On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 17:01 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > Assumption also allows two people to regularly switch offices and not > ever have a weekly report due, or witness Yally holding an office until > the last minute (for nearly two weeks as Granulator?) and being able to > resign with no penalty. Here's an update of an old rule we used to > have, feel free to implement: > > When an officer ceases to hold an office, e SHALL, asap, make a > reasonable attempt to publish all records related to that office > as they stood at the moment of eir ceasing to hold it. Failure > to do so is the Class-S crime of Shredding the Files, where S is > the interest index of the office. > > Otherwise I think the awards, once the bug is fixed, are sufficient. > I don't really think further benefits are needed.
I rather like the system back in the old Notes era - even though it took a bit more effort from the IADoP and Conductor - where whoever actually published the report got the rewards; thus the main reasons to be an officer were a) you got "first dibs" on trying to publish your report (although conversely, it was illegal not to), and b) you got to mess around with officer-only abilities (such as Notaries terminating contracts without objection). The /current/ issue, I think, is that there's not much reason to take an office but civic duty at the moment. The economy is incredibly weak - not to mention, hard to keep track of, especially when there isn't a PSM's report right at the start of the week - and really, I don't have much of a reason to earn ergs. (Similarly, Rests are just a tiny slap on the wrist at the moment, because people have huge numbers of spare ergs anyway.) What should I do with my ergs? I could distribute a bunch of proposals or publish excess NoVs, but I don't have a particular need to do that (indeed, it's not unknown for players to distribute the entire pool just to have something to do with their ergs, which is annoying when a proposal's been left undistributable pending feedback). I know I just assume I have ergs to distribute proposals whenever I need to, because I'm rarely spending them on anything else and when I do, it's end-of-the-week expenditure. I could also burn off Rests, but that should be something that is a meaningful economic choice, and because I prefer to try to obey the rules, it's rare for me to accumulate them. I could democratise a proposal, but it's rare that I care enough about a proposal to want to disrupt it like that, and when I do, it's normally part of a scam; if democratisation's needed for the good of Agora, doing it with 2 support would be easy. I could create capacitors, and often do out of a lack of anything else to do, but that just gives me more ergs.... Or I could move on the list; I can't really at the moment because I have no clue what the List actually is (and there's enough doubt about the matter that probably nobody else does either), but even if I could, it would only lead to short-term gains, really; if everyone put their excess ergs into jostling for List position, it would just make the situation much harder to track, and yet not make a really significant difference. I think it's more likely that people will not try to maintain List positions, but rather just propel themself into a given position for a given purpose (maxing out voting limit just before the end of a voting period, for instance). Part of my motivation for introducing Teams was to try to make ergs more useful, but nobody seems to care about them. Perhaps we should just repeal them again? That should be the fate for all mechanics that don't really catch on; what normally happens with such mechanics is that they linger in the ruleset, unwanted and cluttering it up, until someone finds a way to scam them. Say what you may about the horrors of a "strong" economy where players accumulate wealth over a period of months and gain apparently unsurmountable advantages over newbies and people who have fallen behind; but at least it gives players something to /do/. At the moment, I'm just sitting and waiting. -- ais523
