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Agora's in a bit of a lull at the moment. I've been wondering why this
is, and conclude that there are two real reasons: a lack of a reason to
do anything very much (there's little persistent state that can be built
up week-to-week), and a lack of gameplay elements (I consider things
like messing about with rules loopholes gameplay in Agora, but we're
rather low on rules to abuse atm; I've been reduced to throwing around
interesting-looking CFJs, even without anything but amusement and
interest hanging on their answers).
The problem with complicated contest-like gameplay is that normally not
everyone is interested in it; that's generally best left to other nomics
IMO. (Contests worked mostly because you could avoid them if you wanted
to; if you try to force everyone to participate, it often happens that
many people don't and the contest collapses as a result. Email is also a
rather unsuitable medium for many of the things that might make good
contests.) Some sort of gameplay is a good idea, though, both because it
creates gameplay elements (more to CFJ about, maybe more opportunities
for ingenious scams, more to do generally) and because it creates
persistent state (more reason to participate, which is a good thing so
long as it's enjoyable rather than tedious).
So here's my plan: our current method of measuring positive
contributions is in ergs. We can keep the current uses of those (they
haven't been used much yet, after all), but also, whenever a player
gains ergs, they also gain their team equal number of points. (Points
are an obvious name for a tracked scoring statistic; and rather
helpfully, they're currently undefined.) Why score as a team rather than
individuals? Because scoring as individuals is reasonably commonplace in
Agora's history, whereas teams haven't been done for years. Teams also
offer more of an interesting political dynamic than individual play, and
mean that new players don't end up massively disadvantaged upon joining,
but rather reap the accumulated score of the team they were in.
The idea is that initially there should be two teams; players are
allocated to teams at random, and likewise new players are put on a
random team. Once a team's accumulated 300 points (provisional value;
how fast can ergs be scored, I wonder?), the team is replaced with two
new teams, and its members assigned to those teams at random. Therefore,
the reward for doing well is to end up in a smaller team, and if a
player ends up on a team by emself, that player wins (and the entire
team dynamic is reset back to two random teams again). A player can be
moved from one team to another without two objections from the team
they're leaving and without two objections from the team they're
entering; this lets teams expel underperforming members (as there'd only
be one objection, if that), players move themselves to a different team
(assuming not too many objections from elsewhere), and even let teams
kidnap desirable players if they could prevent the other team from
mustering the objections needed. Two objections is chosen as it has an
interesting relationship with the team size.
I'd be willing to do the officering to track something like this, so
there shouldn't be a need to worry about officer workload.
Any comments? Any obvious flaws? Shall I write this up as a proper
proposal? Would people be interested in this / fear this?
- --
ais523
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