOR my victory proposal", you're going to have to pay for those contract-analogues). -- ais523
