On Sep 23, 2017, at 10:21 AM, ATMunn . <iamingodsa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've put together a list of various different questions I have. I don't > expect all of them to get answered, but feel free to answer any that you can. > > -------------------------------- > > What is the whole "floating value" thing? What determines it, and what does > it do? It's not really clear in the rules. The fundamental idea is that various gameplay actions get cheaper (in shinies) the more money players hold. Per a conversation I had with nichdel before the proposal passed, the intent is to create a boom-bust dynamic: when actions are cheap, many players will do them, driving the cost up, causing players to slow down again, causing the price to drop. The implementation is that once a week, the Secretary (hello!) sets the Floating Value to exactly Agora’s balance at that moment. A bunch of prices are defined in terms of simple calculations on the FV. I’ve got a proposal in flight (proposal 7876, which I expect to pass) that unifies all the calculated amounts: > Floating Value is a natural singleton switch, tracked by the > Secretary. Rules to the contrary notwithstanding, the Floating > Value switch CANNOT be flipped to a value other than the number > of Shinies owned by Agora. > > The following Floating Derived Values are defined: > > * Pend Cost: 1/20th of the Floating Value, rounded up. > * CFJ Cost: 1/20th of the Floating Value, rounded up. > * Authorship Reward: 1/40th of the Floating Value, rounded up. > * Pend Reward: 1/40th of the Floating Value, rounded up. > * CFJ Reward: 1/20th of the Floating Value, rounded up. > * Stamp Value: 1/5th of the Floating Value, rounded up. The proposal also contains a bunch of supporting changes to other rules, and if you’re interested, you can read it here: <https://www.mail-archive.com/agora-official@agoranomic.org/msg08268.html <https://www.mail-archive.com/agora-official@agoranomic.org/msg08268.html>> I’d be curious to hear if the proposed changes to the wording of the rules makes things clearer, since that was one of my goals. By experience, the boom-bust cycle “works” in as much as it does actually go through booms and busts: when the Floating Value is high, and the Pend Cost (the number of shinies needed to pend a proposal) goes up, fewer proposals are pended. When it goes down - and the lowest we’ve seen it is 1 sh. - people write and pend more proposals. The message linked above has, I believe, the most proposals distributed in a single distribution in the last year or so. > In regards to > On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 11:35 AM, Owen Jacobson <o...@grimoire.ca > <mailto:o...@grimoire.ca>> wrote: > * Write a proposal that is impossible to vote against. > How would you actually do that? I'm just curious, I don't intend on doing it. That’s a good question, and I didn’t have a specific answer in mind when I asked it. A couple of folks have supposed that I meant “write a proposal nobody in their right mind would vote against,” and that’s certainly one way to do it. I was also considering the possibilities under CFJ 3559, but I didn’t do any work to fully connect “proposals can be more complicatedly self-affecting than I realized” with anything. I will note that the bar for “a proposal nobody in their right mind would vote against” is a very weirdly-shaped constraint, since * There are a couple of pledges in play where specific players have promised to vote against specific things until conditions change, which could reasonably be read to imply that they’d vote against obviously good ideas if they want to uphold their pledges, on the one hand, and * Proposals that implement obviously-problematic systems, like real estate ownership models, sometimes pass unanimously anyways simply because they’re interesting. (I’m still stunned, not to say extremely flattered, that nobody voted against that proposal.) > What exactly is an Agoran Decision? Is it just a thing that people vote on? It’s a gameplay process where the outcome is determined by a vote by the players, rather than by direct application of the rules or by someone’s unilateral decision. There are a few kinds: * Voting FOR/AGAINST proposals, initiated by the Promotor and resolved by the Assessor (r. 1607), * Voting for elected officers, initiated by any player and resolved by the ADoP in most cases (r. 2154), * Voting to enter a CFJ into moot if there’s a serious doubt about the judgement (r. 911, rare), * Voting to win the game (r. 2482, rare), * Voting for a proposal author to win the Silver Quill for the year (r. 2444, rare). > I've had a few people suggest running for an office as something I could do > as a new player. How would I go about doing that, and what office(s?) should > I run for? The ADoP’s metareport (just published) contains a list of all offices, and when each last published a report. It’s a good place to start shopping; you can look up each office in the rules to find out what its responsibilities are, broadly. I’ve found that players are surprisingly supportive of new officers who goof up their offices, so don’t worry too hard about getting one perfect. As it happens, the only office that’s seriously delinquent right now is the Agronomist, which is brand new. I presently hold it, but you could take it from me by deputisation. It oversees a brand-new mechanic, so you’d get a chance to control some of the - sorry - flavour of the system just by virtue of controlling the weekly reports. If you want something with a bit more existing convention, the Tailor, Herald, and Registrar are fairly low-touch. They report events but have relatively few responsibilities for causing events to happen. Someone mentioned the Referee, and I think it’s a fascinating office. If you want it, I’m happy to step aside and let you deputise for it next week as well as providing you with my notes so that you can see how I was managing it. I’d somewhat prefer to keep it, but I’d also prefer you had something you enjoy doing in the game. The office oversees the issuance of penalty cards for rules violations (see r. 2152 for what constitues a “violation” and r. 2426, r. 2478, r. 2479, and the rules with “Card” in their titles for details). There’s a serious known bug in the accusation process, but there’s also a proposal (proposal 7886, also in the distribution linked above) that fixes the bug. That proposal will almost certainly pass once the Assessor collects the votes. If you want a job nobody wants, there’s an election in flight for the Superintendent right now. I’ve voted for “the first person to unconditionally vote for themselves as first preference,” and nobody else has done so yet, so if you want my vote, just vote for yourself and you’ll get it. The Superintendent is responsible for tracking and reporting on Agencies, which are described in r. 2467. > Do Trust Tokens do anything other than give you the slim potential of winning > if everyone gives you one? No. However, they’re incredibly durable, and they’re untracked. Nobody’s adjudicated this but it’s fairly likely that once a player has given you a trust token, even if they deregister, you still have it (and will continue to have it if they re-register). There’s a tradition of having multiple styles of victory, and Trust Tokens are the current embodiment of the “very gradual ratchet” kind. You won’t win quickly with them, but if you’re committed to collecting them, you can probably engineer a win that way eventually. > Could someone summarize PSS's banking proposal? It seems interesting, but > also quite complex. Players create banks. Banks issue bonds, loans, and currencies. Agora has a (two?) central bank, which oversees the reserve currency of Shinies. I suspect the intent is to create some liquidity by allowing non-reserve Banks to experiment with fiscal policies. I’m curious if it’ll work: I personally think the proposal has too many moving pieces for the size Agora’s at today, but I also think we need some room to fiddle with how money is managed in Agora. -o
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