On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 1:33 PM, Alex Smith <ais...@alumni.bham.ac.uk> wrote: > One of the huge strengths of Agora is that its entire history can be > deduced from the weekly/monthly office reports, making it easy to > determine facts about past gamestates; and all actions also go via the > lists, so you can interpolate the gamestate in between, as well.
I agree, which is why my proposal would still have reports and actions being sent to the lists - the wiki would basically serve as a substitute for players manually performing that interpolation, in order to allow for more fast-paced gameplay. (It would also serve as the basis of reports, of course.) > I'm in favour of more office automation but I'd rather it be done via > parsing messages sent to the lists, rather than requiring actions to be > entered externally. Do you object to systems that require (or at least strongly encourage) actions to be entered externally, but send automated messages to the lists reflecting them? Requiring players to manually send messages in a parseable format is definitely also viable, but I like it somewhat less for various reasons, including the confusion caused if they get the format wrong. Also because there's the potential for less-than-fully automated updates, which can be more flexible. In the future (again, not proposing this for the present), imagine the wiki could be configured to just send each change to a given page as a diff to the list, along with the edit message. Then, we could define the edit message as the canonical action from the Rules' perspective, but players would be expected to make substance of the edit reflect the effects. For example, I could make an edit with the message "pay ais523 2 shinies", and the diff would change our balances to suit. I think this would actually be pretty readable, not just a form of spamming the lists - you could tell pretty easily from the diff whether the action was carried out correctly, and having the old and new state in the message would actually be helpful in understanding the context of the action. Compared to this, a fully automated shiny tracking system would be preferable in some ways, but would be more dependent on the whims of whoever wrote the code, harder to modify to account for rule changes, harder to transition between recordkeepors, etc.
