On 09/23/2017 06:38 PM, Alex Smith wrote:
On Sun, 2017-09-24 at 01:30 +0200, Cuddle Beam wrote:
Btw Agoran Geronotocracy has been a problem since forever:
http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~michaeln/agora/subgame-manifesto.html#g
erontocracy-syndrome
One obvious fix is to make it so that it's possible to cash in an
economic advantage for a win. That way, before long (if the economy is
functioning correctly), the experienced players will have won and then
will end up behind the newer players as they've spent all their assets
on the win.
That's the general idea behind stamp wins. You destroy 10 stamps to gain
a win.
In general, though, I suspect gerontocracy issues are less of an issue
than many players think. The most recent time I've seen it be a
noticeable problem was in the era of permanently accumulable VLOP, and
that went away soon after I initially joined the game, many years ago
now. Since then, I don't think we've had an economic system that didn't
reset either as a result of people using economic assets to win, or as
a result of it being repealed and replaced with something else that had
a cap on how much economic advantage you could accrue. (I also note
that with the typical rate at which players become inactive,
deregister, etc., it tends to be fairly hard to get a considerable age
advantage over another player, especially given how often the economic
rules reset.)
Note that there are two separate issues here: "can new players do
something?" and "can experienced players do more?". Making sure that
new players aren't locked out is very important. Making sure that
they're on a level playing field with experienced players is hard to do
fairly, though, as otherwise deregistering and reregistering is a
simple way to get rid of any economic disadvantage you might have. In
general, I'd suspect that the perfect system involves a) enough
starting assets for new players to be able to participate in the game
at a reasonable rate (I'd argue AP is sufficient for this), and b) a
way to get semipermanent advantages which will fade over time if not
maintained, and for which a skilled new player who's trying to
accumulate advantage and a skilled existing player who's trying to
accumulate advantage will both end up as roughly level frontrunners
within a medium timescale (say, a few months; Agora tends not to do
anything quickly).
Pretty much entirely agree with the above. The way I see it a game should:
- Be interesting to both new and old players
- Prevent new players from fatal mistakes
- Reward both long term planning and short term cleverness
Admittedly, we're failing the second point right now. But that's not
because of any perceived 'gerontology'.
