As the Treasuror Extrordinaire, one of my greatest disappointments
regarding my return to Agora is that there are currently no interesting
economics to speak of. Today I introduce a concept for a "Sets-like"
economy but with a different primary factor driving exchange rates.
For those unfamiliar, Sets[1] was an Agoran economy proposed by nix in
2020 which defined four types of cards and four types of corresponding
products. Victory Cards were exchanged for Winsomes, allowing players to
win the game. Justice Cards were exchanged for Blot-B-Gones, remove
blots from players. Legislative Cards were exchanged for Pendants, which
would formally submit (pend) a proposal. Finally, Voting Cards were
exchanged for Votives, which increased voting power. Cards could be
exchanged for products at a ratio of 1 card to 1 product, 2 cards to 3
products, 3 cards to 6 products, or 4 cards to 10 products. Because the
rate of exchange between card and product was the best with four cards,
this encouraged cooperation, competition, and specialization, creating
an especially active period of economic activity from 2020 to 2022.
I don't want to just revive Sets, but I do think that the central
mechanism of the Sets economy should serve as inspiration for similar
Agoran economic systems, and I think I have a new spin that follows the
core tenants of what made Sets interesting while still having its own
flavor.
The central idea of this new economy has to do with a mechanic that I
have thus far been calling "potency." The potency of an asset is a
number that represents how strong of an effect that item will have when
it is redeemed. The potency of an item is decreased when certain events
happen, most prominently, whenever it is traded. Potency is carried over
when items are "crafted" to create other items. So, although the asset
pipeline won't work exactly the same way, it would be that a Legislative
Card with a Potency of 6 would be exchanged for a pendant with a Potency
of 6.
Then, instead of destroying the product at the time that it is redeemed,
each usage of the product decreases its potency, so each instance of
pending a proposal would decrease the product's potency by 1 until it
reached zero, at which point it would be destroyed.
I also recommend a monthly potency depreciation for all items. This
encourages more economic activity as items will be offered on a "use it
or lose it" basis, requiring quick action to get the most out of the
items and continual involvement with the gamestate to receive a constant
inflow of newly-minted economic assets.
Another aspect to this system is that in my head, there is not a linear
pipeline creating an equivalence between one type of card and one type
of product. I think that this system is significantly more interesting
if two or more types of card are required to create products. The
potency of an item that has been created from two or more other items is
the minimum of the potency of its constituent items. These mechanics
should help to reintroduce the balancing act between collaboration and
competition that the Sets economy enforced.
Balancing the potency depreciation function will be one of the biggest
challenges of making this economy fun. One option is a constant decrease
of 1 potency per transfer. A harsher curve might be to halve the potency
with every transfer (or multiply it by some other fraction). Either way,
I think it would be wise to one player-to-player transfer to effect the
same potency decrease as one player-to-contract transfer so as not to
dissuade players from using contracts to facilitate trades.
A few more design notes. One other potential feature is recombining
assets of the same type into one with their combined potency. I would
like this mechanic to be a lossy process so that players are encouraged
to deal with what they have.
[1]
https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora-official/2020-June/013771.html
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Trigon
Popular Polygon and Treasuror Extraordinaire
